AirSpaceMag.com

The H1 and its owner in 1932.

At an “Ask An Expert” lecture by John Anderson, National Air and Space Museum curator of aeronautics, I learned that although Howard Hughes’ H-1 racer is displayed wearing its cross-country “long” wings, the high-speed-dash wings, which are shorter, are in storage at the Museum’s Garber facility in nearby Suitland, Maryland. Curators initially thought about removing the cross-country wings and installing the high-speed wings, but Associate Director Peter Jakab said,”It was an enormously complex job.” The H-1 has worn its long wings ever since.

I also learned that in the mid-1970s, the General Services Administration took ownership of Hughes’ H-4 Flying Boat. According to NASM’s catalogue of aircraft: “A three-cornered deal was arranged among GSA, the Smithsonian, and Hughes. The Smithsonian was given title to the Goose for a ‘legal instant’ and the deal immediately concluded with the exchange of the Spruce Goose for the H-1 and $700,000.”

NASM ought to put the short wings on eBay. Wouldn’t all us prop-heads love to hang them on a wall?

In the age of orbiting telescopes such as the Hubble and the not-yet-launched James Webb Space Telescope, it’s worth giving a nod to the dramatic advances made in building ground-based telescopes.

The board of trustees of the Carnegie Institution for Science just authorized the release of $59.2 million to move forward with the construction of the Giant Magellan Telescope.

An artist's concept of Magellan. Credit: Giant Magellan Telescope-Carnegie Observatories

Magellan will be the first in the next generation of ground-based observatories that will peer deep into the universe from a mountaintop at the Las Campanas Observatory in the Chilean Andes. It will combine seven primary mirror segments, each of them 27.5 feet across, resulting in the equivalent of a mirror more than 80 feet in diameter (Hubble’s is seven feet, 10 inches across). The telescope will be larger and more powerful than any previous optical telescope, will have 10 times the light gathering power of current ground-based telescopes, and, thanks to the latest advances in adaptive optics, will produce images ten times sharper than those from Hubble.

While Magellan will probe the big mysteries of cosmology such as dark matter and the origins of the first stars and galaxies, the telescope will also keep its keen eyes peeled for planets orbiting nearby stars.

Here’s a nice primer on the five ground-based telescopes that qualify as ELTs (Extremely Large Telescopes), only two of which have become operational.

While the U.S. space program is mired in political arguments over how to reach Earth orbit (something we’ve known how to do for 50 years), Japan’s space agency JAXA, with far less money, is about to take a small but noteworthy step into the future.

An HII-A launcher is scheduled to lift off from the Tanegashima Space Center early on the morning of May 21, Japan time (Note: Launch postponed from May 18), with two spacecraft on board: a Venus orbiter called Akatsuki, and a smaller craft called IKAROS (Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation Of the Sun). With all due respect to Venus researchers, it’s the second payload that really interests me.

Solar sailing has long been suggested as a cheap, efficient way to cross vast stretches of space without having to carry whopping amounts of rocket fuel. Turn your sail into the sunlight, wait a while, and you’ll start building up speed. No fuel required, just photon pressure.

Due to a series of launch mishaps, the technology has never advanced much beyond ground tests. Now IKAROS actually hopes to go somewhere. It will ride alongside Akatsuki to Venus, swing past the planet, then go into orbit around the sun.

Because this is a technology demo and not a science mission, the JAXA engineers will be halfway to happiness if the sail just deploys properly. The 65-foot-diagonal square sail is made of a material called polyimide, just 7.5 microns in diameter, not much thicker than spider silk. It will unfurl from a spinning spool (start watching the Japanese-language video below at about the 6:50 mark to see the deployment). Tip weights at the corners provide tension—the sail has no frame.

The other key technology IKAROS is meant to demonstrate is power generation. About 5 percent of the sail’s surface is covered with thin-film solar cells, which will produce electricity. JAXA intends to follow the IKAROS demo later this decade by sending a larger (165-foot diagonal) sail to Jupiter and the Trojan asteroids, which will require  additional thrust from ion drive—powered by the solar cells fixed to the sail.

It sounds ambitious, but the Japanese have been working on solar sail technology for years, and according to IKAROS project head Osamu Mori, this time they think they have a winning design, particularly when it comes to the material.

The idea for a solar sail first appeared about 100 years ago. Since then, there has been a lot of research done on this in western countries as well as Japan, but so far no one has made a breakthrough. One of the reasons for this is that the technology didn’t exist to reliably produce a lightweight thin film for the sail, which is very important. This film has to be made from a material that’s not just lightweight but can withstand extreme radiation and heat in space. The material that meets these conditions is polyimide resin, which is used as a foam insulation for satellites. Once such a high-quality material became available, the development of a solar sail came much closer to reality. Today, Japan has the largest market share in the world for polyimide resin. We are currently leading the race to develop applications for this technology, and it would mean a great deal to us to be the first in the world to build a working solar sail.

If all goes well, IKAROS will unfurl its wispy membrane about a month after launch, then set sail for Venus.

Ya gotta be rooting for this one.

As the space station gets its finishing touches (Atlantis carries up a new Russian storage module on tomorrow’s STS-132 mission), we’ll see some new gadgets come into play. One is the European Robotic Arm, due to be installed on the Russian Multipurpose Laboratory Module in 2012. A spare elbow for the arm is going up ahead of time on this shuttle flight.

The ERA is like a disembodied arm with hands—actually cylindrical “end effectors”— on either end. While one hand holds onto an attach point on the station’s exterior, the other is free to move cargo around. This video shows the ERA in action. The arm can also “walk” around the outside of the station from one attach point to another, with each step taking 30 minutes to an hour.

Unlike other station arms, the ERA can be operated either from inside the Russian lab module or from outside, by a spacewalking cosmonaut. For the first time, spacewalkers will be able to operate their own robot assistants, without having to ask one of their colleagues inside. At right is the control device they’ll use.

NASA has released better video of the recent launch abort system test in New Mexico. Some spectacular views here.