Article#562 - Supersonic Eclipse Chase

When Astronomers Chased a Total Eclipse in a Concorde

WRITTEN BY CHRIS HATHERILL

March 9, 2016 // 09:00 AM EST

On Wednesday, a solar eclipse gave people across a swath of Indonesia and the South Pacific the chance to see a generous 4 minutes and 9 seconds of totality: the awe-inspiring sight of the moon completely covering the sun, turning day into night and offering a rare glimpse of the corona, the gas swirling in the Sun’s outer atmosphere.

But in 1973, a small group of astronomers from around the globe had a secret weapon for seeing a longer eclipse than ever before: a prototype Concorde, capable of chasing the eclipse across the Earth at twice the speed of sound.

The future airliner—developed in a partnership between the French and British governments—had first flown in 1969 and was nearing the end of its successful test program. It had shown that supersonic passenger travel was very much possible, and proven easier to handle in the air and on the ground than had been theorized. Under the control and overall direction of French test pilot André Turcat, the French Concorde “001” prototype had set numerous speed and altitude records. An era of supersonic passenger flight was on the horizon, promising to cut trans-Atlantic jaunts to a breezy 3 and a half hours, less than half the time of a conventional jet.

As French and British aviation engineers readied their Concordes for passenger flight, the solar astronomy world was gearing up for its own milestone: the longest total solar eclipse of a lifetime, on June 30, 1973. The eclipse promised a luxurious view if you stood at the right place on the planet: a maximum of 7 minutes and 4 seconds as the moon passed over the Sahara Desert. It would be just 28 seconds short of the longest possible eclipse viewable from Earth; in the preceding several hundred years, there had only been one eclipse longer than this one, and there would not be a longer total solar eclipse until June 2150.

Independently of each other, astronomers in France and the UK saw a happy coincidence in the new aircraft and the upcoming eclipse: In Concorde, they could follow the shadow of the moon as it raced across the planet. In theory, a supersonic transport (SST) could give them over 70 minutes to watch the eclipse, ten times more observation time than they’d get on the ground, and high above any potential clouds and water vapor. Now they just had to get their hands on one.

“I don’t know if this kind of adventure would be possible today. I think now all the structures are way more organized and hierarchical.”

In London, British astrophysicist John Beckman had been using aircraft to do astronomy for years, despite being a nervous flyer himself. “I was working in a pioneer group of far infrared submillimeter physics,” he recalls. “At that time you could do very little work of any kind from the ground. You would have to go to very high mountains, or fly. My scientific curiosity allowed me to overcome my nerves.”

Beckman put in a request to use the British Concorde “002” prototype but was turned down, possibly because the UK test program was lagging behind the French. In May of 1972, just over a year before the celestial encounter, an astronomer from the Paris Observatory called Pierre Léna took his own proposal to French test pilot André Turcat personally. A scientifically-curious pilot, he’d given the young researcher an hour of his time. Over lunch at a restaurant inside Toulouse Airport, Léna sketched out his vision on the paper tablecloth.

“I don’t know if this kind of adventure would be possible today,” laughs Léna, now 78 but still an active member of the scientific community. “I think now all the structures are way more organized and hierarchical. I was lucky I got to do it, and of course I was young. In fact, I was very lucky people even took me seriously!”

The plan seemed deceptively simple. Closing in at maximum velocity, Concorde would swoop down from the north and intercept the shadow of the moon over northwest Africa. Traveling together at almost the same speed, Concorde would essentially race the solar eclipse across the surface of the planet, giving astronomers an unprecedented opportunity to study the various phenomena made possible by an eclipse: the ethereal solar corona, the effect of sunlight on the darkened atmosphere, and the brief red flash of the chromosphere, a narrow region around the sun that’s usually washed out by the much brighter photosphere.

