A look into the future and past

© Mark Ollig

As 2021 comes to a close, we find ourselves envisioning what new technological discoveries and breakthroughs 2022 will reveal to us.

The future of technology and discovery is one of wonderment, and as its revelations unfold, we will shake our heads in amazement and appreciate being alive to witness it.

During the summer of 2022, we will begin to see revelations about our universe unfolding from the data obtained using 18 highly-polished gold-coated mirrors attached to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) aka Webb.

Launched Christmas Day, Webb will dramatically change our understanding of the universe.

“The promise of Webb is not what we know we will discover; it’s what we don’t yet understand or can’t yet fathom about our universe. I can’t wait to see what it uncovers,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.

Dec. 25, about 12.5 hours after launch, Webb’s onboard thrusters fired to maneuver the spacecraft and alter its trajectory course. It will journey 1 million miles from Earth, settling into a halo orbit around the second Lagrange point, or Sun-Earth L2 point.

L2 is a point of gravitational balance and distance from Earth, offering Webb optimal cooling and improved communications due to reduced interference from the Sun’s radio emissions.

L2 is also a desirable location because it decreases the fuel required for a spacecraft to remain in orbit.

It will take the Webb spacecraft one month to reach L2. Once there, it will always stay on Earth's night side while it orbits around the Sun.

NASA states another advantage of this orbit is that Webb will always be at the exact general location relative to Earth.

Webb will be close enough to Earth for continuous communication through the Deep Space Network, an international array of giant antennas geographically located on our planet that NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages for deep space missions.

Another advantage of an L2 orbit allows Webb to be perpetually bathed in the sunshine to generate power via the solar array on the Sun-facing side of the spacecraft while providing an unobstructed view of deep space.

In addition, the orbital path Webb takes ensures it stays out of the shadows of both Earth and the Moon.

The gimbaled antenna assembly on the Webb includes a high-data-rate dish antenna that will send approximately 57.2 GBytes (gigabytes) of data back to Earth each day.

Some of the scientific instruments installed on the Webb telescope include cameras for taking pictures of astronomical objects.

Webb will use spectrographs to break light into colors of scientific analysis.

The Webb telescope will also use coronagraphs to block sunlight, allowing observation of planets.

Construction on the Webb telescope began in 2004, and over the last 17 years, there have been many breakthrough technologies and advances incorporated into Webb.

Some of these breakthroughs include lightweight deployable mirrors and advanced composite structures that align to millionths of millimeters and work at super-cold temperatures.

Webb employs large, ultra-sensitive infrared light detectors and micro-shutter devices with thousands of tiny windows, each the width of a human hair and programmable to be open or closed to enable spectroscopic measurement of hundreds of individual objects simultaneously.

Webb also contains a cryocooler that chills the mid-infrared detectors to the necessary temperature just a few degrees above absolute zero (-459.67 degrees Fahrenheit).

The scientific instruments aboard Webb will safely operate at temperatures from -380 to 260 degrees Fahrenheit.

Although it will only take one month for the Webb telescope to arrive at L2, it will be undergoing a six-month commissioning period, during which it fully deploys, cools down to operating temperatures, aligns its mirrors, and calibrates its instruments.

Routine science operations on Webb will begin during June 2022, as all 18 mirrors will be aligned, along with the final calibration of its scientific instruments and telescope.

Webb will give us a look back in time over 13.5 billion years, which is only a few hundred million years after “the big bang” theory which many astronomers and scientists say ignited the universe.

My question regarding this theory has always been, “What created the physical material leading to the energy that caused the big bang to ignite?”

Of course, who started the universe is justifiably related, but today is off-topic, so I will digress to the main subject.

The James Webb Space Telescope was designed to last five years, but is expected to be operational for 10 years.

Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) will store data from the Webb telescope at https://archive.stsci.edu, and is freely accessible to the scientific community and the general public.

MAST is part of the STScI (Space Telescope Science Institute) located in Baltimore, MD.

MAST also stores the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, Kepler, and Hubble space mission data.

The James Webb Space Telescope will use future technology to look billions of years into the past.

As we close out 2021, I’d like to express my appreciation to you for spending a few moments of your time each week reading this column.

Now, it is on to 2022.

A Christmas Eve message from the moon

© Mark Ollig

Three American astronauts, seated in the command module of a Saturn V rocket, blasted off from Cape Kennedy, FL., Dec. 21,1968.

Apollo 8 was initially planned to conduct the first crewed tests of the Lunar Module (LM) spacecraft, which would land on the moon before the decade’s end.

