@Ponderable
I just saw a nice show on the NASA channel about the New Horizon probe taking those iconic photo's of Pluto.
They almost didn't make it, there was a really bad computer glitch brought on by having the computer do too much at the same time so it went into safe mode and it took all hands on deck to get it back on track.
It was kind of like the story of Apollo, the only dish able to pick up Apollo transmissions on that first landing almost didn't happen because the wind was too high for the radio telescope dish to be safely aimed at the moon and it was the only one in sight of the moon that day and it was like up, wind died down under 40 Km/hr or so, top speed of the wind for safe operation of the dish, about ten minutes before the landing! There was a nice movie made about it. It was in Australia and the only one ATT capable of getting data from the moon.
My job was Tracking and Timing, the timing part was two atomic clocks and one tertiary quartz clock, a complete set of those and more at each radio telescope used and the idea was when one scope gets ready to go below the horizon and loses data another one picks up but they had exactly 100 Microseconds of a time window to sync one scope with the next one without loss of data.
So all the scopes had Apollo atomic clocks specifically for that exact purpose.
Later, I was offered a job as an Rf tech at Goldstone Space Tracking center, and they showed me the new tile where the old Apollo clocks were, it was disheartening to see the stuff I was trained on go away.
And to add insult to injury, I went out there to Goldstone for the job interview with my GF att, and when we got close, I stopped the car, got out, and was running around the desert like a gazelle, camera in hand, finding these tiny ecology bands with a whole eco system in an area of say one square foot and flowers the size of rice.
So meanwhile, said girl friend is shivering in the car, tight lipped, WE GOTTA GET OUT OF HERE.
I go Why? It turned out that was when she told me she had agoraphobia, fear of open places, which didn't pop up when we were in Venice Beach California, nice city stuff. But out in the desert she starts freaking out. So like the idiot I am , I refused the job, which would have been a total change of life and went back to Venice Beach getting jobs like an RF tech at Raytheon working on receivers for the government that has specs of zero Hz to 40 gigahertz and accurate in amplitude detection on all those bands, accurate within one db. Nice job and such but nothing like it would have been at Goldstone.
Then later I found out besides agoraphobia she was a kleptomaniac and told me about her time living in NYC, working with a shoplifting gang, where a bunch of them would come into a store, high end of course, and they would be around inside, one of them looking at expensive diamonds and such, planned out very well, getting exact dupes of a diamond at the store, the salesman puts one out on the glass for the customer to see, and a woman starts screaming about something or other and of course the clerk looks away, and a switcheroo of the diamond with a fake looking exactly the same.
We didn't last much longer together after THAT revelation. Sigh.
To go from Apollo to a job offer at Goldstone to just working on radio's and satellite stuff was a bit of a letdown. I did get jobs a few years later working over seas in places like Thailand, several years there, and 4 years in Jerusalem with my family, not my former GF🙂 but wife and kids, one of whom graduated from the Anglican International school in Jerusalem, I worked on ion implanters for a company called Varian and that was the end of Varian making ion implanters in '96, they had at one point 80% of the ion implanter business but they screwed up big time, long story there but ended up getting out of the ion implanter business entirely, which they had gotten buying out Extrion in Gloucester Mass and now it is back to Extrion after some 20 years as Varian.
Oh well, such is life.
NASA JUNO probe around IO Dec. 30.
30 Dec '23 08:23
