Credit: NASA/JHU APL/CIW

I've been supporting MESSENGER's third flyby of Mercury last week. I've got a description of how it went in a friends-locked entry. The contact-heavy work schedule has scrambled my circadian rhythm from day to day, so that one of the reasons I'm looking forward to my upcoming vacation is because I'll have the opportunity to resume a consistent sleep schedule. Since I've been subjected to a simulated sort of jet lag practically every day for the past few weeks, I don't expected to be fazed at all by the real thing.

Credit: DP

Last week I gave a HacDC Lightning Talk on Kōdō, the Japanese Way of Incense, in which I'm by no means an expert. But I know a little, enough to give a five-minute overview and demo. When I go to Kyoto later this month I'm going to attend a Kōdō demo by a genuine expert, and next month I'll be making kneaded incense (nerikō) at a Tankokai DC workshop. So in the near future I'll know a lot more. Let me know if you're interested in an informal demo of the wood-chip incense that's heated by charcoal in an ash-filled censer; I'm happy to share it. The Lightning Talks event was a great success, with a stimulating variety of topics and speakers.

Credit: Mackenzie

On Saturday I led the DC LinuxChix contingent of a group outing (along with AWC Maryland and GWU Women in Computer Science) to the National Cryptologic Museum. We tagged along with a docent-led tour and learned quite a bit, though we only scratched the surface of the museum's fascinating collection.

Credit: Mackenzie

On Saturday evening I joined seelevarcuzzo and Mackenzie at the Japan-America Society's Otsukimi, a traditional moon-viewing event held in this case at the National Arboretum. It was great fun, with a bento dinner, sake, haiku composition, some slightly-unseasonal-feeling bon odori dancing, and even a little practice of our Japanese. I brought a borrowed telescope and set it up to have a good look at the moon; we were lucky to have a clear sky with only a few thin clouds occasionally floating artistically in front of the moon. I wish the event had lasted longer, as we missed our chance to wander around the Bonsai & Penjing Museum and it felt like we were just getting started as it was announced that it was time to pack up and leave.

Credit: Indy

On Sunday I went climbing at White Rocks, a spur from the temporarily-closed Sugarloaf Mountain. The weather was fantastic. I attempted Sugar & Spice (a 5.2 on the Yosemite Decimal System) and Lucifer (a 5.10/5.11), summiting neither but enjoying the climbs nonetheless. I'd be tempted to buy my own climbing shoes and harness but I'm a little discouraged that the local climbing gym has discontinued their auto belay system that would have allowed me to practice on my own.

And now to prepare for Tankokai DC's Autumn Chakai this weekend and my upcoming Japan trip that starts next week. Ack! I don't quite feel prepared for either.

This week at work we've been bringing in our high school yearbooks and chuckling at each others' dorky pasts. One of my co-workers pointed out that, according to my yearbook, I was in the astronomy club my sophomore through senior years and was president my senior year. But although I have always been interested in astronomy, I have no recollection of there being an astronomy club in my high school, much less of leading it. Meetings, events, equipment, a faculty advisor? My memory comes up blank. Huh.

My talk on MESSENGER at this month's Dorkbot DC meeting went quite well, I think. I hadn't spoken in front of a large group in almost two years, and I'd promised myself I wouldn't succumb to the cognitive style of PowerPoint, so I was a bit nervous beforehand, but having a friendly, interested, inquisitive audience made all the difference.

I have so many projects being neglectedgoing that I probably shouldn't be starting another, but I'm thinking I might give a talk on karakuri ningyō (old Japanese automata) after I build a second one, this time an archery one to complement the tea-serving one I put together a couple years ago.

And finally, I leave you with a beautiful poem I found via skurtchasor:

Delay
by Elizabeth Jennings

The radiance of the star that leans on me
Was shining years ago. The light that now
Glitters up there my eyes may never see,
And so the time lag teases me with how

Love that loves now may not reach me until
Its first desire is spent. The star's impulse
Must wait for eyes to claim it beautiful
And love arrived may find us somewhere else.