Turcat was impressed. He pitched the idea to his bosses at Aérospatiale, who gave a tentative green light, and agreed to assume the cost of the mission. Turcat and chief navigation engineer Henri Perrier got to work on all the details, factoring in weather patterns and even ground temperatures in the places where Concorde could take off from, which would affect the fuel load. (The Concorde’s engines were optimized for the upper atmosphere, though this made them less efficient on the ground. Just taxiing for take-off, the Concorde burned more fuel than a 737 flying from London to Amsterdam, a fact which contributed to its eventual grounding.)

Eclipse map of June 30, 1973. Image: NASA

Léna and his colleagues began thinking of what experiments they would carry with them into the stratosphere and working out the details of actually intercepting the eclipse. After deciding on Gran Canaria as a good starting point, the team planned a route south and then east along the eclipse line. Turcat and Perrier looked into which runways in Africa would be able to handle the 200-foot long aircraft, which didn’t exactly stop on a dime. They pushed as far west as possible, to N’Djamena in Chad, with Kano in Nigeria as a back up. The actual rendezvous would take place over Mauritania, which agreed to close its airspace to commercial air traffic at midnight the night before.

“There was a lot to cover,” Léna recalls. First was the mechanical transformation of the plane. Occuring during the summer solstice and practically along the Tropic of Cancer, the eclipse would be at the zenith: directly above them. To view it properly, they would need to install portholes in the roof and design an apparatus to photograph through it.

The windows would have to resist the pressure difference between the cabin and the outside, as well as the high temperatures—around 100º C—felt on the outer surface of the fuselage in supersonic flight, due to friction. If the porthole were to blow out during flight, that wouldn't necessarily risk the safety of the flight, but it would require an emergency landing and an end to the experiment.

The Queen Mary College system being tested outside the Aerospatiale factory in Toulouse. Left-to-right: Jim Lesurf, Jim Hall (RSRE), and Tony Marston. Photo: Jim Lesurf

“As the research advanced and we got more excited, it became clear to us we couldn’t just do the flight without offering it to other scientists too. So we took the decision to use the Concorde’s maximum capacity and share it between five teams.” There would be scientists aboard from the French Institute of Astrophysics, Kitt Peak National Observatory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Queen Mary University of London, and the University of Aberdeen. “So there were five different experiments, which had the advantage of spreading out the risk of failure. Each had a very different objective.”

When Beckman learned there was room onboard the special flight, “I was absolutely ecstatic,” he recalls. “And a bit worried.” For one thing, time was short. “I had the basic equipment, of course, which was a Michelson interferometer with a helium-cooled detector, but I didn’t have the infrastructure to link with Concorde and track the eclipse path. There was no time to automate it.” Instead, Beckman devised a way to track the eclipse manually, which would require “continuously turning a handle to keep the mirror aligned with one hand, while tilting it down into the observing hole with the other hand.”

At last, in February 1973, with just four months until the eclipse, the scientists received word that the mission was a go. The researchers rushed into final preparations. Besides the time constraints of the rapidly-approaching sun and moon, each experiment would have to cope with limitations imposed by the aircraft itself. Nothing could short-circuit—an onboard fire would be catastrophic—and everything had to be built to withstand the vibrations on takeoff: an afterburner-driven sprint that would accelerate Concorde to 250 miles-per-hour even before lift-off, pinning passengers firmly back against their seats. And, despite the aircraft's clean safety record at that point, in the back of the scientists' minds were legitimate concerns about flying in any experimental aircraft at supersonic speeds.

Concorde 001 taking off on its eclipse mission. Photo: Jim Lesurf

At precisely 10:08 am on the morning of June 30, the four twin-spool Olympus 593 engines under the Concorde’s sweeping white wings powered up to full afterburner and launched “001” down the runway of Gran Canaria's Las Palmas airport. Thousands of miles to the east, the shadow of the moon was already racing across the Atlantic at over 1,200 mph, tracing a path eastward from South America toward the African coast.

"There was no room for emotion; that came later."

