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SpaceX Launch of "GoreSat" Planned For Today, Along With Another Landing Attempt
The New York Times reports that SpaceX will again attempt to recover a Falcon 9 launch vehicle, after the recent unsuccessful try; the company believes the lessons from the earlier launch have been learned, and today's launch will be loaded with more hydraulic fluid. This evening, the rocket is to loft the satellite nicknamed "GoreSat," after Al Gore, who envisioned it as a sort of permanent eye in space beaing back pictures of Earth from afar. The purpose of the satellite has evolved, though: Writes the Times: The observatory, abbreviated as Dscovr and pronounced “discover,” is to serve as a sentinel for solar storms: bursts of high-energy particles originating from the sun. The particles from a gargantuan solar storm could induce electrical currents that might overwhelm the world’s power grids, possibly causing continent-wide blackouts. Even a 15-minute warning could let power companies take actions to limit damage.
The Falcon 9 is made up of two parts: a 138-foot-tall first stage, which burns for the first few minutes of flight, lifting the craft up to an altitude of about 50 miles before separating and falling back to Earth, and a smaller, 49-foot-tall second stage, which burns for another five minutes or so, carrying the spacecraft into orbit before disconnecting and falling back down to earth as well.
Normally, both of these stages — as well as the stages that make up other rockets in general — break up into pieces as they plummet downward, eventually sinking in the ocean and becoming unusable. But on Sunday, as the first stage falls back to earth, SpaceX will fire its engines in order to stabilize and guide it in for a controlled landing.
The plan is to land it on an autonomous uncrewed barge, which is being stationed about 370 miles east of Cape Canaveral. As the rocket descends, steerable fins affixed to its outside will help guide it and slow it down. As it nears the barge, a set of legs will unfold from the bottom of the rocket, and if all goes to plan, it'll slow down to a speed of about 4.5 miles per hour before gently landing on them, fully upright.
To solve the problem from the last attempt, the rocket will be carrying more hydraulic fluid.
http://www.vox.com/2015/2/8/79...
It was nicknamed Goresat by it's detractors for two reasons. One of the primary payloads is designed to monitor albedo, which is there to support global climate research. A secondary payload is a camera, supposedly requested by Gore. The camera was to provide high definition, continuous real-time imagery of the entire Earth -- a full sunlit globe. The Wikipedia description matches my memory of the debate: " Gore hoped not only to advance science with these images, but also to raise awareness of the Earth itself, updating the influential The Blue Marble photograph taken by Apollo 17"
This one's orbit is high enough to encompass Gore's monumental ego.
i was confused about how the satellite could continuously watch the earth and the sun at the same time. Turns out it's positioned at the L1 lagrange point, which is in between sun and earth at about 170,000 km from earth (geostationary is 22k, for comparison). At this point, the pull from the earth will cancel out the pull from the sun, and the satellite will effectively stay positioned exactly between the earth and sun as the earth rotates around. look down from the satellite, you see the fully lit earth, and look up, and you see the sun. pretty cool, huh? wikipedia ftw.
speaking of cool, did anybody else see that solar movie Sunshine? that was an awesomely gorgeous movie. its cool if you went to a theater and looked up at the audience in some of those scenes where the entire screen was bright white.
The imagery was supposed to be live streamed to the internet, for one thing. Most of the climate or weather satellites are in Earth orbit, between 350 and 23,000 miles up. This will be all the way out at L1. Being at L1, there will always be a sunlit Earth image and you'll always see the a full hemisphere. Don't know that it will actually end up implemented like that, but that was the intent.
So if you put a big enough satellite at L1, it will shade the planet andreduce global warming.
You'd need to make it out of graphene so it would be light enough.
If you made it like a venetian blind you couldcontrol the amount of sunlight the earth recieves.
Close the blinds when its daytime in asia, open them again when its daytime in the americas.
You could rule the world [evil laugh]
A solar storm causes problems by producing shifts in Earth's magnetic field. It's many orders of magnitude away from being anything like a MRI, and wouldn't scramble hard drives directly, it would disrupt power grids and copper communication lines. The only impact on hard drives or other electronic devices on Earth would be from power surges, while satellites would have increased ionizing radiation to deal with.
Hello, Europe chimes in (not the 2001 Space odyssey one):
What's this hate towards Al Gore? He ran the USA for 8 years in the background, while Bill C. was busy inserting his saxophone into the various body cavities of sexy females. Those 8 years were a period of spectacular economic and technological development for the USA, a true golden age. All other countries of the world watched in amazement, as Russia and co. struggled for survival on the ruins of recently collapsed USSR, while America skyrocketed and revolutionized modern life yet another time, with infocomms, etc..
Regrettably, most americans have never been abroad of their (admittedly vast sized) nation, so they cannot comprehend this feeling. They are remembering the dotcom-bust, while the world remembers the dotcom boom and the free GPS and a myriad of other benefits. Yankee think Albert was a red or at least a pink fellow traveller, while the world saw that he left the reds at standstill, driving America towards and into a better future.
I think people will remember al-Gore even in the distant future, not unlike Benjamin Franklin or even Charlemagne. He will have statues while the word Bush will mean nothing, but a piece of vegetation too small to be called a tree.
No, this is a great Republican strategy, we will just name all beneficial things after Democrats! First there will be Obamacare, and Goresat, and then maybe something like Hillaryrail - a high speed rail network, or Elizabethbucks - A system of guaranteed federal income. Soon everything that Americans have come to depend on will be named after some Democrat! Ha!
You'll see, it will pay off in the end.
I hope they can land the Falcon 9 this time. SpaceX's Hans Koenigsmann says this time the Falcon 9 will come in twice as fast as the January 10 attempt, and it will land farther offshore.