Observing Narrative on the Reentry of the Stardust capsule [Very Long]

Observing point: Along Nevada state highway 93, approximately 30 miles
south of Wendover, Nevada, about 300 yards south of the entrance to the
Goshute Mountain Raptor Migratory Watch road and the Nevada Dept. of
Transportation Ferguson Springs sand/salt cache at the Highway 93
mountain pass (40N 25' 38.37" 114W 10' 48.70", Elev. 5913ft). From
this foothill position below Goshute Mountain but a 600 feet above the
valley floor, with 8x35 binoculars, I can see the lights of the Utah
Test and Training Range ("UTTR") main facility through low-lying haze
on the basin and range salt flat below. On the far eastern horizon, at
about 8 degrees altitude and 110 azimuth and just above the far eastern
mountain range, the bright - magnitude 2.0 orb of Jupiter is visible,
as are, through the binos, two of Jupiter's Moons sitting a line. I
take a moving green flashing light to the south of the UTTR main
facility on the valley floor to be a recovery helicopter waiting for
the Stardust return capsule's plunge into the sub-freezing Nevada
winter temperatures.

From my O.P., the Stardust reentry came over the horizon at magnitude
-0.8 emitting a bright yellow light, traveling along a great circle
about 2-5 degrees north of an east-west azimuth line, and was between
10-20 arc minutes in diameter. It was accelerating towards the zenith.
The entire sequence of events took maybe 30-40 seconds. From my O.P.
the view of the satellite was end-on and not to the side. I had the
distinct impression I was looking at what a candle flame looks like, if
you could look at a candle flame from underneath. Side-flames could be
from the central glow. From this O.P., there was no opportunity to see
the reentry tail streaming behind the Stardust capsule. After about
10-15 seconds, the satellite rose to about 35 degrees altitude and
quickly dimmed to ruddy-orange glow as it moved from 35-60 degrees
altitude. There was an apparent deceleration of the satellite's
motion. Between 60 degrees and the zenith, the satellite body became
invisible, but two wakes on either side of an empty track - that glowed
orange-red - could be seen. I took this to be the wake, with the
satellite in the middle and two contrails of shield debris on either
side. About 10 degrees past the zenith, both the satellite and the
contrails abruptly disappeared. I took this to be initial chute
deployment. I had hoped to see, using tripod mounted 20x70 binoculars,
the recovery helicopter and perhaps the Stardust capsule's chute over
the UTTR valley basin. Heavy extinction in the atmosphere in the basin
floor quickly dispelled any notion of seeing those events. I assumed
the reentry was over and started scanning the UTTR valley for activity
with binoculars. But it was 3:00am (Mountain Time), I was sleep
deprived, and forgot about the sonic boom. About 45 seconds after the
capsule passed my zenith, I heard an odd combination of a two second
rumble and whoosh sound followed by a 30-40 decibel "crack" - like
someone had hit a rubber mallet on a wooden table. The sonic boom had
passed. I watched for another twenty-minutes. Through the valley haze
I could see a moving flashing green light that stopped after 10-15
minutes. I took this to be the recovery team helicopter landing near
the touch-down point. I have no photographs of the reentry.

The remainder of this note is in the style of a first-person narrative
of my experiences leading up to the satellite reentry and aftermath.


This region is Basin and Range province. Crystal spreading creates
north-south trending mountain ranges spread about 10-20 miles apart,
with graben-filled basins between that have filled to a depth of 10,000
feet with sediments topped with alkaline salt flats. Being alkaline,
the soils support a few predominate plants - sagebrush, saltbush and
small 6'-8' juniper trees. The Basin and Range province runs in an
endless repetition of this landform and fauna from Salt Lake City in
Utah, through Nevada to Reno. This vantage point is typical of Basin
and Range highways. Highways run along the basin floors and, where a
low-pass presents the opportunity, the highway engineers run the
highway at an angle up the foothills of one range, across the low-lying
pass, and down into the basin of the next valley. Highway 93 is
typical of such western Basin and Range highways.

It is cold; very cold. I forgot to bring a thermometer, but the
instant, ice freezing of my breath tells of temperatures around 25
degrees. The wind is blowing at 10-25 miles per hour from the west
across a landscape covered with a few inches of snow. Although
possessing a desolate, fierce beauty that my Eastern friends and
relatives do not understand, the Basin and Range supports significant
and ample wildlife. Even if winter, it is possible to see an owl
streaking overhead at night or a small white-tit sitting on a tree
branch - its feathers fluffed and its mind gone into the coma-induced
tupor that these small birds use to survive the winter night. Tonight
there is no hint of wildlife. This is what happens when it gets really
cold in the West. There is only the sound of cold silence. Yes, in
the cold western night with no other living person of 10 or 20 miles,
and full Moon overhead with Saturn in conjunction, silence is noisy.

