The day the moon stood still
I landed on a lunar hill
My eyes were bathed by the celestial sphere
And the Earth afar which I held so dear 
As the galactic dust settled on my feet
I saw both tides ebb and neap
My body relaxed under less gravitation
Brought about by isostatic compensation
Rimmed on all sides by the Galianic ocean
The awesome universe caused me great emotion
The luni-solar precession made my ears ring
And I could hear Newton, Galileo and Kepler sing
The day the moon stood still.
Joe Portney and Pete Mesquita, July 1969

Originally published in the Litton Avionics Newsletter, Vol.1, No.1, September 1969

This poem was inspired by and written on the occasion of the first lunar landing on July 20, 1969 accomplished by the crew of Apollo 11 Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin Aldrin, Jr. 
See http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/ap11ann/FirstLunarLanding/cover.html


ION EVENTS Reference ION.org

2003 National Technical Meeting
January 22-24, 2003 - Anaheim, California

59th Annual Meeting
June 24-26, 2003 - Albuquerque, New Mexico

ION GPS/GNSS 2003
September 9-12, 2003 - Portland, Oregon


LADY BE GOOD AFTERWORD

The saga of the WWII B-24 Lady Be Good that appears under our link Navcerebrations continues to receive interest from our readers. One
such reader’s letter is quoted: 

Your treatment of the April 1943 incident involving the loss of the B-24 Lady Be Good in the North African desert is to be complimented and has caused me to delve into my own archives to come up with the enclosure ( “Cracking the Mystery of the Sahara Ghost Plane” appearing in This Week Magazine / October 4, 1959 ). I send along a copy even though it may well have received your attention in the process of researching the happening.

During my own B-17 operational training at Ardmore, Oklahoma , in the summer of 1944 the Lady Be Good mission was simulated as a training exercise in the Celestial Navigation Trainer tower at Ardmore. It served to impress upon us the perils of taking a reciprocal heading, a lesson which cannot be repeated often enough to aspiring or practicing navigators.

Kind regards, Sincerely, 
Frank N. Aldrich 


MISSION INCREDIBLE

The US Navy submarine Ray under the command of W. T. Kinsela was ordered to take up temporary life-guard station duty south of Kyushu the southernmost island of the Japanese Islands while it was en-route from Guam to an assigned patrol area in the Yellow Sea in early May 1945. Soon Ray alerted to a B-29 in trouble in its area sighted and rescued its nine survivors by then in their yellow life raft. The co-pilot, separated from the crew, was also rescued while the pilot went down with the B-29. The ten survivors sustained injuries from the crash and shrapnel and were attended to by Ray’s pharmacists mates then transferred to another submarine en-route to a safe haven.

Ray was relieved from its lifeguard duty and resumed its patrol assignment. Capt. Kinsella anxious to patrol more fertile waters and now close by to Sasebo Bay and Nagasaki was diverted to a region called Goto Retto. In the meantime two PBM Martin Mariner bombers after sinking two
Japanese ships near Okinawa came under attack by Japanese fighter planes. One of the two PBM’s was destroyed and the other PBM survived the attack but was forced down into the sea. Ten of the thirteen crew members escaped into two life rafts before the PBM broke up.

Prior to being forced down, the PBM got a message out by radio to its base about its imminent danger. The base 500 miles away dispatched two PBMs to find and rescue the survivors. The survivors were in heavy seas and their rafts were continually tipping over with the toppled survivors struggling to regain their positions in the rafts. Ocean water was retrieved and poured into the rafts to achieve stability. Under heavy winds the rafts were perilously drifting toward the rocky shoals of Goto Retto. As the hours passed the situation seemed hopeless to the survivors .

Before sunset, one of the two PBMs spotted the rafts. Stan Kalamaris, the leader of the PBM group directed the other pilot, Bob Bailey, to look for friendly submarines in the area for assistance as Kalamaris maintained his contact with the two rafts. Meanwhile Ray surfaced and then dived as it received a radar contact but was able to identify by IFF that the radar contact was nearby and a friendly - the PBM seeking submarine assistance. Ray through radio follow-up with the PBM was told that there were downed airmen in the waters 25 miles away. Ray resurfaced and by VHF communication with the plane was told that the plane would stay in contact with them while the other plane would circle the raft and drop flares periodically over the area. Ray went ahead full speed in the heavy seas. The conning tower remained shut as solid water spilled over the boat. The raft ‘s location was reported by the circling PBM as 4,000 yards north of Shiro SE Light in Goto Retto.

