Hubble's 25th Birthday: A Personal Memory from Ms. FHST

Hubble Space Telescope was launched by the shuttle Discovery (STS-31) on 24 April 1990 at 12:34 UTC.  For those of us who worked on the project, the inside joke that the “Hubble Constant is 2 years until launch” had been broken.  No longer was this a mission that we were working towards but, rather, a mission that was about to become reality.  The question in all our minds was, “Will it work?  Will all the years of hard work and planning pay off?”

I first joined the Hubble project in 1982.  It hadn't even been named for American astronomer Edwin Hubble yet.  That was to come a year later in 1983.  When I started, it was simply ST, Space Telescope.  I was a comparative latecomer to the project.  For those who had been there at the beginning in the 1970s, it had been the Large Space Telescope, the Large being dropped as budgets and the realities of operating a telescope in space began to settle in.  Still, it was to be Big with a capital B, a 2.4-meter optical telescope that would operate above the distorting layers of the Earth's atmosphere.  It would be controlled remotely from a control center at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Maryland with all science planning done at the newly established Space Telescope Science Institute on the campus of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.  To those of us who worked there, ST ScI would become known simply as the 'tute, truly an internationally-run observatory whose telescope just happened to be in orbit.

My own role on Hubble was a modest one.  I had an MS degree in astronomy with specializations in celestial mechanics and in astrometry, the science of positional astronomy that compiles positions of stars and other celestial objects.  Thus it was no surprise that my first assignment was to work on the attitude determination system that would use data from spacecraft sensors to determine Hubble's pointing to an accuracy of better than an arcsecond.  The name of the project was PASS, an acronym for POCC Applications Software Support, with POCC itself being an acronymn for Payload Operations Control Center.  Our often repeated inside joke was that we had to be an acronym within an acronym in order not to be a somewhat impolite-sounding POCCASS.

Hubble was to be controlled to an accuracy of 3 milli-arcseconds, finer than any pointing control that had been attempted until that time.  It was to be done using data from gyroscopes, sun sensors, and star trackers.  In 1978, on an earlier mission, I had already made my acquaintance with the Fixed Head Star Tracker (FHST).  Hubble was equipped with three of them, and they would be used to update gyro-based attitudes after every spacecraft slew to a new target.  An FHST had a field-of-view (FOV) of 8-deg by 8-deg and could measure a star's position to 20 arcseconds, good enough to go to the next step of determining what stars were in the field-of-view of the telescope's main optics and use them to determine Hubble's pointing to the sub-arcsecond level.  Little did I know when I joined the project that I was to become the most knowledgeable person on FHSTs, eventually becoming known to many as Ms. FHST.

Cutaway Diagram of a Fixed Head Star Tracker

Hubble was scheduled to be launched by the Space Shuttle in October 1986, and we were all under pressure to complete the ground control systems on time.  The pace was frenetic, and from one system audit review to the next, it was becoming clearer that we would not be ready.  But a shuttle launch could not be changed without upsetting all of NASA's mission schedules.  Senior managers began to think that we would launch Hubble and let it sit in safe mode in orbit, a sort of minimum energy cocoon mode, until the ground systems could be finished and tested.

That went out the window on January 28, 1986, when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73-seconds after launch, killing all on board in the most tragic space accident experienced by the US until that time.  After the tragedy of the loss of all the astronauts on board Challenger had sunk in, we began to realize that our own problem now was not whether we would be ready for a launch in October 1986 but, rather, whether Hubble would be launched at all.  Would the Shuttle ever fly again?  After a few months we were assured that Hubble's launch would take place in 1988.  That launch date soon began to slip, however, leading to our inside joke that we knew the true Hubble Constant[1] to be “two years until launch.”

For me the morning of 24 April 1990 was one of sitting in front of the television and watching the launch and feeling the same thrill I had felt at every launch since the early days of the space program.  This time, however, the thrill was even greater, for Shuttle Discovery was carrying a mission that I had a direct role in.

My own launch excitement in the sense of work, however, began two days later on the morning of April 26.  That afternoon the Canadian-built manipulator arm was to remove Hubble from the shuttle bay and release it into space.  Hubble's systems were being turned on one-by-one and tested before the release.  I had just arrived at my office a short distance from GSFC when a PASS friend and colleague called.  I don't remember his precise words, but they were something like, “Robyn, get out here.  We can't identify what stars the FHSTs are seeing.”  A chill went down my spine.  If Hubble were to be released without the FHSTs being able to identify star patterns, Hubble would be literally lost in space, locked into its cocoon-like safe mode until engineers like me could figure out what had gone wrong.