My base is in Salt Lake City, Utah. Throughout the Saturday afternoon
before this cold rendezvous with a satellite, I monitor NOAA CONUS
("continental United States") satellite pictures
http://www.weather.gov/sat_tab.php and the Nevada NOAA station
detail satellite images http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/lkn/ - trying to
decide if the three-hour drive to Wendover or the five-hour drive to
Elko, Nevada, would be worth it. The official weather forecast reads:


"Saturday night: A chance of rain in the evening...then rain and snow
likely after midnight. Cloudy. Accumulations possible. Lows around 30.
Northwest winds 10-20 mph. Chance of precipitation 60 percent. Sunday:
Breezy. Mostly cloudy with a 50 percent chance of snow. Highs in the
upper 30s. Northwest winds 15-25 mph."
Although it is bright, sunny and warm day in Salt Lake City, the NOAA
CONUS image at local morning shows two large bands of storm clouds -
one in the Pacific and the other straddling the California coast. For
3:00am on Saturday-night Sunday-morning, the NOAA sky cover simulator
shows for 3:00am a solid band of clouds from California through
Colorado. Not too encouraging. I forget about traveling to see the
return of the Stardust capsule - a once in a lifetime event - and
readjust my mindset for an ordinary relaxed weekend. At 4:00pm the
leading edge of the first storm band can be seen far on the western
horizon, perhaps 60-80 miles away.

With the 4:00pm NOAA CONUS and Nevada detail satellite images, the
situation has changed. The two large storm bands - that stretch from
Washington State to central California - are fast-movers. These winter
storms sweep down out of the Bearing Straight, taking a great circle
course across the Pacific, Washington, California, Utah, Colorado and
then onto the Great Plains. The first storm band has moved hundreds of
miles in the last seven hours and now is in Nevada. A large gap
between the first and second storm bands is evident between in the NOAA
CONUS infrared picture. 6:00pm and 8:00pm images show the same trend.
I print these images off and crudely measure their rate of travel
across the western United States. The inch marks on my ruler tell me
that at 3:00 am in the morning, the backside of the second band will
reach Elko and perhaps Wendover, Nevada. On the CONUS infrared image,
little puffy white clouds - indicators of partly cloudy skies behind
the second front, are visible.

I have previously checked out some maps and decided on a spot thirty
miles south of Wendover on Nevada Highway 93. As those of us who live
in the west know, the mountains of the Basin and Range make the weather
very variable. It can be overcast and snowing in one hour; sunny and
warm the next. Potential and opportunity exist. It looks like it may
be worth the trip, but success is not guaranteed.

A few hours of scrambling follow. Service and gas the Vanagon. Load
the van with overnight survival camping gear should it break down in
winter on a rural Nevada road. Put the few pieces of astronomical gear
that I decide to use into the back of the van: a film camera, a VCR,
20x70 binoculars, and 8x35 binoculars. It is just past full Moon. The
satellite will reenter at too fast a speed to track for narrow field
telescopes. There is no need for a telescope tonight. I make calls
for last minute invites to a couple of friends. It is now overcast and
raining outside. I patiently explain the risks and potential rewards.
"Your nuts," come their replies, stinging through the phone receiver.
I have been doing this amateur astronomy thing for a number of years.
My hide is thicker to the rebukes of the uninitiated and uninformed.
They really don't know what they are missing. But then again, I am not
too sure myself at the wisdom going to Wendover in the middle of a
winter storm advisory against traveling on highways - to view the
reentry of a satellite that needs a clear sky to be seen.

My doubt grows over the next two and a half hours as the Vanagon plows
westward along I-15 through a 20-30 mile an hour headwind beneath a
dark 500ft cloud base - at times through rain and sleet angled at 30
degrees to my windshield. The scene is eerily light with the light of
a magnitude -12.5 full Moon, hidden above the thick clouds, but still
bright enough to give them and the surrounding landscape a night glow.
Through the weather mess I scan the horizon looking for the promised
backside of the storm front. All I see is gray at the horizon.

Twice I am forced to power the Vanagon back to 45 mph because of the
heavy rain and sleet on the road. The first time occurs at the
turn-off to the Dugway Proving Ground; the second time occurs outside
the industrial turn-off at Aragonite, Utah. Crossing the thirty miles
of the Great Salt Flats, the rain has stopped and the cloud base has
risen to 1500 ft; the wind has died down. It is as if the two-miles of
graben-filling salt beneath the roadbed has sucked the water out of the
air and the energy out of the storm.

This time of year "salt-flat" is a misnomer. Precipitation and winter
snow settles on the salt - and not unlike your salted driveway - melts.
Miles can be driven with the interstate highway being the only object
cutting a glass-like surface of 6 inches to a foot of water covering
the flats. In spring, I have walked across this surface, before the
summer sun has baked it into the solid that the international
jet-powered world-speed challengers favor. Most of the year, Salt
Flats are more precisely described as a brine crust. In spring, you
can walk over it for a few feet, before breaking through into the toxic
salt brine below.

Tonight, the combination of the glass-like water surface, the full Moon
light and the mountains to the north in the distance combined to create
a new visual effect I have not previously seen on the drive to
Wendover. The mountains to the north have a prefect moonlight
reflection on the water flooding the salt basin. The cloud-filtered
moonlight gives everything a blue-steel but black and white tint. I
feel like I am driving through an underexposed Ansel Adams photograph.
I take a driving rest-break at the "Utah Tree," a 100-foot tall
concrete sculpture in the middle of this wasteland - and contemplate
the "big open."

