This full-color textbook will help students and professionals understand the space environment and its impacts on spacecraft design, engineering, and performance. While the primary emphasis of the book is the Earth's environment and its effects on spacecraft, it also addresses the extraterrestrial environment and the effects of radiation on humans in space. The book begins with an introduction to the history of spacecraft failures, risk management reliability and quality assurance techniques, and parts reliability. It goes on to provide an overview of the structure of the Sun: the structure, origin, and models of the geomagnetic field; gravitational field of the Earth; Earth's magnetosphere and radiation environment; neutral environment including fundamentals of the kinetic theory of gasses; variation of pressure with altitude and hypoxia of humans; electromagnetic propagation; the effect of atomic oxygen of materials; plasma surrounding the Earth; transport and effects of photon
The breakup of the Space Shuttle Columbia as it reentered Earth's atmosphere on February 1, 2003, reminded the public--and NASA--of the grave risks posed to spacecraft by everything from insulating foam to space debris. Here, Alan Tribble presents a singular, up-to-date account of a wide range of less conspicuous but no less consequential environmental effects that can damage or cause poor performance of orbiting spacecraft. Conveying a wealth of insight into the nature of the space environment and how spacecraft interact with it, he covers design modifications aimed at eliminating or reducing such environmental effects as solar absorptance increases caused by self-contamination, materials erosion by atomic oxygen, electrical discharges due to spacecraft charging, degradation of electrical circuits by radiation, and bombardment by micrometeorites. This book is unique in that it bridges the gap between studies of the space environment as performed by space physicists and spacecraft design engineering as practiced by aerospace engineers.
Since the beginning of space flight, the collision hazard in Earth orbit has increased as the number of artificial objects orbiting the Earth has grown. Spacecraft performing communications, navigation, scientific, and other missions now share Earth orbit with spent rocket bodies, nonfunctional spacecraft, fragments from spacecraft breakups, and other debris created as a byproduct of space operations. Orbital Debris examines the methods we can use to characterize orbital debris, estimates the magnitude of the debris population, and assesses the hazard that this population poses to spacecraft. Potential methods to protect spacecraft are explored. The report also takes a close look at the projected future growth in the debris population and evaluates approaches to reducing that growth. Orbital Debris offers clear recommendations for targeted research on the debris population, for methods to improve the protection of spacecraft, on methods to reduce the creation of debris in the future, and much more.
This volume, The Sun to the Earth-and Beyond: Panel Reports, is a compilation of the reports from five National Research Council (NRC) panels convened as part of a survey in solar and space physics for the period 2003-2013. The NRC's Space Studies Board and its Committee on Solar and Space Physics organized the study. Overall direction for the survey was provided by the Solar and Space Physics Survey Committee, whose report, The Sun to the Earth-and Beyond: A Decadal Research Strategy in Solar and Space Physics, was delivered to the study sponsors in prepublication format in August 2002. The final version of that report was published in June 2003. The panel reports provide both a detailed rationale for the survey committee's recommendations and an expansive view of the numerous opportunities that exist for a robust program of exploration in solar and space physics.
More than four decades have passed since a human first set foot on the Moon. Great strides have been made in our understanding of what is required to support an enduring human presence in space, as evidenced by progressively more advanced orbiting human outposts, culminating in the current International Space Station (ISS). However, of the more than 500 humans who have so far ventured into space, most have gone only as far as near-Earth orbit, and none have traveled beyond the orbit of the Moon. Achieving humans' further progress into the solar system had proved far more difficult than imagined in the heady days of the Apollo missions, but the potential rewards remain substantial. During its more than 50-year history, NASA's success in human space exploration has depended on the agency's ability to effectively address a wide range of biomedical, engineering, physical science, and related obstacles-an achievement made possible by NASA's strong and productive commitments to life and physical sciences research for human space exploration, and by its use of human space exploration infrastructures for scientific discovery. The Committee for the Decadal Survey of Biological and Physical Sciences acknowledges the many achievements of NASA, which are all the more remarkable given budgetary challenges and changing directions within the agency. In the past decade, however, a consequence of those challenges has been a life and physical sciences research program that was dramatically reduced in both scale and scope, with the result that the agency is poorly positioned to take full advantage of the scientific opportunities offered by the now fully equipped and staffed ISS laboratory, or to effectively pursue the scientific research needed to support the development of advanced human exploration capabilities. Although its review has left it deeply concerned about the current state of NASA's life and physical sciences research, the Committee for the Decadal Survey on Biological and Physical Sciences in Space is nevertheless convinced that a focused science and engineering program can achieve successes that will bring the space community, the U.S. public, and policymakers to an understanding that we are ready for the next significant phase of human space exploration. The goal of this report is to lay out steps and develop a forward-looking portfolio of research that will provide the basis for recapturing the excitement and value of human spaceflight-thereby enabling the U.S. space program to deliver on new exploration initiatives that serve the nation, excite the public, and place the United States again at the forefront of space exploration for the global good.