Léna, Beckman, and the seven other astronomers aboard had no time to enjoy the joyride. “We were running through all the procedures in our minds,” recalls Léna, “and as soon as we got authorization from the cockpit to get out of our seats we got up and got to work. We had to double check the instruments, the pumps, the recorders… there was no room for emotion; that came later.”

Two minutes after take-off, the aircraft hit Mach 1, or about 707 mph at altitude, and headed southeast toward the moving shadow. Climbing up into the stratosphere at an altitude of 56,000 ft., Turcat pushed the aircraft to Mach 2.05, more than twice the speed of sound. Even after a couple of test flights the atmosphere on board was tense—the timing and the equipment had to work perfectly. Helped by Concorde’s two onboard inertial guidance systems, the crew guided the aircraft along the carefully-mapped trajectory and met the eclipse within 1 second accuracy of the planned rendezvous. The chase was on.

A short French documentary about the flight

“Alone in the Mauritanian sky,” as a French film about the flight poetically put it, Concorde 001 hurtled east along the path of totality. With the eclipsed sun high over ahead, Turcat switched on the night-time navigation lights in the midday darkness. Paintings and stamps issued by various African countries would depict the epic, sci-fi sight, and Turcat would later deliberate about whether to file the flight as a day or night one.

"As the limb of the moon slowly occulted the solar disk, I saw the chromosphere, which flashed out in bright red alpha light.”

Under the four specially-made portholes and along some of the side-facing ones, Léna and Beckman, and others on board focused on the science. Léna and his team concentrated their efforts on detecting dust particles left over from comets in the solar halo, attempting to determine if there was a ring or sphere of them around the sun. Paul Wraith from Scotland used a side-porthole to watch the effect produced by the sudden darkness on oxygen atoms in the Earth’s atmosphere, while veteran American airborne eclipse chaser Donald Liebenberg looked up at the eclipse to measure pulsations in light intensity. From a porthole added to the roof of the plane, he observed, he said, how “the moon appeared to work as a slow camera shutter, slicing off only a tiny piece of the atmosphere each second.”

Beckman, meanwhile, was busy multitasking, with a tape recorder taped to his chest so he could make audio observations about the chromosphere. “Everybody was very concentrated on what they were doing,” he recalls, “but I did have time to glance out of the side window at one point and see the edge of the umbra, the penumbra and the daylight beyond. From the height we were at I could actually see the curvature of the earth, so it was pretty incredible. I was also able to gaze up at the corona and, as the limb of the moon slowly occulted the solar disk, I saw the chromosphere, which flashed out in bright red alpha light.”

One of the specially-designed instruments for observing the composition of the sun's corona. Photo: Pierre Léna

The science and the Concorde could have kept going, but the landing site in Chad was coming up fast. Each team wrapped up their observations and managed to steal a few moments gazing out over the sands of the Sahara at a sight few get to witness. In all, the experimenters observed the totality of the eclipse for a record 74 minutes.

Turning south out of the darkness, Turcat began lining up for the approach. “I would have 10 tonnes of kerosene upon arrival,” he later wrote, giving him “forty minutes’ wait, and the right to a missed approach.” In any event, the aircraft landed smoothly, although Beckman remembers that “the aircraft was within meters of the end of the runway.”

“They all played their role in the normal progression of scientific knowledge, but there were no extraordinary results, it has to be said.”

The aircrew and the astronomers arrived to a surreal scene, having descended from the stratosphere at supersonic speed in one of the world’s most advanced aircraft only to emerge under the strange half-light of the African sun, still partially eclipsed. An attempted coup d’etat (possibly timed to coincide with the eclipse) meant that armored vehicles mingled with people on the street who were using smoky glass to gaze up at the sun.

In one flight, Concorde had given astronomers more eclipse observing time than all the previous expeditions last century—generating three articles in Nature and a wealth of new data. But today Léna, who has recently published a book in French and English about the experiment, Racing the Moon’s Shadow with Concorde 001, is modest about what it accomplished.

