NASA scientists don't often learn that their spacecraft is at risk of crashing into another satellite. But when Julie McEnery, the project scientist for NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, checked her email on March 29, 2012, she found herself facing this precise situation.
An excellent overview of how debris avoidance manoeuvres are planned and executed – and it's a similar process at ESA!
Media fact sheet for the 6th European Conference on Space Debris, 22-25 April 2013, ESA/ESOC Darmstadt.
ESA’s Flight Dynamics team uses cutting-edge computational techniques to plan, determine and control complex spacecraft trajectories. They apply fundamental physics and mathematics to 21st century spacecraft orbiting Earth and voyaging deep into our Solar System.
Mercury is not an easy target to observe. The innermost planet in our Solar System is never further away from the Sun than 30 degrees. It is either trailing the Sun and disappearing below the horizon just after sunset or moving ahead of the Sun and visible just a short time before sunrise.
One good opportunity to observe Mercury under good conditions will happen on 16 February when it reaches its maximum elongation (apparent angular distance) of 18 degrees.
Simulation of view toward the West horizon from Darmstadt on 8 February 2013 at about 18:20 CET. Simulation done with Stellarium. Credit: M. Khan
However, a much more spectacular view (weather permitting!) will be offered on the Friday before, on 8 February, when Mars and Mercury will be separated in the sky by only 20 arc minutes (for comparison, the Moon has an apparent size of about 30 arc minutes).
Both planets will be quite bright: Mercury with magnitude -1, which is as bright as the brightest stars, and Mars a bit fainter with a magnitude of +1. However because it will happen right after sunset, the contrast is low and you had best choose a place where the horizon in the Western direction is not obstructed by trees or buildings. Then you should be able to see the two planets at a very low elevation after it has become quite dark.
In fact, members of ESA's Mission Analysis Team from ESOC in Darmstadt, where I work, are planning a viewing on that evening – and you're welcome to take part!
The rough plan is to meet in the Darmstadt area and then head to a hillside by about 18:30 or so. If you'd like to join us, please send mail to me, ruediger.jehn@esa.int, and we'll confirm the plan. And hope for good weather!
– RJ
Editor's note: Thanks to Michael Khan for the information taken from his blog and the image, which was produced using Stellarium.
If you would like to know more about ESA's plans to observe Mercury from up close, access the BepiColombo pages in the ESA website and find out what experiments our space probe (to be launched in 2015) will carry to this difficult-to-observe planet.
Artist's impression of BepiColombo Credit: ESA/P. Carill
ESAW - European Ground System Architecture Workshop
In continuing this highly successful series of Workshops, the European Space Agency’s Operations Centre (ESA/ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, will host the 4th ESAW (European Ground System Architecture Workshop) workshop on 18 and 19 June 2013, under the auspices of ESA’s Human Spaceflight and Operations Directorate.
The ESAW Workshop provides an international forum for ground systems architects to constructively exchange ideas. The organisers invite presentations covering all aspects of ground systems related to space operations with a special focus on collaboration and common solutions.
There will be keynote speakers from ESA, National Agencies (e.g. ASI, CNES, DLR), Telecommunications Operators (e.g. Eutelsat, Inmarsat, SES Astra) and key IT companies.
ESOC radio engineer Boris Smeds has become a modest celebrity for his single-handed discovery of a fatal design flaw in Huygens' radio relay link; one magazine credibly dubbed him a "hero." But developing the mission recovery plan required a team effort involving hundreds.
Editor's note: Repost of an article published in January 2005. Today marks the 8th anniversary of the landing of ESA's Huygens – delivered by NASA's Cassini – on Titan. The touchdown remains today the farthest landing ever made by a human artefact.
The Huygens engineering model located at ESOC, Darmstadt, Germany. The EM was used extensively to confirm the presence of a communications problem between Huygens and Cassini. Credir: ESA
Media interest in the little-known story of how the Huygens mission was recovered from near-certain disaster started to grow last fall as the joint NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini-Huygens mission neared its 14 January 2005 rendezvous with Titan.
The news media and pundits generally got the story correct: that Boris Smeds, Head of the Systems and Requirements Section at the European Space Agency's Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, had found and confirmed a telecommunications flaw encoded into radio receiver software onboard Cassini.
Smeds was able to confirm the existence of the flaw only after pushing through an extensive series of tests that was initially rejected by mission managers as unnecessary.
Boris Smeds Credit: ESA
Smeds confirmed the existence of the fatal software flaw in the Probe Support Avionics (PSA), mounted onboard Cassini, in a series of tests conducted in February 2000.
Details on the 8th anniversary of the epoch-making Cassini-Huygens mission, including video on The Huygens Experience, via ESA Science.
Linking spacecraft with people at the frontiers of human knowledge: ESA’s Estrack ground station network communicates each day over hundreds of millions of kilometres with deep-space missions, or with Earth observation missions just a few hundred kilometres up. The network returns precious scientific data to scientists on Earth and transmits commands from satellite controllers, all via remote control from ESOC, ESA’s European Space Operations Centre, Darmstadt, Germany.
In Dec 2012, ESA's ground station network provided 3741 hours of tracking to 18 missions. New #ESTRACK profile video bit.ly/UaYlo8
— ESA Operations (@esaoperations) January 11, 2013
Our new ESTRACK profile video is below!
A super-nice video clip of Malargüe station inauguration provided courtesy of the president's official YouTube channel and published earlier in December.
During the 18 December 2012 press event, the precision tracking of ESA's Mars Express by the new Malargüe station was commanded ‘on’ by the president via remote link from her office in the Casa Rosada presidential palace.
18 de DIC. Videoconferencia con, Malargüe, Gaiman y Cnel. Suarez (in Spanish) via Canal oficial de la Casa de Gobierno de la República Argentina
Marking its inauguration, ESA’s Malargüe tracking station receives Mars Webcam image.
An image of the enigmatic Red Planet acquired by ESA’s Mars Express on 15 December 2012 was downloaded via ESA’s new tracking station in Malargüe, Argentina, symbolising ‘first data’ and recognising formal inauguration.
Details on the station's inauguration via ESA web and ESA media.
A mosaic depicting ESA's new 35m deep-space tracking station at Malargüe, Argentina, composed of several hundred low-resolution Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) images acquired by Mars Express.
On 18 December 2012, the station downloaded a VMC image from Mars Express orbiting some 328 million kilometres from Earth to mark the station's formal inauguration and the symbolic transmission of 'first data'. The image was received at ESA's European Space Operations Centre, Darmstadt, Germany, and processed by the Mars Express mission operations team.
Photo mosaic generated using AndreaMosaic, an excellent piece of software!