In 1958, mankind's centuries-long flirtation with space flight became a torrid love affair. For a decade, tens of millions of people were enraptured -- first, by the U.S.-Soviet race to the moon, and finally, as America outstripped its rival, by Project Apollo alone. It is now more than three decades since the last man walked on the moon...more time than between the first moonwalk and the beginning of World War II. Apollo did not, as had been promised by a generation of visionaries, herald the beginning of the Space Age, but its end. Or did it? Project Apollo, like a cannonball, reached its apogee and returned to earth, but the trajectory of that return was complex. America's atmosphere -- its economic, scientific, and cultural atmosphere -- made for a very complicated reentry that produced many solutions to the trajectory problem. Rocket Dreams is about those solutions...about the places where the space program landed. In Rocket Dreams, an extraordinarily talented young writer named Marina Benjamin will take you on a journey to those landing sites. A visit with retired astronauts at a celebrity autograph show is a starting point down the divergent paths taken by the pioneers, including Edgar Mitchell, founder of the "church" of Noëtic Sciences. Roswell, New Mexico is a landing site of a different order, the "magnetic north" of UFO belief in the United States -- a belief that began its most dramatic growth precisely at the time that the path of the space program began its descent. In the vernacular, the third law of motion states that what goes up, must come down. Thus the tremendous motive force that energized the space program didn't just vanish; it was conserved and transformed, making bestsellers out of fantasy literature, spawning Gaia, and giving symbolism to the environmental movement. Everything from the pop cultural boom in ufology to the worldwide Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) feeds on the energy given off by America's leap toward space. Rocket Dreams is an eloquent tour of this Apollo-scarred landscape. It is also an introduction to some of the most fascinating characters imaginable: Some long dead, like the crackpot visionary Alfred Lawson, who saw in space flight a new stage of human evolution ("Alti-Man"), or Robert Goddard, the father of rocketry, whose workshop in Roswell stands only half a mile from shops selling posters of alien visitors. Others are very much alive -- like Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and partner with Gerard O'Neill in the drive to build free-floating space colonies, and SETI astronomer Seth Shostak, who has spent decades listening to the skies, hoping for the first contact with another intelligent species. Perceptive, original, and wonderfully written, informed by history, science, and an acute knowledge of popular culture, Rocket Dreams is a brilliant book by a remarkable talent.
The goals of the 10th International Space Conference on “Protection of Materials and Structures from Space Environment” ICPMSE-10J, since its inception in 1992, have been to facilitate exchanges between members of the various engineering and science disciplines involved in the development of space materials, including aspects of LEO, GEO and Deep Space environments, ground-based qualification, and in-flight experiments and lessons learned from operational vehicles that are closely interrelated to disciplines of the atmospheric sciences, solar-terrestrial interactions and space life sciences. The knowledge of environmental conditions on and around the Moon, Mars, Venus and the low Earth orbit as well as other possible candidates for landing such as asteroids have become an important issue, and protecting both hardware and human life from the effects of space environments has taken on a new meaning in light of the increased interest in space travel and colonization of other planets. And while many material experiments have been carried out on the ground and in open space in the last 50 years (LDEF, MEEP, SARE, MISSE, AOP, DSPSE, ESEM, EURECA, HST, MDIM, MIS, MPID, MPAC and SEED), many questions regarding the environmental impact of space on materials remain either poorly understood or unanswered. The coming generations of scientists will have to continue this work and tackle new challenges, continuing to build the level of confidence humans will need to continue the colonization of space. It is hoped that the proceedings of the ICPMSE-10J presented in this book will constitute a small contribution to doing so.