“The five experiments all succeeded, but none of them revolutionized our understanding of the corona,” he says in a disarmingly honest way about the flight’s immediate impact. “They all played their role in the normal progression of scientific knowledge, but there were no extraordinary results, it has to be said.”

For the 1999 solar eclipse over Europe, one French and two British Concordes briefly chased the moon’s shadow, but the only passengers on board were tourists. The tragic crash of Concorde flight 4590 shortly after takeoff from Paris on July 25, 2000, killing all 109 passengers and crew and 4 people on the ground, marked the beginning of the end for what Léna called the “great white bird.” Planned Concorde eclipse tours in 2001 were grounded, and in 2003 the final commercial Concorde flights touched down for the final time.

A 1973 French postcard commemorating the mission. Photo: E-space Lollini

NASA and Lockheed Martin have begun to explore designs for a new, quieter supersonic passenger jet (the Concorde's powerful supersonic booms limited its popularity). In England, a group called Club Concorde is trying to raise enough money to get a single Concorde flying again, possibly for the aircraft’s 50th anniversary in 2019.

Still, Léna doubts their incredible flight will ever be repeated. Today, space-based satellites that can watch the sun 24/7 and create permanent artificial eclipses have revolutionized our understanding of the nearest star to Earth—although observing eclipses on Earth is still useful for astronomy.

“At the time, our knowledge of the solar corona was very very limited,” explains Léna. “Today we have far less need for eclipse flights from a scientific point of view because we can put missions like SOHO in space, which is doing essentially what we were aboard Concorde. Our observation methods have changed a lot, so I doubt if today we’d redo a mission like that.”

It’s often said that scientific inquiry leads to innovation, but the Concorde experiment is a reminder that sometimes innovation offers wild, unexpected dividends to science. Today, the exact plane that chased the eclipse in 1973 sits as a permanent exhibit at Le Bourget Air and Space Museum, complete with the special roof portholes and the eclipse mission logo on its fuselage. Léna, John Beckman and other engineers and astronomers were present for the 2013 unveiling, along with the late pilot André Turcat, who passed away just last month.

“There’s no aircraft flying today that would let us do what we did, nothing that can fly that fast for that long," says Léna. "There are military jets that can fly faster, but not with the endurance of Concorde—and of course they couldn’t carry the instruments. Our record is safe for the foreseeable future.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said the Concorde took off from Tenerife; in fact, it left from Gran Canaria. An earlier version also incorrectly indicated the speed of Mach 1 at which "001" was traveling after two minutes of ascent. At that altitude, 10,000 feet, the speed of sound is ~700mph.

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Article#561 - Reperkusi

Rangkaian detik demi detik kejadian di sore hari itu masih jelas terekam dalam memori. Detak jarum detik berdentam menyuarakan nyawanya ke seisi ruangan. Menghujam pelan pelan melalui telinga sosok yang terduduk kebingungan menghadapi sekian lembar kertas di hadapannya.
Di kepalanya, sederetan rumus dan hitungan telah berjejer rapi untuk diejawantahkan menjadi baris demi baris persamaan di kertas. Tetapi dalam setiap dua detik ia memutuskan untuk mulai menuangkannya, ada satu detik di mana konsentrasinya buyar seketika. Terburai seperti serpih karet penghapus yang disisihkannya dari paras meja.
Tetapi bahkan mungkin itu bukanlah permasalahan utama.

Sementara waktu terus mempergulirkan kegelisahan di dalam ruang, berkas jingga cahaya senja mulai menyelinap dari selasar jendela. Mengundang kesadaran indera untuk terus teralihkan ke rona warna indah di balik kejemuan dalam ruang. Dan, hei, sosok yang terus gelisah memandangi lembar demi lembar persoalan itu adalah pendamba senja paling akut yang pernah sebagian orang kenal. Maka bagaimana mungkin ia akan makin tenang ketika jemari semburat senja seolah menggodanya untuk keluar. Melepaskan diri dari segala macam ikatan bodoh dunia yang menggerogoti kewarasan pikiran. Melarutkan diri dalam ketinggian langit manakala ia memadukan mentari senja dengan peraduannya.