However, due to delays in getting the LM ready in time for Apollo 8’s scheduled December liftoff, NASA announced Aug. 19, 1968, that it was canceling the LM from the mission.

Instead, Apollo 8’s mission became the first crew traveling to and orbiting the moon.

Saturday morning, Dec. 21, 1968, in my hometown of Winsted, I was sitting in front of the living room television watching the countdown of the tall Saturn V rocket sitting on Launch Complex Pad 39A.

In Florida, CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite broadcast from Cape Kennedy (now Cape Canaveral).

“T minus ten, nine, we have ignition sequence start. The engines are armed. Four, three, two, one, zero. We have commit,” NASA’s launch commentator Jack King informed the millions of people watching the launch.

The Saturn V rocket’s five F-1 engines clustered on the bottom of the first stage roared to life as they released massive red plumes of flames and white smoke.

At 6:50 a.m., CST, King reported, “We have liftoff,” while I watched the column of red flames and smoke continuing to shoot out of the first stage of the rocket as it slowly began its ascent into a blue Florida sky.

The 6.2-million-pound Saturn V was propelled upward utilizing 7.6 million pounds of thrust generated by those F-1 engines.

“It looks good! Oh, there’s the rumbling in our building!” exclaimed Walter Cronkite, describing the launch while looking through his binoculars.

“One minute, 15 seconds and we’re a little more than half a mile into the sky, and we’re nearly four miles downrange,” reported Paul Haney of NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston, TX.

The crew aboard the Apollo 8 command module includes commander Frank Borman, command module pilot James Lovell and lunar module pilot Bill Anders (his title even though no LM was attached).

This flight was risky. Without the Lunar Module, there would be no “lifeboat” available to use in the event of an engine or environmental failure aboard the Command Module.

The LM served as a lifeboat during the Apollo 13 mission.

After Apollo 8 attained Earth orbit, for the next two hours, the astronauts checked the systems of the command and service module to make sure everything was ready for their journey to the moon.

At two hours and 27 minutes into the flight, Mission Control radioed the crew with, “Apollo 8. You are go for TLI. Over.”

TLI means Trans Lunar Injection and is an engine-firing maneuver that would take Apollo 8 out of Earth-orbit and propel it toward the moon.

“Roger. We understand; we are go for TLI,” commander Borman responded.

Apollo 8 would go farther from Earth than any previously crewed flight, which was 850 miles during the Gemini XI mission in 1966.

Apollo 8 was 234,474 miles from Earth on Dec. 24, 1968, and was under the moon’s gravitational influence.

They fired the large SPS (Service Propulsion System) main engine on the service module to slow them down and place them into lunar orbit.

According to the NASA logs, Apollo 8 obtained lunar orbit at 69 hours, 12 minutes, 30 seconds into the mission.

Apollo 8 orbited the moon at the height of 60 nautical miles.

“Apollo 8, Houston. What does the ol’ moon look like from 60 miles? Over,” radioed Mission Control.

“Okay, Houston. The moon is essentially grey, no color; looks like plaster of Paris or sort of a grayish beach sand. We can see quite a bit of detail,” astronaut Jim Lovell reported.

Apollo 8 would orbit the moon 10 times.

The crew took photographs of specific locations for future Apollo mission landing sites.

For me, two memorable moments stand out during those 10 orbits.

The first was seeing “Earthrise” from the moon, which became a much-published photograph and a postage stamp.

Astronaut Bill Anders took the photo Dec. 24, Christmas Eve, showing Earth peeking out from beyond the lunar surface.

The second occurred during the ninth orbit around the moon.

Anders radioed Mission Control, “We are now approaching lunar sunrise, and for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you.”

The astronauts beamed back images of the moon and Earth and took turns reading from the book of Genesis.

They closed with, “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you – all of you on the good Earth,” said commander Borman.

You can hear Apollo 8’s live Christmas Eve message from the moon: https://bit.ly/30K1Mig.

I wish you all a very Merry Christmas.

"Earthrise" 
Photo taken from lunar orbit by astronaut William Anders
on December 24, 1968, during the Apollo 8 mission.

‘The Santa Colonel’

© Mark Ollig

The North American Aerospace Defense Command, better known as NORAD, reports it will track Santa and his reindeer team again as they travel around our planet delivering toys on Christmas Eve.

The story of tracking Santa began in 1955 when NORAD was CONAD (Continental Air Defense Command), composed of Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marine forces with its central operations located in Colorado Springs, CO.