An hour later I was sitting in front of a terminal in the Space Telescope Operations Control Center (STOCC) at GSFC.   My colleague and friend explained, “We've been trying ever since the FHSTs were turned on, but no matter what we try, the algorithms can't identify the star patterns.”  As calmly as I could, I asked, “Can you get me all the FHST telemetry since the trackers were turned on?  Let's start reprocessing from scratch, taking it step-by-step and paying close attention to detail.”

The STOCC at GSFC

From my experience on an earlier mission, I already knew just how temperamental FHSTs could be.  These were instruments from before the days of charged couple devices (CCDs).  They used simple optics and an image dissector tube, and they could observe only one star at a time.  A controllable magnetic field was used to cause the dissector tube's photomultiplier and photocathode to scan the FOV in a serpentine pattern and lock onto any object brighter than a threshold magnitude for 20 seconds before breaking track and continuing the scan.  FHSTs had been known to track not just stars but the Moon, planets, nebulae, other satellites, space debris, and even bright cities on the Earth's limb.  The trick was to edit out all the junk so that only star tracks remained and then massage those tracks into point images using gyroscope rate data that measured moment-to-moment spacecraft motion.  Finally, these FHST-measured star positions would be passed into a pattern match algorithm that would take the measured positions and compare them with positions in a star catalog.  That pattern match algorithm required fine tuning in order to work reliably.  All-in-all we had just a few hours to get it right before Hubble would be released into orbit on its own.

Slowly, as calmly as we could, we began reprocessing telemetry from the start.  We edited out spurious objects.  We adjusted the editing parameters to get star images with the smallest possible clump size.  As we worked, I became dimly aware of the big screen that hung at the front of the STOCC.  There was Hubble, perched on the manipulator arm, as the solar arrays began to unfurl, unrolling from their containers and glistening like ever-lengthening, golden sails in the bright sun.  Just as the second solar array finished unfurling, we did it.  We identified the stars that were being seen by the FHSTs.  We did some hand calculation sanity checks to make sure we had identified the right stars.  We had.  “Now let's do it again with another data set,” I said. 

 

Hubble on its Own, Released from the Maniupator Arm

One data set after another, we repeated the process, making further adjustments until we could identify stars correctly without further intervention from us.  The algorithms we had designed were working.  A higher level mission manager approached and asked, “Are we GO with the FHSTs?”  We nodded yes.  Shortly after we watched in real time as Hubble drifted away from the arm and from the shuttle.  We had done our part.  Hubble would not be lost in space.

That was my role 25-years ago.  My day in the STOCC as the solar arrays unfurled is one of those images frozen in my long-term memory.  Hubble didn't have an easy start.  Soon the newspapers were joking about Hubble Trouble when it turned out that the telescope's main mirror had been ground to the wrong figure and suffered from spherical aberration that was giving blurry images.  My FHSTs were not out the woods yet either.  Another part of PASS, the Mission Scheduling System, was attempting to use the FHSTs in a way they had never been used before by commanding them to lock on to preplanned reference stars after each telescope slew to a new target.  The FHSTs were failing to find the right stars one time out of three, each failure resulting in the loss of science observations for a good part of an orbit.  It was the second largest problem in Hubble's early operations right behind the flawed mirror.

As they say, however, the rest is history.  Once the mirror's spherical aberration was understood, it was possible to grind corrective lenses that were installed by astronauts on the first servicing mission to Hubble in December 1993.  Those corrective lenses were known by the name of COSTAR, Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement, and they silenced the cries of Hubble Trouble, enabling Hubble to give the crisp images that have become part of both our scientific and cultural lives.

For my part, I was brought onto a team whose mandate was to reengineer the Mission Scheduling System.  We were known as MSRE, the Mission Scheduler Re-engineering team.  We pronounced MSRE like ms'ry, and thus our inside gallows humor was “MSRE loves company.”  My part of the mandate was the Pointing Control Subsystem.  Over the next several years, working as a team, we improved the FHST reference star success rate to better than 99%. 

The last effort I had a small hand in before leaving HST and PASS in 2005 was the design of what became known as the Two-Gyro Science Mode that would radically change the pointing control algorithms in a way that had never been attempted before.  A gyro gives information in one dimension, and thus three gyros are needed to know a spacecraft's orientation in three dimensions.  Six gyros were installed on Hubble for redundancy and in the knowledge that gyros are mechanical devices that eventually wear out and fail.  Hubble's gyros began to fail within a few years after launch, but they were replaced during servicing missions.  After the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, however, all future servicing missions to Hubble were canceled.  Of the six gyros on Hubble, three had already failed.  It was only a matter of time before yet another would fail and force Hubble into permanent safe mode, ending its mission of scientific discovery.

