I am a 25 year old space engineering student (atm in Bremen, DE), this blog is about things that I find worth sharing.
[Link] This is a great video on the problem of space debris. It was made as opening video for the 6th European Conference on Space Debris, the biggest conference on the subject worldwide. This is a big problem, we should address rather today then tomorrow, if we want to keep using space. Even today, satellites use operational time and fuel due to regular avoidance maneuvers.
Source: ESA
Bion-M launches succesfully!
Yesterday the Bion-M spacecraft launched successfully from Baikonour. It carried a passenger load consisting of 45 mice, 8 mongolian gerbils, 15 geckos, 20 snails, a bunch of fish and a lot of micro-organisms. The new Bion craft is planned to land again in a month on the 18th of May.
Read more on RussianSpaceWeb, space.com, NASA or IMBP.
“Ow hai, we are Festo and we build another flying thing that will blow your mind”
ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) missions and launches planned for the upcoming 5 years.
New Solutions to an Old Problem
You might be wondering what all these scribbles are doing on your dash? Or are they Spirographs maybe?
They are actually solutions to the three-body problem. The famous problem was formulated in the 17th century, and a number of first solutions were offered by Lagrange and Euler, known as the central configuration solutions (or the Lagrange-Euler family) in the 18th century. Only in the 20th century the problem was revisited, First by a group known as the Copenhagen School, led by astronomer S.E. Strömgren, who tried to find solutions to the three-body problem by confining the movement of the three bodies to a single plain. This is also known as the Copenhagen Problem. This was the problem on which Broucke and Hénon found a family of solutions in the seventies. Christopher Moore discovered the last family, the fancy figure 8 family you can see on top, in 1993.
No new solution families were found anymore, up until last year, when Milovan Šuvakov and Veljko Dmitrašinović from the institute of Physics Belgrade decided to take up the challenge. By tweaking the initial conditions of the known solutions Šuvakov and Dmitrašinović have found a stunning 13 new families of solutions. They described and classified their solutions on a shape space sphere, a method suggested by Montgomery in 1998. Funny fact, after the definition of this shape space sphere, Montgomery rediscovered the recently discovered Figure 8 family in 2000.
The next step for Šuvakov and Dmitrašinović is to check whether the orbits are stable or not. If some of the new families are found to be stable, astronomers might encounter somewhere in the universe.
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For more information on the new orbits and their classification: Read the Article by Šuvakov and Dmitrašinović on arXiv.org or the news article about the discovery from Science.
All the solution families can also be found on this beautiful website of Šuvakov and Dmitrašinović, were the solutions are also plotted on the shape space sphere. This website is also the source of the images.
More information on the Three Body Problem can be found on Wikipedia or Scholarpedia (the latter is a lot more extensive).
P.S. There is a as well another solution to the three-body problem, when it is assumed that one of the bodies has a negligible small mass and the two massive bodies move in a circular orbit. This problem is better known as the Circular restricted three-body problem.
First female dean of the Aerospace faculty in Delft.
Hester Bijl has been appointed as the new dean of the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at the Delft University of Technology. Out of the 8 deans at the TU Delft, Bijl will be the third woman. She will start her work on the 15th of April in a field that is notorious for its unequal share of women, only 10% of the student population at this faculty is women.
Hester Bijl, with her full title Mrs. prof. dr. ir. drs. Hester Bijl, studied mathematics (in Delft) after which she started a PhD. in computational fluid dynamics. At the same time she got a degree in English in Leiden. After a short interval working in industry she started her scientific work at the chair of aerodynamics in Delft in 1999. In 2006 she was appointed as Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Professor, a chair which aims to promote young scientists at an early age. This appointment made her the first female professor at the faculty of Aerospace Engineering.
Often she is describe as a cheerful, open and inspirational person. The mother of two lives with the motto ‘Try to get as much out of your life as possible.’ She aims to develop ideas into the future. A future which she tries to better with her involvement in green energy institutes as the director of the Delft Energy Initiative and as a member on teh supervisory board of ECN (Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands).
In my bachelor I have taken several courses in which she lectured. She always managed to interest the people on the subject at hand. Bijl strives to realise an environment where everyone can reach its fullest potential.
In her new job Bijl would like to make her faculty top class in the world:”First of all, I would like to strengthen our connections to the world at large. We make a difference with our first-class education and our relevant research. And we can do even more.”
ESA’s Solar system missions. In a few years ESA in cooperation with the other space agencies will have covered the inner solar system, Jupiter and Saturn.
HighRes download. Source: ESA
An overview of all the space telescopes of ESA which are in operation or planned for launch in the near future. Note that the JWT and the HST are NASA telescopes with use contributions of ESA.
Highres download, Source: ESA
Cargo Cult Science - Richard Feynman
While tumblering about science, we should not forget that science does not solely excist of explosions, excitement and aerospace adventures. Science is the art of verification and validation. Tests should be repeated and should isolate the question at hand in an controlled environment. But who am I to convince you, let Richard Feynman explain it in Caltech’s ‘74 commencement address. Almost 40 years later his speech named Cargo Cult Science [PDF] is still relevant.
As February progresses the shadows of the two towers become longer. The Sun, after three months of permanent presence, starts to touch the horizon. After many weeks of living under an intense blue the sky starts to be painted with a yellowish reflection reminiscent of sunsets at home. The Antarctic plateau indulges the viewer with whims of light and colour with shades ranging from blue to red. In a few days the Concordia crew will experience their first sunset.
Domenico Romano spent a winter in the Concordia station on Antarctica, here he writes about the last plane to leave before the winter. When February is over, no airplane can reach the station, because the fuel will freeze. Photo: IPEV/PNRA-D. Romano.