The Pentagon or a high-ranking general would call the confidential, air-defense telephone hotline at CONAD during a national emergency, such as in the case of an imminent military attack against the United States.

A December 1955 Colorado Springs Sears department store newspaper advertisement was mistakenly printed with the wrong telephone number for children to call and talk with Santa on Christmas Eve.

The newspaper advertisement’s telephone number was for the hotline to the red phone sitting on the desk in the central operations center at CONAD.

The Sears children’s Christmas newspaper advertisement with a picture of Santa Claus read: “Call me on my private phone and I will talk to you personally any time day or night.”

Christmas Eve 1955, the red phone at CONAD began ringing.

Colonel Harry Shoup, the director of operations, immediately picked up the handset.

“The red phone ringing; it’s either the Pentagon calling or the four-star General Partridge. I was all shook up,” Col. Shoup recalled years later.

“So, I picked it up and said, Sir, this is Col. Shoup.”

There was silence from the phone’s receiver.

“Sir, can you read me alright?” asked Col. Shoup, who believed a military general was calling the hotline telephone.

Imagine Col. Shoup’s surprise when he heard a little girl’s voice ask, “Are you really Santa Claus?”

Col. Shoup recalls looking around the room at the faces of his office personnel and sternly saying, “Somebody’s playing a joke on me, and this isn’t funny!”

“Would you repeat that?” demanded Col. Shoup into the phone, now thinking it was some prankster randomly dialing telephone numbers.

“Are you really Santa Claus?” the small voice on the other end of the telephone line sincerely asked.

While Col. Shoup was on the phone, one of his officers told him of the local newspaper’s advertisement mistake.

Col. Shoup’s behavior quickly changed.

Instead of disappointing the little girl calling for Santa, he decided to answer her as Santa would, asking, “Have you been a good little girl?”

The now happy little girl’s voice on the phone said she knew Santa would be coming down the fireplace at her house, and she would be leaving some food there for him and the reindeer.

“Oh, boy! They sure will appreciate that!” Col. Shoup told her.

He listened as the little girl read off the items she hoped Santa would bring her on her Christmas list.

Col. Shoup then asked the little girl if he could talk with her mom or dad; he informed them of their daughter’s Christmas list items.

After saying goodbye to the little girl, Col. Shoup instructed his defense operations center to act as Santa’s helpers whenever a child called the hotline.

Children calling were provided radar updates by CONAD defense operation team members regarding the location of Santa Claus and his globe-circling reindeer sleigh team.

Santa’s sleigh travels faster than starlight, “but this is nothing that our technologies can’t handle,” a commander at CONAD reportedly told one young caller.

By 1958, CONAD became NORAD.

NORAD continues the tradition of reporting on the status of Santa and his reindeer sleigh team each Christmas, monitoring Santa’s trip with the same advanced space satellite technology to follow any airborne object approaching the Northern Hemisphere.

On Christmas Eve, NORAD will again be tracking Santa and his reindeer sleigh team as they make their journey worldwide.

Follow the official NORAD Tracks Santa website at https://www.noradsanta.org. There, you’ll find the Santa Tracker Countdown Clock, videos of Santa’s North Pole headquarters, interactive games, movies, holiday musical tunes, and the history of NORAD’s involvement in Santa’s annual holiday journey.

NORAD Tracks Santa can also be found on Twitter at the user handle @NoradSanta.

Dec. 11, @NoradSanta tweeted, “Did you know Rudolph’s bright red nose gives off a special infrared ray of light that’s invisible to the human eye, but US Space Command satellites can track?” Another tweet read: “Santa flies faster than starlight, but slows down to wave at @NORADCommand fighter escorts that keep North American airspace secure.”

Christmas Eve, Friday, Dec. 24, children and parents can call toll-free to get updates about Santa’s location at the NORAD Tracks Santa Operations Center at 1-877-446-6723.

Col. Harry Shoup became known as “The Santa Colonel,” a nickname he cherished until his passing March 14, 2009, at age 92.

1955 ad for Sears’ Santa hotline; Undated photo of Colonel Harry Shoup

The world looked up into the night sky

© Mark Ollig

In 1952, the International Council of Scientific Unions proposed the Internal Geophysical Year (IGY) to be recognized from July 1957 to December 1958.

Scientists worldwide planned on observing geophysical phenomena and their effects on Earth.

Two countries had much bolder IGY plans, which were literally “out of this world.”

