Tuesday 25 February - Earth: The Pale Blue Dot

On 14 February 1990 Voyager 1, then 4 billion miles from the Sun, looked back for the last time and took a series of photographs of the Sun and six planets from 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane.  NASA has reprocessed the photograph below. Click to enlarge.

Courtesy Voyager Project, NASA and JP-Caltech who hold the copyright

As a backdrop to my 64cm high model Saturn V rocket which I built a couple of years ago, I have another famous photograph: Earthrise, taken by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders from lunar orbit on 24 December 1968.

Wednesday 7 August - NASA-JPL I'm off to Mars in 2020

I launch in July 2020 on an Atlas V-541 rocket from Cape Canaveral Airforce Station and arrive at Jezero Crater, Mars, on 18 February 2021, a journey of 313,586,649 miles. I have my Boarding Pass already.

Atlas V launch (Courtesy Spacenet 101)

Jezero Crater. Courtesy NASA

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California is managed for NASA by the prestigious California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and is the centre for robotic exploration of the solar system. It also manages NASA's Deep Space Network.

Previous JPL missions include Voyagers 1 and 2, Cassini-Huygens, Kepler, Juno and last November, InSight successfully landed on Mars. I watched on NASA TV as Mission Control monitored the "7 minutes of terror" - the Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) phase - which worked perfectly. Unfortunately, I missed getting onto the InSight flight.

"What on earth is he talking about", I hear you say.

Well, I subscribe by email to a number of NASA newsletters including JPL's 'Week in Review' and the first item on the 3 August issue concerned the Mars Entry, Descent and Landing Installation 2 (MEDLI2) on the Mars 2020 Aeroshell. The Aeroshell consists of a Thermal Protection System  (heat shield) and a back shell which will protect the Mars 2020 rover as it journeys to Mars and during the entry and descent through the Mars atmosphere at about 12,500 mph, slowing to 2mph in just 6 minutes.

"Flight data will allow the uncertainties in the models [used to predict the performance of an entry vehicle] to be further reduced leading to a more accurate prediction of the loads and performance" (Henry Wright, MEDLI2 project manager).

Currently large margins (100 - 200%) need to be allowed in predictions to ensure safe entry and descent. This data is of course vital for future human missions to Mars.

So what's all this about me going to Mars?

The Microdevices Laboratory at JPL will be using an electron beam to stencil submitted names onto a silicon chip with lines of text smaller than a human hair (75nm). My name is one of them!  The chips will be affixed to the Mars 2020 Rover.

My Boarding Pass, which includes my name of course.Courtesy NASA

JPL - Fuelling the 2020 Rover's power system (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator.) Courtesy NASA JPL

 JPL - The back shell which will protect the Rover during the descent to Jezero Crater. Courtesy NASA JPL

Coutesy NASA, JPL

The Rover's robotic arm will take core samples of the surface and analyse them sending data back to Earth but there's much more to this mission than that. More later perhaps, but in the meantime I'm looking forward to following the preparations for the mission my the long voyage to the surface of Mars. Even if it's just in name.

For now I continue to build my second Saturn V model though the Airfix version is not as enjoyable to build as the Revell was.