Ray reduced its speed and held its course for another half-hour. LT Len Erb, the executive officer and navigator, advised the captain that their position was too far south; the two officers agreed to adopt a northwesterly course. A half-hour elapsed and the glow of a dim flare was seen by Ray on the starboard bow. The flare was later determined to be a parachute flare dropped by Kalamaris in the circling PBM. Ray altered course to home in on the dim flare in the darkened sky. The enemy coast lay dangerously close - 3 miles to the left. As midnight approached no signals were further seen by Ray except for the Shero SE light which served as a reference for Ray’s navigation. When the position of the rafts reported by the circling PBM was reached, LT. Len Erb asked the captain for instructions. The captain and LT. Erb then decided to haul out a heavy and cumbersome searchlight to illuminate the unseen life rafts. Quartermaster Robert Nagle moved the searchlight through the conning tower and mounted it on its bracket above the bridge. The searchlight was trained to the starboard side of the bearing circle to avoid the enemy coastline. As the searchlight began its first sweep from bow to stern, it at once illuminated the two rafts lashed together. Erb’s navigation was superb. Ray approached the rafts in the heavy seas and launched a recovery party to rescue the survivors using lines tossed to them. After 12
exhausting hours, the survivors were finally rescued. The Ray immediately departed from these dangerous waters. The survivors were later transferred to the Pompon headed for Guam.

Len Erb retired from the US Navy as a captain who was the skipper of one of the earliest operational nuclear submarines USS George Washington, SSB(N) 602 . He then joined Litton Industries and rose to be president of Litton’s Ingalls (now Northrop Grumman) Shipyards, Pascagoula. MS. For reference see http://www.msu.edu/~jocque/abehist2.html

Footnote:
This article is a summary of “Submarine Sagas” entitled Mission: Impossible Rescue by H.C. Moyer, LT USNR (Ret.) see Reference http://www.subvetpaul.com/SAGA_10_97.htm

NEW NASA-BUILT ATOMIC CLOCK DOES THE TIME WARP, AGAIN

We have come a long way from the Harrison chronometer which allowed longitude to be found at sea. Harrison would view today’s time keeping precision with awe.

Today’s atomic clocks with their ultra precision are still found wanting in their performance in certain special cases as ultra-precise standard-keepers to which other precision timekeeping devices rely upon. Their performance is degraded owing to the collision of their atoms with the glass vacuum chamber walls in which they are held; the walls are coated to minimize the likelihood that these collisions will alter the internal composition and resonant frequency of the atoms. A team of physicists and engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., has developed an atomic clock for the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, DC that utilizes a linear ion trap that effectively eliminates the
walls in the chamber to produce 20 times improved stability over other ion traps . The new clock has an effective stability equivalent to one minute in 10 billion years (approximate age of the universe) and will be used to support the U.S. Department of Defense timekeeping and needs of the Global Positioning System, or GPS. In this concept, the glass walls of the vacuum chamber are replaced by an applied electric force field creating a container known as an ion trap thus reducing the collision disturbances by 10,000 fold over the glass cell atomic clock.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov September 23, 2002 
http://www.howstuffworks.com/atomic-clock.htm

KALMAN FILTER ORBIT DETERMINATION OF THE GPS SATELLITE SYSTEM 

Bill Feess has made a life career out of working on the Kalman Filter Orbit determination of the GPS Satellite System which has continued into his post retirement from The Aerospace Corporation- a dedication rarely seen. 

A lot of people don't appreciate the difficulty of keeping the position estimation of GPS Satellites to an accuracy of less than a few feet at its ca. 12,000 mile orbital radius and ca. two miles per second velocity. One of the major challenges is the complexity of the solar sailing model that has to take into account the satellite's solar array aspect angle and satellite body solar aspect vector during the satellite seasons. Another is that whenever an orbit adjustment is made using the hydrazine thrusters, it takes literally many days to re-estimate the orbit using the ground-based GPS as a reference. 

