Schriever Ops Squadrons Manage GPS Constellation

Capt. Jared Delaney, 19th Space Operations Squadron satellite vehicle operator, right, and Senior Airman Bryan Wynkoop, 19 SOPS satellite system operator, monitor telemetry during the GPS SVN-69 launch Oct. 29, 2014 at Schriever Air Force Base, Colo. (U.S. Air Force photo/Dennis Rogers)

From Schriever Air Force Base: It's been a busy year for members of the 19th Space Operations Squadron.  As operators of the GPS launch and early orbit, anomaly-resolution and disposal system, 19 SOPS members executed a historically high number of satellite launches (four), and disposed of a legacy GPS vehicle, all within the past 10 months.

"The last time we launched four vehicles in one year was 1993," said Maj. Kimberly Adams, 19 SOPS LADO flight commander. "We're looking forward to a more normal [operations] tempo, in the coming year."

Tensions were high Oct. 29 during the lift-off and early-orbit of SVN-69, a GPS Block IIF vehicle, when a CBS news crew captured film footage of the event on the operations floor here.

"That was out of the ordinary for sure," Adams said.  "Compound that anxiety with the knowledge that we had just completed final configuration of a GPS vehicle disposal not 48 hours prior and you can understand the type of month October was for us and our 2nd Space Operations Squadron teammates."

Senior Airman Bryan Wynkoop, 19 SOPS satellite system operator, wouldn't change a thing about the past few months of 2014.

"It's exciting," he said. "This sure beats working a regular job.  The drama and importance of what's taking place here is exactly what I signed up for."

Adams and Wynkoop are Air Force Reservists, as are all 19 SOPS members. The squadron falls under the Air Force's 310th Space Wing, headquartered at Schriever AFB, and works in partnership with 2 SOPS, the 50th Space Wing unit responsible for commanding and controlling the GPS constellation.

Adams says 19 SOPS was stood up precisely to conduct GPS launches, manage anomalies and process disposals. 

"We start preparing for launch about 90 days out," Adams said. "With so many launches so close together, we often began preparations for one launch before the previous one was off the pad."

Their partnership with 2 SOPS has proved beneficial for both squadrons.

"This most recent launch was my seventh and Airman Wynkoop's sixth," said Adams, who is in her fifth year at 19 SOPS. "Active-duty Airmen typically reside on station for roughly three years, so oftentimes our 2 SOPS teammates are looking to us to provide continuity and experience."

That continuity became crucial during disposal operations for SVN-33.  It had been more than two years since the two squadrons had disposed of a vehicle and Wynkoop was one of the few Airmen at Schriever who was familiar with the operation's intricacies. 

"These events don't happen often, so to have played a role in two huge events was something special for all of us who were here," he said.

Less than 48 hours after SVN-33 had been fully configured for disposal, SVN-69 was standing on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Adams, Wynkoop and their fellow 19 SOPS operators' day started 8 hours prior to the launch.

"Wynkoop had to set up communications links with our antenna at the Cape so we could get telemetry data from the satellite," Adams said. "Once the rocket lifted off, I was performing communications checks and verifying that we were meeting all of our requirements."

Then they waited.

Three and half hours after launch, SVN-69 separated from its booster rocket.

"At that point we obtained an initial state of health from the satellite to ensure everything was OK and then we started commanding," Adams said.

Wynkoop explained that though he and his teammates are actually studying telemetry data through their monitors on the operations floor, it's easy to envision what's happening in space.

"The vehicle is spinning once it separates from the booster," he said.  "We then issue commands to slow the spin and deploy the vehicle's solar arrays, antennas and other critical components. Later, we get the vehicle in a condition known as sun safe. Shortly after, the vehicle acquires Earth and is in a stable orbit in the GPS slot where it's supposed to be."

Now, it's up to 2 SOPS to command and control the satellite, one of 39 on orbit. The squadron expects to receive satellite control authority of the spacecraft later this month and the next GPS launch is scheduled for March 2015.

Dark-Matter Detectives: the Clocks Aboard GPS Satellites

As reported by GPSWorld: “Networks of correlated atomic clocks, some of them already in existence, such as the Global Positioning System, can be used as a powerful tool to search for topological defect dark matter, thus providing another important fundamental physics application for the ever-improving accuracy of atomic clocks,” write physicists Andrei Derevianko and Maxim Pospelov in the current issue of Nature Physics journal.