The idea behind this last effort on Hubble was to take me back to my FHSTs.  Gyroscopes give rate information, whereas FHSTs give position information.  But could we watch stars as they moved in an FHST FOV?  Could those position measurements be used to compute a rate, effectively allowing the FHSTs to take the place of one of the gyros?  The answer was yes, they could.  The newly designed control algorithms were so successful that NASA shut down the third of the three remaining operational gyros in August 2005, keeping it in reserve and thereby extending Hubble's operational life.  Even after a final servicing mission to Hubble was reinstated and six new gyros were installed in 2009, Two-Gyro Science Mode has remained the primary control algorithm for Hubble.

How long will Hubble continue to provide us with the beautiful photos and ground-breaking science for which it has no equal?  Current estimates are that Hubble will continue to operate at least until 2018, when the next generation James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled for launch.  It may continue in operation well beyond that as long as budgets allow and spacecraft systems continue to function.  Not bad for a telescope that was designed and built with 1970s and 80s technology and that many thought would not last for its original projected lifetime of 15 years.

If you're wondering by now how it was that this engineer left the Hubble project to start a diplomatic career with the U.S. State Department, the answer is that even in those days, I had something of a double life.  Outside of my day job on the Hubble project, I was known as a historian of Soviet science.  In the summer after Hubble's launch, I published perhaps my most important history work on Soviet astronomy in 1936-37 during the height of Stalin's Great Purges.  When I left the Hubble project in 2005, in a sense I exchanged my hobby for my career, my career for my hobby.

But on this April 24th, on the 25th anniversary of Hubble's launch, my mind will be back there, reliving the moments of frustration and exhilaration and recalling the faces and names of so many colleagues and friends from the PASS project who were there at the beginning.  And Ms. FHST will smile and feel an inner warmth to know that her children-in-engineering, those three Fixed Head Star Trackers on Hubble, have not missed a beat and continue to guide Hubble on to discoveries that take us back ever further towards the dawn of our Universe.

 

2014 Reunion Picnic with PASS Friends and Families

 

---

[1] The actual Hubble Constant is a measure describing the expansion of the Universe.  The current best estimates are in the vicinity of 71 km/s/Mpc, where Mpc is a megaparsec, a distance of approximately 3.3 million light years.

Holding "Iron Felix" in Her Hands

Once again I sit in an airplane, getting ready to fly.  Today's destination?  New Delhi for a conference on cyber security that I had no expectation I would be going to until three weeks ago.  Such is the Foreign Service.

By rights I should say "last night's" destination.  I was to fly out of Astana at 00:30 this morning, but Motorpool picked me up only at 23:50.  I had already been standing and waiting in the cold for an hour and twenty minutes, making increasingly frantic calls to ask, "Where's my driver?"  It turns out my assistant had given Motorpool the right time but the wrong date.  When we finally reached the airport, it was too late to board.  By the time I was home and in bed it was after 3:00 am.

At 7:30 I simply got up and went to the Embassy to find out what could be done.  I had thought and was even looking forward to being told it was impossible to get to Delhi in reasonable time.  I'm not sure I was actually thrilled when I was told I could be re-routed through Tashkent, arriving in Delhi at midnight and only missing a half day of my training.  So here I am, about to take off, some thirty hours without sleep and eight hours of flights and transit lounges ahead of me.  This is all getting a bit old, and I'm getting a bit old for it.

But that was not what I wanted to write about.  Rather, my mind is turning back to my last trip, my first extended, one-week stay in Almaty, Kazakhstan's old southern capital city known in Soviet times as Alma-Ata.  Alma, by the way, means apple, Central Asia being reputed to be the place from where all apples that cover the world today come.  For me, however, it is the city where I held Iron Felix in the palm of my hand.

