Silver Streak

October 04, 2008

The new Carnival of Space is up, but that's not the only exciting space-related news this week. The Jules Verne Automated Transfer Vehicle re-entered Earth's atmosphere in a blaze of glory after spending several months docked with the International Space Station. You can see the video here.

The Jules Verne wasn't carrying any passengers; it was basically a 20-ton garbage truck. When it came back down to Earth, it was carrying some 2.5 tons of garbage and waste that had accumulated aboard the ISS. It's not like there are any local sanitation workers orbiting the Earth up there, so the spacecraft was doing a good deed, giving up its life so astronauts don't choke on their own refuse, and it even burned up all that accumulated waste in the process.

Among the lucky few who had ringside seats to the spectacular re-entry were two faculty members of the Clay Center Observatory (CCO) in Brookline, Massachusetts, along with an undergraduate student. The CCO is a special facility: its state-of-the-art equipment makes it popular with NASA researchers looking to study meteor showers and re-entering spacecraft -- they even have a NASA "hotline" -- but it's also part of Dexter and Southfield Schools, a system that provides K-12 education to more than 600 students. Not only do those students have access to the observatory for class purposes, but the CCO holds regular "Public Telescope Nights," among other outreach events. Talk about giving back to the community...

Anyway, the hotline rang when Jules Verne was preparing to make its re-entry, and on September 29th, the teachers (Ronald Dantowitz and Marek Kozubai) hopped onto a "chase plane" (a Gulfstream V, technically a private jet, how cool is that?)  crammed with cutting-edge equipment and recorded the temperature and composition of the superheated fragments as they blazed through the atmosphere. Apparently it first broke into three large chunks before exploding into hundreds of pieces. The collected data, according to Dantowitz, should help NASA and the European Space Agency to better understand the dynamics of spacetime re-entry, leading to better designs for future spacecraft.

Their student (David Sliski) was aboard a second aircraft armed with a camera and spectrograph. That aircraft was a DC-8, but hey -- not everyone can ride in the Gulfstream jet. Those suckers are expensive. But it just so happens there are lots of other student projects with far less need for big-ticket items; sometimes just a few hundred dollars can make a difference.

That's why Twisted Physics is joining Cosmic Variance's Donors Choose pledge drive, part of the organization's Blogger's Challenge to help raise money for deserving classrooms in public schools around the US. Cosmic Variance has already done the heavy lifting and picked several worthy projects. We've got a good start, but are no where near our (admittedly ambitious) goal. So any readers that feel inspired to help, head on over to Cosmic Variance, pick a project, and make some K-12 teachers and students very, very happy.

Photos: Jules Verne ATV disintegrating as it re-enters Earth's atmosphere. Source: NASA/ESA. Public domain.

Comments

[Dan Fischer]

The Gulfstream V used here is not just "technically a private jet" - it is the personal airplane of one of the founders of Google! Who can park their planes within sight of their office at NASA Ames in exchange for (considerable) doe and their occasional use in science flights. This was once a tightly kept secret, but after plane spotters figured out the connection in Sep. 2007, it became open knowledge.