Derevianko teaches at the University of Nevada, Reno, and Pospelov at the University of Victoria and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada. Derevianko and Geoff Blewitt, director of the Nevada Geodetic Laboratory at the University of Nevada, Reno are testing this dark-matter detection theory by analyzing clock data from atomic clocks aboard GPS satellites, searching for instances where initially synchronized clocks might have become desynchronized. They expect time discrepancies between spatially separated clocks to exhibit a distinct signature, one that may reveal the nature of spatial dark matter.

The Geodetic Lab developed and maintains the largest GPS data processing center in the world, according to a University of Nevada statement, able to process information from about 12,000 stations around the globe continuously, 24/7.

“We know the dark matter must be there,” explains Blewitt, “because it is seen to bend light around galaxies, but we have no evidence as to what it might be made of. If the dark matter were not there, the normal matter that we know about would not be sufficient to bend the light as much as it does. That’s just one of the ways scientists know there is a massive amount of dark matter somewhere out there in the galaxy. One possibility is that the dark matter in this gas might not be made out of particles like normal matter, but of macroscopic imperfections in the fabric of space-time.”

“Despite solid observational evidence for the existence of dark matter, its nature remains a mystery,” said Derevianko. “Some research programs in particle physics assume that dark matter is composed of heavy-particle-like matter. This assumption may not hold true, and significant interest exists for alternatives.

“Modern physics and cosmology fail dramatically in that they can only explain 5 percent of mass and energy in the universe in the form of ordinary matter, but the rest is a mystery.”

Scientific evidence reportedly shows that dark energy constitutes about 68 percent of the mystery mass and energy. The remaining 27 percent may be dark matter, though it has never been detected or measured.

“Our research pursues the idea that dark matter may be organized as a large gas-like collection of topological defects, or energy cracks,” Derevianko added. “We propose to detect the defects, the dark matter, as they sweep through us with a network of sensitive atomic clocks. The idea is, where the clocks go out of synchronization, we would know that dark matter, the topological defect, has passed by. In fact, we envision using the GPS constellation as the largest human-built dark-matter detector.”

Toyota Names Hydrogen Fuel Cell Car

As reported by the UK Telegraph: Toyota has revealed that it’s first mass-produced hydrogen fuel cell car, which goes on sale in the UK next year, will be called the Mirai.

The word means ‘future’ in Japanese, and was chosen because Toyota believes that’s exactly what the Mirai represents.

Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda said: “Today, we are at a turning point in automotive history. A turning point where a four-door sedan can travel 300 miles on a single tank of hydrogen, can be refuelled in under five minutes and emit only water vapor.”

Toyoda also claimed that the hydrogen that the Mirai will run on can be made from virtually anything, “even garbage”, and that its fuel cell creates enough electricity to power a house for about a week.

The Mirai will be the second hydrogen-fuelled car available to paying customers in the UK; the first was the Hyundai ix35 Fuel Cell, which Hyundai started delivering to owners just last month.  


Pricing for the Mirai is still to be announced, but it’s likely to cost about £40,000 ($62,580 USD) - around twice as much as a conventionally-powered hatchback.

Aside from the high price, the biggest hurdle it faces is the limited hydrogen refuelling infrastructure.  

Earlier this year, Business Minister Matthew Hancock announced £11 million of government and industry funding to expand the hydrogen refuelling network, with the aim of giving the UK up to 15 refueling stations nationwide. However, that’s still a tiny amount compared with the number of conventional filling stations, which stands at about 8,500. 

Police in California and Texas Test Networked Guns

As reported by MIT Technology Review: When a police officer draws a firearm he or she often doesn’t have an opportunity to radio for backup.

YardArm, a California-based company, is building technology that will automatically alert headquarters in such situations. The company makes a chip that goes into the handle of a regular firearm and transmits data over a cell-phone network connection. The data transmitted includes the location of a gun and whether it has been unholstered or discharged. The company is also working to track the direction in which a gun is pointing. The data can be fed to a police dispatch system or viewed on a smartphone.

Founded in 2013, YardArm started out making a consumer product for monitoring a firearm’s location. But since many American gun owners object to technology or policies aimed at regulating firearms, it did not find many customers.

“You have a social demand for smart gun technology, but not necessarily a market demand,” says Jim Schaff, YardArm’s vice president of marketing. “As a consumer product, it’s going to be a long road.”

Gun owners didn’t flock to YardArm, but law enforcement remained interested. Technology that tracks officers’ action is slowly gaining acceptance as police chiefs and officers realize that the data can help clear them of wrongdoing and save litigation costs. Meanwhile, it is becoming increasingly common for many ordinary objects and devices to come with Internet connectivity.

The gun industry is gradually taking notice of these trends. The gunmaker Beretta already offers the i-Protect, a sensor that goes on the front of the gun and captures data on the weapon’s use. Meanwhile Taser, which makes a gun that delivers a nonlethal electric shock, also sells head-worn cameras to help police and security workers document events in the field.