Ia terpenjara dalam ruang sempit kaku itu, menatap nanar lembaran kertas yang memancangnya pada bangku. Tetapi jelas kentara ke mana pikirannya terpancang: pertunjukkan megah yang hanya mampu menyusupkan rona warnanya. Menyusupkan cercah yang tak mampu menangkal kebengisan ruang sempit itu dalam menyurutkan nyala api hati manusia, meski tetap sanggup untuk memberikan sosok itu kesadaran menyakitkan akan apa yang tak bisa ia dapatkan.
Siapa yang akan berdiri bangga menawarkan diri menyaksikan betapa sesuatu yang demikian ia damba beranjak pergi perlahan di hadapannya? Semua manakala ia terbelenggu, tidak mampu memperjuangkan apapun, bahkan untuk sekadar mengucapkan sampai jumpa.

Rona senja menghilang berganti malam, dan di dalam ruangan temaram, seorang anak manusia terpekur dalam tapaknya menempuh suram. Suasana muram yang agaknya biasa diperkuat oleh langit yang ikut berarak sendu, dicoba diusirnya dari benak supaya tidak mencekam.

Setidaknya masih ada senja yang akan datang.
Setidaknya menumpuk segala balada dalam jiwa tidak mengubah keadaan.

Come on
Why're you scared?
You'll never change what's been and gone

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Article#560 - Brexit

[latest update: 22nd September, 2016, 20:45 (UT+9)]

A little glance on this blog every now and then will be more than enough to show that I am not really into macroeconomics and financial issues. Mainly because I lacked the adequate understanding on the topic, but that will only account for the lack of coverage on those topics only here in this blog. The fact that I rarely talk about this particular issue at all, is simply due to me being not familiar with the political turmoil that wreak havoc within the United Kingdom and European Union as a whole.

Then–who would've thought about this–it drew my full attention. For a completely unexpected reason.

*****

Result of UK referendum of EU membership, depicted by region (left),
local constituency (center), and weighted results of local constituency (right).
Shades of blue indicate areas in favour of leaving the EU, while shades of yellow
indicate areas in favour of remain in the EU.

"Brexit will be followed by Grexit. Departugal. Italeave. Fruckoff. Czechout. Oustria. Finish. Slovakout. Latervia. Byegium."
- Imtiaz Mahmood

What would then be known by the moniker "Brexit", at the time, is still unheard of all across my social media timeline. That day, the afternoon of 24th of June in Japanese Time, would be only the fourth day before my planned trip to leave Japan for several days, the details of which will be given in the upcoming posts. It is barely half a week before the scheduled departure time, yet at that particular afternoon, I still had no possession of the necessary currency for the travel, which is the mighty Euro. This particular perk of mine will come as no surprise to people close enough to know me—I even blatantly portray myself as "Procrastinator" in my Facebook profile page; go figure.

But hey, four days are no long times when it comes to this sort of thing. And apparently the gears of the universe had enough of it already, I was then forced–purely by my amateurish economical insight, that is–to wrap things up real quick.
Just during the afternoon, the news of United Kingdom's referendum to leave the European Union started to surface on my social media timeline. It was early morning within the borders of the United Kingdom, and the circulating news had already pointed out how the ballot leans UK toward leaving the EU. As the sun rose onto the slightly damp corpse of the British Empire, as fate would have it, the result was obvious: UK residents has voted in favor of leaving the EU.

That, among all, lead me to leap onto the Brexit bandwagon.


The impact of that result takes no time to unfold.
From all the news outlets shared all over my social media timeline, it became evident how the world, responded to the morning news of UK actually voting to leave EU. It was particularly apparent from the freefall of both Great Britain poundsterling and European euro, which value dropped by 11% and about 6%, respectively.
At ths point, it's probably obvious: this Brexit has secured me several thousand yens to buy euro.