Another 20 minutes and I am in the middle of the casino unreality of
"downtown" Wendover. When I first came to Utah a few decades ago,
Wendover was kind of a dump. Now there are few modern 500 room casinos
decorated with in the style of Nevada gambling glitz.

It is overcast as far as the eye can see. It is 1:00 am. There is not
enough time to drive on to Elko, nor does it look like any hope of
clear skies if I do drive further west. I am dejected. There is no
point in going down to the Wendover Airport and joining a group of
fellow amateur astronomers from local Utah astronomy clubs. I decide
to go into a local trucker stop - "The Pilot"- for a cup of coffee and
to buy a candy bar. I need some sugar for the three-hour return drive
to Salt Lake. The headline of the local paper - The Wendover Times -
reads "Spacecraft Will Cross Nevada While Bringing Back Comet Samples
to Earth." Yeah, right.

Ten minutes later, I emerge from "The Pilot" and it is as if Moses has
been in the neighborhood. Looking south down in the direction of
Nevada state highway 93, I see a vertical half-mile wall of clouds
moving away from the east side of the highway traveling east. On the
west of Highway 93 are clear-dark skies containing the Moon, Saturn and
the bright stars of Canis Major (Sirius) and of Orion (Orion's Belt and
Betelgeuse) constellations. A few high cirrus clouds are on the far
southwestern horizon. The backside of the storm bands has arrived!

Another forty-five minutes of driving south on state 93 brings me to
the Goshute Mountain Raptor Migratory viewpoint road-head at about 2:00
am (Mountain Time) and a draw cutting the foothills that gives me a
view of the UTTR facility on the valley floor below. I have another
hour before the Stardust capsule returns to Earth - bringing samples of
materials unchanged over the last 4 and one-half billion years. I
spend the time scouting locations - south of the Goshute Mountain
Raptor Migratory viewpoint road, up the frozen dirt Raptor road. By
2:45 am (9:45 UTC), I have selected the draw overlooking UTTR as the
best site.

I had previously chosen this area because it is on a line between the
landing zone and Elko, Nevada, which the NASA Ames Hypervelocity
Research Center has previously stated will be directly underneath
Stardust's reentry track. I figure from here I can the see reentry
and the recovery, although driving two more hours to Elko would yield
more brilliant colors from the satellite's heat shield.

Now, one would think that at 2:30 am on a rural Nevada highway with
subfreezing temperatures there would be no traffic. Outside of a
nearby branch of the Goshute Indian Nation, you can count the number of
human habitations along highway 93 between Wendover and Ely on one
hand. But it is not so. Cars, an NDOT highway road-salt truck,
long-distance truckers, oil tankers, even a stretch limo, go by every
three or four minutes. It's casino traffic between Wendover and Ely.
I recognize a white Izuzu "Tracker" as a couple of fellow amateur
astronomers - two guys I saw pouring over maps back at "The Pilot"
truck spot in Wendover.
It is 2:45am (9:45 UTC). I have less than 10 minutes to set up. I
turn my portable short-wave radio to the United States Naval
Observatory (UNSO) time broadcast. The "tick-tick" followed by the
words "at the tone the time will be . . ." are the only company many
late-night early-morning amateur astronomers have. Now, I make my one
serious judgment error of the evening. I decide to set up only the VCR
camera, but not my film camera for a long-term exposure. The VCR
focuses and resolves the Moon and nearby Saturn, so I figure the VCR
will resolve an -8.0 magnitude satellite reentry.

In the intervening 45 minutes, high cirrus clouds have moved into the
west and southwest sky, partially obscuring Taurus, Orion and Canis
Major. But the bright stars of each constellation are still visible
through the cirrus cloud streaks.

The appointed time for reentry (9:56:45 UTC) is seconds away. I have
checked my reference tables and charts and know the azimuth and
altitude the reentry trail will follow. I have memorized how the
reentry trail will progress through the constellation Taurus, just to
the south of Auriga, below the Moon and Saturn, through my zenith and
then on through the constellation Leo. I have practiced swinging and
tracking the VCR on its tripod from the west horizon through the
zenith. The VCR is humming from DC-to-AC converted electricity flowing
out of my car's battery. My watch is synchronized to the sound of the
UNSO time broadcast in the background.

My UTC-synchronized watch says 9:56:46. There is nothing on the
western horizon. This is serious. In the world of Newtonian dynamics
- the trains tend to always run on time. Has something gone wrong with
the capsule? Then I remember that Goshute Peak and Ferguson Mountain
cut off part of my horizon to the west. As the computerized UNSO
announcer begins "at the tone, the time will be 09:57 Universal
Coordinated Time," the brilliant flaming yellow disk of the Stardust
capsule unmistakably comes racing low over the western horizon.

When an orbiting satellite passes overhead, like the International
Space Station (ISS), they are "fast-movers," but it is still a lazy,
beer-drinking kind-of-an-affair. It takes about four minutes for the
ISS to cross from the northwest to the southeast horizon.

