Explorations
Swift in Space
Dispatch 4: Swift in State College
The Mission Operations Center was open only to essential personnel during the launch of the Swift Observatory.Photo by Annemarie Mountz
Saturday, November 20, 2004
Last night—the night before the launch of the Swift satellite—Marg Chester made two sheet-cake-sized pans of rich, buttery coffee cake. "I had to do something to keep myself from going crazy," she says. "The temptation was to stay up all night, but we have to be alert and ready to work today." So Chester, a Penn State astronomer and a lead scientist on the Swift project, made cake and went to bed early.
This morning, a couple dozen scientists and engineers, many of whom have been on duty since 4 a.m., are hovering around the kitchen at the Swift project's Bristol Park facility, two miles from Penn State's University Park campus. They're drinking coffee from a 20-gallon box container, munching on the coffee cake, and using napkins to prevent cinnamony crumbs from falling on their nicer-than-usual attire—mostly button-downs and khakis, in one case a cummerbund and bowtie. "Marg doesn't mess around when she's baking," says her husband Doug Chester, a lawyer and consultant on the project. "This stuff goes right to the coronary arteries."
Chester, wearing a long skirt and a white polo shirt with the Swift emblem on the left side, isn't messing around today, either. She's got tabs on the whole place. Right now she's running between the Mission Operations Center (MOC) in the back of the building and a make-shift press room in the front of the building, where a small crew of reporters are waiting to record the local reaction to a launch taking place a thousand miles away. In the MOC, a slew of people from Penn State, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, General Dynamics, the company that built and wired the Swift spacecraft, and Omitron, Inc., the developer of the MOC's computer systems, are gearing up for the launch. The NASA crew at Cape Canaveral in Florida will get Swift in the air, but once it's in orbit, the crew in State College will command it.
The office given to the press today really belongs to John Nousek, the astronomer leading the Swift project at Penn State. Nousek is in Florida for the launch, but his presence is felt here in the form of a screen saver, a scan of a drawing of him made by his daughter—lots of curly, squiggly hair, big glasses, a big grin, and a caption that reads "listen to the boss." In Nousek's office, we're watching live footage of NASA engineers working at their computers at the Kennedy Space Center. The scene reminds me of the movie Apollo 13, except the equipment is obviously 21st century and there are lots more women on the team. There's another TV with a video feed from down the hall showing us the activity inside the MOC: The scientists and engineers, the same ones I saw eating coffee cake in the kitchen, are talking to each other and staring at screens. Not too exciting.
The Mission Operations crew at Penn State University Park was set and ready to go before the launch of the Swift Observatory. Photo by Annemarie Mountz
For the most part, we're in wait mode here in State College. And it's been an extended, nerve-wracking wait mode - hurricanes in Florida pushed the launch from early fall into November and, just this week, with everyone and everything literally at the launch pad waiting to go, minor technical snags put things on hold for a couple more days. This crew is ready to get Swift off the ground. They're excited and, yes, a little tired and most of them still have months—years, if things go well—of work ahead of them. "When the satellite is launched, that's when our work really begins," says Chester. That's when the science that Nousek and Chester and a team of other researchers proposed to do begins. They're going to use Swift to capture gamma ray bursts from the edges of the universe.
Today's launch is set for 12:10, one minute after kick-off at the Penn State-Michigan State game in Beaver Stadium, just a few miles away. At T-101 minutes, Tom Taylor, program manager for Swift and a research engineer with the Applied Research Laboratory at Penn State, walks into Nousek's office and tells us that they're putting the fuel in the rockets down at Cape Canaveral.
Chester looks thrilled. On a table in front of me, she has unfurled an incredibly detailed list of events that are supposed to take place shortly after Swift launches and hits its orbit. The key moments are separation from the rocket at 80 minutes, communicating with the TDRSS satellite system above Hawaii at 81 minutes, the opening of the satellites solar panels at 83 minutes, and communicating with the groundstation in Malindi, Kenya at 131 minutes.
The sequence was prepared by Lisa Nelson, the lead operations engineer from General Dynamics. Nelson and a team of engineers from her company are in State College to make sure Swift gets off the ground and running. "Then they hand the keys over to Penn State," Taylor had explained to me weeks ago. On the TV with the video feed from the MOC, I can see Nelson pacing back and forth in the center of the room wearing headphones and a talking into a mouthpiece.
The next hour and a half slides by quickly, with NASA TV showing footage of the rocket on the launch pad, interviews with the lead scientists, and animations of gamma-ray bursts. Soon the launch countdown drops to numbers that seem bearable—20 minutes, 14 minutes, and then a ten-minute hold, six minutes, four minutes, and, finally, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6 ....
At 12:16 p.m. the rocket blasts off and streams across the perfect blue sky. A cheer goes up from the MOC in State College. Phone calls are made, bottles of champagne are uncorked, and quickly, very quickly, everyone switches into work mode. "I gotta go now. I can't talk now. I gotta get to work," says one of the young Swift scientists into his cell phone.