Photos of—or just including—me made it into two global media outlets this week, and for two different reasons.

First, if you look closely, you can spot me in the control room in the first photo in this Sky & Telescope article about MESSENGER's first flyby of Mercury this past Monday. Of the people visible in that photo, I'm the second from the left. Check out some great photos of Mercury while you're at it.

Second, I feature in the bottom photo of the Make: Blog entry on Wednesday evening's LED-cube-making workshop organized by Dorkbot DC and Make: DC. There you can see me soldering together LEDs that will eventually form a 3-by-3 cube—I don't think any of the participants got past that stage of the project during the two-hour workshop, but I expect there will be plenty of support for people finishing them at home.

I'm surprised that I never blogged about the [Space] Flight Software Workshop back in November that I helped organize. It went quite well, and so there'll be another this November. In conjunction with that workshop, David Mindell gave a lecture on the tension between automation and human control during the Apollo lunar landings. I thought it was fascinating enough that I want to point you to the (Flash 8) video of that lecture.

In other space notes, MESSENGER's first Mercury flyby is coming up soon. Their flight controllers will be putting in some long hours this month, given the loads of DSN support time they've got scheduled around the flyby—around the clock for several days. One of them just had a baby, too. (Our—New Horizons'—and their operations centers are co-located, so we're well acquainted.)

Three co-workers and I arrived in Los Angeles, California around mid-day on Wednesday of last week. After renting a Ford Edge, driving to Pasadena, checking into the hotel, unpacking, and eating lunch, we were ambivalent about getting ourselves involved in any lengthy tours, but we called our contact at ITT, the contractor that runs the Deep Space Network complexes and networking infrastructure. Our "tour guide" was Lu, one of the Network Operations Project Engineers with whom we occasionally speak in the course of our jobs. He showed us around their offices in Monrovia, where they have a Remote Operations Center and test facilities along with the standard rows of cubicles, all housed in the shiny facilities of a defunct dot-com. We were introduced around to more people than we could possibly remember. For dinner that night, we walked all around Old Town Pasadena before settling on Barney's Beanery.

On Thursday we attended a morning of presentations at ITT on how they support DSN operations, from scheduling and resource allocation (there are thirtysome spacecraft—still including Voyager—competing for time on the antennas) to radio electronics the likes of which I lack the background to understand much.

In the afternoon we toured JPL. They've got a beautiful campus and a renovated Deep Space Operations Control Center (with plenty of room for press and VIPs). Outdoor snack bars dot the campus, reminding us how far sunny California is from temperate Maryland. From viewing galleries we took in high bay cleanrooms where Kepler and the Ocean Surface Topography Mission were being physically assembled. We made de rigeur visits to the gift shop and the (web-invisible?) von Kármán Museum. New to me since my last visit—when the auditorium had been converted into a dining area—was a Voyager display including a model of the spacecraft and visual and audio material from its evocative golden record.

My companions were itching to go to In-N-Out Burger to eat that evening, but I'd already eaten one meal that day at a restaurant whose cuisine I don't like, so I struck out on my own and found Masa, a sushi and sake bar. I enjoyed an oyster shooter, a crunchy spicy tuna roll, an interesting-if-not-genius salmon-and-mango roll, and a bottle of Kurosawa Jun-Mai Kimoto sake, which made the nigh-interminable wait for my bill a little more tolerable. Afterward I stopped by Zephyr for a chai tea and some much-needed liberal company.

Friday was our day to go out into the Mojave Desert and see the big antennas and related infrastructure that constitute Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex. From Pasadena/Monrovia it was a three-hour drive, but it didn't seem that long to me, maybe because the landscape was so interesting to watch. It wasn't as flat as I had expected. Apparently the rolling hills (combined with the geographic isolation) helps shield the complex from radio spectrum pollution, to the extent that regulations like the ones that have created the radio quiet zone near Green Bank, West Virginia, are unnecessary. Military activities nearby can interfere with the complex's communications, though, so the military is warned well in advance of any times during which especially critical spacecraft communications are scheduled to occur.