This was a whole new order of satellite motion; something that I had
never experienced before. The whole would be over in 30-40 seconds.
It felt more like I was playing outfield during a baseball game. In
baseball, a quirk of physics is that when a high and long ball is hit
to the outfield, you determine where the ball is going to land by
running as fast as you can until the apparent acceleration of the ball
of stops. If you keep your running speed so the ball is neither
accelerating nor decelerating, the ball is coming right to your mitt.


From its motion, the Stardust capsule is clearly coming in my direction
- but not for an overpass. In the back of my mind, I take some comfort
in the fact that the Stardust capsule is rapidly accelerating toward my
zenith and does not, like the baseball moving into an outfield, is
neither accelerating nor decelerating.

As to the Stardust capsule's apparent brightness, color and movement,
reread the description at the beginning of this note.

A few things happen in quick succession. Although my VCR camera will
focus on the Moon and Saturn, it quickly becomes obvious that something
in its fuzzy-logic chip prevents it from focusing or imaging the
Stardust reentry track. I abandon it and just enjoy the reentry show.
Two kids in a supped-up Toyota screech to a halt on the highway about
100 ft away; they are startled by the brilliance of the Stardust
reentry. Car headlights appear behind them. They hop back into their
car and burn rubber off into the night. The sonic boom comes and goes.
Rural back-of-the-beyond Nevada at 3:00am; go-figure.

I scan the UTTR with binoculars for another twenty-minutes, hoping to
see some activity of the recovery, without success. I pack up and
drive back to Wendover and "The Pilot."

My astronomy "high" is too strong and the concentration of caffeine in
my bloodstream is too high to consider catching some sleep in the
consumerist unreality of a Wendover casino. I walk into "The Pilot" to
buy a second candy bar for the trip back to Salt Lake. I mention to
the clerk, "I just saw that satellite reentry. The minimum wage clerk
replies, "Oh, did they make it work this time. All that money and the
last time it didn't work." I wonder if the clerk knows that "[a]ll
that money" means one-fifth of a billion dollars.
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/...g?sc=1999-003A
"Yes, it looked liked it worked," I reply.

Driving back to Salt Lake, gives me time to think about the meaning of
the night's great enterprise, it's social and economic cost, and my own
insignificant connection to it - more as a taxpayer than as a guy
standing out on a rural highway at three in the morning. I believe it
was Pericles, the greatest mayor of ancient Athens, who said that the
one reason people build cities is so that they can build upon the
sacrifices of their predecessors by coming together to do great things
that they otherwise could not do alone. Let's face it; modern U.S.
post-industrial cities can be pretty monotonous, dreary and ugly. One
of things that make cities worthwhile is this potential to come
together to do "great things." Doing "great things" is one mark of a
healthy civilization; its absence a mark of decline. Not to be
mistaken, the first measures of a good civilization is in its ability
to provide for the sick, the infirm, and the less fortunate, to educate
the young, to free the unjustly imprisoned and to rehabilitate the
justly imprisoned. The cost of the Stardust mission could build 8
badly needed new Utah high schools or 25 new elementary schools. The
money could have funded better health care or drug treatment programs
for the victims of Utah's methamphetamine and prescription drug abuse
epidemics. But the ability to do great things - things that our
predecessors sacrificed toward but only dreamed of in passing, but that
are beyond the core business of caring for the sick, providing for the
poor or educating the young - also is an indispensable marker of a
healthy civilization.

The Stardust mission - which diverts about 0.0016% of our national 12.5
trillion GDP from the such core activities of society - qualifies as
coming together to do great things - unimagined by our ancestors. We
fly to the outer solar system using our robotic agents, capture
microscopic particles unchanged for billions of years, and then have
our robotic agents return those particles to Earth in order to
investigate the initial conditions our own origins. In the
post-Internet era, one way to celebrate those great works is watching
NASA TV and seeing JPL scientists cheer and jump, up and down during
reentry. Another form of celebration involves standing out on a quiet
rural Nevada road, on a freezing wind-swept night, watching part of our
future understanding of ourselves unfold.

One more decision to make for the night. What music to pop into the CD
player to keep me out of the drowsy driving zone while going back to
Salt Lake through the early morning hours. It's bad form to have a
good astronomy night and then crack your car by falling asleep during
the drive home. The Emerson Quartet playing Beethoven chamber music;
Phillip Glass's "Einstein on the Beach"; McCoy Tyner's "Revelations";
Tina Turner; the Beatles? Tina, I think, turned up to an ear splitting
volume assured to kill off a few of those inner ear cilia that I'll
wish I still had when I'm in a nursing home in 25 years. I pop in Tina
as I a streak down the moonlight interstate with the immensity of the
Salt Flats on either side. I hit a random track on the CD player.
Tina starts in with a duet:

Everything gonna be alright tonight.
No one's moving
No one's talking
No one's walking
But everything's gonna be alright tonight
... . . .
I'll meet you high in the sky tonight
Everything's gonna be alright tonight

Yep, just another good night of amateur astronomy in the Basin and
Range.

