Goddard Space Flight Center

Mapping the Early Universe

When Chuck Bennett came to the Goddard Space Flight Center in 1984 as a young graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) was one of the hottest, most exciting missions at NASA. He couldn’t think of anything more professionally rewarding than to peer back in space and time to study the oldest light in the cosmos, the faint background radiation that the Big Bang created between 12 and 15 billion years ago when it created the universe in an unimaginable cauldron.

Since the spacecraft’s picture-perfect launch on June 30, Bennett said he and his team, led by Goddard and Princeton University, are well on the way to achieving the mission’s ambitious goals.

Now safely in orbit 1 million miles from home, MAP has checked out perfectly and has begun collecting information about the faint cosmic glow in five wavelength bands. It will collect enough data to make a map of the entire sky, which Bennett expects in December 2002. From this map, scientists will study the patterns caused by the fluctuations in temperature to unravel clues about the nature, composition and destiny of the universe. Because MAP has 30 times greater resolution and is 50 times more sensitive than COBE, astronomers are anticipating even greater results.

In so many ways, MAP is a mission of firsts. Before MAP, Goddard never competed for a mission. In 1995, NASA received 65 proposals for a mid-sized, Explorer-class mission. It selected only two. MAP made the cut. Before MAP, Goddard had never formed such a close
partnership with a university to develop a major space mission. Goddard and Princeton relied on each other’s strengths to build successfully a space mission that wasn’t easy to build. And before MAP, no satellite had ever flown in the L2 orbit, a quasi-stable position in the opposite direction of the Sun. Although many satellites have passed through the L2 neighborhood, none has used it as a permanent observing station.

IMAGE RIGHT: The Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP), a successor to Goddard’s highly successful Cosmic Background Explorer, is collecting enough data to make a map of the entire sky showing the tiny fluctuations in temperature, which reveal clues about the nature, composition and destiny of the universe

“Like COBE, MAP so far is a huge success for the Center,” Bennett says. “It really is a testament to the engineers here. It really is the hottest thing at NASA.”

The Balloon Lady
Scientific balloons have become commonplace. The NASA Balloon Program at Wallops Flight Facility alone averages about 25 flights each year, lofting these billowing giants a hundred thousand feet above the Earth’s surface from such places as Texas, Ft. Sumner, New Mexico, and as far away as Australia and Antarctica. Now balloon- ists would like to try their craft in an alien world, millions of miles from home.

Debbie Fairbrother, a Balloon Technology Manager at Wallops, counts herself as a member of that crowd and has begun planning a demonstration project that she hopes will give her Goddard team an edge to winning future opportunities. To Fairbrother, one of the few women involved in the field today, balloons are a way to fly an experiment package on Mars. “I know balloons,” she says. “You can get better resolution than with an orbiter and more spatial coverage than from a lander or rover. Furthermore, you can have longer duration than from airplanes or gliders. We’re hoping for 7 days, but it’s conceivable that you would get much more.”

Under most scenarios, a Mars balloon would be deployed soon after the spacecraft entered the Mars atmosphere and rapidly inflated from a helium tank as the payload system descended beneath a parachute. Once fully inflated, the parachute and tanks would detach and the balloon and its payload would then fly at a near constant altitude for a few days. But even she says building a balloon capable of doing this will be a challenge.

However, she’s hopeful that the experience gained on NASA’s Ultra-Long Duration Balloon (ULDB) will provide some needed insights as she pursues her goal. The ULDB is a lobed or pumpkin-shaped platform composed of a lightweight polyethylene film about the thickness of ordinary plastic food wrap.

A Year in Launches: New Spacecraft Launched to Study Earth and Space

In fiscal 2001, Goddard deployed nine missions ultimately aimed at expanding scientists’ understanding of our home and our universe.

HETE-2
A new gamma-ray burst mission, the High-Energy Transient Explorer (HETE-2), separated from a Pegasus rocket about 12 minutes after launch on October 9, 2000, in the Marshall Islands. HETE-2 is a multinational collaboration and is designed to locate with pinpoint accuracy hundreds of gamma-ray bursts, the
most energetic events in the universe. The satellite then relays the information in real-time to space- and ground-based optical radio observatories.

Ultra-Long Duration Balloon
NASA ended the March 10, 2001 launch
of the Ultra-Long Duration Balloon mission from the Northern Territory of Central Australia. The balloon, the largest single-cell, super-pressure balloon ever flown, reached its desired float altitude of 112,000 feet before a NASA operations team decided to bring it down because the balloon’s internal pressure was less than expected. It was supposed to travel around the world on the fringes of space.

MAP
The Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP) lifted off on schedule aboard a Delta II rocket from Pad B at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on June 30, 2001 beginning a mission scientists hope will determine the content, shape, history and the ultimate fate of the universe. The satellite, a partnership between the Goddard Space Flight Center and Princeton University, is designed to capture the afterglow of the Big Bang, which comes to us from a time well before any stars, galaxies or quasars existed. Science observations will take place from MAP’s L2 orbit, which is four times farther from the Earth than the Moon in the direction opposite the Sun, or about one million miles from Earth. MAP is the first spacecraft to use an L2 orbit as an observing station.

The MAP satellite is up, up and away on its

journey to the beginning of time. NASA's

Microwave Anisotropy Probe launched successfully on June 30, 2001, from Cape Canaveral aboard a Delta II rocket. The satellite will study the first light of the universe—the afterglow of the Big Bang—from an era long before the first stars and galaxies appeared.

Daley, SGI Supercomputer

In the summer, Goddard’s Data Assimilation Office and the Goddard Institute of Space Studies received an addition to their computing prowess in the form of the 512-processor SGI Origin 3800 supercomputer, which is among the most powerful of its kind. With this computer—made up of 512 computer processors that share a128- part memory—NASA will be able to double the amount of data it ingests to 800,000 observations daily.  These twin attributes allow the Data Assimilation Office and the Goddard Institute of Space Studies to run climate models four times faster and at double the resolution. The computer is known as Daley in honor of Roger Daley, a leading data assimilation scientist who died in August.

In Appreciation…

THE EXTREME ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT MISSION COMES TO AN END
After 8 years in orbit—the Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer (EUVE) stopped operating in December 2000. The bantam astronomical satellite opened a new window on the cosmos by observing extreme ultraviolet light, a form of radiation that no one had thoroughly explored until its deployment in June, 1992. Before NASA launched EUVE, many scientists believed the thin gas between the stars, known as the interstellar medium, would block extreme ultraviolet light. That proved not to be the case. Rather than seeing only a couple dozen nearby objects as many expected, EUVE observed more than 1,000 sources, including more than 3 dozen objects outside our galaxy, making our view of the cosmos more complete.

NASA

National Aeronautics and
Space Administration

Goddard Space Flight Center