This is the reason angular momentum dumping using the hydrazine jets is abhorrent. Dependence upon magnetic torquers interacting with the weak earth's magnetic field at the 12,000 mile orbital radius is used. Special magnetic sensors (made by Schoenstedt [black magic]) aboard the satellite determine the earth magnetic field at the satellite position in satellite body coordinates, and tell the three-axis torquer coils what current to use. 

A third challenge is the reliability of the satellite-borne atomic clocks, which are so accurate and stable that they can demonstrate the relativistic effect of GPS satellite motion. 

GPS users cannot begin to appreciate the cost, complexity, magnitude, and sophistication of the World-Wide ground support system that makes their navigation possible. 

Contributed by Frank Pelteson, retired Aerospace Corporation Project Engineer 


THINKING OUTSIDE THE CIRCLE

Circumference problem the long and short

In a recent Marilyn column in Parade Magazine, a problem submitted by a reader posed the question on the increase in time incurred of a vehicle traveling at 70 mph on a highway erected 15 feet above the circumference of the Earth over a path around its surface. The answer submitted laboriously calculated the difference of the outer circumference time en-route with the inner circumference time en-route. This old saw illustrates that increasing the Earth’s radius by tens of feet has a miniscule effect on its growth in circumference. The puzzle’s author and Marilyn overlooked the opportunity to present a deeper and important insight in its solution. Suppose that the circumference of the Earth was unknown; could one still solve the puzzle? As the ancient Eudoxus of Cnidus was confronted with problems with insufficient information, he found the method of exhaustion could be used to solve the problems. Erwin Brecher, puzzle maven, places these types of problems in the category of the zero option.
Assume that the radius of the Earth is zero, therefore its circumference is zero. Now we are left with the outercircle with a radius of 15 feet radius and a circumference of 30 pi. Thus the vehicle on the bridge will take (30ft) x (22/7) / 70mph = 0.92 sec. This answer will be found to be the constant difference in time duration of the two traveled paths regardless of the size of the inner circumference. The illusion of an outer circumference separated from the inner circumference by tens of feet being significantly larger than an inner circumference with a huge radius will be shattered. We can prove the validity of the simpler solution by simple math:

Subtract the circumference of the Earth from the circumference of the upper circle where “r “ is the radius of the Earth-
2(pi)(r + 15) - 2(pi)r = 2pi(r + 15 - r) = 30 pi. 

30(pi)ft/70mph = 94.25ft /102.67fps = 0.92 sec. Note that one does not need to know the radius of the Earth to use the simple solution. No matter what size the inner circumference is the outer circumference will increase over the inner circumference by a constant 2(pi)(separation distance). 

WE HAVE CAPTURE

Retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General Thomas P. Stafford’s life is chronicled in a new book We Have Capture: Tom Stafford and the Space race written by Tom Stafford and Michael Cassutt. The book was released in November 2002 and spans his spectacular career from his test pilot years, astronaut and rise to head of Air Force Research and Development directorate in the Pentagon. On one weekend while in a hotel, he wrote the draft specification for the design of the B-2 stealth bomber on hotel stationery. His birthplace Weatherford, OK honored him by naming Weatherford’s airport Tom Stafford International . The announcement last month of Stafford’s lecture "From Gemini to Apollo-Soyuz: The Race for Space" given at the National Air and Space Museum on the
eve of the release of the book appears as follows: 

Lt. Gen. Thomas P. Stafford–who flew aboard Gemini VI and commanded Gemini IX, Apollo 10 and the Apollo "half" of the Apollo- Soyuz Test Project– recalls a truly amazing career. Tom Stafford attained the highest speed ever reached by a test pilot (28,547 mph), led the team that designed the sequence of missions leading to the original lunar landing. His crowning achievement, however, was surely his role as America’s unofficial space ambassador to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. As President Nixon’s stand-in at the 1971 Soviet funeral for three cosmonauts, he opened the door to the possibility of cooperation in space between the Russians and Americans. In July 1975, his "handshake in space" with Soviet commander Alexei Leonov–who became a lifelong friend–proved the two countries could indeed work successfully together.