The US announced it would place a scientific satellite into Earth’s orbit during the IGY.

The Soviet Union also announced its plans for launching an Earth-orbiting artificial satellite.

A historical event occurred Friday, Oct. 4, 1957, which caused the world to take a collective breath and look upward at the night sky.

At 10:29 p.m., Moscow Standard Time (2:29 p.m. Central Time), a Soviet R-7 two-stage rocket weighing 267 tons, lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome launch complex in the remote Russian region of Tyuratam, inside the Kazakhstan Republic.

The R-7 was a Russian/Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile without the military warhead attachment.

Instead of a warhead, the rocket carried a 184-pound satellite payload called PS-1, better known as Sputnik 1.

Sputnik 1 was a highly-polished 23-inch diameter metallic beach ball-sized sphere made of an aluminum-magnesium-titanium combination.

According to the English Oxford dictionary, “In Russian, the word sputnik means a ‘traveling companion.’”

The Sputnik 1 satellite was jettisoned from the R-7 at about 142 miles above the Earth in the weightlessness of space.

Sputnik 1 then settled into an elliptical orbit, circling Earth once every 98 minutes at a speed of 18,000 mph.

A 1-watt radio transmitter was powered from two of three onboard silver-zinc batteries. The Sputnik 1 satellite used a third battery to power its internal temperature and other instrument systems.

The first artificially-made, Earth-orbiting satellite sent out a curious radio signal from its four “cat-whisker” antennas extending 7.9 and 9.5 feet, respectively.

For the next three weeks, people worldwide became fixated, listening to the steady radio signal audio pattern of “beep-beep-beep-beep-beep” being transmitted down through the Earth’s atmosphere by Sputnik 1.

Scientists and shortwave radio operators closely listened to Sputnik’s 20.005 and 40.002 MHz frequency radio band transmissions.

American television and radio broadcast the satellite’s beeps for the general public to hear.

Ground-based telescopes could see the small, shining metallic sphere as it speedily flew across the night sky.

People peering up into the star-filled night sky saw a small, bright sunlit ball, Sputnik 1, majestically passing by.

While Sputnik 1 orbited the planet and sent its radio beeps, American emotions ranged from shock and amazement to feelings of inspiration by witnessing the start of space exploration.

However, many people also feared the Soviet Union would turn soviet satellites into space weapons.

Instead of a harmless beeping satellite passing over the US, some folks felt the next Sputnik would be carrying a nuclear warhead that the Soviet Union could drop on them.

There was real fear, confusion, and much anxiety experienced by many Americans.

I once asked my mother about her memories of Oct. 4, 1957, and Sputnik 1.

“I was 27 years old,” she recalled. “I remember people were frightened; we didn’t know whether the Russians were going to attack us by dropping bombs from their space satellites passing over our heads,” she explained to me.

In an attempt to ease a growing US public anxiety, Oct. 9, 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower announced, “Now, so far as the satellite itself is concerned, that does not raise my apprehensions, not one iota. I see nothing at this moment, at this stage of development, that is significant in that development as far as security is concerned.”

President Eisenhower, or “Ike,” may have calmed the fears of some folks; however, many now felt that the Soviet Union had taken the technological lead in the new “space race” with the US.

Starting Oct. 4, 1957, Sputnik 1 continued to broadcast beeps until Oct. 26, 1957, when the satellite’s battery power wholly drained.

Sputnik 1 burned up Jan. 4, 1958, while re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere.

Two months after Sputnik 1, the US attempted to launch a satellite into Earth orbit atop a three-stage Vanguard rocket.

At the Atlantic Missile range in Cape Canaveral, FL, the Vanguard rocket ignited and began its ascent Dec. 5, 1957; however, after rising a little more than 3 feet, the rocket stalled, then settled back on the launch pad as its fuel tanks ruptured and exploded. The irony is that the Vanguard satellite was thrown clear of the explosion and landed on the ground. Although damaged, the satellite transmitted its beacon signal while lying on the ground.

The first successful launch of a US satellite into Earth orbit occurred Jan. 31, 1958 at 9:48 p.m. Central Time, with Explorer 1.

Explorer 1 used a modified US Redstone ballistic missile to obtain the altitude needed for orbit.

Explorer 1 descended into the Earth’s atmosphere and disintegrated in the heat of re-entry March 31, 1970.

One minute of recorded radio signal beeps from Sputnik 1 can be listened to at http://bit.ly/2fwmc6P.