Felix Dzerzhinsky

Iron Felix, Zhelezny Feliks in Russian, was the legendary founder and first chief of the Cheka, the Chresvychayny komitet or Extraordinary Committee for Battle with Counterrevolution.  In other words, he founded what later became known as the NKVD, then the KGB, and today the FSB – i.e., the secret police.  His real name was Feliks Dzerzhinsky.  Of Polish roots, he was an ascetic, almost saint-like figure to those who idealistically thought they were starting to build a new socialist order.  He was the mastermind who was going to protect the new Soviet state from counterrevolutionaries and foreign capitalist agents who, so the doctrine went, sought at any cost to destroy the communist ideal and save the world for the rich and powerful.  In fact, he succeeded.  During his years at the head of the Cheka, the Soviet Union fought off foreign interventionist forces and numerous clandestine efforts to destabilize the new Soviet state.  He ran rings around White Russians and others who had fled the country after the 1917 Revolution and Civil War.  The émigré Russians, still incredulous at their defeat, were certain the regime of Lenin and Trotsky could not and would not last.  They plotted and schemed, but it was Iron Felix who played them for fools, turning them against each other and luring the most important ones back to the Soviet Union, prison, and execution.

I must admit to a bit of romance about the period.  I'm not apologist for the regime.  Far from it.  Rather, I remember watching the BBC series Reilly, Ace of Spies on PBS in the 1980s.  Each week I followed the handsome, daring, and always successful British agent from the days of the Great Game between Russia and Britain for power and influence in Central Asia through World War I and then to his support of émigré Russian attempts to overthrow the Soviet regime.  He was always successful, that is, until he, too, allowed himself to be lured to Moscow.  In the final two episodes he and Dzerzhinsky face each other for the first time, two masters of intelligence and covert operations finally together in an interrogation room in the Lyubyanka Prison, the headquarters of the Cheka.  As portrayed in the series, they have a respect, almost a liking for each other.  Their final walk together on Sparrow Hills, the site today of Moscow State University, cements that relationship even as Dzerzhinsky tells Reilly he will need to go alone from that point . . . taking his final steps before falling to an executioner's bullet in the winter snow.  The BBC series being, after all, a British production, leaves open the question of who duped whom, hinting at a possible deeper game played by Reilly in which he sacrificed himself in order to disclose the depths to which the Cheka had infiltrated foreign organizations.  History, however, does not share that nostalgic, patriotic view.

If I ever did have a strange romance for the period, it was shaken out of me in just a few words spoken by a young woman in 2004.  I had purchased a few T-shirts in Moscow, and one of them had a picture of Dzerzhinsky on the front and an all seeing eye on the back together with the slogan Будьте бдительны – Be vigilant.  Seeing me in this T-shirt, the young woman came up to me, looked me in the eye, and said, "That man killed my grandparents."  It wasn't funny anymore.  I never wore the T-shirt again.

Iron Felix

To see how genuinely popular Dzerzhinsky was in the Soviet Union, however, one only needs to look at the mechanical adding machine that was mass-produced and named Iron Felix in his honor.  In astronomy it was the machine that, together with logarithms, was used at observatories and institutes to calculate orbits and carry out all sorts of complex computations.  Much of that computing work was carried out by women, many of them the wives or daughters of astronomers in a science that at that time was almost the exclusive realm of men.  In observatory staffing reports from the period, they were referred to as computers.  At the time no one could foresee the day when these human computers, most of them women, would be replaced by the electronic computers in all their myriad forms that rule our lives today.

Now my story returns to Almaty.  I spent a week visiting and becoming acquainted with more institutes than I had ever encountered in such a short period before.  I visited the biology faculty at KazNU.  I was at the Institute of Genetics, the Zoology Institute, the techno-park, the Botanical Institute, and KazNTU.  I even stood right up next to the research reactor and two cyclotrons at the Institute for Nuclear Physics.  As wonderful as this all was, however, my heart was intent on another visit that I suspect no one else in my position had ever made.

Fesenkov Institute, Main Building

It was a snowy Thursday when we slowly climbed on slippery roads onto the Kamenskoye Plateau to the south of Almaty.  The road narrowed, and then we passed through a gate.  We were at the Fesenkov Astrophysical Institute.  Some thirty years ago, Academician V. G. Fesenkov was one of the central figures in my research on the 1936-37 purges in Soviet astronomy.  He survived the purges largely due to geography and a strong personality.  The purge of astronomers was most devastating in Leningrad, but Fesenkov was in Moscow as director of the Shternberg Institute.  He is reputed to have stopped cold the cry to root out wreckers among Moscow astronomers, and as a result the astronomers at Shternberg largely escaped with their lives and careers.

In 1941 Fesenkov led an expedition of Moscow astronomers to observe the total solar eclipse in the southern regions of the Soviet Union.  They chose their site near Almaty and successfully observed the eclipse only to find they could not return to Moscow.  Germany invaded on June 22 and rapidly advanced on the capital.  There could be no question of returning to Moscow.  The astronomers stayed in Almaty, and the equipment they brought for the eclipse became the seed for a new observatory that eventually carried the name of its founder, the Fesenkov Astrophysical Institute.

