Monthly Archives: April 2013

NASA, Space

Antares and tiny satellites

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This weekend was full of excitement for commercial space fans. Orbital Sciences Corporation launched the Antares rocket, making them only the second private company to put a vehicle into orbit. Like the SpaceX Falcon 9, Antares is intended to carry cargo to the International Space Station. Antares is cool for a couple of reasons – partly because it represents a further gain in the United States’ launch capability, but more notably because the target market for Antares commercial launches are smaller spacecraft than the usual several-thousand-ton geosynchronous birds.

Smaller spacecraft are particularly cool because – since their design, fabrication, and launch costs are lower than big satellites – satellite manufacturers are more willing to take risks with their design. I don’t mean “risks” to imply that these spacecraft are unsafe. I mean that they are not quite as tried-and-proven. In other words, they can be more cutting-edge. More innovative. More likely to push the envelope.

In that vein, what I find most exciting about the Antares launch is that the vehicle carried three NASA CubeSats specifically designed to puncture the conventional wisdom about how conservative spacecraft designs need to be. They are called “PhoneSats,” and what makes them special is that their flight computers are off-the-shelf Android cell phones. Their on-board avionics software is an app.

http://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/small_spacecraft/phonesat.html
PhoneSat 1.0 (from nasa.gov)

The idea behind these CubeSats is to test how robust spacecraft really need to be. Commercial spacecraft engineers design huge margins into their vehicles. We tend to be very careful and conservative. But since many spacecraft last well longer than their quoted design lifetimes…maybe we’re too conservative. The PhoneSats will help answer the question: If we just get commercial computer hardware and design a system that works – without so much conservatism – how long will it last in space? Maybe it will operate long enough to complete its mission.

If the PhoneSats stayed in orbit forever, they’d be likely to burn out. Their Android processors and flash memory would fail under the onslaught of cosmic rays. But, at under $7000 each, maybe even the short mission of these satellites would make them competitive with the longer-lasting multi-million-dollar vehicles.

I’ll be very interested in the results of the PhoneSat project!

Space

Where does the public see innovation?

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The Lockheed Martin corporation recently conducted a poll in which they asked members of the public to choose the company’s “ultimate innovation.” There were a lot of fancy gizmos in the poll, including some very recent ones that definitely qualify as “innovations.” The Joint Strike Fighter, for example – a jet that can take off vertically and then fly at supersonic speed – is pretty damn cool. The SR-71 is almost mythic in the aerospace world. There were underwater robots and fighters that helped us win World War II.

But what won the poll, in the eyes of the public? What was the “ultimate innovation?”

A twenty-three-year-old clunker of a machine. A device that was once universally panned as myopic and wasteful.

The Hubble Space Telescope.

These high-profile space exploration missions simply soar in the public imagination. More than any other aerospace or engineering innovation, they capture people’s attention and fire their spirit.

Clearly, we need more of them.

Not only is it good policy…it’s just good public relations!

Games, Science Fiction, Space

A spacecraft engineer’s review of Flotilla

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I just picked up the latest Humble Bundle sale entirely because of the gameplay video of Flotilla. Flotilla is a terrific little gem of a game that puts players in tactical command of a small squadron of combat spacecraft, with a little irreverent stomp-around-the-galaxy exploration to frame the battles.

Screenshot from the Flotilla web site.

What it gets right

Spacecraft physics-wise

The simultaneous turn-based mechanic. I’ve written before that a realistic movie depiction of space combat would play out like a submarine movie: long periods of tension between scenes of rapid action. Flotilla only allows players to issue orders every 30 seconds, and then watch how their tactics play out – which plays right into that tension/action dynamic. It also is probably pretty close to how communications lag and astronomical distances would force a true space fleet commander to operate.

The focus on both spacecraft position and orientation. Ships have well-defined firing arcs, strong points, and weak points. These features make it essential for players to consider the 3D orientation of their spacecraft and their targets: I learned very quickly that the basic orientation control mode (in which you specify an enemy for your ship to face) was not sufficient if I wanted to get through combat unscathed. The advanced mode (which lets you specify yaw, pitch, and roll Euler rotations for each ship) let me perform much more advanced maneuvers; faking out my opponents so that they exposed their vulnerable points to me while I absorbed incoming fire with armored surfaces.

Gameplay-wise

The simplified interface. The game is very clean, stylish, and accessible. It’s easy to set up complex tactics in the fully 3D environment. I also appreciate that you don’t have to keep track of a bazillion unit types and special abilities – but, at the same time, each ship class has particular strengths and weaknesses.

