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Log inGardiner trucker a mission specialist
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Gardiner trucker a mission specialist
by Outspoken on Thu Jun 12, 2008 4:13 am
Gardiner trucker a mission specialist
BY MECHELE COOPER
Staff Writer Kennebec Journal
GARDINER -- What do black holes in space and a long-haul trucker from Gardiner have in common?
The Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, NASA's most powerful space observatory.
The telescope blasted into space from Cape Canaveral, Fla., at 12:05 p.m. Wednesday to begin a five-to 10-year mission orbiting earth.
In the decade it took to conceptualize, design, build, test and launch the telescope, moving the observatory was one of the few times the $850 million project would have been exposed to failure, according to Scott Clough, NASA's instrument systems engineer.
That is why Jeff Crane, of Gardiner, a trucker for 30 years, is the only person allowed to transport the telescope, which is known by its acronym.
"Jeff moved GLAST or major portions of GLAST across the country five times," Clough said. "Not once did we have any issues with our transport. Being such an expensive and delicate observatory, we travel with redundant sets of instrumentation, including temperature, humidity and shock recorders. This monitoring is required to ensure that the hardware being shipped is not compromised during shipment."
GLAST, the first imaging gamma-ray observatory, will explore the most extreme environments in the universe, Clough said. The telescope will detect thousands of gamma-ray sources, most of which will be supermassive black holes in the cores of distant galaxies.
After a final meeting of scientists, engineers, technicians and officials on Wednesday, the observatory received the final "Ready to Go!" from all teams. The telescope was launched on United Launch Alliance's Delta II Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral.
Crane stood by Wednesday morning and waited to see if the launch would take place.
He had to take the huge empty crate in which the telescope was transported back to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
"I'm waiting outside down here in Florida with the big huge empty crates in anticipation that this thing will take off today," Crane said in a telephone interview before launch Wednesday. "I'm going back to D.C., then come back down here and pick up my trailer, which will be loaded with all the launch computers and stuff and take that back to the Goddard Space Flight Center."
http://kennebecjournal.mainetoday.com/news/local/5143721.html
BY MECHELE COOPER
Staff Writer Kennebec Journal
GARDINER -- What do black holes in space and a long-haul trucker from Gardiner have in common?
The Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, NASA's most powerful space observatory.
The telescope blasted into space from Cape Canaveral, Fla., at 12:05 p.m. Wednesday to begin a five-to 10-year mission orbiting earth.
In the decade it took to conceptualize, design, build, test and launch the telescope, moving the observatory was one of the few times the $850 million project would have been exposed to failure, according to Scott Clough, NASA's instrument systems engineer.
That is why Jeff Crane, of Gardiner, a trucker for 30 years, is the only person allowed to transport the telescope, which is known by its acronym.
"Jeff moved GLAST or major portions of GLAST across the country five times," Clough said. "Not once did we have any issues with our transport. Being such an expensive and delicate observatory, we travel with redundant sets of instrumentation, including temperature, humidity and shock recorders. This monitoring is required to ensure that the hardware being shipped is not compromised during shipment."
GLAST, the first imaging gamma-ray observatory, will explore the most extreme environments in the universe, Clough said. The telescope will detect thousands of gamma-ray sources, most of which will be supermassive black holes in the cores of distant galaxies.
After a final meeting of scientists, engineers, technicians and officials on Wednesday, the observatory received the final "Ready to Go!" from all teams. The telescope was launched on United Launch Alliance's Delta II Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral.
Crane stood by Wednesday morning and waited to see if the launch would take place.
He had to take the huge empty crate in which the telescope was transported back to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
"I'm waiting outside down here in Florida with the big huge empty crates in anticipation that this thing will take off today," Crane said in a telephone interview before launch Wednesday. "I'm going back to D.C., then come back down here and pick up my trailer, which will be loaded with all the launch computers and stuff and take that back to the Goddard Space Flight Center."
http://kennebecjournal.mainetoday.com/news/local/5143721.html
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Plato (427-347 BC)
Plato (427-347 BC)