1/16/2006 Canopus56

P.S. - Did I mention that winter weather in the Basin and Range changes
a lot? The drive back to Salt Lake was uneventful - no rain and the
energy of the storm bands had dissipated into picturesque cumulus and
high cirrus clouds. The Moon shines through the ice crystals creating
a iridescent halo. Back in Salt Lake, I crash for 7 hours and wake up
in the afternoon to overcast skies and two inches of snow to shovel out
of the driveway!

YOu NUT! This isn't 60 minutes or Anderson 360 !! GAWD MAN! But just
the same , the basins and range are probably some 40 million
years old





The remainder of this note is in the style of a first-person narrative
of my experiences leading up to the satellite reentry and aftermath.


This region is Basin and Range province. Crystal spreading creates
north-south trending mountain ranges spread about 10-20 miles apart,
with graben-filled basins between that have filled to a depth of 10,000
feet with sediments topped with alkaline salt flats. Being alkaline,
the soils support a few predominate plants - sagebrush, saltbush and
small 6'-8' juniper trees. The Basin and Range province runs in an
endless repetition of this landform and fauna from Salt Lake City in
Utah, through Nevada to Reno. This vantage point is typical of Basin
and Range highways. Highways run along the basin floors and, where a
low-pass presents the opportunity, the highway engineers run the
highway at an angle up the foothills of one range, across the low-lying
pass, and down into the basin of the next valley. Highway 93 is
typical of such western Basin and Range highways.

It is cold; very cold. I forgot to bring a thermometer, but the
instant, ice freezing of my breath tells of temperatures around 25
degrees. The wind is blowing at 10-25 miles per hour from the west
across a landscape covered with a few inches of snow. Although
possessing a desolate, fierce beauty that my Eastern friends and
relatives do not understand, the Basin and Range supports significant
and ample wildlife. Even if winter, it is possible to see an owl
streaking overhead at night or a small white-tit sitting on a tree
branch - its feathers fluffed and its mind gone into the coma-induced
tupor that these small birds use to survive the winter night. Tonight
there is no hint of wildlife. This is what happens when it gets really
cold in the West. There is only the sound of cold silence. Yes, in
the cold western night with no other living person of 10 or 20 miles,
and full Moon overhead with Saturn in conjunction, silence is noisy.

My base is in Salt Lake City, Utah. Throughout the Saturday afternoon
before this cold rendezvous with a satellite, I monitor NOAA CONUS
("continental United States") satellite pictures
http://www.weather.gov/sat_tab.php and the Nevada NOAA station
detail satellite images http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/lkn/ - trying to
decide if the three-hour drive to Wendover or the five-hour drive to
Elko, Nevada, would be worth it. The official weather forecast reads:


"Saturday night: A chance of rain in the evening...then rain and snow
likely after midnight. Cloudy. Accumulations possible. Lows around 30.
Northwest winds 10-20 mph. Chance of precipitation 60 percent. Sunday:
Breezy. Mostly cloudy with a 50 percent chance of snow. Highs in the
upper 30s. Northwest winds 15-25 mph."
Although it is bright, sunny and warm day in Salt Lake City, the NOAA
CONUS image at local morning shows two large bands of storm clouds -
one in the Pacific and the other straddling the California coast. For
3:00am on Saturday-night Sunday-morning, the NOAA sky cover simulator
shows for 3:00am a solid band of clouds from California through
Colorado. Not too encouraging. I forget about traveling to see the
return of the Stardust capsule - a once in a lifetime event - and
readjust my mindset for an ordinary relaxed weekend. At 4:00pm the
leading edge of the first storm band can be seen far on the western
horizon, perhaps 60-80 miles away.

With the 4:00pm NOAA CONUS and Nevada detail satellite images, the
situation has changed. The two large storm bands - that stretch from
Washington State to central California - are fast-movers. These winter
storms sweep down out of the Bearing Straight, taking a great circle
course across the Pacific, Washington, California, Utah, Colorado and
then onto the Great Plains. The first storm band has moved hundreds of
miles in the last seven hours and now is in Nevada. A large gap
between the first and second storm bands is evident between in the NOAA
CONUS infrared picture. 6:00pm and 8:00pm images show the same trend.
I print these images off and crudely measure their rate of travel
across the western United States. The inch marks on my ruler tell me
that at 3:00 am in the morning, the backside of the second band will
reach Elko and perhaps Wendover, Nevada. On the CONUS infrared image,
little puffy white clouds - indicators of partly cloudy skies behind
the second front, are visible.

I have previously checked out some maps and decided on a spot thirty
miles south of Wendover on Nevada Highway 93. As those of us who live
in the west know, the mountains of the Basin and Range make the weather
very variable. It can be overcast and snowing in one hour; sunny and
warm the next. Potential and opportunity exist. It looks like it may
be worth the trip, but success is not guaranteed.

