Recently in Work Category
It's only Tuesday but it's already been a weird week. I find myself trying to get certified to work a position that, for now, is specific to the space shuttle. The space shuttle, however, is going to stop flying in two years. There are lots of decisions being made about how to conclude flight controller training for the shuttle and begin to transition a large part of the NASA workforce to the new Constellation program. And I feel pinched. I really, really want to finish the training flow I am about to begin, and I really, really want to be able to work a shuttle flight as lead rendezvous officer before the program ends. I feel like I need this certification, and the ensuing experience, in order to put myself in a decent position to make contributions to the future vehicle -- and to position myself for a fulfilling job after the shuttle program ends. But upper management is trying to figure out how to reduce the number of sims that we run. This is necessary to free up people to work the new program, but it also adversely affects people like me who are still in a training flow. It's a race against time, but many of the factors involved are beyond my control, and I'm afraid that I might not win. So I feel very anxious about my future career.
I swam 1800 yards last night and I can feel it in my arms and back today. It was a good swim, three sets of 500 yards freestyle, each followed by 100 yards of breaststroke. There was a crazy guy two lanes over from me. I couldn't figure out what he was doing. As I left, I noticed his bag had tags hanging off it that read "Speedo" and "Athlete" and things like that -- they looked like athlete passes from some kind of event. But his behavior in the pool was just strange. He never swam more than 50 yards without taking an extended break. He swam each of those 50 yards all-out, but his breaks were so long that it didn't seem as if he was doing any sort of structured workout. At one point, he wore flippers on his feet and paddled backstroke furiously while his body was angled in the water at about 45 degrees. I can't even describe well what he was doing but it was strange. Basically, everything he did seemed designed to produce the maximum amount of splash and noise. Weird.
I bought two more orchids last night at HEB. I know, HEB! A grocery store. Seems like a strange place to buy orchids, but they were only $9.99 and they looked very healthy. Plus, they were both still blooming, so now I've got some new flowers to enjoy while my purple one goes dormant for the year -- or whatever it is they do.
After two up-and-down years, I surrendered the HARRA webmaster position to someone else. I enjoyed working on the website, and being a part of the HARRA board, even if I wasn't very active as a board member. I enjoyed redesigning the site and getting things up and running with a new system. But after two years, I needed a break from the day-to-day maintenance work, and from the emails from members asking questions that were new to them, but that I felt like I'd answered a thousand times already. I think I'm a lot more interested in website design than in website maintenance anyway. It will be good to have fresh blood working on the site.
After launch on May 31, rendezvous last Monday, and lots of little issues to work over the past week, my involvement in STS-124 finally came to a close this morning as the shuttle undocked from the space station, did a lazy lap around the ISS to take lots of pretty pictures, and then departed into the darkness of space. Discovery is headed for a landing in Florida on Saturday, assuming the weather there is good.
Undocking was completely uneventful, as it should be. Just before the second separation burn, the crew called down and thanked both the rendezvous training lead and the lead rendezvous officer (the front room guy) by name for their help in preparing them for flight. Since I was the third wheel on that team, I was excited to hear my coworkers get called out on the air-to-ground. Hopefully my own mission as lead (STS-129, which seems eons away) will be just as cool.
But to be ready for that mission, whenever it finally arrives, means getting certified as a Rendezvous GPO. And my first sim in the front room is in two weeks! I'm nervous already. I'll be working an undock sim (undocks are easier than rendezvous) and will have an experienced person with me, but I have to -- gasp! -- talk to the flight director! In 2.5 years of training and working flights, I've never had to talk to the flight director. It's a little intimidating. But I know it will feel really good to get out there in the front room and do it. I'll only get one lead flight before the shuttle program ends, but dang it, I'm going to make it count.
Tomorrow I am sleeping until a TBD time. All I know is that it will definitely be later than 7 a.m. I haven't slept later than 7 since Memorial Day, and most days have been much earlier than that! I'm exhausted. I don't know how all you early morning runners do it.
Ah, the iPhone. Apple introduced the "Gen 2" version yesterday, as you may have heard. It runs on the 3G network and it's got GPS. But other than that, there are no huge hardware changes. I don't really need 3G and GPS so for once I'll overcome my need to have all things tech -- gasp! -- So I'll be keeping my current iPhone and upgrading to the new firmware. Which looks great! Lots of updates and the app store is finally coming out so I can add 3rd party programs. I do adore my iPhone and now that it's only $199, I think they are going to sell a crapload of them.