Listen to 10 seconds of telemetry transmission from Sputnik 1 at https://go.nasa.gov/2whXCtp.

The world looked up into the night sky Oct. 4, 1957, in wonderment and apprehension.

Laser optical communications in space

© Mark Ollig

For more than 60 years, NASA has been using the traditional radio-frequency (RF) wave spectrum for communicating with its spacecraft and satellites.

Soon, we will find ourselves living in 2022, and NASA knows future space missions will require enhanced communications capabilities.

NASA is testing its spacecraft and satellites using “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation,” or laser, for communication transmission and reception.

Using laser optical communications with satellites and other spacecraft will drastically increase their transfer-rate throughput speed.

These optical laser enhancements will significantly benefit space mission communications, with 100 times more spectrum bandwidth than currently used RF systems.

Using optical lasers will significantly improve voice and video communications from astronauts aboard the International Space Station and future spacecraft on the moon and Mars.

Laser communications will greatly assist NASA in obtaining data from satellites traversing within our solar system and those traveling into deep space exploring distant celestial objects.

According to NASA, the “pinpoint precision of laser communications” is well-suited to the goals of NASA mission planners.

“Laser technology is ideal for boosting downlink communications from deep space,” said Abi Biswas, the supervisor of the Optical Communications Systems group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA.

Other advantages of laser communications include receiving greatly-improved photographic image resolution and video from satellites or spacecraft missions to other planets.

Future astronauts performing an extravehicular activity, or from inside their spacecraft will select and view optical laser video feeds from the ground to aid in quickly completing various tasks.

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is currently in orbit around the Red Planet.

Its mission is to expand our scientific understanding of Mars, paving the way for our current robotic missions and helping NASA prepare to send humans there.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter transmits data at a minimum of 500 kbps (kilo, or thousand bits per second) from its furthest distance away from Earth, about 250 million miles; currently, it is about 232 million miles.

If the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter used optical laser communication technology, its estimated data rate speed to Earth would be around 250 Mbps (megabits per second).

NASA’s Deep Space Network RF antennas are located in Australia, Spain, and California. These are primarily used for X-band (8 to 12 GHz) radio frequency range communications with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter via ultra-high frequency antennas.

In 2013, NASA first demonstrated an optical communications laser’s effectiveness, reliability, and long life operation in space through an experimental launch of a laser-equipped communications relay satellite with the Lunar Laser Communications Demonstration (LLCD) mission.

The mission’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environmental Explorer (LADEE) satellite launched Sept. 6, 2013, and aligned itself in the proper orbit over the moon.

NASA technicians prepared LADEE’s onboard communications laser system for the test.

NASA’s ground station, located in White Sands Complex in Las Cruces, NM, activated its communications laser beam Oct. 18, 2013, which traveled 239,000 miles to the LADEE spacecraft in lunar orbit.

The LADEE satellite used a communications laser beam focused on a particular ground transmitting/receiving station on Earth.

The download data speed of the satellite information sent to the Earth from the moon reached a fantastic maximum rate of 622 Mbps.

The LLCD mission proved laser communications could be successfully transmitted to Earth from a satellite in space with more incredible speed and efficiency than current RF signaling methods.

Unfortunately, the LADEE ended up crashing onto the moon’s surface a couple of months later; however, it did answer the vital question about successfully using long-range laser communications in space.

The next high-profile NASA laser test is the LCRD (Laser Communications Relay Demonstration) mission. It will launch this month from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

LCRD will be the payload aboard a US Department of Defense Space Force STPSat-6 spacecraft using a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.

This mission will last for two years and test long-term regularly-used laser communications from the Earth-orbiting International Space Station and ground stations in Hawaii and California.

LCRD will downlink data over optical signals at a rate of 1.2 gigabits per second, which is double the 622Mbps from the 2013 Lunar Laser Communications Demonstration.

NASA hopes the LCRD mission will be the prelude to launching future laser-communications equipped satellite, robotic, and other spacecraft missions to the moon, Mars, the other planets, and missions eventually traveling beyond our solar system.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center developed LCRD.

In 2018, NASA announced a closer study of the TRAPPIST-1 solar system, located some 40 light-years from Earth, revealed seven planets, some of which may be holding far more water than the oceans of Earth.

Perhaps, future generations on Earth will use optical laser communications technology to communicate with space satellites sent to the TRAPPIST-1 solar system containing Earth-like exoplanets, where life may have evolved.

Stay tuned.

Illustration of NASA's Laser Communications Relay Demonstration communicating over laser links. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center