Posted on 02/13/2003 5:57:41 PM PST by woofie
KIRTLAND AIR FORCE BASE — It was a lark for Rick Cleis and his buddies, the sort of technical challenge the Air Force satellite trackers thrive on.
Could they snap a picture of the space shuttle Columbia as it streaked above Albuquerque on its return to Earth on Feb. 1?
NASA didn't ask for the picture. The researchers just thought it would be fun.
Rigging up a small home telescope, a decades-old satellite-tracking mirror array and an ancient Macintosh computer, they succeeded historically.
As dawn broke, Columbia appeared above high western clouds, right where the NASA flight track said it would be, and they snapped a single grainy picture.
That ghostly image, released last week by NASA, is the last close-up image before Columbia broke up in the skies above Texas, killing the seven astronauts aboard. Some observers suggest it shows damage to Columbia's troubled left wing. NASA is not so sure.
"It's not clear to me that it reveals anything significant at this point," said shuttle program manager Ron Dittemore during a news briefing last week.
After almost two weeks of official silence, Air Force and NASA officials Wednesday allowed the team that snapped the picture to talk about how they did it.
Cleis, Robert Johnson and Roger Petty work at the Air Force's Starfire Optical Range, using telescopes to track and study satellites in orbit.
That led to speculation that the picture had been taken with the Air Force's most powerful satellite-tracking telescope. In interviews Wednesday, they tried to set the record straight.
It was just some guys cobbling together cheap old gear for fun, they said.
The shuttle's orbit only rarely carries it over Albuquerque, and the Starfire team doesn't often get the chance to track objects re-entering Earth's atmosphere, said Johnson, an Air Force major.
They got the data they needed from NASA to track the shuttle as it passed, but they were too busy with their regular work to get started setting up for the attempt until the night before.
"We literally started that Friday evening," Cleis said.
Johnson worked until 10 p.m., aligning a little old Questar telescope they pulled out of a closet for the task. Cleis — whose colleagues call him "the telescope wizard" — stayed up all night writing the software to track the descending shuttle.
They have some of the most powerful telescopes available for the job, including a behemoth with a mirrored lens more than 11 feet in diameter. But for their Feb. 1 attempt, they chose the smallest telescope in their arsenal. It was the easiest to set up for the unique job of tracking the fast-moving shuttle, flying far lower than their usual targets, they said.
The Questar is small, even by the standards of backyard astronomy. Its lens is just 3-1/2 inches in diameter.
They mounted it in front of a set of larger movable satellite-tracking mirrors that had been salvaged from White Sands Missile Range two decades ago.
Old but still reliable, the mirrors tracked the shuttle, reflecting its image back to an instrument room where the telescope was mounted.
From the time Columbia emerged from clouds in the west until they lost it because of clouds in the east, the shuttle was only visible for 24 seconds, according to Robert Fugate, Starfire's chief scientist.
That was only enough time to snap one picture. The shuttle was 36 degrees above the western horizon, nearly 70 miles away at the time.
It was not long before they got a telephone call in the control room from a family member, telling them that the shuttle had broken up.
They immediately grasped the significance, and made backup copies of the computerized image.
"We said, 'We'd better start backing this up, somebody's going to want to see this,' '' Johnson said.
The image was turned over to NASA, which is still analyzing it as part of its investigation.
If this causes a problem with anyone, I wont do it again.
Not to many interested nowadays unless there is T & A or some other garbage involved.
For those interested this was taken with an off the self, LX-200 Meade on a tripod and an older Olympus O-M 1 camera with Fuji 200 w/exposure time of 1/2 sec. The lx200 has an aperture of 10". The Apollo 11 spacecraft landed not to far from this region, I believe directly to the west in the heavely cratered area to the left of Crater Theopilus, (central crater on top). Another Apollo mission landed not to far from the top left, which would be to the north and west to the large central crater, with the visible central peak. After taking the image, I discovered that the central peaks of this crater, extend upward in excess of 22,000 feet in elevation. This image was taken in a fairly light polluted environment, and I used some cheap lunar filters to block the glaring, reflected sun light from the lunar surface.Its so bright through the eyepiece, one wants to put on sunglasses.
I find astrophotography to be very rewarding. I would recommend it to anyone with some interest. Family pics and vacation pics get old. LOL.
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