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Sisältää nimet: Alan S. Stern, S. Alan Stern

Image credit: Official NASA Photo by Bill Ingalls

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It always impresses me how much goes on behind the scenes. While the media and the general public are only ever interested in launches and final photos, the process of getting a ship from Earth to Pluto requires an incredible amount of forethought, intelligence, and money.

Chasing New Horizons at times feels a little too shallow for its own sake. This isn't American Moonshot which spends 700 pages delving into political and scientific niceties. However, this book does give its reader a good idea of how much work went into the project and why New Horizons was so important.… (lisätietoja)
 
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keithlaf | 5 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Aug 19, 2022 |
This book gives a behind-the-scenes look at the New Horizons interplanetary space probe: what it took to get it funded, the work necessary to get the public excited about Pluto and the mission, some of the decision-making processes along the way, and more.

I didn't write it down, but I believe the primary narrator for this was David Grinspoon - Alan Stern also narrated a bit, but only small sections. (Or I mixed up the names and it's actually the reverse.) Although the narration wasn't terrible, and definitely communicated how exciting and nerve-wracking this mission was, I found myself wishing that it had been narrated by someone else. It took me longer than it should have to get through this book, two checkout periods, and my slight dislike of the narration was part of the reason why. Grinspoon's voice didn't quite work for me.

Overall, this was a nice overview of the New Horizons mission for someone like myself (enough of an interest in space to have listened to at least one other nonfiction book on the topic, but otherwise not very knowledgeable). I could feel the tension whenever the team ran into problems, and one of my favorite parts was the nerve-wracking bit just before the close flyby at Pluto. I also liked the book's science communication aspects - in order for the project to happen in the first place, a lot of people had to be convinced that it was worth doing, and part of that relied on selling the public on Pluto and its importance. And, same as in Rob Manning and William L. Simon's Mars Rover Curiosity: An Inside Account from Curiosity's Chief Engineer, a large chunk of the book was devoted to efforts to get the mission funded. I wasn't as interested in this, but it was clearly a source of stress and concern for the team.

The narrative could get a bit melodramatic at times, and the authors were fond of Star Wars references. Also, yeesh, there were a lot of bickering scientists. JPL vs. APL and efforts to get approval and funding, and the whole "Pluto isn't a planet" thing brushed off as just one scientist disliking another one enough to want to undo his legacy. Still, this was a decent book, and I definitely learned a few things.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)
… (lisätietoja)
½
 
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Familiar_Diversions | 5 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Sep 12, 2021 |
Love me a good space exploration tale. What these folks do is amazing and very cool. Loved the detail on what they went through to get the mission launched. Nice photos as well.
 
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bermandog | 5 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Mar 20, 2021 |
This is a selection from "Chasing New Horizons" by Alan Stern and David Grinspoon. When NASA sent a spacecraft to Pluto, there was no room for error or after the fact corrections. So NASA did its software testing the correct, thorough way:

"As leader of the mission, Alan Stern felt as though it was part of his job to look for weaknesses in the flyby plan, ask a lot of questions of his teams, probe their assumptions, and ask for changes to fortify the planning. One of the many weaknesses he spotted and changes he asked for concerned NHOPS (New Horizons Operations Simulator).

"About the time that the seven various flyby phases were being laid out and architected, Alan became concerned that the NHOPS spacecraft simulator, which was used to test all spacecraft command sequences to weed out bugs, could become a showstopper if it failed in 2015. He just wasn't comfortable with the fact that an NHOPS failure in 2015, when there was little time for a repair, could risk the team's ability to fully test the flyby sequences. A backup, called NHOPS-2 was al­ready in place, but it was a stripped-down version of NHOPS that lacked much of the simulation capability and fidelity of the original. So at Alan's direction, Glen put plans and budget in place to convert NHOPS-2 into a full-up spare to NHOPS, and to test it as thor­oughly as had been done with NHOPS, to be sure it would be ready if there ever was a need. Little did he know then, this was a decision that would prove crucial in the final days of the approach to Pluto.

"As each of the dozens of command sequences that together com­prised the entire flyby were designed and had passed their peer re­views, the MOPS team began running them on the NHOPS spacecraft simulator to see if they would work as expected. Bugs were often found, corrected, and then new NHOPS runs would be sched­uled. MOPS repeated this again and again, until every sequence ran completely error-free. For the Core load -- the crucial nine-day-long chain of sequences that instructed the spacecraft how to execute all actions during the close flyby -- that took eight tries. Each of these eight NHOPS runs of the Core load took the full nine days. Version 1 was called V-1, version 2 was called V-2, and so on. Every time the team found bugs it rewrote the errant parts of the sequence and started the NHOPS run again, from scratch. When the Core finally ran bug-free on V-8, the eighth of these nine-day-long NHOPS runs, Alan cele­brated by buying a couple cases of little cans of V-8 juice and handed the cans out for each team member to keep as souvenirs of the time­consuming battle to create a completely bug-free Core load.

"Once that error-free milestone was achieved, the Core sequence was 'locked down' under a rigorous 'no change without careful re­view and approval' process, called 'configuration management' (or CM). CM's job was to ensure that an extra level of scrutiny and test­ing rigor went into any change, no matter how minor. Weekly meet­ings of a group called the Encounter Change Control Board (or ECCB), were held to evaluate change requests to the Core load and half a dozen other sequences that would run on New Horizons dur­ing the period from May to July of 2015. The ECCB was chaired by Alan and staffed by chief engineer Chris Hersman, project manager Glen Fountain, MOPS lead Alice Bowman, senior project scientist Hal Weaver, PEP lead Leslie Young, and encounter manager Mark Holdridge.

"At the same time that all the Pluto flyby command sequences were be­ing developed, the project team also took a look at everything that could possibly go wrong during the encounter and how they or the space­craft would have to react in order to fix any given situation. This kind of 'malfunction procedures' development is common to space mis­sions, and it was crucial for a one-shot opportunity like a Pluto flyby.

"The largest effort to prepare for potential problems was led by spacecraft chief engineer Chris Hersman. Hersman, incredibly sharp and meticulous in his attention to detail, and incredibly knowledge­able about all aspects of the bird, made plans for each of 264 potential spacecraft, ground system, and other problems that might arise."
… (lisätietoja)
 
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AntonioGallo | 5 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Oct 30, 2019 |

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Teokset
12
Jäseniä
361
Suosituimmuussija
#66,480
Arvio (tähdet)
4.1
Kirja-arvosteluja
9
ISBN:t
31

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