A number of years ago I worked for Astrium Space, a member of the ESA and EADS developing models and simulations of spacecraft attitude sensing and dynamics. “Attitude” meaning the orientation: roll, pitch, yaw, rates, sensors, and control algorithms.

Specifically, I worked on a revolutionary new Drag-Free and Attitude Control Subsystem, DFACS, that performs autonomous determination and control of the spacecraft’s attitude pointing, angular movements and linear and angular accelerations. You can download an article describing the system that was used for HYPER .

It was at this time, living and traveling extensively through Europe on short trips, constantly connected with a mobile phone, a cheap GPS receiver, and blogging and photo sharing that you could see the convergence and emergence of Where2.0. Fortunately the Wayback machine has my old blog “An American Engineer in Germany” recorded for posterity.

In addition, I was quite frustrated with the satellite industry. The politics and budgets that inexplicably cancel projects years, and millions of dollars/euros – or even when physics gives you a swift kick and dooms your satellite to a 30-minute flight before immediately de-orbiting. Not a rewarding way to end 10 years of hard work.

At Astrium, I was a member of the GOCE satellite team. The goal of GOCE, Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer, was to utilize a very high precision gradiometer in order to measure the magnetic characteristics of the Earth. The benefit is a highly detailed gravitational model of the Earth’s geoide which can then inform ocean circulation and sea-level models, orbital predictions, space-time drag, and more. Since the force of gravity falls off at a cubic rate inverse square from the distance to the mass, GOCE must fly at a relatively very low altitude. It therefore uses continuous ion thrusters to compensate for atmospheric drag, and another reason the DFACS is so important.

About 6 months after leaving Astrium, I had been told that the project was shelved, and never wondered about it.

Then surprisingly, while at the UNGIWG workshop in Rome last February, a director of UNOSAT told me that GOCE was in fact completed and being boxed up for shipment to the launch site! Again I didn’t track it until a couple of weeks ago, twitter showed it’s power again and Astronautics pointed out that GOCE was launching!

On March 17, GOCE launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Northern Russia. GOCE is the first of ESA’s Core Missions of the Earth Explorer programme – others including atmospheric dynamics, ice sheet thickness measurement, radiative balance, and ocean salinity.

So while the space industry can be quite frustrating, it is undeniably exciting to see something you helped build hurtling around the Earth at approximately 7,700 meters per second just 170 miles above us. GOCE is even using GPS to track its own position in space.

In deference to the title of this blog, my consulting company, and my profession – Happy Space Race Day! Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik launch – proving that we could achieve at least Low-Earth Orbit (and that it wasn’t full of scary space monsters)

Of course, besides very brief forays to nearby celestial bodies we have relegated ourselves to primary the same orbit we reached 50 years ago.

Here’s to hoping we have the vision and execution to go back to deeper space – both for knowledge and to spread ourselves into more than one basket.

Ever need to know the altitude at a given location on the Earth?

Well, there are several free resources to the rescue:

EarthTools has a webservice that covers the US and Europe using the SRTM data. Given a latitude/longitude it returns the height above sea-level in feet and meters. (found from Quakr Viewr)

Geonames offers two services using the SRTM data, and also the GTOPO30 from the USGS. Geonames gets bonus points for also returning the results in JSON. Geonames also uses a larger dataset – lands within 60 degrees north and 56 degrees south.

As “points” become rather ubiquitous among neogeographers/web-mappers, they’re moving into more complex geometries and especially 3D space. Having access to data means it is very easy to tie into services and applications. For example, making a hiking profile given just 2-d ground waypoints.

You can download the data yourself to do whatever you want with it. Perhaps make yourself a very cool, high-res 3D model of the earth.

It’s not clear how accurate the data is. The reports seem to say within 9m vertical accuracy. But I assume this is measuring the “surface” that the Shuttle saw – so that would include roof tops. But with smoothing/filtering, would this be washed out to represent an average ‘ground height’?

I’m a big fan of the acronyms NASA and SL and was really interested to read the article on NASA’s SecondLife Presentation of their work on Synthetic Worlds. (via Slashdot)

The details are fairly light, but it seems as though NASA is building a VR game on space exploration (remember Microsoft’s Space Simulator, or the free and open-source Orbiter?). I wonder why NASA is rebuilding their own engine rather then picking up and using existing simulators (like Open-SESSAME) on top of the Unreal graphics/physics engine.

I also wonder if, given their presentation venue in SL, if they are considering integration of their space simulator with SecondLife itself. Apparently right now it is possible in SL to have some sort of orbital platform. But imagine if they actually opened up Space Stations, or other planets/moons for exploration/colonization.

Mikel has posted a how-to on how he made the OSM Nestoria Tiles for the recently released upgrades.

It’s a really good how-to for making your own maps from your own data, and also an excellent idea for brain-dumping after a big project. Whenever I do a large project, I learn a lot of useful tips, strategies, what worked/didn’t work, etc. that is probably useful to a larger group of developers and users (for knowing what’s going on underneath). Not only for my own notes, but also anyone wanting to improve upon my work, or go and fix parts of it.

Documentation in engineering and software development is always emphasized and always a battle to get done. Inline documentation using something like Doxygen really helps, but then also putting together a single, simple overall report, especially on an editable format like a Wiki, can really make a big difference.