One small step for man, one giant leap for Norfolk

So for the last few months the main item of procrastination within the department has been to form The University of East Anglia’s space program. This is a collaboration project of UEA PhD students and faculty members who have formed an organisation codenamed BLEAT, the Balloon Launch Exploration and Analysis Team, and also known as ARSE, Andrew Rushby’s Space Explorers (our website). Since Commander Rushby (see his blog to see just how much he really loves space) first proposed the idea of establishing Norfolk’s long overdue position in the race to commercialise spaceflight back in March we have been putting a lot of time into making this dream a reality. This is unlikely to aid anybody’s actual work, we’re just doing it for an excuse to do some exciting science in space, because we can and basically (to paraphrase Mallory before he attempted the first ascent of Everest) because it [space] is there.

Bleat Logo, designed by J. Shirley

The first mission, with launch scheduled for 10:00 hours GMT tomorrow (01/12/2012) is a preliminary mission to send cameras and a GPS tracking system attached to a weather balloon up 30km to the edge of space. As well as hopefully getting some cool photos this should allow us to test our methods of launch and recovery so future missions can have a more advanced payload – there’s talk of developing an ‘air-core’ unit to sample the air column at varying heights and also to maybe send some single-celled organisms up as Norfolk’s very first astronauts.

Scale schematic of the space balloon launch and recovery system

As Chief Engineer, it’s been my primarily my job to develop the launch vehicle and make it space worthy. This has mostly involved scrounging materials from the labs and building the ‘Spacebox’ the (hopefully) space-proof capsule that will contain and protect our payload from the hostile environment of near-space. At ≈33km up (the maximum our balloon can reach before exploding as it expands to 20 times its launch diameter) It will have to survive low pressures that would make your blood boil and tissues explode and temperatures down to -80^oC, and then survive the ride back to Earth attached to a rather small parachute, so it’s been heavily insulated and securely duct-taped to perfection (although it has to still be able to vent excess pressure so is not completely air-tight).

'Spacebox' launch capsule (photo courtesy of H. Chylik)

The top-secret launch site – a field in Burton-on-Trent – has been carefully selected by our team of resident Meteorologists led by Tactical Officer Surl. Using computer simulations (developed at Cambridge University) to predict the balloon’s path as it is strongly influenced by the weather conditions and changes in the jet stream this is the closest location to Norwich we can launch from if we want any hope of our payload still landing in East Anglia. Just in case, attached to the capsule are multi-lingual instructions for its return in English, French and Dutch, kindly translated by members of our international team, although if it does not land before reaching the coast it is likely it will end up on the bottom of the North Sea.

Today the final preparations have been put in place, after we finally got CAA approval yesterday, first thing this morning we tested whether it would be possible to transport the balloon fully inflated – to get around regulations on transporting pressurised gasses – but unfortunately it was too big to fit it Captain Mill’s balloon transport vehicle (BLV aka camper van). Luckily however Admiral Professor von Glasgow is fully trained in pressurised cylinder transport and has kindly volunteered to separately drive the helium up for us while we follow in the BLV.

Once launched we will track the balloon’s progress using the GPS system and, orchestrated by Science Officer Chylik running ground control out of UEA and predicting the flight path, the chase team led by Captain Gooch will fearlessly race across East Anglia to recover the payload, or to hopelessly watch it crash (possibly in flames) into the sea.

None of this project would have been possible without the time and dedication by many more people than it has been possible to name above nor the money kindly donated by the UEA (with surprisingly little begging involved. A further mention needs to go to the journalist Michael Brown who has been following us for the last few weeks to put together press coverage for Concrete (UEA’s student newspaper) and has also been instrumental in securing extra funding from the Student Union.

(most of) the BLEAT Team (photo courtesy of H. Chylik)

An update on the outcome of the launch will be posted next week, although you can follow our Twitter feed for exciting live updates, but I thought I should write this pre-launch just in case it all goes wrong while we’re still relatively optimistic and nothing has yet crashed and burned. However, whatever we do, it's never going to be as cool as this by some students from Harvard:

Abuse of power

So, now the students are back, for the last month or so my work’s been pretty much on hold while I've been demonstrating non-stop for the undergraduates. Somehow I've ended up helping on second year module practicals for both Tectonic Processes and Sedimentology, subjects I've not gone anywhere near since being a confused undergrad myself.

