AirSpaceMag.com

Now this is a charming idea, and maybe a handy one too – fleets of solar sails delivering pictures of distant worlds back to the home planet.

Data is a valuable commodity in the Information Age, just as spices and silk were in centuries past. So Joel Poncy and his team at Thales Alenia Space have imagined clipper ships cruising the solar system, loaded to the gunwales with…data.

In a paper presented at the recent European Planetary Science Congress (here’s a PDF version), Poncy et al. conceive of a solar-sailing data clipper that would fly close to an orbiter circling a distant planet, upload its data, then return to Earth to dump the stored terabytes. “Space-rated flash memories will soon be able to store the huge quantities of data needed for the global mapping of planetary bodies in high resolution,” said Poncy in a press release. “But a full high-res map of, say, Europa or Titan, would take several decades to download from a traditional orbiter, even using very large antennae.  Downloading data is the major design driver for interplanetary missions.  We think that data clippers would be a very efficient way of overcoming this bottleneck.”

And it may be a concept whose technological time has come. After years of speculation and aborted launch attempts, one solar sail, Japan’s IKAROS, is already flying, and another, NASA’s NanoSail-D,  is scheduled for launch on November 19 from Alaska. An identical NanoSail was destroyed on the failed launch of the third Falcon 1 rocket in 2008. This time a Minotaur IV will provide the ride.

The idea that ancient cultures were keen observers of the night sky is neither surprising nor new: think of the Druids, the Mayans, and the Babylonians. But most examples from the annals of archaeoastronomy seem to come from the northern hemisphere.

Now a team of researchers from Macquarie University in Austrlia is reporting what they believe is the only indigenous record of one of the most spectacular southern astronomical events of the 19th century.

Hubble view of Eta Carinae (N. Smith, J. A. Morse (U. Colorado) et al., NASA)

This Hubble image of the binary star Eta Carinae has always been one of my favorites. It looks like an explosion—which is exactly what it is. In 1843, this “hypergiant” star system, 100 times more massive than our sun and four million times as luminous, suddenly flared up to become brighter than every star in the sky except Sirius. Astronomers still aren’t sure exactly what prompts Eta Carinae’s periodic outbursts—it isn’t a supernova, although it may someday become one. And by 1858 the star had settled back to its normal brightness, just as it always does.

A few years after the 1843 “Great Eruption,” William Stanbridge, a wealthy Australian landowner, went out among the Boorong people of northwest Victoria to collect information on their knowledge of and myths about the night sky. Stanbridge found “two members of a Boorong family who had the reputation of having the best astronomical knowledge in the community,” according to the Macquarie researchers. They sat down at “a small campfire under the stars, located on a large plain near Lake Tyrell,” and talked about the sky overhead.

One of the stars named by the Boorong was Collowgullouric War, meaning “female crow,” which the researchers identify (in a paper to be published in the Journal for Astronomical History and Heritage), as Eta Carinae. The dramatic temporary brightening “would have been widely observed by most, if not all, indigenous peoples of the southern hemisphere,” say the authors. But as far as they can tell, Stanbridge’s 1858 report is the only mention of it in the literature. Read the full paper here.

Lockheed Martin's transformer concept.

The defense research agency DARPA recently selected six companies to participate in a year-long program to transform a Humvee-like vehicle into an aircraft. Lockheed Martin and AAI Corporation are asked to supply something that can “avoid traditional and asymmetrical threats while avoiding road obstructions,” according to DARPA’s press release.

The program hopes to “combine the advantages of ground vehicles with helicopters.” But is this scenario even plausible? As John Grossmann wrote for us in January 1996 (“Auto Pilots”), “The challenges of building [a flying car] are perhaps exceeded only by the challenges of selling it. Because a vehicle worthy of both land and air has compromise written all over it, the technical challenges are numerous. The common elements are few: fuel tank, steering wheel, passenger and baggage compartments, wheels, and engine. For flight you need wings, ailerons, a horizontal stabilizer, a vertical tail, rudder, elevators, and a propeller, none of which has any business on a car. For the road, you need a drive train and bumpers, not to mention rear-view mirrors and catalytic converters—all dead weight in the air.” (Even Terrafugia’s “roadable aircraft” lists this as a caveat: “Terrafugia’s philosophy is to design a vehicle for pilots that brings additional ground capability to an airplane instead of attempting to make a car fly.”)

AAI Corporation's concept.

DARPA’s vehicle is supposed to carry four troops and travel up to 250 miles (that’s both on land and in the air). First phase development will include propulsion systems, wing structures, and the advanced flight control system.

The flight control system, by the way, will allow for semi-autonomous flight, according to the press release, “permitting a nonpilot to perform VTOLs [Vertical Takeoff or Landing], transition into forward flight, and update the flight path in response to changing mission requirements or threats.”

