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As you undoubtedly noticed, Iran launched a rocket on February 2. And released pictures of a space launch vehicle. Which may not be the same thing.

As some of you may know, Geoff Forden is going through some personal stuff right now, which is why we are missing his usual detailed commentary on Iran’s space launch. (He has something coming, but I am inclined to be patient.)

So, in honor of Geoff, I am just going to create an open thread for the Iranian space launch. Here are images from IRNA, ISNA and Mehr to get you started.

Have at it.

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The most recent satellite reported to be joining China’s constellation of Beidou navigation satellites is shown in yellow. An example of a geostationary Beidou satellite is shown in white and China’s one and only navigation satellite in a medium Earth orbit (MEO) is shown in green.

The launch of what is reported to be a seventh Chinese navigation satellite (on 16 January 2010) provides an opportunity to review what we know about this system of satellites. First, it is clear that the satellite, which has yet not been officially designated a Beidou satellite on the NASA space-track website (at least as of 12 noon, 18 January 2010), is intended to be a geostationary satellite. It, and the third stage of the CZ-3 launch vehicle, are in a geostationary transfer orbit (GTO), as the image above shows. Within a few days of launch, the satellite’s apogee motor will fire, positioning the satellite in to its final orbital.

If the case of Beidou 1D is any indication, we will not know which satellite it is replacing until China moves it into position. China, as a responsible spacefaring nation, moved Beidou 1D into a supersync orbit just days after the launch of its replacement satellite, Beidou G-2. Beidou 1D as only about two years old when China replaced it with what is reported to be a second generation Beidou satellite. That is somewhat surprising since Beidou 1 was over six years old at the time and one might have expected it to be replaced before the much younger 1D. If China decided to replace 1D because it was failing, they must have had plenty of warning since they were still in control of that satellite.

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Current Beidou Constellation is shown (at the top) with the ground tracks for three orbits for each satellite projected onto the Earth’s surface; (lower left) an equatorial view of the satellites; (lower right) a polar view of the constellation. Note the Beidou 1D’s ground track shows both a large longitudinal displacement over three days and a large inclination—the up and down motion of the ground track. Dates indicated are the launch date of each satellite.

China’s first generation of navigational satellites did not have an onboard atomic clock. That, of course, complicated their operation and limited the number of users. Instead of broadcasting their own timing, as GPS satellites do, the satellite operated as a “bend in a pipe” with the time standard generated on Earth and, in fact, the “user” position determined by a central location after a round trip of radio signals from the center to the satellite to the user and back. It would be very interesting to know if the second generation satellites had their own space qualified atomic clocks.

With this latest satellite, we are also starting to see a pattern in Beidou launches. About every three years (2000, 2003, 2007, 2009*, 2010) a new wave of satellites is plugged into the constellation. (The asterisk for 2009 indicates that this launch might well have been accelerated to replace a dying satellite.) That might indicate the length of time it takes to design and/or build a new satellite. If it includes design time, I would expect evolutionary changes; something we might expect from China in any case given their known history of systematic development.

Iran is justifiably proud of its satellite launch last February. After all, both North and South Korea failed in their satellite attempts in that same year. It appears from images that are starting to show up on the web—pointed out to me by the ever observant Wonk-Reader Tal Inbar—that they have taken the show given to President Ahmadinejad at the Iranian Space Center on the road. These images show new and revealing details of both the Safir/Omid system and some indication of the quality of workmanship that goes into it. The image above is another image of the back of the Safir’s second stage engine platform showing more about how the turbopump is enclosed. Compare it to the image shown here, which shows more of the turbopump. The very frail looking “flaps” are light-weight baffles to prevent the fuel from sloshing about particularly during staging. Other images show what appear to be drain holes to the fuel tanks, a new telemetry dish antenna, and several nice views of the first stage engine (and are those indigenously produced components laid out on little pedestals?) Any help translating the Farsi on any and all these images would be gratefully appreciated!

