From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Wed, 08 Aug 2001 02:22:22 -0400, "Alexandra H. Mulkern" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: "We'll store Triana in here. In a shipping container, a metal box," Watzin said, looking through a window at the storage room. "We'll find a corner out of the way." For Gore Spacecraft, All Systems Aren't Go Earth Observation Satellite Shelved By Joel Achenbach Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, August 8, 2001; Page A01 A $100 million Earth-observing spacecraft conceived in the middle of the night by then-Vice President Al Gore will soon be entombed in an aluminum box in the corner of Building 7 at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. No one knows if it will ever fly. Triana, sometimes known as the "GoreCam" or "GoreSat," was designed to study the Earth's climate and monitor global warming from a vantage point a million miles from the planet. NASA originally planned to launch it aboard the space shuttle later this year. Political opposition by Republicans in Congress delayed the project, however, and Triana lost its slot in the shuttle schedule. Budgetary pressures then forced NASA to cut back on the frequency of shuttle missions, and the agency has decided that, for the moment, the shuttle has no room for Triana. Like the political career of the man who envisioned it, the satellite may face a prolonged period in cold storage. Construction is complete. Calibration of the instruments is in the final stages. The spacecraft has been variously baked and chilled inside a steel vacuum chamber. Engineers have vibrated the satellite on a "shaker table." They have placed it in an acoustic test cell and blasted it with the sound of a shuttle rocketing into space. Triana has passed every test so far and within a matter of weeks will be officially declared space-worthy. All it lacks is a ride into space. The scientists and engineers who labored on the project are dismayed. "We have spent $120 million, we have a spacecraft that is ready to fly, we have developed the instruments, we have calibrated and tested it, and we have developed all the scientific algorithms to retrieve the climate data we want to study. Imagine what a tremendous waste it would be. This should not be thrown away into the garbage can," said Francisco P.J. Valero, an atmospheric physicist at the Scripps Institution of the University of California at San Diego and the lead scientist on the project. "It's very frustrating," Triana scientist Steve Geary said. "This is not a paycheck. This is a mission we believe in." NASA spokesman Dave Steitz said the agency still expects to launch Triana "sometime within the next several years." The decision to shelve the spacecraft for now is purely a matter of budgets and scientific priorities, he said. "We would like to see Triana complete a successful science mission. But that being said, we have to live within our budget," Steitz said. Triana has been derided by Republican critics, and its political pedigree is unusual for a scientific instrument. But Valero and Geary have not alleged that NASA's decision is politically motivated. Asked whether politics played a role in the decision, Valero said, "That is a very difficult question. I am not a politician, and I don't know. We scientists do not like to talk about things we don't understand." Steitz said, "I think the politics left a long time ago, if there were any." If nothing else, Triana reveals the vulnerability of scientific missions at a time when NASA is constructing the budget-devouring International Space Station. Most space shuttle flights are dedicated to that multiyear project. Triana was always considered a "secondary" payload on the shuttle. Other scientific missions, such as the servicing of the Hubble Space Telescope, were higher priorities. Triana has been an atypical mission since it sprang from the brain of the vice president in March 1998, reportedly at 3 o'clock in the morning. Gore, who for years kept an Apollo-era photograph of the "whole Earth" on his office wall, envisioned a camera in deep space, permanently pointed at the Earth and sending real-time imagery to be seen on cable TV and the Internet 24 hours a day. Gore felt the mission would have both scientific and spiritual dimensions. "I believe it will have inspirational value that's hard to describe," Gore said at the time. He wanted it named Triana, after Rodrigo de Triana, the sailor on Columbus's ship who first sighted land. Weather satellites can observe continent-sized swaths of the surface, but not an entire hemisphere. Satellites in low-earth orbit glimpse only fragments of the planet. But a million miles from Earth, directly toward the sun, is an orbital position known as L1 that is a handy place to station a satellite. At L1, the gravity of the Earth partly neutralizes the gravity of the sun. A satellite at L1 would continuously orbit the sun on a line between the sun and the Earth. There are satellites at L1 that study the sun, measuring incoming streams of solar particles. Gore's satellite would, in effect, turn around and face home, scrutinizing the Earth's permanently sunlit face. "We've never had a complete, sunlit view of the Earth," Steitz said. When Gore was the Democratic front-runner for the presidential election, his satellite drew a sharply mixed reaction. Republicans mocked the "GoreCam." They said it was a waste of money on something that was essentially a "screen saver." On the House floor, Majority Whip Tom Delay (R-Tex.) dismissed the importance of "pictures of Earth turning on its little axis." Republicans won passage of a bill that halted the project for five months pending a review of the merits by the National Academy of Sciences. By that time, however, NASA scientists and engineers had expanded the set of instruments on Triana to ensure that this would be much more than just a camera in space with a snazzy view of Earth. The National Academy of Sciences gave the mission a strong endorsement. The project gradually got rolling again, but the delay forced NASA to bump the satellite from its previously assigned shuttle mission. Earlier this year, cost overruns on the International Space Station were projected at as much as $4 billion over the next five years. NASA cut back on its shuttle schedule, trimming two flights a year. The agency had to make a painful decision. "It is not possible at this time to identify a definitive launch date for Triana," Ghassem Asrar, NASA's associate administrator for Earth science, wrote Valero in March. "It is thus necessary to stop launch preparation work and rapidly bring the project to a stable state of suspension." The Triana scientists and engineers speak proudly of their project. They say their instruments can measure changes in the Earth's climate that now have to be pieced together, with large margins of error, by multiple satellites. "This is solid, needed science and unfortunately we still have this GoreCam baggage around our necks. I wish the connection to GoreCam could be broken," said Geary, who worked on Triana for more than two years. "If we could just get that name to go away, and quit waving a red flag in front of the Republicans. . . . From a pure science standpoint, it's too valuable not to fly." Valero, the lead scientist, and Jim Watzin, the Triana program manager at Goddard, fear that the greatest loss during Triana's storage period will be intellectual. Engineers will drift away to other projects. Information could be misplaced, lost or forgotten. Even certain pieces of technology, currently assigned to Triana, might be carted away for other purposes. "That's another risk of going into long-term storage -- the predatory projects," Watzin said. He led a reporter on a tour of the warehouse-sized Integration and Test Facility, where Triana is out of sight, sealed inside a massive steel vacuum chamber. The spacecraft is equipped with all the 21st-century gadgets a scientific satellite requires -- hydrazine propulsion thrusters, gallium arsenide solar panels, a radio transmitter for beaming data across the interplanetary void, a radiometer to measure the thermal emissions of Earth, and a telescopic camera that can capture color images of our planet in 10 wavelengths. Technicians are treating the spacecraft as though it is about to rocket toward the sun. Instead it will be bolted to a dolly, rolled to a "clean room" and enclosed in an airtight container full of nitrogen gas. "We'll store Triana in here. In a shipping container, a metal box," Watzin said, looking through a window at the storage room. "We'll find a corner out of the way." ------ http://USFamily.Net/info - Unlimited Internet - From $8.99/mo! ------ ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> <FONT COLOR="#000099">Small business owners... Tell us what you think! </FONT><A HREF="http://us.click.yahoo.com/vO1FAB/txzCAA/ySSFAA/7gSolB/TM";><B>Click Here!</B></A> ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> "Evolution beyond the moral and intellectual fraud of politics." You *will* read the entire website *before* contributing! http://groups.yahoo.com/group/American_Liberty/files/al.htm To post, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit site. Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
