The Complete Book of Spaceflight: From Apollo 1 to Zero Gravity

14 AIRS (Atmospheric Infrared Sounder)
AIRS (Atmospheric Infrared Sounder)
An instrument built by NASA to make extremely accurate
measurements of air temperature, humidity, cloud
makeup, and surface temperature. The data collected by
AIRS will be used by scientists around the world to better
understand weather and climate, and by the National
Weather Service and NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration) to improve the accuracy of
their weather and climate models. AIRS is carried aboard
the Aqua spacecraft of NASA’s EOS (Earth Observing
System), which was launched in May 2002.
Ajisai
See EGS (Experimental Geodetic Satellite).
Akebono
A satellite launched by Japan’s ISAS (Institute of Space
and Astronautical Science) to make precise measurements
of the way charged particles behave and are accelerated
within the auroral regions of Earth’s magnetosphere. Akebono,
whose name means “dawn,” was known before
launch as Exos-D.
Launch
Date: February 21, 1989
Vehicle: M-3S
Site: Kagoshima
Orbit: 264 × 8,501 km × 75.1°
Mass at launch: 295 kg
Akiyama, Tokohiro (1944–)
The first Japanese in orbit and the first fee-paying space
passenger. A reporter for the TBS television station,
Akiyama flew to the Mir space station in 1992 after his
employer stumped up the cost of his ride—$12 million.
Alongside him was to have been a TBS colleague, camerawoman
Ryoko Kikuchi, but her spaceflight ambitions
were dashed when she was rushed to the hospital before
the flight for an emergency appendectomy.
Albertus Magnus (1193–1280)
A German philosopher and experimenter who, like his
English counterpart Roger Bacon, wrote about black powder
and how to make it. A recipe appears in his De mirabilis
mundi (On the Wonders of the World): “Flying fire: Take
one pound of sulfur, two pounds of coals of willow, six
pounds of saltpeter; which three may be ground very finely
into marble stone; afterwards...some may be placed in a
skin of paper for flying or for making thunder.”
Alcantara
A planned launch complex for Brazil’s indigenous VLS
booster. Located at 2.3° S, 44.4° W, it would be able to
launch satellites into orbits with an inclination of 2 to
100 degrees.
Alcubierre Warp Drive
An idea for achieving faster-than-light travel suggested
by the Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre
in 1994. 4 It starts from the notion, implicit in Einstein’s
general theory of relativity, that matter causes the surface
of space-time around it to curve. Alcubierre was
interested in the possibility of whether Star Trek’s fictional
“warp drive” could ever be realized. This led him
to search for a valid mathematical description of the
gravitational field that would allow a kind of space-time
warp to serve as a means of superluminal propulsion.
Alcubierre concluded that a warp drive would be feasible
if matter could be arranged so as to expand the
space-time behind a starship (thus pushing the departure
point many light-years back) and contract the
space-time in front (bringing the destination closer),
while leaving the starship itself in a locally flat region
of space-time bounded by a “warp bubble” that lay
between the two distortions. The ship would then surf
along in its bubble at an arbitrarily high velocity,
pushed forward by the expansion of space at its rear and
by the contraction of space in front. It could travel
faster than light without breaking any physical law
because, with respect to the space-time in its warp bubble,
it would be at rest. Also, being locally stationary,
the starship and its crew would be immune from any
devastatingly high accelerations and decelerations (obviating
the need for inertial dampers) and from relativistic
effects such as time dilation (since the passage
of time inside the warp bubble would be the same as
that outside).
Could such a warp drive be built? It would require, as
Alcubierre pointed out, the manipulation of matter with
a negative energy density. Such matter, known as exotic
matter, is the same kind of peculiar stuff apparently
needed to maintain stable wormholes—another proposed
means of circumventing the light barrier. Quantum
mechanics allows the existence of regions of negative
energy density under special circumstances, such as in the
Casimir effect.
Further analysis of Alubierre’s Warp Drive concept by
Chris Van Den Broeck34 of the Catholic University in
Leuven, Belgium, has perhaps brought the construction
of the starship Enterprise a little closer. Van Den Broeck’s
calculations put the amount of energy required much
lower than that quoted in Alcubierre’s paper. But this is
not to say we are on the verge of warp capability. As Van
Den Broeck concludes: “The first warp drive is still a long
way off but maybe it has now become slightly less
230, 239
improbable.”