A few hours of scrambling follow. Service and gas the Vanagon. Load
the van with overnight survival camping gear should it break down in
winter on a rural Nevada road. Put the few pieces of astronomical gear
that I decide to use into the back of the van: a film camera, a VCR,
20x70 binoculars, and 8x35 binoculars. It is just past full Moon. The
satellite will reenter at too fast a speed to track for narrow field
telescopes. There is no need for a telescope tonight. I make calls
for last minute invites to a couple of friends. It is now overcast and
raining outside. I patiently explain the risks and potential rewards.
"Your nuts," come their replies, stinging through the phone receiver.
I have been doing this amateur astronomy thing for a number of years.
My hide is thicker to the rebukes of the uninitiated and uninformed.
They really don't know what they are missing. But then again, I am not
too sure myself at the wisdom going to Wendover in the middle of a
winter storm advisory against traveling on highways - to view the
reentry of a satellite that needs a clear sky to be seen.

My doubt grows over the next two and a half hours as the Vanagon plows
westward along I-15 through a 20-30 mile an hour headwind beneath a
dark 500ft cloud base - at times through rain and sleet angled at 30
degrees to my windshield. The scene is eerily light with the light of
a magnitude -12.5 full Moon, hidden above the thick clouds, but still
bright enough to give them and the surrounding landscape a night glow.
Through the weather mess I scan the horizon looking for the promised
backside of the storm front. All I see is gray at the horizon.

Twice I am forced to power the Vanagon back to 45 mph because of the
heavy rain and sleet on the road. The first time occurs at the
turn-off to the Dugway Proving Ground; the second time occurs outside
the industrial turn-off at Aragonite, Utah. Crossing the thirty miles
of the Great Salt Flats, the rain has stopped and the cloud base has
risen to 1500 ft; the wind has died down. It is as if the two-miles of
graben-filling salt beneath the roadbed has sucked the water out of the
air and the energy out of the storm.

This time of year "salt-flat" is a misnomer. Precipitation and winter
snow settles on the salt - and not unlike your salted driveway - melts.
Miles can be driven with the interstate highway being the only object
cutting a glass-like surface of 6 inches to a foot of water covering
the flats. In spring, I have walked across this surface, before the
summer sun has baked it into the solid that the international
jet-powered world-speed challengers favor. Most of the year, Salt
Flats are more precisely described as a brine crust. In spring, you
can walk over it for a few feet, before breaking through into the toxic
salt brine below.

Tonight, the combination of the glass-like water surface, the full Moon
light and the mountains to the north in the distance combined to create
a new visual effect I have not previously seen on the drive to
Wendover. The mountains to the north have a prefect moonlight
reflection on the water flooding the salt basin. The cloud-filtered
moonlight gives everything a blue-steel but black and white tint. I
feel like I am driving through an underexposed Ansel Adams photograph.
I take a driving rest-break at the "Utah Tree," a 100-foot tall
concrete sculpture in the middle of this wasteland - and contemplate
the "big open."

Another 20 minutes and I am in the middle of the casino unreality of
"downtown" Wendover. When I first came to Utah a few decades ago,
Wendover was kind of a dump. Now there are few modern 500 room casinos
decorated with in the style of Nevada gambling glitz.

It is overcast as far as the eye can see. It is 1:00 am. There is not
enough time to drive on to Elko, nor does it look like any hope of
clear skies if I do drive further west. I am dejected. There is no
point in going down to the Wendover Airport and joining a group of
fellow amateur astronomers from local Utah astronomy clubs. I decide
to go into a local trucker stop - "The Pilot"- for a cup of coffee and
to buy a candy bar. I need some sugar for the three-hour return drive
to Salt Lake. The headline of the local paper - The Wendover Times -
reads "Spacecraft Will Cross Nevada While Bringing Back Comet Samples
to Earth." Yeah, right.

Ten minutes later, I emerge from "The Pilot" and it is as if Moses has
been in the neighborhood. Looking south down in the direction of
Nevada state highway 93, I see a vertical half-mile wall of clouds
moving away from the east side of the highway traveling east. On the
west of Highway 93 are clear-dark skies containing the Moon, Saturn and
the bright stars of Canis Major (Sirius) and of Orion (Orion's Belt and
Betelgeuse) constellations. A few high cirrus clouds are on the far
southwestern horizon. The backside of the storm bands has arrived!

Another forty-five minutes of driving south on state 93 brings me to
the Goshute Mountain Raptor Migratory viewpoint road-head at about 2:00
am (Mountain Time) and a draw cutting the foothills that gives me a
view of the UTTR facility on the valley floor below. I have another
hour before the Stardust capsule returns to Earth - bringing samples of
materials unchanged over the last 4 and one-half billion years. I
spend the time scouting locations - south of the Goshute Mountain
Raptor Migratory viewpoint road, up the frozen dirt Raptor road. By
2:45 am (9:45 UTC), I have selected the draw overlooking UTTR as the
best site.

I had previously chosen this area because it is on a line between the
landing zone and Elko, Nevada, which the NASA Ames Hypervelocity
Research Center has previously stated will be directly underneath
Stardust's reentry track. I figure from here I can the see reentry
and the recovery, although driving two more hours to Elko would yield
more brilliant colors from the satellite's heat shield.

