Endeavor is carrying the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the International Space Station that will perform some inspiring science on measuring dark matter radiation. There’s also a host of spiders, aggressive bacteria and other science experiments that will be run on the iSS. I’ll have more photos and stories up soon.

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.

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.

Tags: space, sputnik, mars, moon, spaceexploration, lowearthorbit,

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’?

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.

Tags: nasa, secondlife, space, simulation, unreal, virtualreality

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.

Tags: nestoria, osm, tiles, howto, geo, mapping, programming, documentation, doxygen, mikelmaron, brainoff,

I carry around many processors, a cellphone, tablet, laptop, camera. These are all just processors, running an operating system and waiting to execute some code. Currently they run application/device specific code, designed for their single use lives. Any of the devices could really be application independent and dynamically perform whatever operation I want to give it. My cellphone breaks, so I just make my computer as a cellphone, or my tablet.

Let me illustrate with an example: All of my devices run Python, so I write a Python video player. So then I can load it onto my cellphone and boom my cellphone is now a media player, or my tablet is now the media player, and so on. The device itself is irrelevant, it is a packaged form factor that I as the user/developer decided what it was going to do now.

So then carry it forward a little bit to where I go into my local hardware shop and buy a slew of “processors” or devices. Generic devices with several interpreters or OS on it that I can drop an image to it. I may buy a couple of matchbox bricks with no display, and once that is a soapbar size with a screen and some buttons. Oh, and another screen with keyboard. I then drop a “cellphone device image” or application on the soapbar device, and perhaps a Word Processor application on the keyboard/screen, and so on. Think of it like Amazon’s EC2 computing cloud, but in the palm of your hand.

stack’em

Now the matchbox devices, they can be simple devices, or maybe they’re even like Lego bricks, where I can snap them together for easy parallellization. The processors start communicating and sharing data and code between them, without any intervention from me the user. Maybe some of these small devices then snap into larger devices with a screen, so I can make my tablet device now have 3, 4, or 8 processors in it. Perhaps the devices communicate via exposed connectors, or wirelessy using RF, or even some kind of optic communication.

I may even put 100 of these in as a small stack of cards in my computer. Over time, they slowly start “wearing out”, so after a year or 2 I only have 80. So what, some programs run a little slower, or I can’t do as many actions on the device. I swap the broken ones out, toss in some more, or even just pick up a new device and interface.

bucket o’ computing

Now what if the processors were just small amounts of silicon, like sand. I have a pile of these “sand processors” that communicate omni-directionally with other processors near them, not just the ones touching it, but any within a short spherical range. They would share data, hand off programs and provide me with a compact, parallelized, mobile, amorphic computer.

And if the sand computer can react to visible and non-visible light, I could show it a picture and it is instantaneously processed.

the future is now

While I really think there is a future in “sand computing”, I don’t think I’ll be able to buy my “Pail o’ Processing” after WWDC’07. However, we have reconfigurable devices now. Linux has pushed for this for a long-time, a single operating system running on consumer and embedded devices. Even easier is to run an interpreted language like Python or Ruby. Right now I can run a GPS program, MP3 player, or any other number of desired functionality on a handful of devices. Using open-standards I can then share the data between devices, so I can take my GPS waypoints off of my receiver and load them onto my cellphone.

The future is now, and it’s fun.

I first noticed this when deciding what I wanted to do in Undergraduate studies. Computer Science was hot stuff in the late ’90’s, but it really seemed like companies weren’t looking for Computer Scientists, they were really looking for Software Engineers, Developers, and Programmers (all different jobs with different skills, personalities, and types of work).

Computer Scientists really should be developing “formal specifications of a programming language”, whereas Software Engineers should be figuring out how to scale out a database, or apply domain specific solutions.

Of course, I ended up doing Aerospace Engineering, but with a Computer Science Minor. The CS minor let me take C++ instead of Fortran, and also have courses where I actually learned how to do requirements documentation, work in a team, design and build large scale systems in a single semester – all skills I didn’t learn in the Aerospace department but have since applied to my work.

I firmly believe that in the near future, all engineers/scientists should/will learn how to program. It is becoming a basic skill necessary to do proper analysis. Given a little bit of programming ability, an engineer can relieve themselves of copying & pasting from Excel to MatLab or other such silly things. Teach them good programming and software design techniques, in a modern and easy to use language with good tools, like Python (and then SciPy and NumPy) and they can be much more effective designers and analyzers. Also, if they learn general, good technique, they can apply that ability to learning other languages that may be specific to their domain.

And no, learning Fortran (or Java) is not going to cut it.