At the Fesenkov Institute

On that snowy Thursday I sat in the director's office as one astronomer after another told me of his or her research.  For once I was at a meeting where, unlike with geneticists or zoologists, I have some background and understanding.  I was in my element.  Even the main building looked and felt familiar.  One of the senior astronomers asked if I noticed a similarity with another building.  I had indeed.  The main building at the Fesenkov Institute, or at least its circular hall, was modeled on the main building at Pulkovo Observatory outside Petersburg where I spent many months in 1987-88.

We must have talked for two hours, and I was taken on a quick tour of several of the observatory domes.  Back in the director's office, however, one of the women astronomers, remarking on my interest in the history of astronomy, went to a cabinet and brought down an impressive looking mechanical device.  She asked me if I knew what it was.  I did.  For the first time in my life, I was seeing an Iron Felix.  A moment later I was holding Iron Felix in my hands, an electric moment of camaraderie will all the women who, in the rough conditions of the 1920s and 1930s, laboriously carried out their computations, in the process sometimes being the ones to make the discoveries for which others, more senior and almost always male, took the credit.  Along the way they drank their tea, shared their joys and sorrows with their friends also hard at work, and in the process tamed and bent Iron Felix to their will.

Holding Iron Felix in My Hands

It was a short moment followed by handshakes, a group photo, and goodbyes.  Soon the main building of the Fesenkov Institute was just a reflection in the rear view mirror as we started our descent back into Almaty.  The memories of that day now mix with the memories of my own past spent in archives and observatories as I carried out research on the fate of Soviet astronomers in the 1930s.  As Russia today embarks on a glorification of its Soviet past, I choose to leave the Dzerzhinsky T-shirt in the back corner of a rarely-opened drawer . . . and treasure the moment when I held Iron Felix in my hands.

A Central Asian Little Christmas

Christmas and New Year's brought with them the first respite I have known since I arrived in Astana at the end of September.  From a U.S. perspective, the city has had a holiday look to it since mid-November.  There was never any question but that this would be a white Christmas, and the white snow cover and holiday lights helped to brighten the short days and long nights.

The run-up to the holiday weeks were busy.  I returned to Tashkent for the first week of December for the US-Uzbekistan Annual Bilateral Consultations and for a series of side meetings on everything from water management to biodiversity.  The direct flight from Astana to Tashkent isn't even two hours in duration, but the difference in climate makes it seem as though the distance between must be much greater.  When I landed in Tashkent, I was greeted by green and brown.  There was little in the way of snow.  The temperature must have been +4-5C, which felt so warm in comparison with Astana that I spent much of my time without a coat at all.  The stores had fresh lettuce, which must be nearly worth its weight in gold in Astana if it can be found at all.  The week was a good one, and I got to spend two evenings of free time with my friends E1 and E2.  At the end of the week, however, I was ready to return to the cold.  Tashkent may be warm, but it is easier to breathe in Astana in many senses.

At the American Corner in Karaganda

Even Christmas week saw me in motion.  On December 22-23 I made a lightening two-day trip to Karaganda, Kazakhstan's fourth largest city.  Again I was in non-stop meetings on everything from methane gas to HIV/AIDS to ecotourism.  I also spoke at the city's American Corner.  The subject?  Hubble Space Telescope (HST), of course!  Wherever I go, that's what people want to hear about when they learn that I worked on HST.  Then I watch their interest wander as I begin talking about Fixed Head Start Trackers and quaternions.

Karganda has a holiday look as it also celebrates
the 80th anniversary of its founding.

The Embassy closed two hours early on Christmas Eve, and I rushed home to cook.  The Embassy had found a local supplier of turkeys, and I had bought a 15-pounder.  Between the turkey, side dishes, and desserts ranging from fruit cake to pumpkin pie, I had my hands full in the kitchen.  It was a small Christmas party the next day in comparison with those I used to have in Bucharest, but there were nevertheless seven guests at my table.  Hindered although I am by work and travel, I am nevertheless slowly beginning to make friends.

Christmas at Robyn's

The Embassy was closed both Christmas Day and the day after.  That being Friday, I had a four day weekend.  Bliss!  I felt I was on vacation with the extra comforting knowledge that Washington was on vacation too.  

The following week we were closed again for New Year's Day and the day after, thereby giving another four day weekend.  I did nothing special for New Year's other than talk with friends via Skype, but it was wonderful just to get a rest at last.  The best part of Skype that evening was seeing my granddaughter bounce up and down on my son's lap.  Watching her as the clock struck midnight in Astana was better than watching any ball drop.