The two of us from the New Horizons mission and two of us from MESSENGER were joined on our tour, once we got there, by about fifteen people from Kepler. Our guide told me my skirt and sandals would be a problem, which certainly wasn't something I anticipated. And being a six-hour round-trip drive from my suitcase, I was peeved—but only until a staff member of about my height and build lent me a pair of jeans, socks, and steel-toed sneakers.

The first antenna we visited was the biggest: the 70-meter dish. It was impressive. In addition to walking around it in awe, we donned hard hats and went up to a platform about two stories high outside and inside its "pedestal". (That's the part where open-toed shoes and a skirt would notionally have been problematic.) We saw the thin, greased shims that keep the structure level and a great many insulated cables. We were allowed to go inside the area inside the pedestal for a short time without hearing protection, but it didn't turn out to be very loud inside. We also got to go inside a small building next to the antenna where the signal processing (and control operations for the whole complex) happens. The control room there is where you can find the DSN operators with whom I talk during each communications session with our spacecraft in order to configure everything right.

After visiting the big antenna, we visited several 34-meter antennas with various sophisticated optics. I think our tour group was a bit too large for us to be able to follow the guide's explanations, so we mostly wandered around inside the equipment rooms underneath the antennas, gawking at the machinery, electronics, and controls. Capping off our tour was a visit to their maser laboratory.

For dinner we walked to Cameron's Seafood, which was okay; the decor at least managed to be marine-themed without veering into Red Lobster kitsch. And that was it: the next morning we got up bright and early and headed to LAX for our flight home, which was late as well as uncomfortable, but it did get us home.

Our little New Horizons spacecraft is getting close to Jupiter as it uses the planet's gravity to slingshot it along its way to Pluto. Pointing the instruments at Jupiter not only takes advantage of the close approach to gather valuable science data but also serves as an exercise in advance of the spacecraft's fly by Pluto years hence. I'm not involved in the operational aspects of this mission, but having developed some of the control and data handling software, of course I'm watching with keen interest. If you're particularly interested and in the Baltimore/DC area, you can come to a Planetary Society-sponsored public lecture on New Horizons at Jupiter on Wednesday, February 28, 2007 at 7 p.m. in the Kossiakoff Center.

Are any of you readers going to LISA ‘06 (in Washington, D.C., December 3–8, 2006)? What caught my eye about it is that DJ Byrne from JPL will be giving an invited talk entitled “Open Source Software and Its Role in Space Exploration” there. I’d like to go hear that talk, which is scheduled for 4-5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, 6 December, but I'm not sure how I might swing that as far as conference registration goes—even a one-day tech session pass is rather expensive. Here’s the description of the talk from the conference web site:

Open source developers and NASA have a lot in common. Both are dedicated to expanding the pool of information floating freely through society. Both are focused on the cutting edge, creating new tools and capabilities. Open source software explores our solar system and observes the universe. For example, software on and around Mars today was built with gcc out of a CVS repository stored in AFS, using Kerberos authentication.

At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, DJ is privileged to be writing flight software for the 2009 Mars rover’s landing radar. He has written ground system software for Voyager, Galileo, Magellan, and other missions. He’s been a System Administrator for several projects and sections on a variety of operating systems. He’s been JPL’s kerberos admin (10,000 principals), AFS administrator (200 users), public-domain tool builder (set of ~700 for 3 platforms), a Knowledge Management System Engineer, and postmaster (~3000 mailboxes).

In the very near future, I'll be able to say that my job involves Linux (and not just spacecraft)! I'll be embarking with a small team on a two-month exploratory effort to install RTLinux on an MCP750 chip (similar to the space-qualified and therefore very expensive RAD750). Once we get it running and set up a credible development environment, we plan to roughly simulate the kind of processing that would happen on a spacecraft's main processor(s), maybe including intensive tasks like data compression and guidance-and-control algorithms.