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This is the second in a series of preparatory posts leading up to a discussion on the Safir’s guidance system. The first discussed the orientation of the Safir at launch and showed, as closely as the errors associated with photo-interpretation would allow, that it’s first stage guidance and control system was a standard SCUD-type system: Fin I is oriented along the direction of flight of the missile and its pitch program operates in that plane.

This short blog post discusses the ground terminal trucks Iran used to communicate with the satellite. Iran, in accordance with the “rules of the road” organized by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), had an uplink (401 MHz) and a downlink (465 MHz) frequency for the Omid satellite recorded in the ITU-R’s Master Registry. Various computer animations of the launch show mobile ground stations positioned around Iran for communicating with the satellite and it would be nice to confirm that images taken of ground station trucks are used for that purpose. It also turns out to be a very satisfying exercise in photo-interpretation. A future post will discuss communications for guidance purposes, as was implied in the secret missile memos.

As the image above—taken during a visit to the Iranian Space Center by President Ahmadinejad—shows, there are trucks with potentially suitable antennas. The dual antennas are of a Yagi-Uda design (often simply called a Yagi antenna) with 12 passive “directors,” a looped Balun-type element for radiating the signal and, at the very rear of the array, a somewhat larger “reflector.” The reflector is to ensure that there is a preferred direction to the antenna as opposed to being sensitive to signals from both directions along the boom. The Balun radiator matches the impedance from the simple coaxial cable to the array and the directors increase the “gain” or directionality of the antenna. Interestingly, there are both vertical and horizontal arrays on each boom with the horizontal array set back a quarter wavelength (see below), perfectly suited for detecting or radiating circularly polarized radio waves. That is needed because the Omid satellite tumbles as it orbits and its polarization—while not circular—is directed in an arbitrary, time varying manner. The bulky cable run up to the antenna hub is for controlling the direction of the antenna arrays and could, though there is no way to know from the photo, be capable of autonomous direction if it is set to maximize the strength of the signal.

Yagi antennas are nice from a photo-interpretation point of view because their dimensions are so easily related to their wavelength. For instance, an optimal 13 element (counting the radiator but not the reflector) Yagi for 401 MHz has a boom length of 2.7 meters. That’s from reflector to last director. It also has a reasonable antenna gain, which means that half the uplink beam is radiated into a cone with a half angle of about 16 degrees. The question then becomes: is the observed array consistent with these expectations?

The image to the left is taken from a more suitable perspective for photo-interpretation. The antenna arrays are nearly horizontal and close to being aligned with the rear of the truck. I have drawn two vertical lines continuing up the truck’s rear edges and a third, horizontal, line paralleling the antenna booms. Of course, there are a great number of approximations taken in this drawing. But then again, there are some approximations still to come. The most important of those is to assume that the truck’s rear cabin is approximately two meters in width. With that assumption, we can estimate the boom length to be approximately 2.9 meters long (from radiator to last director). This is consistent with the Omid satellite’s uplink frequency given all the approximations we have made. Either the far antenna in the image is shorter than this (if it is used for the downlink) or they are running the antennas nonoptimally for reception or there is a different receiver somewhere not on the truck.

What I find most interesting is the conclusion that if there are antennas on the Safir that have significantly different lengths than the Omid’s, then these trucks are not being used to communicate with them.

Update | 12:42 November 3, 2009 As if on cue, Michael Wines in the New York Times ledes Qian’s obituary with the grossly inaccurate statement that Qian “single-handedly led China’s space and military rocketry efforts.” No, he didn’t. Not single-handedly, at least.

Qian Xuesen — often called the “father of China’s space and missile programs” — has died. He was 98.

The late Iris Chang wrote a wonderful biography of Qian, Thread of the Silkworm, which I heartily recommend.

