OrbitalHub

Credits: ESA – S. Corvaja, 2009

Arianespace is getting closer to the first Soyuz launch from Kourou, in French Guyana.

On November 7, 2009, two Soyuz launchers were loaded on MN Colibri, which transports them from Russia to French Guyana. The journey of the two Soyuz 2-1A launchers from St. Petersburg to Kourou takes two weeks.

Each launch vehicle is loaded in ten containers, which hold the four first-stage strap-on boosters, the Block A core stage, the Block I third stage, the Fregat upper stage, and the Soyuz 2-1A ST-type payload fairing. MN Colibri is also carrying the refined kerosene propellant used by the boosters, the Block A and Block I stages, as well as the unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) and the nitrogen peroxide (N2O4) needed to fuel the Fregat upper stage.

The Soyuz launch site at Kourou is in its final stage of construction. While sharing common features with the cosmodromes at Baikonur in Kazakhstan and Plesetsk in Russia, the launch site at Kourou will have a fifty-two meter tall mobile gantry, which will be used for vertical payload integration and final pre-liftoff processing.

If you ask yourself how safe is Soyuz, it has been in production since 1957, continuously upgraded, and has more than 1,740 successful launches on record to date. Soyuz will become the medium-size launcher in the Arianespace family of launch vehicles. Taking advantage of the low latitude of the European spaceport, Soyuz will be able to deliver three-ton payloads to geostationary orbits.

Space Shuttle Atlantis docked to Harmony on November 18, 2009, at 11:51 AM EST. The hatchway between Atlantis and the International Space Station opened at 1:18 PM EST. STS-129 has three EVAs scheduled.

Read more about STS-129…

STS-129 Space Shuttle Atlantis launched on November 16, 2009, at 2:28 PM EST. The members of the crew are Commander Charlie Hobaugh, Pilot Barry Wilmore, astronauts Leland Melvin, Mike Foreman, Robert Satcher and Randy Bresnik, all mission specialists.

Read more about STS-129…

Credits: ESA OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

On November 13, 2009, at 8:45 AM CET, ESA’s comet chaser Rosetta swung by Earth. Rosetta passed just South of the Indonesian island of Java at an altitude of 2481 km. Its speed relative to Earth was 13.34 km/s. The maneuver provided a boost of 3.6 km/s.

Rosetta’s OSIRIS (Optical Spectroscopic and Infrared Remote Imaging System) narrow-angle camera was used to image the Earth once every hour for 24 hours.

Rosetta will meet asteroid 21 Lutetia in 2010. The final destination of Rosetta is the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which the spacecraft will reach in 2014. Rosetta will deploy a lander to the surface of the comet, and will also orbit the nucleus of the comet and fly alongside as it heads towards the inner Solar System. Most of the time, the probe will hibernate with the majority of its systems shut down in order to optimize the power consumption.

You can find more information about Rosetta’s swing by on ESA’s Rosetta Blog website.

Credits: General Dynamics C4 Systems

Carnival of Space #128 is hosted by Peter Lake at AARTScope Blog.

The blog posts cover topics like a race in Spain to build a space hotel, the Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge competition, commercial space satellites, various forms of space travel being researched and proposed, NASA’s Fermi Gamma ray telescope, the Sun’s gravitational lens, naming of the Martian meteorites found by the Opportunity and Spirit rovers, the Space Station Crew Return Vehicle, and much more.

In a world dominated by personal computers, there is room left for applications running on microcontrollers. Beginning with home appliances and ending with robotic manipulators used in space missions, microcontrollers are still the optimal choice of many system designers. It seems that in computer-land you do not have to be big, strong, and/or fast in order to be smart… there are even examples of Kalman filter implementations running on microcontrollers.

Today I recommend you a book on programming microcontrollers – Programming Robot Controllers. The book focuses on using microcontrollers for robot control and has the declared goal to provide robot designers with the knowledge and the tools that will help guarantee that his/her robot will perform to expectation and specification and can be easily modified.

Myke Predko, the author, uses the Microchip PICmicro PIC16F627 chip for the example circuits presented in the book. Despite the modest performances of the microcontroller (PIC16F627 is a 18-pin device, providing 1K instruction space and 68 bytes of variable memory, two 8-bit timers, a 16-bit timer, serial communications, and a single-vector interrupt capability), it is very popular for robot applications. Assembly language enthusiasts might be a little bit disappointed because the code examples in the book are written in C. But there is an advantage to that… if you want to port the robot code, the compiler will do most of the work for you.

The author introduces three different spectrums in describing how software is written for robots. Depending on the requirements for the code response/execution speed, the code can be biologic, mechalogic, and elelogic. Don’t bother to look up the last two in the dictionary… they are new terms. In a nutshell, the biologic code makes the high-level decisions providing the high-level intelligence demonstrated by the robot, the mechalogic code controls the mechanical devices built into the robot, and the elelogic code provides intercomputer communications and some interface and output functions.

After an introduction focused on the specifics of software development for microcontrollers and a detailed description of the microcontroller itself, the book presents devices that are external to the microcontroller and how they can be integrated into a general robot architecture: RS-232 interfaces, LEDs, LCDs, IR sensors, sound sensors, motor controllers, odometers, and radio control servos. The author points out that it is easy to build a robot, but it is much more difficult to get it to work properly or as expected. The conclusion is that designing the robot system is an important step of the process.

If you plan to build your own exploration rover, design a micro-satellite bus, or put together a robot manipulator, Programming Robot Controllers is a good book to start with.