We're aware of the FlightLinux project that was completed several years ago, but it's not entirely clear how the status of Linux in space has changed since then. I'm starting a web page to keep track of various missions and efforts; if you know of any that aren't listed, please tell me about them!

A Linux Journal article on the use of Linux in NRL's TacSat-1 sounds promising; next month we expect to hear whether we'll get the go-ahead on a proposal to partner with them in some more of this sort of Linux-in-space research.

Perhaps the most productive part of the conference, for me, was an informal panel discussion on Tuesday afternoon entitled "Space Communications Researchers and Mission Planners: Shall we talk?" It addressed the dissonance I alluded to in my earlier post between the nifty technical work presented at the conference and the conservative managers who decide whether it gets to fly. The Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems was applauded for its work in establishing standards that pave the way to conservative-manager acceptance, with very few staff and very little money. U.S. export laws that define spacecraft technology as "arms" were identified as a big obstacle to collaboration in the spacecraft software community. At the end of the discussion, we vowed to Do Something About It this time and collected names and e-mail addresses.

The talks I attended on Wednesday contained more of the technical details of space communications systems. "Security Considerations in Space and Delay Tolerant Networks" was one of the more interesting, to me, combining some of the network security perspective I'd gleaned from varous security-guru friends with the awesomeness of space. :) Following the talks was a lightning-round of poster presentations, including my brief overview of Andrew Turner's open-source spacecraft simulation software. I was pleased to see some interest in it afterwards.

Wednesday evening was our "night out" at JPL; here are my pictures. We wandered in their museum for a little while, where I was impressed with the immensity of the Galileo spacecraft, based on their full-size mock-up. They also had a cube of aerogel on display, but alas, it was strictly hands-off.

Then it was time to head to their auditorium, set up as a banquet hall and laid out with a sumptuous buffet. I hung out at a table with self-described "protocol people"—I assume that refers to protocols like LTP. The keynote speaker was Steve Kilston, of Ball Aerospace, who presented his vision of "The Ultimate Project - A Plausible Path to the Stars." This would be a spacecraft to be launched in about 500 years, carrying around a million people to some other star system. At first the sheer ambitiousness of this plan (dubbed simply "THE PROJECT") seems stunning, but of course 500 years is a long time. The only other time I've heard about projects on this time scale is from the Long Now Foundation and those planning for warning signs at the Yucca Mountain radioactive waste repository. I love hearing about this kind of stuff. Here's a pdf of slides very similar to those he showed us, where you can get an idea of the physical form of the suggested spaceship and some rough mass and energy estimates. (On a side note, I think Kilston bears an unmistakable physical resemblance to his one-time research advisor, the late Carl Sagan.) I thought he seemed pretty clear-headed about the challenges and questions about THE PROJECT, including the need for human civilization not only to avoid collapse but, indeed, to advance our understanding of ourselves before we can reach the stars.

My presentation on the Evolution of a Test Process for Spacecraft Software was Thursday morning, and I think it went quite well. Attendance at all the sessions on that last day of the conference lagged, so I was satisfied to see about fifteen people in the audience for my talk, if I recall correctly. They asked plenty of questions at the end, and I got some leads on people to talk to about funding for evaluating software development and testing tools and about lessons learned in this area by people at NASA centers and the like.

SMC-IT wound up on Thursday afternoon with a panel discussion that was a broader version of Tuesday's discussion among network-oriented people. The panelists included people from industry, government, and academia, so a variety of emphases were expressed. Technology infusion was a major theme, again. My attention span was a little taxed by this point, though, so this discussion might have been more valuable than I'm making it sound.

The rest of the evening was spent chilling out, tea shopping (I picked up ilennium [?] green tea and vanilla black tea at Leaforever), and stopping by a Thirza Dafoe performance at Levitt Pavilion that involved dancing with hoops and audience participation and heavy doses of self-acceptance—an only-in-California sort of experience, or so it felt.

So, in conclusion, it was a great conference; I wish it was held more frequently than every three years. I met a bunch of cool people, felt validated in my progressive attitude about spacecraft software development, and experienced California for the first—and certainly not the last—time.