In other news, after this morning we have all our ducks in a row for the undocking tomorrow. The events summary is finalized with times of all the important milestones -- when the Shuttle-ISS stack gets into the proper attitude for undocking, when the solar arrays are properly configured so as to avoid any damage from pluming by the shuttle's thrusters, when we undock. After that, we do a one lap flyaround of the ISS so that we can get some pretty pictures, and then it's time for the two separation burns that take the shuttle on its merry way away from ISS and towards a landing on Saturday. Undocking is scheduled for 6:42 a.m. Central time and should stay there, barring any problems. But this has been a very problem-free mission (knock on wood). Good stuff. And only one more early morning for me!
The only downside is that my odd hours have left me with little-to-no energy or motivation to work out. I'm not going to beat myself up about it. Instead, I'm going to jump back in after we undock tomorrow. I'm tired of beating myself up about what I do, how often I do it, and how hard I push myself. I'm also just tired. :)
It's 4:30 in the morning and I am currently contemplating whether there is really any value to having a slew of flight controllers on console in the wee hours of the morning when their mental and physical states are very likely compromised by lack of sleep. I first walked past the vending machines at 4:05 a.m. and noticed a guy attempting to purchase a snack. He put in a coin and it went straight through and came out the coin return. So he tried again. And again.
I just walked by the machines a second time, a full 10 minutes later, and the guy was still there, and still inputting a coin again, and again, and again. One would hope that he took a break somewhere in there to go find a different coin or something, but I'm not so sure. Keeping weird hours makes everyone a little loopy.
I like flight control. But I'm not so in love with flight control that means setting my alarm for 3 a.m. (and 2:30 a.m. tomorrow, and 2:00 a.m. on Wednesday). It's not that I'm particularly a morning or a night person -- I've found that I can be either if I adjust my schedule accordingly. No, it's mainly that I just don't do well with a lack of sleep. It may be an obvious statement, but that doesn't make it any less true. As a freshman in college, I went to bed around midnight every night -- which was quite a bit earlier than most of the people on my hall. By senior year, I was staying up until the wee hours of the morning on a regular basis and even pulled a couple all-nighters. Looking back on it now, I can safely say that I was a complete and total basket case during my last semester at Georgia Tech. I was already anxious about graduating and what the future held. Add the incredible lack of sleep I subjected myself to for months on end, and I was a physical and emotional mess. UGH. I shudder just remembering those days (which, to be fair, had some spectacular moments as well).
But old habits die hard, and I stayed up too late last night -- 10:30! -- but it was because I had to watch the first two episodes of "When We Left Earth." I had built up such high expectations of what the old footage should/could look like in HD that I was a little disappointed to be reminded that HD is only as good as the original film. Some clips looked really good, but others were still as grainy and oddly color-balanced as ever. Still, there was a lot of footage in both episodes that I had never seen before and it was fun to watch. I can't wait for the last couple episodes dealing with the shuttle program though, primarily because I think the HD there will really be high definition as we've come to think of it.
I think this is the preview Karen is referring to in her comment on my last post. There is a short clip of someone on the Vomit Comet, but it is not me. The majority of the footage that Discovery has cleaned up and digitized in HD is from the early NASA programs. The clip of the Vomit Comet looks, to me (based on other video I've seen), like something from the early days of the shuttle program.
Nonetheless, When We Left Earth looks like an awesome series and I hope many of you will check it out. It is one of the coolest things I've seen thus far being done to celebrate NASA's 50th birthday this year. The series begins this Sunday night on the Discovery channel, and I totally invited myself over to Gavin and Jen's place to mooch a viewing on their HDTV. You can come too! I'm sure they won't mind. ;)
The early hours are starting to get to me, less because of the earliness itself and more because it's just hard to go to bed at 8:30 p.m. and thus be prepared for the 4:30 a.m. alarm. Thankfully, I get to take tomorrow and Sunday off. This is the 11th day in a row that I've worked (my last day off was Memorial Day) so I'm looking forward to my weekend. I'll still be getting up early, since on Monday our on-console time is 4:00 a.m. Here I am looking a little more awake, since this was taken last Monday in the middle of the rendezvous. This is the first time I've actually gotten a photo of me on console working, since the photographers never come into our back room during the launch shift (too many people).
If you want to know I'm doing, well, I'm watching my displays. I'm also trying to ignore the fact that there is a camera in my face, and I'd really like to talk photography. But we're in the middle of a rendezvous here, people! :)
NASA TV is currently showing replays of the video taken from the solid rocket boosters on launch. It's pretty cool -- watching the liftoff and first couple minutes of ascent, followed by a gorgeous view of the shuttle leaving the booster behind as it begins to fall back to earth.
Today the crew is working on installing more equipment inside the new Japanese module. Here's video from Wednesday, when they opened the module for the first time and the astronauts got to bounce off the walls for a while. Now that they are installing lockers and other equipment on each side ("floor" and "ceiling" too), it doesn't like quite as spacious. Still big though.
