Vulnerable MOSFETS in NASA's Europa Clipper

 

Oh man, this is terrible.  Just months before launch of the Europa Clipper mission to Jupiter's satellite, they discovered that some of the MOSFETS in the spacecraft might get fried by the Jovian radiation.  1500 MOSFETS.  Ouch.  Details here: 

https://futurism.com/nasa-disastrous-flaw-spacecraft

Who can tell us more about Lovelock's homebrew shortwave radio?

"Three years earlier, Lovelock had listened on his homemade shortwave radio in Finchley to the 'beep, beep, beep' transmission of the USSR’s Sputnik, the first satellite that humanity had put into orbit. Now he was playing with the super powers."

From: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/sep/05/gaia-theory-born-of-secret-love-affair-james-lovelock

A bit of a soap opera, but the radio question is, I think,  interesting. 

CuriousMarc Visits Cape Canaveral -- Lots of Space History (and some ham gear)

I like all the CuriousMarc videos, but I especially liked this one. Marc and company visited some of the very early launch sites and bunkers at Cape Canaveral.  If you thought Apollo tech was crude, take a look back at what they used in Mercury and Gemini.  Wow.  

I spotted two ham radio receivers.   In the first bunker at 10 minutes 28 seconds we see an old National HRO Sixty with the classic HRO dial, much like the one given to me by Armand WA1UQO. (Thanks again Armand!) Note how they attribute one of the early launch disasaters to two diodes in the power supply that shorted due to launch vibration.  I hate it when that happens.  

In the second bunker we see a Hammarlund HQ-140 at 19 minutes 7 seconds.  This was apparently being used as a Frequency Standard (or maybe a time standard?) perhaps receiving WWV at 10 MHz.  I note that the frequency knob shows it set for the AM broadcast band... 

Arthur C. Clarke Talks about Satellites, SETI, Remote Work, and Wrist Radios (1976 Video)

He was, of course, right about the impact of satellites, but he was the inventor of the geo-stationary concept.  I wonder how he would react to the low-earth orbit Starlink system we are now using. 

He coments about how contact with extraterrestrial civilizations could come at any time, but notes that false alarms are common -- this made me think of recent explanations of the famous "Wow!" signal. 

His "Communicate don't Commute" idea seems to foreshadow the "remote work" via  Zoom that kicked in during the pandemic.  

And he talks about Dick Tracy-like wrist radios.  I sort of have one now (thanks to Elisa), in the form of my Apple Watch.  But it may be that putting a camera in there would be a bit too much... 

Ham Radio in China -- Interesting info from 高大伟 David Cowhig

Chinese Radio Licenses and Operating Certificates

David Cowhig (aka WA1LBP,  aka Gao Da Wei) was Hambassdor for 73 Magazine on Okinawa when I held a similar "position" on the island of Hispaniola.  David is a real Asia hand, and is fluent in both Mandarin and Japanese.   He is uiniquely sitated to provide info on ham radio in China.  In a recent post he provides this info, and describes how we may soon be hearing from ham Taikonauts in space:  

https://gaodawei.wordpress.com/2024/05/22/2024-ham-radio-in-china-soon-chinese-hams-in-space/

Thanks David! 

CuriousMarc Looks at Phase-Locked Loops (PLL)

I really like Marc's (AL6JV) videos. It is great fun and very educational to watch him and his team troubleshoot some of the old gear they work on.  There is also a lot of humor. 

In this video Marc delves into the circuitry of the Phase-Locked Loop.  I didn't know that the PLL circuitry has its origins in the space program.  NASA needed a circuit that would permit very narrow band reception of a signal that was undergoing the kind of Doppler shift that spacecraft produce.   Viola! Enter the PLL.  Far beyond Apollo, PLL circuits started to show up in ordinary radio gear.  The General Electric (and JC Penny!) CB transceivers that we rescued from 11 meter infamy used PLL as the frequency determining circuit. 

Marc gives a really good explanation of how the PLL circuit works.  Thanks Marc. 

However, Marc gives an incorrect pronuniation of "kludge" (it should sound like fudge).  But he is a computer guy and is originally from France, so all is forgiven.  He also redeems himself by making fun of the inaccuracies that appear in what he calls "data shites." 

Deep Space Station 43 -- Canberra, Australia

 

https://spectrum.ieee.org/apollo-era-antenna-voyager-2

From the IEEE article: 

The dish’s manufacturer took great pains to ensure that its surface had no bumps or rough spots. The smoother the dish surface, the better it is at focusing incident waves onto the signal detector so there’s a higher signal-to-noise ratio.

DSS-43 boasts a pointing accuracy of 0.005 degrees (18 arc seconds)—which is important for ensuring that it is pointed directly at the receiver on a distant spacecraft. Voyager 2 broadcasts using a 23-watt radio. But by the time the signals traverse the multibillion-kilometer distance from the heliopause to Earth, their power has faded to a level 20 billion times weaker than what is needed to run a digital watch. Capturing every bit of the incident signals is crucial to gathering useful information from the transmissions.

