2010 will hopefully be the year that the NASA Glory mission launches into space. I have been working on the Glory-TIM instrument since 2004 and am extremely excited to have my own system fly in space for the first time! If I haven’t told you about it before, I designed the pointing system for the TIM instrument that will allow it to look directly at the sun as the spacecraft orbits around the earth. As the November 22, 2010 launch date grows closer, Glory is beginning to receive attention in the press, so I thought I would report on some of the interesting stories out there.
First off, you can check out all the latest official NASA news about Glory at the main Glory website, and there is also a very nice PDF brochure about the Glory mission.
Now on to my entries in the Glory news! Last week, I was interviewed about the connection between Glory and the hit t.v. show Lost, and a great article was posted online. Here is an excerpt:
“What they surely don’t know, regardless of how many hours they’ve spent scouring Lostpedia or regaling perplexed coworkers with Lost trivia, is that engineers for NASA’s Glory mission have a computer and button of their own at the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) that’s keeping them up at night.”
Be sure to check out the full article and my video that inspired the article at the NASA What On Earth blog.
And finally, I have a number of videos I created about the TPS that are posted on Youtube. Here is a favorite of mine that shows a time-lapse of the TPS motion during testing at LASP.
That’s all for now, but I will be sure to post with more information as the launch date nears…
[…] set forth building a follow-on TIM, and I spent 7 years designing, building, and testing the solar pointing system for the TIM. However, when the Glory mission and our new TIM launched in March of 2011, the rocket’s nose […]