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Secrets of universe revealed thanks to AF research complex
by Philip Lorenz for Arnold Engineering Development Complex Public Affairs
Arnold AFB TN (AFNS) (SPX) Dec 10, 2012

Data from testing conducted on NASA Goddard Space Center's 1,760-pound satellite Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) in the Arnold Engineering Development Complex's (AEDC) Mark 1 Aerospace Chamber in 2000, enabled scientists to determine the universe's size, composition, approximate age and rate of expansion. (Photos by Gary Barton and David Housch). For a larger version of this image please go here.


On June 30, 2001, a Delta II launch vehicle carried NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) on a mission to make fundamental measurements of cosmology - to literally study the properties of the entire universe.

Jim Burns, AEDC's space chambers lead, said that the center's efforts came to light in a recent article published by NASA.

"The solar arrays for NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) were tested in Mark 1 during the late 1990s or early 2000," Burns said. "NASA's recent story regarding this particular project, like others we've supported with testing at AEDC during the 1990s and into this decade, shows the impact our work is having on research today.




Bennett said AEDC's role was "absolutely critical" in helping to pave the way for this landmark NASA Explorer mission to "map" the universe and study its properties.

In 2000, Bennett was NASA Goddard's principal investigator for the MAP project and had tasked Alphonso Stewart to find the best place to ground test the probe's solar array and deployment equipment.

Stewart, an aerospace engineer with NASA Goddard Space Center's Mechanical Engineering Branch, was the lead solar array deployment system engineer for the 2000 testing in AEDC's Mark 1 Aerospace Chamber.


"It would be devastating if it [had] failed; there would have been no recovery from a failure," Bennett said. "NASA would ask me occasionally, 'and what if this deployment fails,' and I would just tell them, 'end of mission.'

"'We will get nothing out of it if that happens' - not the answer they wanted to hear - but it was the truth. Frankly, I leaned very hard on Alphonso and made sure that he understood that this had to work. This was not a best effort. This had to work."

Stewart, who is currently NASA Goddard's lead deployable(s) engineer for the James Webb Space telescope, said finding and then choosing AEDC's Mark 1 Aerospace Chamber as the site for the test paid off in more ways than his team had envisioned.

"At the time, we needed a facility large enough and cold enough to check the functioning of the array," he said. "That system is both a solar array as well as a thermal shield, it actually shields the spacecraft from the sun, so it get can get very cold.

"For example, when facing the sun, the shield is designed to attenuate the heat it generates down to minus 150 degrees [Celsius], and Arnold's [Mark 1] facility had the ability to go to minus 200 at the time. So, we were able to test the shield in that very cold environment.


"And by knowing that, we were able to adjust the size - to make extra material in the blanket because as it deploys, it's shrinking. So that when it does get to the end of the deployment, there is still enough material to allow it to open up. Not knowing that, you would have had a problem when you got on orbit, the system just wouldn't open up properly."


"This satellite [WMAP] has made the most accurate measurement of the age of the universe and that made the Guinness Book of World's Records," Bennett said. "The universe is 13.7 billion years old - when I was in school, we didn't know if it was 9 billion or 22 billion - now we know the age of the universe to one percent.



Bennett, continuing, said, "Five times more (prevalent) than the atoms, there's something that we call cold, dark matter. This is a kind of material that has gravity, but it doesn't give off any light at all. That's why we call it dark matter. We can tell it's there by its gravity, but not by giving off any light.


Bennett said the dark energy "acts like an anti-gravity, it pushes the universe apart."

He emphasized that it will take more work to determine what the dark energy and dark cold matter are composed of, "but we do know from this satellite about the percentage that each of these make up; the pieces of the pie."

Bennett said it also helps to understand how the WMAP functioned.

"The probe was somewhat like a radio receiver," he said. "In the old days, we used to get our radio and TV signals as electromagnetic spectrum waves received and routed to analog receivers, not digitized signals like we get through cable or routed from satellites. And between stations or channels, we had something we called snow or noise. It turns out that one percent of that is actually from space. That's from the beginning of the universe; one percent of that static."


Related Links
US Air Force
Stellar Chemistry, The Universe And All Within It


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