Graph depiction of EUR-JPY exchange rate in the preceding 10 hours (above)
and 30 days (below) to 24th June, 2016, 15:40 (UT+9).
Screenshot from bloomberg.com.

So now is the time for some money-hunting, I guess?
Because only an hour later, I found myself waiting on the chairs of Japan Post (JP) bank to buy some euro. As far as I an tell, there was nobody else seemingly excited about the prospect of plummeting euro value (or also poundsterling in that matter).
That, despite the bank being fast enough to update the currency value so that I need not to worry about missing out the downfall.

With that rate, it may appear that I can buy Euro now and sell it later after my trip
without losing that much money.
Euro-Yen rate is the lowest one, depicted by EUR.

Being one of the most renowned Japanese bank, of course they provide news coverage. And needless to say, it's Brexit again on the TV.

News about... basically announcement of Brexit.

Final results: 17,41 million people voted for Leave, while 16,14 million voted for Remain.

Quick recap about Brexit

Referendum results (without spoiled ballots)

Leave: 17,410,742 (51.9%)	Remain: 16,141,241 (48.1%)
▲

Aside from the general result portrayed in the above photo, there's an interesting note about the poll result. While United Kingdom in general favored leaving the European Union, things didn't roll the same way for two of its constituent countries: Scotland and Northern Ireland. Both countries basically voted to remain in the EU, with Scotland especially favour staying with 62% versus 38%; even all districts of Scotland voted to remain in the EU. As for Northern Ireland, while some of its districts favour leaving the EU, overall it leans toward staying by 55.8% versus 44.2%. Unfortunately for them, voters from these two countries only accounts for 10.34% of total votes; basically the result is largely dictated by English voters.
Even when Greater London, which also voted in favour of remain in the EU, is counted alongside those two countries, the number still falls short to the other regions which favour leaving the EU.

This, normally, had caused tensions to arise within the UK itself: Scotland already called for a referendum to leave the UK and rejoin the EU, while Ireland had started persuading Northern Ireland to join them under the umbrella of "united Ireland". Right-wing leaders of several EU countries, like France's Marine le Pen and Netherlands' Geert Wilders had also called for a referendum of their own countries to follow the Britons, mainly citing reasons related to immigration problems as a driving force.

All in all, leaving EU is a complicated and lengthy process, as Article 50 of the Treaty of European Union gladly explains. It will take at least another 2 years for the UK to pave its way out of the EU, and until an agreement is reached in relation to this leaving process, we will still have to wait and see. The least I can tell is that with UK leaving the EU, world market may never be the same again. UK is one of the world's economic powerhouse, after all; it's a member of G7, that may be more than enough to explain how big of an impact this whole process may inflict upon the world market.

I'll stop my blabber here though, before I speak too much about thing I may not have enough knowledge about. I'll let these articles handle the rest of the ongoing discussion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_European_Union_membership_referendum,_2016
http://www.vox.com/2016/6/23/12021222/brexit-what-happens-next
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21701265-how-minimise-damage-britains-senseless-self-inflicted-blow-tragic-split
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-36615028
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/gallery/2016/jun/24/britain-votes-to-leave-the-european-union-in-pictures
http://www.todayonline.com/business/britains-votes-break-eu-national-media
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36616018
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36618317
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/06/24/the-british-are-frantically-googling-what-the-eu-is-hours-after-voting-to-leave-it/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/brexit-what-is-the-eu-google_us_576d2dfee4b0dbb1bbba3911?
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-32810887
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/psychology-voting-brexit_us_576d636ae4b0f1683239641f
http://www.unilad.co.uk/news/the-daily-mail-explains-what-brexit-means-readers-seem-shocked/
http://www.vox.com/2016/6/24/12025514/brexit-cartoon

As an aftertouch, let me close this post with several pieces of videos.

[UPDATE] Several insights of Brexit aftermath can also be found in these videos.

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