It's also time that I introduced my young friend NN insofar as it is with her that I have my best memories of the holiday weeks.  She's 22-years-old and in her fifth year as a university student.  We met in my first week in Astana when I was wandering from one shop to another in the nearest shopping mall looking for facial powder.  NN was the saleswoman on duty in the shop where I finally made my purchase.  An ethnic Kazakh from a provincial city, she wanted to improve both her Russian and her English.  We exchanged telephone numbers, and the rest, as they say, is history.  

So there we were on January 2, NN and I, tramping through the snow in Pyramid Park across the street from where I live.  It was a cold but sunny and beautiful day, and we laughed uncontrollably as we walked on top of the snow, at times falling through where the snow surface was soft.  When we fell through, we had snow up to our knees.  Although I've seen no blizzards here, the snow comes every few days and doesn't melt.  It just keeps piling up.  At one point in our walk, NN tried doing a hand stand, and I responded by trying to do cartwheels.  We lay in the snow and made snow angels.  For a few minutes I, too, was 22-years-old again with a fun and excitingly new world at my feet.  (I'd post a few photos from that day, but I'm having fun using an old film camera and need to find where I can get the film developed in Astana!)

On Snowshoes for the First Time

I had one other social outing on the 3rd, this time with the Astana Outdoor Club.  This assignment is the most sedentary one I have had since joining the State Department, and living across the street from work doesn't help.  Although I'm riding my bicycle on rollers indoors, I have to make an effort to do so.  I signed up with the Outdoor Club almost as soon as I arrived, but due to work and travel, so far I've only been able to participate twice.  On January 3rd some two dozen of us headed out on snowshoes under a full moon on a frozen river outside Astana.  The temperature was about -15C, but as long as I kept moving, I stayed warm.  My only real problem was that my glasses first steamed over and then froze over completely.  I had everything I could do just to see the person in front of me.  We hiked on the river for two hours and then adjourned to a cafe for shashlyk.

It's now January 10.  Tomorrow I'm off for a week of TDY travel to Almaty.  The work year has begun.  As I return to working long hours, I am reminded of a New Year's greeting from a U.S. friend.  She wrote simply, "Be well and have a wonderful year as you begin to close the book on a very exciting career."  It is the first written reminder I have received that the official part of my work life is drawing to a close in a few short years . . . even as I tramp on frozen rivers, romp in the snow, and make snow angels like a 22-year-old.

Best 2015 wishes to all!

If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Urgench

I'm drinking coffee out of my own mug that bears the state seal of Albania.  It was a gift from a special mom in Tirana over two years ago.  The coffee came from my own stove-top espresso maker.  The dishware is my own, and it's Sunday.  That must mean that I'm back in Astana, my home-on-the-steppe.  Not only that, this is HHE-day, the first time I've had my own dishes and cookware, not to mention bedding, winter clothes, and photos, in three months.  For any Foreign Service Officer, the day one receives her household effects (HHE) is a veritable holiday.  This is my Christmas in November.  Given that the ground is covered by a light blanket of white and the Esil' River is starting to freeze over, it might as well be the end of December.

Two weeks ago today I was in Bucharest.  No, dear Bucharest friends, I don't mean that I came and went without seeing any of you.  I mean I was in Bucharest mentally and time-wise.  You see, the cell phone that I use as my alarm clock while traveling is the phone that I used in Romania.  It's still set to Bucharest time, and I'm not changing it.  I look at that phone and think about what you must all be doing at this time of day.  Since I knew when I arrived that the time difference from Bucharest to Astana is +3 hours, I just made a +3 hour allowance when setting the alarm wake-up time.

So there I was two weeks ago, stretching and yawning after the alarm began playing Eric Anderson's Violets of Dawn at 7:30am.  That's my wake-up song.  TN, my assistant, was to come at 9:30am, and we were to go to the airport to catch our flight to Almaty, Kazakhstan's large southern city and former capital.  I had lots of time to pack my suitcase and enjoy an unhurried breakfast.  It was only after enjoying my first cup of coffee that I did a double take.  The clock in my kitchen said 9am.  I checked my Astana cell phones.  They also said 9am.  I had only 30 minutes to get dressed and throw clothes into my suitcase.  What had gone wrong?  I checked my Bucharest phone again.  It was now +4 hours from Bucharest to Astana, not +3.  Then it hit me.  Romania had gone from daylight time to standard time that Saturday-Sunday night, and my Romanian cell phone had automatically adjusted.  Kazakhstan is on standard time all through the year, and thus I am now an hour further away from Bucharest friends than I was when I arrived.