The antenna has a transmitter capable of 400 kilowatts, with a beam width of 0.0038 degrees. Without the 1987 upgrade, signals sent from DSS-43 to a spacecraft venturing outside the solar system likely never would reach their target.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/apollo-era-antenna-voyager-2

Sci-Fi Series with an Apollo-era Vibe

Kind of fun.  The Apollo-era and Saturn V stuff bring back memories of 1969 and all that. It is a series that you can watch on Apple TV. 

Here is a review: 

https://www.wired.com/2023/12/geeks-guide-for-all-mankind/

Other Workshops: Mission to Jupiter's Icy Moons: The Making of JUICE: The Full Movie

I really like this film.  The enthusiasm of the people involved comes through very clearly.  They love this project.  At the end, you can see a person from the ESA team crying with emotion when they received word that telemetry had been picked up from JUICE -- it had survived the launch. 

Imagine the difficulties involved in doing this across many countries and many languages, in the midst of the COVID pandemic.   Three cheers for all those who made this happen. 

I put this in the "Other Workshops" category.  At some points the workshop seems to be all of Europe.  At other times (like when they move JUICE to the test facility) it seems like one specific place. 

I wonder how the procedures we see in this film compare to the famed spacecraft-building procedures of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.  But just remember:  When it came time to launch the Webb Space Telescope, NASA opted to launch from the ESA facility in French Guiana.  Their Ariane rocket apparently had a better success rate than ours.  But it did seem to me that they did discover problems with some of the instruments in the thermal phase of the "shake and bake" but then corrected them without re-running the thermal tests.  Was that a violation of test principles? 

Watching this movie makes me really want to take out my small telescope and aim it at Jupiter (which is now high in our evening sky). 

We see a lot of "soul" built into this new machine:  the inclusion in the spacecraft of a copy of pages from Galileo's Starry Messenger and the names of those involved in the project, and the selection of the faring logo from a children's contest,  for example.  Yaryna, the young Ukrainian artist who drew the logo at age 8, even mentions "soul" in her remarks.  

Godspeed, JUICE! 

Video on Discovery and Restoration of the Apollo Guidance Computer

I've probably posted before about CuriousMarc's efforts to restore the DSKY Apollo Guidance Computer.  But this Wall Street Journal video sums it up and adds detail about where the computer they worked on came from:  the guy in the video found it discarded in a junk warehouse that he bought in the 1970s!  Those of us who scour those under-the-table parts boxes at hamfests will appreciate this find, and the ensuing restoration. 

Apollo Core Rope Memory -- CuriousMarc Takes it on (video)

Here is another amazing Apollo video from CuriousMarc (AJ6JV).  Thanks to Bob KD4EBM for alerting me to this. We have recently been discussing the "Apollo rope memory" as I read Sunburst and Luminary by Don Eyles (ex K4ZHF). In this video Marc and his colleague Mike get ahold of some actual Apollo memory modules, develop a device that allows them to read it,  and they discover a design error.  Wow.  

My analog HDR head hurts after watching this.  Even Marc says he was approaching his limits in explaining all this.  

I had not heard of the bug they discovered in the Apollo 11 software just a month before launch, and how they had to climb into the Saturn V to fix it.  Amazing.  

Thanks Marc, thanks Mike and thanks Bob. 

Sunburst and Luminary: Apollo "Rope" Memory, and other items of interest

 

Wow.  That is the method that they stored computer memory for the moon missions.  When they were satisfied with a program they would say it was time to "put it on the rope."  

Here's an article on the women who built the rope memory (and the integrated circuits used in Apollo). This reminded me of the women's collective in Hyderabad that "wove" the ferrite core transformers for Farhan's BITX rigs: 

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/core-memory-weavers-navajo-apollo-raytheon-computer-nasa#:~:text=Core%20memory%20used%20metal%20wires,to%20create%20a%20particular%20pattern.

Here is a Wikipedia article on core rope ROM memory with some great illustrations: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory

The Rope

Other stuff of interest that I have spotted so far in the book Sunburst and Luminary -- An Apollo Memoir by Don Eyles:  

-- Not long before the fatal Apollo 1 fire, an MIT colleague of Don Eyles had a drink with Astronaut Gus Grissom.  Grissom unloaded about the poor state of the spacecraft, saying that, "What we have here is a Heathkit."  Grissom died in the fire. 

-- Eyles mentions the use of 6L6 tubes in analog audio amplifiers. 

-- MIT's Doc Draper used a Minox camera.  

-- When the Apollo 11 astronauts came back and were living for two weeks in an isolation chamber, NASA had bulldozers on standby to bury the whole thing ("astronauts, staff and all") in case some dangerous moon bug was detected.  (Is that true?) 

-- At one point soon before an important missile test, engineers realized that they needed an isolation transformer.  They did not have enough time to order one.  So they took an isolation transformer out of one of their soldering stations and used it in the missile.  It worked. Sometimes you just use what you have on hand. 