Now, one would think that at 2:30 am on a rural Nevada highway with
subfreezing temperatures there would be no traffic. Outside of a
nearby branch of the Goshute Indian Nation, you can count the number of
human habitations along highway 93 between Wendover and Ely on one
hand. But it is not so. Cars, an NDOT highway road-salt truck,
long-distance truckers, oil tankers, even a stretch limo, go by every
three or four minutes. It's casino traffic between Wendover and Ely.
I recognize a white Izuzu "Tracker" as a couple of fellow amateur
astronomers - two guys I saw pouring over maps back at "The Pilot"
truck spot in Wendover.
It is 2:45am (9:45 UTC). I have less than 10 minutes to set up. I
turn my portable short-wave radio to the United States Naval
Observatory (UNSO) time broadcast. The "tick-tick" followed by the
words "at the tone the time will be . . ." are the only company many
late-night early-morning amateur astronomers have. Now, I make my one
serious judgment error of the evening. I decide to set up only the VCR
camera, but not my film camera for a long-term exposure. The VCR
focuses and resolves the Moon and nearby Saturn, so I figure the VCR
will resolve an -8.0 magnitude satellite reentry.

In the intervening 45 minutes, high cirrus clouds have moved into the
west and southwest sky, partially obscuring Taurus, Orion and Canis
Major. But the bright stars of each constellation are still visible
through the cirrus cloud streaks.

The appointed time for reentry (9:56:45 UTC) is seconds away. I have
checked my reference tables and charts and know the azimuth and
altitude the reentry trail will follow. I have memorized how the
reentry trail will progress through the constellation Taurus, just to
the south of Auriga, below the Moon and Saturn, through my zenith and
then on through the constellation Leo. I have practiced swinging and
tracking the VCR on its tripod from the west horizon through the
zenith. The VCR is humming from DC-to-AC converted electricity flowing
out of my car's battery. My watch is synchronized to the sound of the
UNSO time broadcast in the background.

My UTC-synchronized watch says 9:56:46. There is nothing on the
western horizon. This is serious. In the world of Newtonian dynamics
- the trains tend to always run on time. Has something gone wrong with
the capsule? Then I remember that Goshute Peak and Ferguson Mountain
cut off part of my horizon to the west. As the computerized UNSO
announcer begins "at the tone, the time will be 09:57 Universal
Coordinated Time," the brilliant flaming yellow disk of the Stardust
capsule unmistakably comes racing low over the western horizon.

When an orbiting satellite passes overhead, like the International
Space Station (ISS), they are "fast-movers," but it is still a lazy,
beer-drinking kind-of-an-affair. It takes about four minutes for the
ISS to cross from the northwest to the southeast horizon.

This was a whole new order of satellite motion; something that I had
never experienced before. The whole would be over in 30-40 seconds.
It felt more like I was playing outfield during a baseball game. In
baseball, a quirk of physics is that when a high and long ball is hit
to the outfield, you determine where the ball is going to land by
running as fast as you can until the apparent acceleration of the ball
of stops. If you keep your running speed so the ball is neither
accelerating nor decelerating, the ball is coming right to your mitt.


From its motion, the Stardust capsule is clearly coming in my direction
- but not for an overpass. In the back of my mind, I take some comfort
in the fact that the Stardust capsule is rapidly accelerating toward my
zenith and does not, like the baseball moving into an outfield, is
neither accelerating nor decelerating.

As to the Stardust capsule's apparent brightness, color and movement,
reread the description at the beginning of this note.

A few things happen in quick succession. Although my VCR camera will
focus on the Moon and Saturn, it quickly becomes obvious that something
in its fuzzy-logic chip prevents it from focusing or imaging the
Stardust reentry track. I abandon it and just enjoy the reentry show.
Two kids in a supped-up Toyota screech to a halt on the highway about
100 ft away; they are startled by the brilliance of the Stardust
reentry. Car headlights appear behind them. They hop back into their
car and burn rubber off into the night. The sonic boom comes and goes.
Rural back-of-the-beyond Nevada at 3:00am; go-figure.

I scan the UTTR with binoculars for another twenty-minutes, hoping to
see some activity of the recovery, without success. I pack up and
drive back to Wendover and "The Pilot."

My astronomy "high" is too strong and the concentration of caffeine in
my bloodstream is too high to consider catching some sleep in the
consumerist unreality of a Wendover casino. I walk into "The Pilot" to
buy a second candy bar for the trip back to Salt Lake. I mention to
the clerk, "I just saw that satellite reentry. The minimum wage clerk
replies, "Oh, did they make it work this time. All that money and the
last time it didn't work." I wonder if the clerk knows that "[a]ll
that money" means one-fifth of a billion dollars.
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/database/...g?sc=1999-003A
"Yes, it looked liked it worked," I reply.

