DeepEarthScience

Reading the books and watching the TV series “the Expanse” awoken my old boyish-dreams of our presence on the Moon. Growing up with a dad that introduced me to the fantastic worlds of Larry Niven, Brian Aldiss, Isaac Asimov, Jack Vance, and Arthur C. Clark, gave me hope for the future and it motivated me to start my studies in Space Engineering. The science fiction became real-life science and engineering and I began to understand why the future was not yet achieved. We have made space engineering very complicated and expensive, which allowed only nations to perform this type of activities. But, I am living in the future of my old heroes of words and spaceflight has a permanent role in our daily life.  And more and more young engineers want to participate, because space is not that complicated anymore. We evolve as humans, such that complicated problems in the past are simple issues in the future. James S. A. Corey (A.K.A. Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) hints to this as well in...

All the trees have blossom, baby ducklings are rooming the ponds, and we get more Sun: we survived the winter! Spring is here to give us our much needed vitamine D.  Spring on the campus of TU Delft Not only on the surface of the Earth this is felt, but also in outer space. The Delfi-C3, now more than 9 years orbiting our Earth, notices that spring has arrived on the Northern Hemisphere. During winter, our ground station (DopTrack) only receives data during the morning and mid day (between 8:00 and 13:00 CET). Starting from April, we start receiving signal around 20:00 CET. Fraction of a 24 hour day (UTC) at Time of Closest Approach (TCA) of the Delfi-C3 with DopTrack. We saw this already last year, when in April the telemetry of Delfi-C3 started appearing in the evening. The Sun was already set on the ground, but at 560 km height light was still shinning on the solar cells of the satellite. The satellite is designed such that when sunlight hits the solar cells and eno...

This year was the second time I gave my tutorial with an SDR dongle. The idea behind this tutorial is to simulate ground-station-to-satellite interaction in the radiowave spectrum. The ground station is replaced by the SDR dongle and the student's computer. For the satellite, I use a radio beacon designed and built by a colleague of mine. The device transmits an FSK modulated signal at a certain frequency. During the tutorial, the students learn to develope software that interacts with the SDR, such that they can process the digital stream observed by the SDR. I made a small video of the signal with GQRX software, such that you can see the signal in the frequency spectrum and listen to the FSK modulation. Last year, I was using an open-source software package "gnuradio" for the signal processing part, but I found out that this introduced a lot of trouble-shouting in the first few hours, because of students having: different operating systems and versions (every s...

This week I saw a great article in Wired.com about the static test of one of the solid boosters for the SLS rocket. So I tweeted: "The Earth rotated a little bit faster that day! #rocketengine". I should have known that I cannot make these kind of statements without proving them first. One of my friends called my bluff. So, I replied with "Challenge accepted!". The blog post will report on my investigation and show how much the Earth speed up/slowed down by the QM-2 test of the SLS booster rocket. My investigation consists of three parts: the model, the search for reliable information, and my conclusions. Model of the Earth with an attached booster By igniting their propellant, rockets can produce thrust that normally propel them upwards towards space. If you fix them on the Earth they could speed up or slow done the rotation of the Earth, depending on  the direction of its thrust. Ok, hold your horses! Of course this will have a small effect, but I st...

On a cold winter day, 21 November 1934, professor Vening Meinesz turned on his pendulum apparatus. Just a few minutes ago, the submarine K-XVIII dived to a depth of 30 meters [1]. A t these depths, t he motion of the surface waves was dampened such that it did not influence the delicate measurements done by the professor. This particular observation would mark the 500th measurement, observing the tiniest changes in the Earth's gravity field. This new gravity dataset would reveal many new mysteries of our home planet and would be the life’s work of Vening Meinesz. It is all documented in scientific publications of four volumes called  Gravity Expeditions at Sea , followed by a fifth volume with gravity observations done by his students. Along these expeditions, the professor had brought his specially designed pendulum apparatus, or folklorised by the sailors on board the many submarines: Het Gouden Kalf  (the Golden Calf). The pendulum apparatus of Vening Meinesz, also kn...