Transcripts of The Rough Road to Space

Narration: John Satrom

Transcript:

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[John Satrom] The environment of space is very harsh on any hardware we put up, whether it be satellites or rockets or the space shuttle, and I think it’s one of the things that the average person doesn’t really appreciate.

The Glory mission is going to fly in what’s known as a low Earth polar orbit. It will fly around the poles of the Earth. We’re in a particular orbit called a Sun synchronous orbit such that when we come over the equator, at every pass, the Sun is in the same relative position. When you think about that, on every orbit we’re going from Sun into darkness and Sun into darkness, and so the spacecraft can cycle through temperature extremes of 100° centigrade from high to low. And so you just think about going from the hottest place in the summer to the coldest place in the winter every 45 minutes. That extreme thermal cycling is very tough on the spacecraft.

So what we do on the ground is we try and expose the spacecraft to the environment that it will see in space as much as we can before launch, to try and work out all those kinks.

Starting at the component level, we do vibration and thermal testing, and then up to the instrument levels, with the APS and TIM instruments, they’ll go through a full environmental test program. And then once we put the whole thing together, we expose the spacecraft with the instruments to a series of vibration tests, and then we put it in a vacuum chamber and pump out all the air to simulate the vacuum of space. And we’ll cycle it through those temperature extremes, and again, try and replicate all those environments it will see out in space before we launch it to make sure we’re worked out all the kinks.

The thermal cycling, and the vibration of being launched on a rocket, all those things are very harsh on the spacecraft, and if you don’t check them out in advance, there’s a good possibility you could induce failures. And if you induce failures on the way up, you know, there’s no way to go grab the spacecraft and bring it back down and fix it, so you’ve lost the mission if you’ve done that.

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