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telescope to it, there would sure be a heck of a lot of jitter in that
connection."
Tabitha interjected, "No matter anyway. Terrence's system is in the payload
bay of the Shuttle. I just don't see a way to do this without an EVA."
"How much time do we have before the rendezvous?" I asked.
Tabitha looked at her watch, "About twenty-two hours."
"Even if we do an EVA, what do we do?" I wasn't sure if this problem had a
good solution.
"The Japanese do an EVA and bring in their broken telescope. Wangche has been
depressurizing for a while now. Then we go from there."
"Yes ma'am, Colonel." Terrence saluted and departed. I hadn't seen anybody
salute Tabitha before.
It must have been an instinct for Terrence.
Wangche Lynn brought the Japanese Low Noise Optical Instrument Package in
through the airlock a
couple of hours later. While waiting, Tabitha and I had dinner in the
Habitation Module. We played around for about ten minutes in the microgravity.
I spun her around a few times and she had me do some flying spin kicks. I soon
realized that spin kicks are virtually impossible without gravity. Tabitha did
a few dazzling spins and tucks and flips that affected me in just the right
way. I really wished there were some hidey-hole that we could find and get
friendly. That just wasn't going to happen. This was the longest period of
time we'd been in space that Tabitha was just Tabitha and not Colonel Ames and
it was very short-lived, too short-lived. I had had something on my mind that
I wanted to talk to her about at the right moment, and this one didn't last
long enough. Or I chickened out.
Upon further inspection of the JLNOIP, Wangche decided that the optic was
damaged but salvageable, but the pointing system was completely destroyed.
Tabitha and I knew that there would be only one way to fix it and accomplish
the tasks that the Japanese crew had been preparing for the past month. We
also knew that they couldn't have access to the classified equipment in the
payload bay either.
"Here's the plan," I said to Tabitha, not giving her time to interrupt once I
had her attention. "You sneak the telescope and the focal plane instruments
away from the Japanese. I'll give the optics and detectors a once over. Then
Terrence and I will go out into the Shuttle and attach the thing to the radar
assembly of his experiment. We feed the telemetry, point and track data, and
the focal plane images through the modem on Terrence's experiment. Tomorrow,
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during the rendezvous, we send the Japanese the feedback control sequences and
let them point the telescope for the experiment. When it's over we cut the
circuit and fly off in the Shuttle." I paused for air.
"We have to get approval first!" I knew she would say that.
Believe it or not, we got approval for the EVA and for the process we planned.
The biggest hurdle was getting Terrence's bosses to okay the project but we
assured them no damage or exfiltration of the equipment technology would take
place.
Typical of NASA, some group of engineers dirtside were put to work developing
a schedule for us.
After the bright boys figured out about how long it would take us to do the
job, they added a twenty percent contingency to that, then added another time
delay according to some formula for designing
EVAs. Tabitha was told to schedule a four-hour later departure from ISS than
in the original flight plan. I
really didn't believe that it would take us four extra hours to complete the
tasks, but I kept my mouth shut. Besides, Terrence and I had to start
preparing for the EVA. The Shuttle environment would have to be brought back
down to lower than atmospheric pressure immediately. Lowering the pressure in
the environment would help prevent getting the bends in the very low pressure
environment of the spacesuits.
Since this was a NASA-sanctioned plan, Tabitha didn't have to sneak the
telescope away from
Wangche after all. She just explained that we had a fix and the Japanese
astronauts couldn't be involved with it. Then she asked them plainly if they
wanted to get the data for the rendezvous or not.
The JLNOIP focal plane detectors were all in good and operational condition.
The primary optic on the other hand, had a scratch about an inch wide across
it from one side to the other. Even worse, the scratch had been caused when
the support for the secondary mirror, called a spider, collapsed into the
larger primary mirror due to the force on it from the "Lemote Manipuratol Alm"
or Remote Manipulator
Arm. So, a new spider had to be rigged somehow or other. I was able to repair
the -structural pieces from parts on the Shuttle and the ISS. However, the
large primary mirror couldn't be made as good as new without serious
repolishing and recoating. I did some quick calculations on a scratchpad and
discovered that the total aperture of the telescope wouldn't be required in
order to gather enough light to image the satellite rendezvous only
twenty-eight thousand miles away. This meant that the efficiency of the
primary optic could be a little worse than its original specifications. I did
comment that the inch wide scratch across the optics diameter wasn't to
factory specs. I also did some image calculations and decided that the error
in the image that the scratch would cause would be negligible. Some slight
spatial filtering would take place, but that just couldn't be helped. Maybe
the Japanese team had an optical wavefront guru working for them who could
clean that part out of the images later.
I managed to bang the telescope and the rest of the JLNOIP back in working
order and Terrence
and I completed the EVA to mount it on his radar pointing and tracking
experiment hardware in the
Shuttle bay. We used some bungee cord, a few hose clamps, a lot of duct tape,
and some ISS
camera-mounting hardware we "McGuyvered" into a mount for the JLNOIP. Terrence
and I played with
the point-and-track algorithms until we had the telescope pointing to
classified parameters. Duct tape is amazing. Then Terrence wrote a random
noise function into the code that would cause the JLNOIP to demonstrate a
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pointing jitter just short of state-of-the-art. I was impressed by Lieutenant
Fine's engineering prowess.
We handed the datalink over to the Japanese about thirty minutes before the
rendezvous. From the oohs and ahs and the machine gun Japanese banter we could
hear over the UHF, they must have been impressed. I high-fived Terrence and
reminded him that we weren't getting paid for this work since we were payload
specialists.
"Hey! Perhaps we should bill NASA when we get back," he joked.
"I'll have my lawyer look into it," I agreed only a little more seriously. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]