I've been admiring some fun composite photos by one of the people I follow on Flickr, so this morning at 6 a.m. while on console, I decided to try it myself using my iPhone as the camera. I put them together in Photoshop and this is the result. It was a fun little project to do, so expect to see more various scene composites in my photostream.
The new Japanese module, Kibo, was just "ingressed" today -- meaning they opened the door and went inside. It is huge! The crew looked like they were having a lot of fun bouncing off the walls -- literally. There aren't even any wall lockers installed yet, so the module is nothing but empty space in which to play. I bet those are the most fun times to be an astronaut.
We docked to the space station today! I half expected it to be boring, since in real life there are far fewer issues and problems to work on during the 6-hour rendezvous. But then again, for the first time ever, I was sitting on console for a rendezvous that was happening for real. Like, in real life. And that was very exciting.
During the first part of the rendezvous, as we began to take data with the star tracker, the crew "invited us onboard." What that means is that they had a camera running on the flight deck that we were able to downlink to the ground. It was fun watching them on TV. Mark Kelly, the commander, was having fun spinning his rendezvous procedures book around in zero g, and I saw a lot of smiles and laughter. I'm sure they were very happy to get to the ISS without incident.
(That book he's holding, by the way? It's the rendezvous procedures book. And for this mission, I was the rendezvous book manager, in addition to working the flight from the control center. That means I made sure that everything in that book got updated correctly. Two weeks ago, I was looking through that book -- the very copy he is holding on the space shuttle -- to make sure that the official flight copies were accurate. Then it got shipped to Florida, loaded onto the space shuttle, and now it's in orbit. Pretty cool.)
It was an eventful rendezvous. Everything went very smoothly, but there were a couple things that were "normal-but-unusual," meaning that there were a couple things that we (and the crew) are prepared to handle, but don't always happen. The first interesting thing happened during the star tracker pass. We use a star tracker, normally used to track stars (duh) and use it to track the space station instead, since at a distance the station looks like a very bright star. The data we get from the star tracker helps us update our position in space to be as accurate as possible relative to the space station. During our star tracker pass today, there were 5 stars that passed through the field of view! This is interesting because there is always a chance that the star tracker could get confused and lock onto one of those stars instead of the space station, and screw up our navigation. That didn't happen today, but we had to watch the data very carefully just in case.
We also did two of our rendezvous burns using the right OMS engine. Again, this isn't a big deal, but we usually use the left engine. The left engine had a minor problem during ascent, so to be safe, we aren't going to use it again until it's time to deorbit. Because we used the right OMS engine, we had to be in a slightly different orientation during two of our burns. And that slightly different orientation meant that there was an increased chance that our radar would lose its lock on the space station. So we had to do a couple slightly different steps to protect for that case -- even though it turned out that the radar never lost track of the ISS.
The final interesting thing is that due to various dispersions, our approach trajectory was a little bit shallow. This meant that one of our midcourse correction burns did not fall into the nominal 10-minute window -- the onboard guidance calculated that it was late, almost a minute beyond our accepted window. To correct for this, we had to load a different set of targets and perform that burn right at the end of the window. Again, not a big deal since the crew is well-trained for this type of thing, but it was still an interesting case to see in real life.
Some days my job is not that exciting. But today was different. Today was a very good day!
It was a pretty day in Florida for a launch! STS-124 took off carrying the Japanese module "Kibo" for delivery to the space station. It was another smooth launch for me as ARD Support Officer; this was my fourth flight. The solid rocket boosters burned a little hot, so the main engines throttled to compensate for the extra thrust from the SRBs. We had a little bit of a trend, due to performance dispersions, and therefore took a thrust update to get the ARD modeled correctly. No big deal. Wham, bam, we're in orbit! It was a very smooth launch overall and I'm excited that the mission has begun.
For the past few missions, NASA has been putting together creative posters for each crew. They usually spoof a movie, and this mission's taking on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. (Google the movie poster and compare it to the above.) I particularly like Karen Nyberg's wind-blown and glowing hair. Very dramatic. Makes me laugh.
I'm off to find some dinner and relax before heading to bed. I'm due on console for my first-ever Orbit 1 shift at 6 a.m.!
CHECK. IT. OUT. The Mars Reconaissance Orbiter, which has been orbiting Mars for the past two years, took a picture of Phoenix as it parachuted towards its successful landing on Mars last night. That is SO FREAKING COOL. In fact, this may be the most amazing photo I have ever seen. Something we sent all the way to Martian orbit was able to capture a photo of something else that we sent all the way to the Martian surface. Amazing.
More Phoenix info is all over the web for those of you who are interested (and that should be pretty much everyone because landing things on Mars is pretty dang cool).