Sunburst and Luminary -- A Poem about Transistors and ICs

 

Sunburst and Luminary by Don Eyles has a lot of the kind of color that helps the reader understand what was going on technologically during the 1960s.  For example, there is this poem about integrated circuits (you don't get to use "poem" and "integrated circuits" in the same sentence very often): 

The transistor's a marvelous invention

Replaced the tube convention

        Found its niche

        To amplify or switch

Whatever the designer's intention. 

But the breakthrough was the IC

Integrated monolithically

        It became pivotal

        As computers went digital 

With increasing complexity. 

Eyles tells us that this poem was written by hardware designer Jayne Partridge, and appears in Eldon Hall's write-up of the Apollo Guidance Computer and the decision to use ICs in it: 

https://www.amazon.com/Journey-Moon-Guidance-Computer-1996-09-03/dp/B01F9FSN7C  

"Sunburst and Luminary" author Don Eyles was a Ham, a Hacker, and a user of Plywood who Understood Juju

-- As a kid, Eyles took a summertime shop class with W4LRO.  Eyles himself went on to get his ham license -- he was K4ZHF and was active for a while on the 40 meter and 6 meter bands. 

-- He writes of how the Apollo software acquired more "juju as labor and logic were poured into them." Juju. 

-- He describes the electronics lab in the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory: "If you had a private project you could sometimes get some simple milling done for a smile, and you could scrounge the odd resistor or capacitor... On the second floor there was a small "hackers shop" with a drill press, metal shear, a bending brake, and a few hand tools which was open to anyone, including software engineers. That was the first use of the term "hack" in a technical context, that I can recall hearing. I took the term as referring to the sometimes messy process by which perforations of suitable sizes were made in the aluminum boxes, or chassis, that were used for constructing electronic devices."  Indeed.  We hack.   

-- After describing the first integrated circuits, Eyles looks back at high school and notes that he and a friend, "after learning about truth tables, James Chambers and I had experimented with similar devices composed of relays mounted on a piece of plywood."  Plywood.  

  

More to follow on this book. 

Sunburst and Luminary -- An Apollo Memoir by Don Eyles (video)

Buy the book from the Amazon link on the right side of the page >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

There is so much great stuff in this 2018 video.  I am definitely going to buy the book.  This is another of those things that reminds me (a hardware guy) of the importance of software (Sunburst and Luimary were the names of two programs that Eyles wrote to enable the LEM to land on the moon).  

-- Asked about one of the biggest ancillary contributions of the Apollo program,  Eyles immediately says, "integrated circuits."   They used three terminal NOR gates.  Lots of them. 

-- They never had a hardware failure in the Apollo computers.  Demonstrating a classic troubleshooting technique, when they discovered what they thought was a hardware failure, they ran the program on another computer.  The problem was also there, so they knew there had been no failure on the first machine. 

-- The LEM simulator was very cool. 

-- Eyles' ability -- in two hours -- to write the code for the automatic landing program that Astronaut John Young was asking for, then have it flown on an Apollo mission to the moon was very impressive. 

Thanks to the MIT Museum for posting Don's talk.  And thanks to HackADay for alerting us to it.

Also, take a look at this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi4h04ZgQsQ

And this:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmAc7t7tAlc

More Ancient Technology Keeping Space Missions Alive

 https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230815-the-ancient-tech-keeping-space-missions-alive

Three cheers for software.  Really. 

Voyager, Canopus, JPL, and 74xx Logic Chips from the early 1970s

"So somewhere out there in interstellar space beyond the boundary of the Solar System is a card frame full of 74 logic that’s been quietly keeping an eye on a star since the early 1970s, and the engineers from those far-off days at JPL are about to save the bacon of the current generation at NASA with their work. We hope that there are some old guys in Pasadena right now with a spring in their step."

https://hackaday.com/2023/07/31/just-how-is-voyager-2-going-to-sort-out-its-dish-then/

Australia and Apollo 11 -- Honeysuckle Creek

Trevor reminded me that Parkes ("The Dish") was not the only Australian antenna at work during Apollo 11.  This very nice video gives a more complete description of what happened.  

I saw one piece of Collins gear.  And some of Curious Marc's HP frequency counters.  

More on the Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station here: https://honeysucklecreek.net/

Jam on Radar Antenna of Jupiter-bound Spacecraft FIXED! Antenna deployed!

Great news. This stuck antenna was getting me down.  Three cheers for the ESA folks who fixed it from afar.  

https://phys.org/news/2023-05-stuck-antenna-freed-jupiter-bound-spacecraft.html

Here is how they did it: 

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Juice/Juice_s_RIME_antenna_breaks_free

The RIME antenna looks a bit like one of my dipoles! But it can look 9 km into the ice. 

And what a great name:  Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer.  Juice. 

Godspeed JUICE!  

Europa -- "Attempt No Landing There."

As we get ready to send two probes to the Galilean moons of Jupiter, this sci fi movie made its way into my feed.   It is pretty good, and the ending will appeal to all true radio amateurs. 

https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/searching-for-life-on-europa-the-science-behind-europa-report

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Juice