Qian was a more complicated figure in the development of China’s space program than mere partrimony suggests. Gregory Kulacki and I, in our monograph A Place for One’s Mat, argued that Qian’s legacy is profound, if mixed:

The historical accounts also shed light on the role of certain personalities. Qian Xuesen is rightly lauded as the “father” of China’s space program. But from the historical accounts, he emerges as a more complex, human figure than in English-language accounts. Qian is, first and foremost, a cheerleader, pressing China’s leaders to consider the possibilities of interplanetary spaceflight even as China endured one of the worst famines in human history. In some cases, Qian’s enthusiasm may have undermined China’s space development. In other cases, he was essential to move the bureaucracy. In the United States, a certain mythology has grown up around Qian, suggesting that, were it not for his deportation from the United States, China might not have developed missiles and satellites. Qian was undoubtedly a major figure linking the scientists and engineers to the political leadership. But Qian, for all his technical skill, was not the principal designer of any of China’s rockets or satellites. Dozens of other Chinese scientists, many of them trained in the United States, made invaluable contributions. American myths about Qian reflect views about “great men” in history, as well as the debates about McCarthyism, not Qian’s role in China’s space program.

This is a carefully worded paragraph. I recommend the entire monograph to get a sense of the role that Qian played. (Peter Brown observes our portrayal put Qian in a somewhat different light than Chang. I am happy to let readers judge for the themselves.)

Our conclusions are based, in part, on a two volume set of Qian’s correspondence that Gregory hauled back from China:

钱学森. 钱学森书信选 1956.2 -1991.12. 国防工业出版社, 2008.
钱学森. 钱学森书信选 1992.1 -2000.7. 国防工业出版社, 2008.

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Cataloged debris associated with the 10 February 2009 collision of Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 as of 23 October 2009. The orbits associated with the major pieces of each satellite are indicated.

As we wait for the next shoe to fall in the Iranian nuclear crisis, I feel a real need for a short break to consider something completely different at least for a little while. The evolution of the debris from last February’s collision between a dead Cosmos satellite (Cosmos 2251) and Iridium 33 always represents an interesting and important digression. First off, here is the score card as of 23 October 2009:

Debris Associated with Iridium 33’s Orbit:
Cataloged: 484
Decayed: 17 (3.5% of those cataloged)

Debris Associated with Cosmos 2251’s Orbit:
Cataloged: 1102
Decayed: 35 (3.2% of those cataloged)

Qualitatively, the plot of the debris positions shown in the image above shows that the debris associated with the cosmos satellite’s orbit has precessed to a greater extent around the globe than that associated with the Iridium’s. This does not represent a wider angular distribution to the pieces following the cosmos’ orbit but rather a significantly greater change in the ensemble’s average speed than that associated with the Iridium. (It appears that observational biases eliminated those pieces with large angular differences from the catalog, at least it keeps them from being associated with either of these two satellites.) This difference in orbital speed distributions is shown below, which I made several months ago when there were far fewer pieces cataloged:

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The orbital speeds of the collision debris. The arrows indicate the original satellites’ orbital velocities.

Why did the pieces associated with the Cosmos’s orbit end up with such a significantly greater shift in orbital speed than for the Iridium’s? It would be tempting to say that this asymmetry is somehow related to the geometry of the collision but it is hard to imagine how that asymmetry could arise. Perhaps the Cosmos passed through a portion of the Iridium that had relatively light components and that “all” those were bounced into the Cosmos’s orbit or at least into trajectories that made large angles with both orbits and were not associated with the collision. Those pieces that ended up in the Iridium orbit might have been broken apart by the shockwaves that traveled through the satellite after the collision. That might explain the factor of roughly twice as many pieces in the Cosmos orbit as in the Iridium orbit. Such “delayed” breakup is probably not properly modeled in NASA’s computer programs that predict the numbers of debris created (at least not in my limited understanding of those programs, though I could be wrong about this). In any case, this collision should reveal interesting phenomena is hypervelocity collisions of extended objects. Phenomena that will be important for, among other things, missile defense where the increasing emphasis is the destruction of specific components of incoming warheads. (Richard Lloyd has an updated version of this book but for some reason I cannot find a link for it.)

Update (one minute later): It looks as if the other shoe has indeed fallen with NPR reporting that Iran has reneged on the TRR refueling deal.