Driving back to Salt Lake, gives me time to think about the meaning of
the night's great enterprise, it's social and economic cost, and my own
insignificant connection to it - more as a taxpayer than as a guy
standing out on a rural highway at three in the morning. I believe it
was Pericles, the greatest mayor of ancient Athens, who said that the
one reason people build cities is so that they can build upon the
sacrifices of their predecessors by coming together to do great things
that they otherwise could not do alone. Let's face it; modern U.S.
post-industrial cities can be pretty monotonous, dreary and ugly. One
of things that make cities worthwhile is this potential to come
together to do "great things." Doing "great things" is one mark of a
healthy civilization; its absence a mark of decline. Not to be
mistaken, the first measures of a good civilization is in its ability
to provide for the sick, the infirm, and the less fortunate, to educate
the young, to free the unjustly imprisoned and to rehabilitate the
justly imprisoned. The cost of the Stardust mission could build 8
badly needed new Utah high schools or 25 new elementary schools. The
money could have funded better health care or drug treatment programs
for the victims of Utah's methamphetamine and prescription drug abuse
epidemics. But the ability to do great things - things that our
predecessors sacrificed toward but only dreamed of in passing, but that
are beyond the core business of caring for the sick, providing for the
poor or educating the young - also is an indispensable marker of a
healthy civilization.

The Stardust mission - which diverts about 0.0016% of our national 12.5
trillion GDP from the such core activities of society - qualifies as
coming together to do great things - unimagined by our ancestors. We
fly to the outer solar system using our robotic agents, capture
microscopic particles unchanged for billions of years, and then have
our robotic agents return those particles to Earth in order to
investigate the initial conditions our own origins. In the
post-Internet era, one way to celebrate those great works is watching
NASA TV and seeing JPL scientists cheer and jump, up and down during
reentry. Another form of celebration involves standing out on a quiet
rural Nevada road, on a freezing wind-swept night, watching part of our
future understanding of ourselves unfold.

One more decision to make for the night. What music to pop into the CD
player to keep me out of the drowsy driving zone while going back to
Salt Lake through the early morning hours. It's bad form to have a
good astronomy night and then crack your car by falling asleep during
the drive home. The Emerson Quartet playing Beethoven chamber music;
Phillip Glass's "Einstein on the Beach"; McCoy Tyner's "Revelations";
Tina Turner; the Beatles? Tina, I think, turned up to an ear splitting
volume assured to kill off a few of those inner ear cilia that I'll
wish I still had when I'm in a nursing home in 25 years. I pop in Tina
as I a streak down the moonlight interstate with the immensity of the
Salt Flats on either side. I hit a random track on the CD player.
Tina starts in with a duet:

Everything gonna be alright tonight.
No one's moving
No one's talking
No one's walking
But everything's gonna be alright tonight
.. . . .
I'll meet you high in the sky tonight
Everything's gonna be alright tonight

Yep, just another good night of amateur astronomy in the Basin and
Range.

1/16/2006 Canopus56

P.S. - Did I mention that winter weather in the Basin and Range changes
a lot? The drive back to Salt Lake was uneventful - no rain and the
energy of the storm bands had dissipated into picturesque cumulus and
high cirrus clouds. The Moon shines through the ice crystals creating
a iridescent halo. Back in Salt Lake, I crash for 7 hours and wake up
in the afternoon to overcast skies and two inches of snow to shovel out
of the driveway!

Delightful, Canopus56. I always look forward to your postings.
Thanks for going to the trouble to experience this one and share it with us.

Stuart in hazy Champaign, IL

Stuart Levy wrote:
Delightful, Canopus56. I always look forward to your postings.
Thanks for going to the trouble to experience this one and share it with us.

Thanks Stuart. To correct, that should be -8.0 mag, not -0.8 mag. -
Canopus56

canopus56 wrote:
Stuart Levy wrote:
Delightful, Canopus56. I always look forward to your postings.
Thanks for going to the trouble to experience this one and share it with us.

Thanks Stuart. To correct, that should be -8.0 mag, not -0.8 mag. -
Canopus56

A final corrected version of the journal/blog version is at:

http://members.csolutions.net/fisher...5Stardust.html

- C

"canopus56" wrote in message
oups.com...
canopus56 wrote:
Stuart Levy wrote:
Delightful, Canopus56. I always look forward to your postings.
Thanks for going to the trouble to experience this one and share it
with us.

Thanks Stuart. To correct, that should be -8.0 mag, not -0.8 mag. -
Canopus56

A final corrected version of the journal/blog version is at:

http://members.csolutions.net/fisher...5Stardust.html

- C

Some people just have WAY too much time on their hands!

In article .com,
canopus56 says...

A final corrected version of the journal/blog version is at:

http://members.csolutions.net/fisher...5Stardust.html

Muchly enjoyed your report; but was the storm bearing straight from the
Bering Strait?

--
rgl keeping a strait face

raymond larsson wrote:
In article .com,
canopus56 says...
Muchly enjoyed your report; but was the storm bearing straight from the
Bering Strait? rgl keeping a strait face

Raymond, thanks for the correction. - C

LOL - I was just down the road from you. I turned on the road east to
the Goshute Indian Reservation and stopped pretty much right on the
UT/NV border. Excellent description of the night - very well written,
and captures the experience well!

- Tim Harris