“Dash-cams really set precedent,” Schaff says. “When it comes down to it, monitoring technology helps more than it hurts.”

YardArm is holding tests to hone the tracking accuracy with police departments in Santa Cruz, California, and Carrollton, Texas. The technology has been tested at firing ranges, but not during active police duty.

“It is going so well we don’t even know it’s there,” says Santa Cruz sheriff Phil Wowak. “The product brings so much data that we’re going to have to figure out how to respond to every element.”

Yardarm plans to start selling the hardware and tracking service in mid-2015. The next goal is to capture the direction in which a gun was fired, but Schaff says this aspect of the technology needs to be improved. And despite the rebuff, YardArm has not given up on consumers. “We absolutely believe there’s a market of consumers perfectly happy deploying the technology,” Schaff says.

ESA Will Attempt to Improve Orbits of Errant Galileo Satellites

As reported by Inside GNSS: The European Space Agency (ESA) announced plans to implement a series of maneuvers to reposition one of two Galileo full operational capability (FOC) satellites left in the wrong orbit this summer, as a prelude to its health being confirmed.

The aim is to raise the lowest point of the satellite’s orbit — its perigee — to reduce the radiation exposure from the Van Allen radiation belts surrounding Earth, as well as to put it into a more useful orbit for navigation purposes.

Should the two-week operation prove successful, then the sixth Galileo satellite will follow the same route.

The Galileo pair, launched together on a Soyuz rocket on 22 August, ended up in an elongated orbit travelling out to to its apogee, a point of 25,900 kilometers (16,058 miles) above Earth, and back down to 13,713 kilometers (about 8,500 miles).

The target orbit was a purely circular one at an altitude of 23,222 kilometers (14,400 miles). In addition, the orbits are angled relative to the equator less than originally planned.

The two satellites have only enough fuel to lift their altitude by about 4000 kilometers — not enough to correct their orbits entirely. But the move will take the fifth satellite into a more circular orbit than before, with a higher perigee of 17,339 kilometers.

“The new orbit will fly over the same location every 20 days,” explains Daniel Navarro-Reyes, an ESA Galileo mission analyst.

“The standard Galileo repeat pattern is every 10 days; so, achieving this will synchronize the ground track with the rest of the Galileo satellites” he said. “In addition, from a user receiver point of view, the revised orbit will reduce the variation in signal levels, reduce the Doppler shift of the signal, and increase the satellite’s visibility.”

The orbit will also allow Galileo’s Earth sensor to hold a stable direction for the satellite’s main antenna to point at Earth, according to Navarro-Reyes.

“Right now, when the satellite dips to its lowest point, Earth appears so large that the sensor is unusable. The satellite relies on gyroscopes alone, degrading its attitude precision.”

The recovery is being overseen from the Galileo Control Center in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany, with the assistance of ESA’s Space Operations Center, ESOC, in Darmstadt, Germany.

France’s CNES space agency is providing additional ground stations so that contact can be maintained with the satellite as needed.

The two satellites were previously Sun-pointing. On 3 November that changed for the fifth satellite, as it transitioned to normal Earth-pointing mode.

During November, some 15 maneuvers will take the satellite into its new orbit. Once there, it can formally begin in-orbit testing. The host satellite’s health is checked first, followed by more detailed navigation payload testing.

Orion Capsule Moves to NASA Launch Pad for Test Flight

As reported by the Denver Post: NASA's new Colorado-made Orion spacecraft is now at the launch pad for next month's test flight.  

The spacecraft, built by Lockheed Martin Space Systems, was moved 22 miles overnight at Cape Canaveral, Fla., and reached the launch pad early Wednesday.

It was then hoisted into place on top of a Delta IV heavy rocket, made by Colorado-based United Launch Alliance, for the Dec. 4 launch.

In the next few weeks, the rocket and spacecraft will be integrated and powered up, and engineers will test and verify interfaces between the two in preparation for the test flight.

The test flight will last slightly more than four hours and will propel the unmanned capsule 3,600 miles from Earth, before returning it for a splashdown in the Pacific.  

Data collected during the flight will provide engineers insight into the performance of systems, including the massive Colorado-built heat shield, as well as avionics, parachute deployment and recovery operations, Lockheed said in a news release.

The information will be used to validate the spacecraft's design before it begins carrying human astronauts on deep-space exploration missions, including trips to Mars. Astronauts are expected to start flying on Orion in 2021. The capsules are built for four passengers, one more than the old Apollo spacecraft.