McMaster team sending a bit of the Hammer into space
No, it's not a scene from Thor." But McMaster researcher Andrew Gadsden and his team are flinging a hammer (or rather HAAMR) to the high heavens, non-fiction style, in an effort, ultimately, to help save the world.
They've developed a highly specialized robotic mount for a highly specialized telescope, to be deployed 70,000 feet in the sky, a chip shot from outer space.
That's even higher than the spy balloons were flying at," says Gadsden.
The data that the telescope will accumulate - and it can't do it without their mount - will be used by NASA to determine the best ways to understand and address climate change.
The code name of the first generation of the mount is ARTEMIS, which stands for Autonomous Robotic Telescope Mount Instrument Subsystem. It's unrelated to NASA's project of the same name that'll take Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen to lunar orbit and eventually place people back on the moon. In fact, this project was named before the moon mission.
Gadsden, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, along with graduate student Alex McCafferty-Leroux and research engineer Andrew Newton, are already fine-tuning it with a second generation called HAAMR (High-Altitude Aircraft Mounted Robot).
The telescope will capture measurements and data from reflected moonlight. Without the mount, the telescope would not be reliably able to withstand the effects of extreme cold (average temperatures of minus 60 C) and constant motion at such high altitude.
The mount will ensure that the telescope stays tracked on the moon while in flight.
Measuring the moonlight accurately is important because the moon is relatively stable and unaffected by disturbances and changes in the atmosphere and by local conditions and climate that can corrupt the data from less stable satellites. So it serves as a benchmark for Earth-observing satellites.
These satellites, among other sensors and sources, are vital to studying our planet in order to accurately predict and track the consequences of climate change," says Gadsden.
NASA will use the data collected by their Earth-observing satellites to better understand what is happening here on our planet. This knowledge will then be used to build more accurate climate change models.
This project is at the intersection of science and engineering," says Gadsden. We are providing the engineering tools to collect all this data and then we pass the results of that off to science to analyze the data and understand what it means and how to initiate change from it."
NASA, near outer space, robotics, software, code names, environmental relevance. Does it get much better for ambitious young pioneers in the fields of engineering and future dreaming?
We're doing what we love," Gadsden says.
Just the idea of being connected with NASA is the kind of thing one fantasizes about, says McCafferty-Leroux, who's doing his master's thesis at McMaster.
ARTEMIS started about seven years ago when Gadsden was in Baltimore with the University of Maryland, Maryland also being home to the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). He started working at McMaster (his alma mater) in 2022, and since then he and the team have perfected the mount to the point where it has been taken up by NASA, as well as NIST.
ARTEMIS works splendidly well, passing various high altitude tests with flying colours. But on one there was turbulence - a rare occurrence at 70,000 feet - and the system didn't perform as well. Gadsden knows there is always scope for improvement.
Hence, HAAMR, the second generation, which is coming along.
It's a nod to Hamilton," says Gadsden with a smile. The Hammer.
The improvements embodied in HAAMR should enable a doubling of our tracking accuracy and maintain target lock during bumpy portions of the flights," says McCafferty-Leroux.
The mount they have developed and are continuing to perfect was built in-house at McMaster, with a double-gimbal control mechanism that corrects for motion during flight, ensuring accurate tracking.
There's a lot of custom work on this mount," explains Newton, a research engineer in Gadsden's lab. It's not built with off-the-shelf components. Almost everything is custom engineered."
The project that the mount is part of is the 2021 Robert H. Goddard award-winning airborne lunar spectral irradiance mission, air-LUSI.
The mount and telescope get flown up on the wingpod of a Soviet-era ER-2 spy plane.
HAAMR will be delivered to the team at NIST in Maryland in July for integration with their telescope, and next January it will be deployed to NASA's Neil A. Armstrong Flight Research Center (Palmdale, California) for an extended air-LUSI Operational Flight Campaign.
Jeff Mahoney is a Hamilton-based reporter and columnist covering culture and lifestyle stories, commentary and humour for The Spectator. jmahoney@thespec.com