The combat balance. It’s possible to approach a battle with a large fleet and blast your enemies into space dust…and it’s also possible to slip in with a single destroyer and land surgical hits to wipe out a superior force. (It took a while, but about half a hour ago I took down two destroyers and four dreadnoughts with a single destroyer. I even tricked two of the dreadnoughts into colliding – that was very satisfying!)

What it gets wrong

Spacecraft physics-wise

The specifically top/front armor design. All ships have strong armor on their “tops” and “fronts,” with weak armor on their “bottoms” and “rears.” I think it’s great to have weak and strong faces, but if the engineers who designed these ships knew that they were going into space – where only the enemy’s gate is “down” – why would they make all ships the same in this regard? It would make more sense for the different ship classes to have different strong and weak faces.

Forces do not exist. There is no gravity, and no orbital motion. All battles take place in deep space. Orbital dynamics would certainly complicate the gameplay – but the cool thing about including orbits would be to add complexity to players’ tactical options. (In orbits, it’s actually easier to move in some directions than others. That’s a phenomenon that players could manipulate.) More importantly, the direction a ship’s engines are pointing has no effect on its motion. It would have been neat to see some coupling between the 3D positioning and spacecraft orientation, instead of letting vehicles slide “sideways” at the same speed that they move “forward.”

Gameplay-wise

No collision warnings. The movement hint lines really need to turn red or something when you accidentally drive them through an asteroid. Or when two ships’ movements will lead them into a collision halfway through your turn. Even after I knew to look out for these situations, I still sometimes drove my own spacecraft into each other. Those are real facepalm moments!

Orientation can be tricky. While I love the abstracted spacecraft graphics because they make me feel like a fleet admiral looking at a tactical display, it’s sometimes hard to tell at a glance which spaceship faces are “up.” A little extra coloration or something would help indicate the weak and strong spots. In addition, Euler angles are not my favorite way to represent and manipulate orientations of spacecraft. I would prefer to use the same planar/vertical interface that sets 3D motion to specify the front-facing direction of my ship, and then roll the spacecraft about that axis.

What it gets hilarious

Everything about the Adventure Mode. That owl warlord will rue the day he challenged my karaoke championship!

 

Art, Concepts, Geology, Maps, Original fiction, Science Fiction, Space

On the World Zarmina

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2014 update! You can now buy prints of this map!

…Preliminary report on image data from the LongShot-2 mission…

The planet Gliese 581g – also known as Zarmina – is a circular world.

It is not circular in the literal sense shown on ancient maps of the Earth, before we understood Earth to be a sphere. Rather, Gliese 581g spins at the same rate as it orbits its star, so its sun is always in the same place in its sky. Heat from the red dwarf, distributed by the circulation of the atmosphere, keeps a circular region under the star warm enough to melt ice into liquid water.  Thus, the habitable regions fall entirely within a disc under the constant light of the red star. Outside this region, water freezes – and the further one goes out onto the ice, the more inhospitable it gets. Travel to the far side of the planet is about as difficult as traveling from the Earth to the Moon – and so, to the inhabitants of Zarmina, their world might as well be a circle ringed in ice.1

This artist’s concept, based on image mapping from our recent interstellar probes, depicts the habitable region of Zarmina:

Zarmina, from above the substellar point
Zarmina, from above the substellar point.

For discussion of Zarmina, some reference points and directions are necessary. The circular boundary of the map is the ice line: beyond this point, water is certain to freeze. The center of the circle thus defined is the substellar point. When standing here, the red dwarf Gliese 581 is directly overhead. This image shows Zarmina oriented with is orbital plane horizontal. The planet has a south magnetic pole pointing roughly towards the top of the page, and so the “top” and “bottom” of this map become the cardinal directions north and south. East and west take on their usual definitions.

Gliese 581g is approximately three and a half times the mass of Earth. It is tidally locked to its star, meaning that one side always faces its Sun just as one side of the Moon always faces the Earth. Gravitational tides from the star also have the effect of pulling the rocky surface of the planet into an oblong shape, like a rugby ball. Since our probes reached the Gliese 581 system,2 we determined that the planet has a tiny orbital eccentricity (from perturbations by the other planets in the system) which causes a periodic shift in the gravity force on the planet: slightly east to slightly west, and back again, every Zarminan day (about 37 Earth days). The combination of the periodic variation in stellar tide and the fact that the ocean is more mobile than rock makes dry land much more common in the center of the disc than near the edge, as we see in the map.3

This variation in tidal force results in one of Zarmina’s most striking surface feature types. Continue reading On the World Zarmina →