So there I was, foiled by what I thought was my good sense of time zones.  Somehow I got downstairs just as TN and the Embassy car arrived to pick me up.  When we got to the airport, we learned that our flight was an hour and a half late.  If I had known, I could have stayed on Bucharest time for the morning after all.

By mid-afternoon we were in Almaty.  What a difference there is between Almaty and Astana!  It was so warm that afternoon that I could walk around with my jacket unzipped.  The air pollution was palpable, reminding me of New York City in the 1960s, but the Tien Shan Mountains could still be seen through the smog.  We checked into the Holiday Inn and looked for our U.S. colleagues who had come for a workshop on seismology.  When we found them, we sat together for an hour to go over last-minute organizational issues.  Back in my hotel room, I discovered I had forgotten to bring panty hose.  I inquired at the desk and was given directions to a nearby underground mall where I bought the most expensive hose of my life.  For three pair I paid about $90USD.  That extra hour time difference between Kazakhstan and Romania had acquired a monetary value.

I woke early on Monday morning in an Almaty that had changed dramatically overnight.  Snow covered the ground and continued to fall.  We must have brought the Astana weather with us, and it was time again for the winter coat.

The seismology workshop had its formal opening.  Everything was going smoothly.  After lunch I left our U.S. colleagues in the capable hands of TN and headed back to the airport.

The Top of my Head Peaks
Through in the Back Row

The flight to Tashkent took an hour and a half, but by my watch it was only 30 minutes.  Crossing into Uzbek airspace, we had moved one time zone closer to Bucharest.  The plane had rolled up to a stop, and we passengers were collecting our things and heading for the exit doors.  Before I could get there, however, I found that I had arrived not in Tashkent but in the Twilight Zone.  The voice over the public address system was that of a flight attendant, but could there have been a trace of Rod Serling in the words, "Robyn McCutcheon, the VIP bus is waiting for you?"

In all of my flights in and out of Uzbekistan in 2008-10 (see I Wish I Was in the Land of Cotton), I had never been met as a VIP.  I wasn't sure I wanted to start now, but I had little choice.  Once in the bus, I hurriedly checked my hair and makeup.  When the bus got to the VIP lounge, a Reasonably High Personage was there to meet me and usher me through entry formalities.  In the freshest and most official voice I could muster, I settled into diplomatic talk about the importance of the Aral Sea conference I was about to attend.  It really was important, after all, no matter how much I was yearning for a nice bed and a good night's sleep.  An hour later I was checked into my hotel in downtown Tashkent, a city I had left in 2010 and did not think I would see again.  Yet here I was in old familiar surroundings.

My escort having departed, I stepped out of the hotel to be met by my good friends F1 and F2.  We spent the next three hours in a cafe, catching up and marveling that fate had brought us together again.  For those hours I was no longer a VIP but just Robyn.  For the first time since arriving in Astana at the end of September, I felt entirely relaxed and at home with good friends.  For those hours the loneliness of the distance to loved ones in Romania and in the US receded.

* * * * * * * * * *

Where was I?  I started to write this entry in early November, and here it is, the last day of the month as I again sit at an airport boarding gate.  I'm writing long-hand in my travel notebook and have no idea where I left off in the draft that sits incomplete somewhere in the Internet universe of web journals.  So let's presume I was on Monday and had just collapsed into my hotel bed in Tashkent after my reunion evening with F1 and F2.  (Amazingly, post-fact I see that my guess as to my stopping point was correct!)

On Tuesday morning my next flight touched down in the Khorezm region of Uzbekistan.  The ground is frosted with patches of white, but I hear another passenger comment that it's salt, not snow.  We are in Urgench.

Ours was a charter flight filled with diplomats, international aid workers, water management specialists, ecologists, and journalists.  As we pulled up to the terminal, we could see men and women in traditional Uzbek clothes waiting to greet us.  The women were holding round loves of Uzbek flat bread, known to Russians as lyepyoshkas.  Everywhere there were TV cameras, microphones, and reporters with notebooks.  There were at least as many of them as there were of us.  It would be that way for the next two days.

As we descended the stairs to the tarmac, enthusiastic young greeters waited to sort us onto buses by language.  The route from the airport took us down the main streets of Urgench past gleaming white buildings and green parks.  Everything had a proud air of newness.  In less than fifteen minutes we were at our hotel.