Up-update: First media reports are always so problematic. Other reports now say that Iran will respond to the deal next week. Thanks for pointing this out Josh! ( Here is a more “official” statement.

The last serious debate over ASAT testing occurred in the 1980s. In addition to advocating the Strategic Defense Initiative, Reagan administration officials pushed for the testing of a kinetic energy ASAT system employing the Air Force’s F-15 as a launch vehicle (above). The Soviet Union had previously tested, with decidedly mixed results, a co-orbital interceptor designed to kill satellites in low earth orbit with buckshot-like effects.

The Pentagon carried out a KE-ASAT test against an aging U.S. meteorological satellite on October 13, 1985. Members of Congress disinclined to fund further ASAT tests employed a variety of blocking methods, including legislative provisions calling for the consideration of diplomatic initiatives, which the Reagan administration parried in the following way:

In general terms, the United States remains willing to consider limitations on specific weapon systems, including ASATs, which meet the requirements accepted by the Congress in 1984: that they be equitable, verifiable, and compatible with US national security. In the case of ASATs, however, we have yet to identify a specific proposal which would meet these criteria.

Alternative views on the value of ASAT testing constraints filled one of my shoe boxes in the 1980s. Paul Stares, then at Brookings, wrote a fine book, Space and National Security (1987) in which he argued that,

The principal benefit of an arms control agreement would be to prevent transforming what is still a relatively immature threat to one that is altogether more formidable and more difficult to counter unilaterally. Given the problem of monitoring the dismantlement of existing systems, test restrictions provide the most useful approach to constraining the evolution of more sophisticated ASAT weapons.

Daedalus published two volumes on space weapons in 1985, including an essay by Kurt Gottfried and Richard Ned Lebow, warning that, “ASATs could both increase the likelihood of war and complicate its termination.” Their prescription, like that of Stares, was the prevention of the development of new, highly capable ASAT systems through a test ban. Former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, writing in Arms Control Today, also supported a ban on further ASAT testing “so far as verification can support such a ban.”

More creative thinking came from a high-powered commission co-chaired by Fred Ikle and Albert Wohlstetter. Their 1988 report, Discriminate Deterrence, included the following recommendation:

Exploration of a possible tacit understanding or even explicit agreement with the Soviets on self-defense zones around many of the satellites… Such an arrangement might permit some entries into the self-defense zones and would not affect normal, non-threatening satellite operations, including perhaps some inspections.

A verifiable KE-ASAT test ban in the 1980s would have met US national security requirements, but few could foresee back then how much of a threat debris would pose to satellites essential for personal, national, economic, and international security. A clear glimpse of this unwelcome future was provided fourteen years after the Reagan administration’s F-15 ASAT test, when one piece of debris from the shattered target satellite came within one mile of crashing into the newly launched international space station.

If there were any lingering doubts about the sheer irresponsibility of causing massive debris fields by means of KE-ASAT tests, the PLA dispelled them in January 2007.

Mating the Indigenous KSLV-1 Second Stage with the Angara

It always helps to go back and read the original documents, even to things you think you know fairly well. I found myself doing that recently when a number of ( wonk-readers questioned the MTCR-soundness of Russia’s sale of the Angara as a first stage for the KSLV-1. Now that the announced launch window for the KSLV-1 has come and gone (and with it the delegation from the DPRK) and they are still fixing the software problem, it might be a good idea to review the MTCRs relevance as we await developments. Not only is it interesting in and of itself, but it also might help define exactly what is South Korea’s space launcher development path.

First, selling the Republic of Korea the Angara counts as a category I sale (specifically Category I, Item 2), the sale of an individual rocket stage, according to the MTCR Equipment, Software, and Technology Annex. However, selling Category I items is still left up to the discretion of the seller if that country believes it will not be used for delivering weapons of mass destruction. Additional items that Russia might have considered selling ROK (but my guess is that they didn’t) include a guidance set suitable for putting something in orbit. Even SCUD guidance sets would be considered Category I. Of course, once Russia, along with the most of the rest of the world, has reached the conclusion that the ROK isn’t going to develop WMD, it can sell almost anything except production equipment. The guidelines clearly say that the “strong presumption” would be to deny the sale of production facilities for Category I items.