Tectonic processes was definitely the most fun of the two, with half of the practicals involving messy experiments, such as using cornflower paste (which one student did keep eating), strips of plastic and wooden canes to look at how varying the rates and amounts of applied strain affected how different materials deformed as analogues for various rock types in the Earth’s crust. The most impressive was using wet sand to produce a half graben by piling the sand on top of plastic sheets and then pulling them apart, which, if the sand had exactly the right moisture content, worked really well, producing a nice series of stepped faults perpendicular to the direction of applied stress. Although trying to keep a straight face demonstrating this with my supervisor at the front of the class while the students on the front table made horrific innuendoes about the shape of the faultzone I was sticking my fingers into kind of failed.

The best part of demonstrating for gullible, trusting undergrads is definitely being able to tell them whatever you want and they will believe you so long as you keep a straight face. The other week they were looking at faulting around the North African craton (paper here) and had to work out why the faults were going around it rather than through it by looking at this figure:

Stress envelopes of the lithosphere around the East African Rift System (Albaric et al., 2009)

As can be easily seen from the strength envelopes, the real reason the faults go around the craton is because it is much stronger down to greater depths than the surrounding (younger) crust. However, it was too easy to convince the students that the faults were going around the craton because Lake Victoria is in the middle of the craton and you obviously can’t fault through a lake as water does not deform in a brittle manner. I did have to eventually go back and help them get to the real answer as otherwise they would have ended up writing that bollocks in their exam or coursework. Although this still isn't in the same league as managing to convince the girlfriend the other week that if the proposed badger cull had gone ahead, swan populations would spiral out of control, as the badger (with its semi-aquatic lifestyle and massively strong jaws) is their only natural predator…

My favourite question from one of the students, in one of the Sedimentology practicals, was a guy asking if the ichnofossil (I think it was a cruziana; an arthropod feeding trace) he was looking at was in granite. If I hadn't already spent half the class arguing with one of the professors over whether one of the samples was actually a sedimentary rock or not (I thought it was an igneous rock (a gabbro) rather than a very immature breccia which she eventually convinced me it was) I should have attempted to convince him that strange thermophilic arthropods did actually live in magma chambers, rather than just admit it was a slightly metamorphosed sandstone/quartzite. Although the majority of these practicals were rather like pulling teeth, how hard is it to describe a mudstone?

Could evil, intelligent magma dwelling trilobites have left tracks in granite?

This Saturday I ended up on a fieldtrip to look at coastal sediments on the North Norfolk coast, as is customary for any geology trip I was hungover and the weather was horrific, cold, wet and windy. This was especially fun for the undergraduates who had decided they wouldn't need waterproofs – although one did bring an umbrella which I'm amazed survived the whole day. Luckily both myself and the other demonstrator were only there to make up the numbers for health and safety purposes, as neither of us knew anything about what was being taught. So, basically, it was like we were undergrads again, stood at the back of the group learning about how cynobacterial mats consolidate sediments, what life is like for a diatomaceous slime and the formation processes of various forms of ripples, while actually getting paid for it. It was nice to get information spoon fed again, I didn't realise just how easy being an undergrad is – it seemed a lot harder the first time round!

This week the students are off on their ‘reading’ week (nobody ever reads), so I should be back doing my own science. However, my mass spectrometer is, of course, broken again. I had to dismantle it a couple of weeks ago and I've now been waiting for the workshop to lathe me a new part for a fortnight. I do think this is a good thing as it means I've actually got very little to do other than play about with old data and prep samples for when it’s finally up and running again, giving me a much needed break from swearing at the damn machine and plenty of time to mess about with other projects as we’re currently in the middle of something rather special, but there’ll probably be more on that next time…

How does this go back together again?