Aerocar. Courtesy NASM.

Did no one think of the Aerocar (left) as a solution to this problem? If I saw a bunch of Marines piling out of that bad boy, I’d run.

There’s some justice in the fact that the worst rocket accident in history, which happened 50 years ago today, is remembered by the name of the man who caused it.

Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin was an ambitious military leader who rose to command the Soviet Union’s Strategic Missile Forces during the Cold War. In the autumn of 1960, his main focus was developing the new R-16 intercontinental ballistic missile, which was meant to be an answer to the American Atlas. According to Soviet rocket designer Boris Chertok in his landmark history Rockets and People, work on the R-16 was proceeding ahead of schedule, with a target date of July 1961 for the first launch, when Nedelin upped the ante: He would launch by November 7, in time for the 43rd anniversary of the Soviet revolution.

Nedelin’s desire for glory cost him his life, and the lives of nearly 100 others. Rushing the schedule led exhausted workers to take all kinds of short cuts and risks, including continuing to work on the missile after it was fully fueled on the launch pad at Baikonur, with some 250 people milling around within close range.

On the evening of October 24, a cascading series of errors, including a mistaken switch setting, led to a rocketeer’s worst nightmare: the R-16′s second stage fired on the pad, still attached to the first stage underneath it, which immediately exploded.

Chertok describes the scene:

Propellant components splashing out of the tanks soaked the testers standing nearby. Fire instantly devoured them. Poisonous vapors killed them. Of course, the quality of the film frames is not up to today’s standards [an official documentary film maker recorded the incident] but when viewed in slow motion you can see how the missile and erector burned and how the frantic people trapped on the service platforms jumped straight into the fire and were instantly consumed. The enormous temperature at a significant distance from the epicenter of the fire burned peoples’ clothing, and many of those fleeing who got bogged down in molten asphalt burned up completely.

There was an investigation, but no witch-hunt or official blame. Soviet authorities decided that being on the scene of the accident was punishment enough for the engineers and technicians who survived. Families of the victims were told to keep quiet, and the first detailed accounts of the accident were not published until the late 1980s.

As for Marshal Nedelin, he was near the base of the missile at the time of the explosion, and perished in the blast. Writes Chertok: “The majority of the dead were unrecognizable. … Nedelin was identified by the ‘Gold Star’ medal that had survived.”

A new documentary on the Nedelin disaster will air on Russian TV this weekend:

Pilot Lowell Smith oversees the movement of the Chicago before the flight to Scotland. When asked by a reporter if he'd be willing to make the grueling flight again, Lt. Smith replied, "Not in a million years, unless ordered to do so." Courtesy NASM.

On September 28, 1924, crowds cheered and sirens shrieked as the Army Service pilots known as “the Magellans of the Air” landed at Sand Point Field in Seattle, Washington, after completing the first round-the-world flight.

They had set off on April 6, some six months earlier, determined to circumnavigate the globe: eight men, four airplanes, eight stuffed spider monkeys from the Ambassador Hotel (see photo), and one stowaway from the Associated Press. (Ok, the AP stringer didn’t climb aboard until the group reached India.)

The group endured Arctic snow (dodging icebergs because of low cloud cover), survived the blistering heat of India, and made their way through thick fogs and violent storms. The four ships—the Seattle, the Chicago, the Boston, and the New Orleans—were specially built by the Douglas Aircraft Company. Not all would complete the journey: The Seattle crashed in the fog on an Alaskan mountainside, and the Boston sank near Iceland. (The crews survived.)

The Ambassador Hotel's manager gave eight stuffed spider monkeys, taken from the lobby's imitation palm trees, to the fliers as mascots. He promised $50 for each monkey safely returned. Courtesy NASM.

The Chicago, part of the National Air and Space Museum’s collections, is on display in the newly reopened Pioneers of Flight gallery. Jeremy Kinney, a curator in the aeronautics division, talked about the Chicago in a public presentation at the Museum this week. “The Army Air Service aviators saw the purpose of this flight,” he said, “as a key not only for stating their own importance within the defense establishment in the United States, but also as a way to make the world better, to show the ability of the airplane as a global technology.”

The 26,345-mile flight transfixed the world: couples arranged their marriages to coincide with the termination of the World Flight; babies were named after the pilots; the fashion-minded wore patches cut in the silhouette of a Douglas Cruiser.  To learn more, read the 1925 book The First World Flight, based on the crew’s personal narratives, written by Lowell Thomas.

President Calvin Coolidge (in raincoat) and Secretary of War John Wingate Weeks waited for three hours in the rain to greet the fliers at Bolling Field, Washington, D.C. (Arnold and Smith at far right.) Courtesy NASM.

Or watch video of the flight from the National Archives.