Instead, I think it will turn out that the ROK developed its own guidance set, which after all would also have to be used for the indigenously developed second stage. By purchasing a powerful first stage (but not its production facilities), the ROK can continue to develop its liquid-propellant technology in parallel with the orbital insertion technology which it will exercise during the KSLV-1 launch.

Update: As a number of readers point out, South Korea did launch the KSLV-1 during the previously announced period. (I must have missed the announcements some how.) Initial media reports indicate that the “orbital injection” was somewhat higher than intended. Perhaps there was an attitude determination/control issue or some other guidance issue.

Update (9:45 EDT 26 Aug 2009):

As of this morning, the NORAD catalog still does not have the South Korean satellite listed so its looking more and more like it failed to make it into orbit.

Bloomberg. com is reporting that the nose fairing failed to separate , causing the satellite to fail to get to orbital velocity. I’m a little surprise at that AND the report that the satellite was inserted into a higher than planned orbit. Perhaps that was just the peak trajectory reached? Or perhaps its just media noise?

The Republic of Korea (ROK) aborted today’s launch of the KSLV-1 at T minus seven minutes. The crystal-clear blue skies shown in the picture, with the only cloud present being the venting of LOX boil-off, seem to indicate that it was not weather that caused the abort. Instead, it could be either a technical or a political problem. Not enough has been announced for us to discuss technical problems, though that is obviously a possibility with a new rocket. So let’s discuss the political angle.

As the New York Times notes in its article on the aborted launch, the DPRK has been agitating against the launch. Obviously, the North’s national pride would be hurt if the ROK succeeded in launching a satellite the first time it tried after three successive DPRK failures. It has responded in an interesting way by tweeting (oh, dear, once again I am reminded that North Korea is more technologically hip than I am) that it is closely watching to see if the same sanctions are applied to South Korea as were applied to the North. Of course, the South Korean rocket development program was never banned the way the North’s was.

But the real reason the ROK canceled the flight might have just as much to do with the dead as the living. It appears that the DPRK is sending an official representative to the funeral of the late ROK president Kim Dae-jung. Postponing a space launch to some time in the indefinite future seems like a small price to pay for a possible new opening with the North.

India’s CIRUS reactor in Google Earth (top) and Bhuvan (bottom)

I love Google Earth and don’t know how I could have ever done my job before it was invented. (The love is apparently not mutual since Google censored my work on China’s ASAT, at least in China.) However, not everyone loves Google Earth (GE). Perhaps you remember India strongly objecting to GE when it first came out. Of course, India has always objected to people photographing its bridges and military instillations and perhaps it has a point considering how the Mumbai terrorists apparently used GE to familiarize themselves with their targets. These are some of the issues we who use open source information have to face. that is why it is so surprising that India has, apparently, introduced its own knock-off of Google Earth with the introduction of Bhuvan, Sanskrit for Earth. It seems like India has decided that if you cannot ban GE, you should emulate it, but at a much reduced resolution. And as far as I can tell, no coordinates. (In the interest of full disclosure, I have to say that I am just getting familiar with Bhuvan and some of its features might not have revealed themselves to me.)

Both the low resolution and the lack of geographic coordinates would make Bhuvan much less of a security threat, but of course do nothing to get rid of GE. As the above two images show, GE has little to worry about as far as competitors go; the resolution of Bhuvan is reported to be 5 meters which severely limits it usefulness for, at least the kind of work I do. (Interestingly, the little blurb I saw that stated the resolution was 5 meters also bragged about how you could zoom down to 10 meters while GE was limited to 200—is that true?—it didn’t say, however, that 5 meter resolution looks awful at 10 meters height.) Bhuvan does look like it will eventually have some interesting features such as reporting the type of soil in different locations. But if this proves useful, GE will undoubtedly incorporate such information too.