Matt Wronkiewicz’s Weblog

Thanks to the generous offer by Mallory and Joan Green to let me stay with them in Washington DC, I was able to go to March Storm this year. March Storm is an event organized by ProSpace to bring together space enthusiasts for three days of lobbying congress. The specifics of what we talk about are different from year to year, but the overall goal is to encourage more private commercial activity in space, and to reorient the national space program toward solving real problems instead of exploring for the sake of exploration. I have gone to the annual event for five years now and have always been encouraged by the legislative results that follow. Not to mention the enthusiasm of some of the congressional staffers we talk to when they begin to understand what space exploration is really about.

Anyway, we had a very coherent agenda this year, and I think it worked really well. You can read it here.  We had three main points. One, NASA should continue and expand the COTS program for International Space Station logistics and crew access. So far, this program has encouraged private investment in commercial orbital rockets and spacecraft. This is a good thing, because private, for-profit investment is generally much more effective than government investment at improving efficiency and reducing costs. NASA administrator Michael Griffin has done a surprisingly good job of managing and protecting this program to date. The second topic was the threat of near Earth objects (NEOs) to the Earth. Mitigating this threat is one of the ways the national space effort could demonstrate effectiveness at solving real problems, since sooner or later we will find a rock that has it in for us. The only question is how big it is, where it will hit, and whether or not we find it while we can still do something about it. The third topic was space solar power. You may already know that I have a particular interest in this technology. Our presentation centered around the NSSO interim assessment (PDF) of space based solar power. One of the findings of this assessment was that space solar power is a technology that may be able to solve some serious and real energy problems that affect the Department of Defense, and therefore that it merits further study.

I had the pleasure of working with some very smart and dedicated people during my two days of Congressional briefings. On Monday I teamed up with Will Watson of the Space Frontier Foundation. On Tuesday my partner was Joe Gillin. Of course, the event would not have been possible without the extensive efforts of Frank Johnson. A great time was had by all. Below you’ll find a photo from the Sunday training session of Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart giving us a presentation over Skype, on my laptop!

I’ve finished my first Google Gadget. It’s an up-to date map of the Earth using satellite imagery from the Aqua and Terra observation satellites. The satellite data gets downloaded from NASA GSFC and turned into tiles which work with the Google Maps API. No images older than 36 hours are used. There are other satellite maps available online which are more up to date or more complete, but not both.

Add it to your iGoogle homepage or use the interactive map page.I’ve been working on mapping satellite images off and on for about two years. I have a virtual globe program that downloads the images on the fly and lets you spin and zoom around, but it was never in a state that I could distribute it. The biggest problem was that it makes heavy use of NASA’s web server, and I didn’t think they could take the load if lots of people were using it at the same time. The gadget gets around that problem by hosting a reduced resolution map on my own server. If the load gets too much for my web host, I can make use of Google caching, but that has its own problems. There are some defects in the map stitching. MODIS Rapid Response serves the images as JPEGs, with stuff drawn on them. Also, absent data and heavy cloud cover look exactly the same in the images, so picking them apart is a difficult problem. That’s why there’s some occasional white noise or white regions in the map. Finally, NASA doesn’t publish the geolocated satellite images until about a day after the image is taken, so I had to do it myself using the orbital elements of the satellites. I don’t think the orbital elements are exact enough for this, and I think I have some errors in the algorithm. This means that some parts of the map are shifted slightly from the correct locations.

Still, I think the resulting map came out really good. It’s fun to watch as clouds swirl around, dust blows off the Sahara, snow covers New England, and fires consume my home state.