| GeoFlow-II experiment campaign complete |
[10 May 2012|12:25am] |
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ESA today announced the successful completion of the GeoFlow-II experiment campaign aboard the ISS, for those of you interested in experimental work on the interior dynamics of planets. GeoFlow is a dimensional-similarity fluid-dynamic experiment in the Fluid Science Laboratory aboard … Continue reading →
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| Famous on the internet |
[02 May 2012|10:56pm] |
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In case you’re curious what I’m up to, here are a few recent mentions on websites other than this one. First off, my grad-student research is being highlighted on the CPSX website at the moment. It’ll be on the front … Continue reading →
This post is a syndication to LiveJournal from the main weblog at wolfstu.ca. You can comment there or here.
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| RMC launches FLOAT-3 |
[16 Apr 2012|11:20am] |
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A team from the Royal Military College of Canada launched FLOAT-3 last month, the third Flying Laboratory for Observation of ADS-B Transmissions. This was the first flight of a new, more effective receiver system, using a balloon and payload support … Continue reading →
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| Man, machine, and world |
[11 Apr 2012|10:24pm] |
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This is a fantastic image. It’s Ed White, Gemini 4 astronaut. He’s got a look of quiet contemplation fitting of pausing from your groundbreaking experimental space mission to look out on your home world, or the depths of outer space. … Continue reading →
This post is a syndication to LiveJournal from the main weblog at wolfstu.ca. You can comment there or here.
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| Rediscovering old friends |
[11 Apr 2012|02:36pm] |
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There’s something charming about finding the stars you learned about as a child revealed, one by one, to host planetary systems. Even the best optical telescope images from my childhood showed a bright spot, shining in the cold, empty darkness … Continue reading →
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| A quick skim through the 2012 Federal budget |
[30 Mar 2012|01:07am] |
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Just some thoughts: Total spending is $276B (17% of GDP). Deficit: $33.4B (1.2% of GDP). Spending, revenues, and debt charges are all forecast to continue rising until at least 2016, when the federal debt will be unchanged at $602B. I … Continue reading →
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| Whole worlds waiting to be revealed |
[27 Mar 2012|05:43pm] |
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I spent last week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference just outside of Houston, Texas. With an annual attendance of around 2000, it’s the main conference for people who study the nature and history of the solar system. All … Continue reading →
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| Single LGM seeks same |
[25 Mar 2012|09:33pm] |
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Searching for a partner-in-life is a lot like SETI, except there are a whole lot of Wow! signals. In the first place, it’s a big universe, and there are a lot of stars out there. And it’s likely that somewhere … Continue reading →
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| FLOAT in Physics in Canada |
[05 Mar 2012|05:16pm] |
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I spent much of my master’s degree at the Royal Military College of Canada working on ADS-B, a new system of air traffic surveillance. In particular, I was looking at how to detect aircraft transponder signals from orbit, what kind … Continue reading →
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| Western Worlds #101 podcast now available |
[02 Mar 2012|10:35am] |
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The first episode of Western Worlds is available in mp3 format for download from CPSX. It features my interview with Dr. Gordon Osinski about impact craters, and a follow-up discussion on the topic with the Western Worlds panel of the … Continue reading →
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| Western Worlds radio program on Astronomy.fm |
[27 Feb 2012|11:23pm] |
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Western Worlds, a new radio program about planetary science and exploration on Astronomy.fm, had its premiere tonight. Produced jointly by the Centre for Planetary Science and Exploration (CPSX) and Astronomy.fm, it will air Monday nights at 10 PM EST. Each … Continue reading →
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| The wake of a freely flying European Starling |
[13 Feb 2012|04:26pm] |
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One of the fun things about working at a university is the continual series of lectures, presentations, and seminars about current research. Today in the Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, a paper was presented on aerodynamics, an area in … Continue reading →
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| Welcome back |
[30 Jan 2012|12:58am] |
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Welcome to wolfstu.ca. After a long while as a static webpage, we’re back to periodic updates and a bit more structured look. If you can’t bear to lose the old hand-coded-from-scratch look, you can always indulge in some nostalgia, but … Continue reading →
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| Contact established |
[23 Mar 2008|09:52pm] |
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From the time NASA launched its successful Viking 1 probe to Mars, to the time it received the first pictures and data from the Martian surface beamed back by the lander, just under eleven months had passed. It sounds like a long time, but Mars is a long way from here, and the probe had to:
ride to Earth orbit,
complete an almost ten-month transit to Mars,
spend a month in orbit while the landing site was chosen (the initial target site turned out to be full of rocks),
separate from the orbiter module,
deorbit by firing rockets,
slow down by atmospheric friction,
slow down some more with a parachute,
slow down still more with some final rockets,
land successfully (about 3 hours after separation from the orbiter),
make contact with the orbiter,
take its first picture, and
transmit the image (this alone took 4 minutes)
The first image from the surface of Mars. High-resolution version from NASA here.</p>
Then, of course, the radio signal had to make its way to Earth, and that can take between about 7 and 44 minutes, not counting delays at each link in the transmission chain. And after all this the probe still had to finish unfolding itself, deploy the rest of the equipment, and turn everything on.