However, with the increasing number of interplanetary rovers, observations of moons, and perhaps future excursions, it is still useful to define how to properly handle these other reference frames. Luna and Mars are two suggested Microformats that are starting the discussion on how one might mark locations on the two bodies. Additionally, the OGC is working now on determining standards for scientists and developers to publish and share data sources of planets, moons, asteroids, comets, ‘oh my’.

And why does the Earth have to be the only one with cool, “slippy maps”. I quickly put together a map of Mars. It uses the powerful OpenLayers Javascript mapping library to display the tiles from a NASA WMS server.

To produce the locations for the map, I put up a Space Blog, using WordPress and a slightly modified GeoPress to publish Mars lander locations and landing dates. I altered the published Microformats produced by GeoPress to make the class “geo mars” as a suggested way to markup Mars coordinates. The published GeoRSS feeds from the Space Blog then produce the locations and layers automatically on the OpenLayers Mars Map.

To Do: CRS and You

So this is all very neat, and in the end, really easy to setup. However, this is just a demonstration and in no way should be construed as “the way to do it”. Specifically, there are these questions left unanswered:

1. How to define the Microformat and GeoRSS for non-Earth (and non-WGS84) reference frames
2. How to define the Microformats and GeoRSS/Geonames location for non-Earth locations (like “Ares Vallis”)
3. More sources for interplanetary map servers
4. Ways to syndicate, and subscribe to, specific bodies
5. Support for publishing, consuming, and drawing lines – in order to plot out mission profiles
6. Support for publishing, consuming, and drawing areas – in order to plot out mission profiles, landing sites, and expected areas of “mission failures”

I’m sure there are more issues, so please speak up. You know who you space geeks are.

Like my thoughts on why plugins make, TextMate has excellent support via bundles (over 124 of them). However, the only way to get to these is via subversion. This is nice because it keeps me up to date, but is a little annoying having to get the subversion command right and path all the time.

So I wrote a small shell script to grab a bundle, get_tmbundle:

#!/bin/bash
svn --username anon --password anon co http://macromates.com\
/svn/Bundles/trunk/Bundles/$1.tmbundle ~/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles/$1.tmbundle

I can then $ get_bundle AppleScript to get a new bundle installed.

You could also use the getBundle Bundle, but that seems like cheating. Of course, getBundle also has an AutoUpdater and is baked into TextMate as a bundle itself (how deep does the Rabbit Hole go?)

Technorati Tags: mac os x, macosx, programming, subversion, textediting, textmate

I think this is a simply marvelous idea. I’ve been in several European cities when they’ve had “Car Free days”, most recently in Brussels during EuroOSCON. The idea is one day of the week that everyone will go car free, and enjoy the relative quiet and easy biking/strolling about town.

Overall, I am an idealistic technocrat. I really enjoy technology, gadgets, programming, etc. However, I also enjoy natural beauty and the environment as it is. I hope that towns here in the US start promoting these sorts of activities. I mean, what’s the worse that can happen, people actually think its a good idea and turn off their lights at night?

This was done with the increasingly popular jQuery, an up-and-coming javascript framework/library. (via Dr. Nic)

Tags: css, javascript, jquery,

I like this, as feed readers then have a succinct list of interesting sites to show (rather than a sidebar, who goes to a blog anymore?). A list of links is often more interesting than some half-written paragraph of diatribe just to get to the point. (case in point).

How to setup del.icio.us to post daily links

1. Log into del.icio.us
2. On the right-side, under “experimental”, choose “daily blog posting”
3. Click “add new thingy” (yes, it really says “thingy”, those crazy del.icio.users
4. Fill in the form as appropriate, here is an example:
   • job_name: DailyLinks
   • out_name: (blog user – e.g. delicious)
   • out_pass: (blog password for that user)
   • out_url: http://highearthorbit.com/xmlrpc.php
   • out_time: 3 (approx time to post, in GMT)
   • out_blog_id: (leave this blank)
   • out_cat_id: (category id, look at the id in your blogging software)
5. Click “Submit Query”

Sometime within the appointed hour (they’re spaced out so neither del.icio.us’s servers, or ping services, are flooded ‘on the hour’) your new links will be posted.

For this blog, I created a new user, gave that user Author privileges, and created a specific category, bookmarks

]]> http://highearthorbit.com/daily-delicious-blog-posting/feed/ 3 http://highearthorbit.com/losing-old-knowledge/ http://highearthorbit.com/losing-old-knowledge/#comments Wed, 16 Aug 2006 23:48:00 +0000 Andrew http://highearthorbit.com/losing-old-knowledge/ This is both an interesting, and really tragic, story of how NASA engineers are learning from museum piecies (via Slashdot). I definitely think it is imperative that today’s engineers know how and why decisions were made in the past. Especially with something as monumental as flinging human beings almost 240,000 miles.

