Space Conference succeeds in efforts to teach and inspire

The 20th annual Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium Conference at UW-Sheboygan, which was announced in these pages last Tuesday, achieved liftoff on-schedule Thursday morning, and with lots of thrust.

The thrust for the first stage of the conference was supplied by Dr. Marc Rayman. He is the mission manager for an unmanned space ship, Dawn, now in flight. Launched in December 2007, it is wending its way toward exploring two bodies out there in orbits between Mars and Jupiter.

His brilliant and humorous powerpoint lecture kept attendees enthralled and inspired. One target object, Ceres, discovered in 1801, is a sphere 350 miles in diameter with a surface area about as vast as the United States. It may have lots of liquid water beneath a dusty surface. The other, Vesta, is smaller and a bit irregular, a victim of a big collision eons ago. Scientists think that 5 percent of the meteorites we have found on Earth originated from that specific event. Pieces thrown off from the crash later screamed into Earth’s atmosphere and found their way to the ground.

Both of these objects, Vesta considered an asteroid, and Ceres a dwarf planet, are the two most massive bodies in the asteroid belt. They are both of great interest and will tell us much about the early history of the Solar System, some 4.6 billion years ago.

These bodies are a long way off, and getting out there to orbit each in turn takes a long time. The Dawn vehicle will orbit Vesta for a year, beginning in July 2011 and then “climb” farther out to reach Ceres and go into orbit around it starting February 2015. Detailed photography and other data will tell us a great deal about these two bodies.

Dawn, the spacecraft itself, is a wonder. It uses ion propulsion, in which relatively small amounts of xenon ions are wooshed out of a thruster at very high speeds. An electric charge system does this trick, all powered by solar panels. The panels, which unfolded after Dawn was in space, extend out 65 feet, making Dawn a very large vehicle indeed. Dawn and its clever ion thrusters will have a tough job, because in order to go into orbit around the two bodies it has to “stop,” then maneuver into the orbit. That’s a neat trick, because the orbits of Vesta and Ceres are cockeyed with respect to the orbital “plane” of most things in the Solar System, including Earth’s orbit.

During its mission, Dawn will be four times farther away from Earth than the sun, and will still do all this intricate maneuvering. Dr. Rayman emphasized that this mission is nothing less than “an achievement of all humankind.”

Next on Thursday were several reports from groups of college students who won awards for the rockets they built. These are typically about four feet long, may weigh 30 or so pounds and achieve heights of 1,400 feet. The idea here is for the students, engineering students and otherwise, to solve the design and technical problems involved, and get this real-world experience.

This is a central thrust of the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium: education. Young people need to know that there is an aerospace industry here in Wisconsin, and that careers in aerospace are various: it’s not just working directly for NASA.

So: inspiration, education. The third thread of the conference was science. The real thing. I went to a breakout session in which five presenters had l5 minutes each to tell us what they are up to. The speakers were various, from academic PhDs to undergraduates, but all doing cutting-edge things that relate in some broad way to space. You’d think this stuff would put to you sleep. A typical title: “Anoxia in the Permian Oceans: Evidence from Island Arc Faunas…,” etc. Take my word for it: this talk, and the others, were genuinely interesting and were presented by folks who know what they are talking about (rapid fire!); they make you sit up and listen.

Friday morning featured another keynote speech by a native Wisconsinite, Max Mutchler, a research and instrument scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. He’s worked on the Hubble Space Telescope for its entire 20-year mission and has striven to produce some of those most glorious images from Hubble we’ve all seen. He also showed us amazing pictures of comets as they fall apart, fragmenting into hundreds or thousands of mini-comets, as one of these “dirty snowballs” now swinging close to the sun begins to become unstuck.

Another mission he works with is the effort to catalog the swarm of near-Earth asteroids, some of which could menace Earth if one were to crash into us. There are a lot of these, co-orbiting the sun along with us. We’d like to send astronauts to visit one or two of those by 2025 to better understand what is going on in the space near us, and eventually be able to prevent a catastrophic impact, like the one that killed off the dinosaurs. (Question: What caused the dinosaurs to disappear? Answer: They didn’t have a robust space program!)

All in all, the conference successfully met what I gather are the three intentions of the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium: inspiration, education and science.