After a mission launches out into the void, it can be a long time before those back home know if everything’s okay.
Read the rest of this entry » _____________________________________________
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| Partyline removed from Friends List |
[22 Mar 2008|05:16pm] |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif?v=92.1) partyline has been removed from the Friends List. It was formerly a multi-author political weblog including one of the other writers currently on my list, but has become a wordy, rambly, disagreeable and self-impressed evanglical serial spiel. It uses flourishingly grand language to drive home mundane and inarguable points, then burns through thesauruses expounding poorly-argued religious opinions as if they were just as obviously true. The over-grand language makes it look like the writer either takes pleasure in substituting ten-letter words for shorter ones to look smart, or writes in Korean and publishes in English via Babelfish.
There's no need for me to scroll past badly-written bad ideas about the supernatural to read updates from my actual friends.
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| Noordwijk 07-08 |
[25 Jun 2007|10:09am] |
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I’m all packed up. My bags are in the car, and in a few minutes my parents will drive me to the airport to leave for the ESA YGT in Noordwijk. It’s a longtrip, and afterwards it may be some time before I can get to the internet again. So in the meantime, I’ll leave you with the letter of application I sent to ESA last December, explaining why I aspired to join the program.
See you from the Netherlands.
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To: Applications officer, European Space Agency
From: Raymond Francis
Date: 14 December 2006
Re: Application for Young Graduate Trainee Program
Madam or Sir,
I wish to express my interest in the European Space Agency’s Young Graduate Trainee program. For a young person in my position – a recent graduate in engineering, with a mind as full of the aspirations and idealism of youth as it is with mathematics and science – a training contract with the ESA represents a tremendous and unique chance to learn, and grow, and prepare myself for an exciting career in space technology.
I live in Sudbury, a remote northern city surrounded by Canada’s boreal forest. The closest settlement large enough to be called a city is 150 km away, and much of Low Earth Orbit – including the ISS – is closer than the provincial capital. It’s a surprising spot for a city; not on any major rivers, far from the Great Lakes, cold and wintry. There’s a city here because of a vast mineral deposit; one that exists because of a meteorite impact 1.85 billion years ago. All of the history of this city, its settlement, growth, industrialization, resulting ecological devastation, and the engineered and ongoing recovery of the forest flow from that event. Sudbury is here because of how earth and space and humanity interact, and so am I.
Read the rest of this entry » _____________________________________________
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| 2 1337 4 *fleet? |
[24 Jun 2007|01:47am] |
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If Air Cadets and MCG left me with anything, it was knowing how to schedule my time. And there are a lot of things to do to get ready for the ESA YGT. Not that I’m complaining; I’m having fun with all the planning and preparation. I’m pretty well booked up until Monday, though, when I leave for Noordwijk. But things are well on their way.
Last week at the symposium, I ran into a freelance reporter who took great interest in my pending adventure to the Netherlands. She passed the information on to some of the agencies she works with, and as a result, last Thursday I was interviewed on CBC Radio ( the regional afternoon program ) about it. I enjoyed the interview, and it was also just fun being on the other side of things; I grew up listening to Quirks & Quarks and Ideas, and such.
I was also interviewed by a young man from one of the local newspapers, the Northern Life. The article appeared in yesterday’s paper; it was my barber who pointed it out to me, in fact. The online version is available here.
So now I’m famous? It’s more fun than when the paper printed a photo of me with a vacuum cleaner, when I was three. The best part, of course, is that some day about fifty years from now, about fifty light-years away from here, the Romulans are going to briefly scan to this otherwise unremarkable frequency and think: “Man, that isn’t a string of prime numbers, either.”
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| You tend to look up a lot when you come out of buildings |
[17 Jun 2007|10:59pm] |
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It’s okay not flying. It really is. Life is fine, and the world is full of interesting and exciting things. It’s a whole experience, and there’s an entire universe to explore and learn about, an entire life to learn how to live. And it’s just fine, walking around among the trees, under the sky.
Then you go flying again. And you come down. And you look up at the sky and long to return. And for a little while, you remember what it felt like to turn about up there, to manoevre, to think and plan and operate and control and fit in. And move, however briefly, throgh the air as if you belong there. Move the machine as an extension of yourself, the lifting surfaces only a few joints away, the open air just beyond your body.
If you wait long enough, that fades, slowly, and reaches a low, steady-state level at which you can almost forget it…
… until you go flying again.
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| Planetary and Terrestrial Mining Sciences Symposium |
[16 Jun 2007|05:10pm] |
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I was out most of this week again. This time, it was the Planetary and Terrestrial Mining Sciences Symposium. Representatives were there from a number of universities and from industry, as well as several NASA technical centres and the CSA. It’s hosted by the Northern Centre for Advanced Technology, who are designing a drill or two to be used on NASA and CSA geology missions to the Moon and Mars.
Most of the conference consisted of presentations of papers by various individuals and groups. There was the company developing a new way of doing highly comprehensive chemical analysis on rock samples with minimal preparation and non-radiaoactive equipment, and the one with a fancy new hybrid computing system for real-time equipment control. NASA showed off calculations for oxygen production from regolith for a moon base
Read the rest of this entry » _____________________________________________
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