However, what is really distressing is that today’s engineers have to learn at museums. There obviously wasn’t enough documentation, recording, and continuation between generations of engineers for NASA to capture that tremendous knowledge and experience. Instead of learning from their mentors, or reading manuals, workbooks, and photographs, they must resort to figuring out what works by inspecting the actual devices themselves.

Learning by inspection can be a very good learning experience. You are forced to make connections and gain insights on your own. However, it is also very easy to miss what is important.
“Why did they use platinum wires but gold connectors?” (hypothetical question)
“What didn’t work that we’re not seeing here?”

The same thing is happening with today’s nuclear missiles. The current missiles were designed to last 20-30 years. Yet they’re still online, with testing equipment that is severly outdated. Retired engineers are brought back, sat in a room for days with recording equipment and asked to tell their stories. Today’s engineers are now realizing that when they design something with an expected lifetime of 30 years, just imagine it may be 50-70 years before it’s actually replaced.

In essence, the Apollo program must be redone. Granted they now have the relics of the past (including some lingering engineers), and new technology, but they’re doing it with a more limited budget and less gusto from the general public.

I want us to go to the moon. It’s the only place in human history that we have traveled to, returned, and never gone back. Lets try and learn from our mistakes and get this job done.

Tags: space, nasa, exploration, moon, apollo,

]]> http://highearthorbit.com/losing-old-knowledge/feed/ 0 http://highearthorbit.com/20q-deluxe-game/ http://highearthorbit.com/20q-deluxe-game/#comments Wed, 09 Aug 2006 00:34:22 +0000 Andrew http://highearthorbit.com/20q-deluxe-game/ I had heard about the 20Q Deluxe Game awhile ago. It was developed using an Artificial Neural Network learning (ANN) architecture to develop an ‘intelligence’ at one of the world’s silliest games, Twenty Questions. To refresh your memory of the game, someone in a group “thinks” of something, and then everyone else in the group is allowed to ask up to 20 questions to try and figure out what that “something” is. The one who figures it out wins, and if no one figures it out, the “thinker” wins.

So 20Q was slowly developed by letting people be the thinkers and the computer/website slowly trying to guess. Over-time, the ANN learned how to deduce what you were thinking about. If it’s really using an ANN, the amount of data that would actually have to be stored to then recreate this network would be very small, and therefore very mobile.

Developing an actual methodology to try and guarantee convergence to a single solution, given 20 binary (well, really fuzzy, since ‘maybe’ is acceptable sometimes) inputs seems rather incredible given the rather broad amount of “Stuff” to think about.

According to the FAQ, it is correct 80% of the time with 20 questions and correct 95% of the time with 25 questions. I’d like to see an actual question-to-correctness graph/ratio to see what the benefit is of each question. Imagine you were caught on a bridge with a troll who let you have 1 question for each appendage he got to eat off of you…

You can play via the site, via their mobile interface, or get a small handheld version for your kids (good ploy, I know its for you) to play on the go, or while just sitting around. FunForGeeks has them for sale (not to mention lots of cool other Home Automation stuff).

By the way, when I first played the game, I was thinking of something very pertinent, and really didn’t believe it would get (especially with the kinds of questions it ended up asking), but I was astonished when the last line came up:

“You’re thinking of an air conditioner“.

]]> http://highearthorbit.com/20q-deluxe-game/feed/ 0 http://highearthorbit.com/open-sessame-at-smc-it/ http://highearthorbit.com/open-sessame-at-smc-it/#comments Wed, 19 Jul 2006 13:16:29 +0000 Andrew http://highearthorbit.com/open-sessame-at-smc-it/ I have a poster at the Space Mission Challenges in IT conference hosted by NASA JPL. Unfortunately, I was unable to make it to the 4-day conference, despite it being an incredibly large number of amazing projects.

In my place, Katie Betchold has done a great job getting my rather large 3′x4′ poster out there, hung up, and my in fact be presenting it today for the 2-minute poster precis. She is totally awesome!

If you don’t, in fact, find yourself in Pasadena, California at the conference, then you can virtually check out my poster (1.8 MB pdf). The accompyaning paper should be in a future IEEE publication available at local newstands everywhere.

