Health & Science
Worth the trek
by Marilyn Head
Southland, with its remote location and lack of light pollution, is making a unique contribution to international space exploration.
When Robin McNeill took on the job of enterprise project manager at Venture Southland a few years ago, he had no idea that the job title would prove so apt. Now, a picture of the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek on the back of his office door whimsically signals that his work includes “Space – the final frontier.”
“Southland has unique advantages when it comes to space science,” says McNeill. “We’re the last decent bit of land before Antarctica and between Australia and South America, there’s no light pollution or radio interference and although we’re remote, we’re up with the play. We’ve got good infrastructure and superb technicians, so we’ve attracted a number of international research projects.”
The most recent of these is a rocket-tracking facility for the European Space Agency (ESA) being established at remote and radio-quiet Awarua, just north of Bluff.
Southland is fortuitously located on the opposite side of the globe to the ESA’s launch site in French Guiana and is on the trajectory route of one its most important missions: the Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), which will service the International Space Station (ISS).
For the past decade, 16 countries have been building the interlocking modules that make up the 450-tonne ISS. Each has been responsible for specific modules that are assembled in space like so many bits of Lego – the Canadians built a robotic arm; Raphaello, Donatello and Leonardo (multipurpose logistics modules, not Ninja Turtles!) were supplied by Italy; the Russian Svezda module is the crew’s living quarters; the US contributed the solar array and so on. Eventually, the ISS will support seven crew and dozens of scientific experiments in laboratory modules. It will also be the brightest object in the night sky after the moon.
Keeping the station supplied with equipment, spare parts and fuel as well as food, air and water for its crew will require large and regular deliveries and the ATV is designed to do just that, and more. Named Jules Verne after the legendary French sci-fi novelist, the ATV will carry a cargo of up to nine tonnes on its first mission. After automatically docking and pressurising, it will become an extension module.
While attached, its motors will be able to boost the station into a higher orbit to counteract the slight drag of the Earth’s atmosphere. For six months, supplies will be taken out of it and several tonnes of rubbish fed back in, before the whole caboodle separates from the mothership and burns up in a guided re-entry over the Pacific.
The ESA is exclusively responsible for the Jules Verne, the most complex spacecraft ever developed in Europe – the software alone contains a million lines of code. It weighs over 20 tonnes and is the size of a Mack truck, and the ESA’s standard launch vehicle, the Ariane-5, had to be modified to launch it.
When the first of seven ATV launches happens later this year, the Ariane-5, with the Jules Verne safely stowed in its nose cone, will be tracked as it arcs high over Central Europe and across Asia. But just when it has to be deployed, the vehicle will be too far south for contact by the established rocket-tracking facilities in Australia and before it is picked up again by stations in South America.
That’s where Awarua comes in – covering the 15-minute hiatus. Two satellite dishes will provide a communications link and a backup so that mission control can monitor the manoeuvre. It’s been a challenge for ESA’s engineers and lawyers. The engineers weren’t used to building ground stations with poor satellite coverage – most ESA launches are in equatorial or polar orbits with excellent ground and satellite coverage.
And the lawyers?
“International agreements are necessary if one country wants to come into another and be confident that it will be allowed to operate,” says Pat Helm, from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, who initially brokered the deal. “The ESA approached me because many years ago I had worked in radar. I was able to point them in the right direction – and to the right people. They’re very impressed by the span of expertise and skill New Zealanders have – their own teams tend to be quite specialised.” An official agreement between New Zealand and the ESA is imminent.
The tracking station is only one in a long line of international research projects that Southland has attracted. The Unwin Array is another success story. It forms part of an international auroral network exploring the impact of solar flares on the ionosphere. Yet another project will use a redundant 11-metre telecommunications dish to link up with antennas in Auckland and Australia for radio astronomy research.
As McNeill explains, “High-performance computing and high-speed data communication networks can computationally synthesise huge antennas by using lots of smaller, cheaper, well-separated ones. We’re working with Auckland University of Technology’s Centre for Radiophysics and Space Research to develop capability with this sophisticated digital technique called e-VLBI, particularly as there’s potential to host a station for the Square Kilometre Array, a $2.3b international radio astronomy project.”
All this activity spills over to the kids. Tania Lineham, head of science at Invercargill’s James Hargest College, is enthusiastic about involving students in NASA’s RadioJove project, which uses simple radio equipment to observe Jupiter. “It’s a fantastic way to involve young people in real science,” she says.
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