The title of the paper is: “The Development and Use of Open-source Spacecraft Simulation and Control Software for Education and Research”, and primarily covers the experiences of developing Open-SESSAME spacecraft modeling and simulation framework, its use at the Space Systems Simulation Laboratory at Virginia Tech, and by various researchers around the world.



]]> http://highearthorbit.com/open-sessame-at-smc-it/feed/ 3 http://highearthorbit.com/no-latex-never-fret/ http://highearthorbit.com/no-latex-never-fret/#comments Wed, 12 Jul 2006 20:43:41 +0000 Andrew http://highearthorbit.com/no-latex-never-fret/ Reference->Cross-reference…, then scroll to find your article, and set to paragraph number, etc. has got you really down. Bet you didn’t know about [...]]]> So you’re writing a paper with citations and you’re wishing you had LaTeX’s beautiful self-referencing ability to your list of references. However, for whatever reason, you’re stuck using Microsoft Word. And clicking through Insert->Reference->Cross-reference…, then scroll to find your article, and set to paragraph number, etc. has got you really down.

Bet you didn’t know about field codes. Instead, just put your cursor in your citation brackets (or whatever you use), press <ctrl>-F9, and then REF NameYear \n.

... demonstrated in on an airship [{REF Turner02 \n}].

The \n specifies that you want the paragraph number of the reference, which equates to the ordered-list number. Later, in your references section, you will Insert->Bookmark and properly name your citations (again, I use NameYear). You then need to hit Alt-F9 turn ‘hide’ all the field codes in your doc and update and they’ll all be linked.

It’s not pretty, it’s not LaTeX (not that LaTeX is pretty either), but it works.

]]> http://highearthorbit.com/no-latex-never-fret/feed/ 1 http://highearthorbit.com/geonames-supports-reverse-geocoding/ http://highearthorbit.com/geonames-supports-reverse-geocoding/#comments Mon, 26 Jun 2006 13:21:04 +0000 Andrew http://highearthorbit.com/geonames-supports-reverse-geocoding/ GeoNames is YAG (yet another geocoder), but behind the curtains lie many cool features. The most unique of which is a reverse geocoder.

Reverse geocoding is converting Latitude & Longitude to a place name. This is the other side of the mirror from traditional geocoding, which converts a place name into latitude & longitude. Why would someone want to reverse geocode you ask? With reverse geocoding you can convert your GPS tracklogs into meaningful locations easily, or allow users to click on a map and get back actual location of where they’re clicking.

The GeoNames API provides an interface for getting nearby postal codes, country, or most specific: place names.

Example

HighEarthOrbit offices: http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyPlaceName?lat=42.4266&lng=-83.4931&style=full

returns:

<geonames>
  <geoname>
    <name>Northville</name>
    <lat>42.43111</lat>
    <lng>-83.48333</lng>
    <geonameid>5003956</geonameid>
    <countrycode>US</countrycode>
    <countryname>United States</countryname>
    <fcl>P</fcl>
    <fcode>PPL</fcode>
    <fclname>city, village,...</fclname>
    <fcodename>populated place</fcodename>
    <population>6360</population>
    <elevation>252</elevation>
    <admincode1>MI</admincode1>
    <adminname1>Michigan</adminname1>
    <admincode2 />
    <adminname2 />
  </geoname>
</geonames>

The whole geo-enchilada

Lastly, to make you really feel warm and good inside, the GeoNames database is provided for direct download under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Yum, free data.

See the GeoNames Blog post about it.

]]> http://highearthorbit.com/geonames-supports-reverse-geocoding/feed/ 6 http://highearthorbit.com/hijacking-site-functionality/ http://highearthorbit.com/hijacking-site-functionality/#comments Tue, 16 May 2006 02:38:00 +0000 Andrew http://highearthorbit.com/hijacking-site-functionality/ A couple of days ago I mentioned some Greasemonkey scripts I wrote. One of them, which I didn’t discuss, is particularly devious.

What happens when users have the ability to hijack sites and how they expect to be used? For example, there are scripts to provide mapping functionality within Flickr!, or to compare book prices on Amazon.com with other vendors.

MapThis! overrides the “Map This!” link that shows up in GMail when an address is detected. Instead of linking to just a plain-ol’ googlemap, the link is “hijacked” to provide routing directions from the user’s geolocated position (using HostIP) to the address in the email.

This is useful, for example, if a friend sends you the address of their house, or that cool roller-rink with disco ball that you’re meeting up at and you want to quickly get directions.

It also demonstrates how a user isn’t limited by the interface a site-designer supplied, allowing them to customize and use the site as they wan.

]]> http://highearthorbit.com/hijacking-site-functionality/feed/ 0