Urgench

Within the hour we were on our way again, first to an oncology center and then to a urology clinic.  Both were so new that one could still sense the smell of fresh paint.  It is no secret that the disappearance of the southern portion of the Aral Sea -- that portion that is on Uzbek territory -- has had a huge negative effect on the people living to the east of what was once one of the world's largest inland seas.  The salt we had seen at the airport was blown there from the dry sea bed.  Dust storms carry salt and agricultural chemical runoff hundreds of miles.  An island in the middle of the Aral Sea had once served as the site for Soviet biological weapon testing.

NASA Imagery Documents the
Disappearance of the Aral Sea

Our next stop was outside the city where dozens of young volunteers stood holding trees next to pre-dug holes.  Our task was to plant the trees, shoveling dirt over the roots and watering them with pre-filled buckets.  There was a showtime air about this Uzbek Arbor Day with many camera shutters clicking, but the enthusiasm of the volunteers was genuine.  All hope is gone that the southern Aral Sea will return, but these volunteers were doing their part to hold the soil in place and break the winds by planting thousands of trees.  They may have been part of a show for this one day, but their work would go on without us.

A Tree Grows in Urgench

The rest of that day went to tourism in the ancient but now largely reconstructed city of Khiva, the capital of a once independent, powerful Central Asian khanate until it fell to the Russian Empire in 1873.  It was my second time there, my first visit having been with my son in 2009.

The next long day was taken up by the conference itself.  As I listened to one presentation after another, I couldn't help but think how little had changed since I left Uzbekistan in 2010.  If anything, the predictions had become more dire.  Late in the evening, after a ceremonial dinner featuring stars of the Uzbek operatic stage, we all rode a bleary-eyed special charter back to Tashkent.

Khiva

Thursday morning saw me on a flight to Almaty, where I arrived at the seismology conference just in time to deliver closing remarks.  The loop back to Astana closed early Friday morning, but the week was not yet over for TN and me.  From morning to evening, we escorted a U.S. visitor for a day's worth of official meetings.  Only when we waved goodbye to her at the airport at 8pm that evening was our week over. . . .

Well, not really over.  Saturday was taken up by my writing reports on the Aral Sea and seismology conferences.  Sunday was the day to catch up on all the work e-mails I had missed while traveling, and Monday dawned to a new week and new tasks.

If my readers wonder why I write so little in this web journal, my description of this one week should give a clue as to why.  Not every week involves that much travel, but many do.  (I am finishing this draft while between sessions at yet another conference in Uzbekistan.)  All weeks are intensely busy, and the concept of a weekend break is fuzzy at best.  My hopes for a slowdown center around the New Year holiday.

Meanwhile, temperatures in Astana have dropped to -25C, and the winds are sometimes so strong that I have trouble walking.  The Esil' River has long since frozen over.  The howl of the nighttime wind is louder than anything I have heard in my life before now.  Safe in my bedroom, I pull my blankets about me and listen.  It may still be fall by the calendar, but in reality, the long Kazakhstan winter arrived some weeks ago.

Have I Mentioned It's Cold and Windy Here?

Just like the NASA astronauts returning from the International Space Station, I've been taking my first steps in the steppes of Kazakhstan. My first four weeks have been full of ups and downs, ranging from blues and loneliness to the exhilaration of new experiences and discoveries as I find time to to venture beyond Embassy walls.  In short, life is normal, following the pattern that I now recognize from my three previous foreign postings.

Have I mentioned it's cold and windy here?  Let's see how many times I repeat that over the coming three years.  Astana is at the same latitude as the northern tip of Newfoundland, which should put things in some perspective form my friends in Maine.  It is about -5C, about 20F, this morning, and yesterday's light snowfall is not melting.  The Esil' River is still flowing, but the pond in the park across from my building is frozen over.  The wind penetrates right through the winter coat that kept me warm in Bucharest.  I haven't switched to the Canada Goose parka that I bought before leaving the US, but I will soon.  Halloween is still a week in the future, and from all appearances it will be a white one.

Baiterek Tower in the New City

Well, O.K., it hasn't been entirely December in October.  The wind and cold have had the upper hand only about 75% of the time.  A week ago we had an unexpected Indian summer that lasted 3-4 days.  The thermometer rose all the way to +15-18C, and I spent Saturday and Sunday on long walks.  On my own two feet, I'm slowly learning my way around the city.

Astana is an amazing mixture of dazzling modern in the new capital and old Soviet from the days when this was a small town known as Tselinograd at the center of Khrushchev's somewhat misguided push to open the steppe to agriculture.  (Think of the U.S. dust bowl of the 1930s and you will have a sense of why cultivating grasslands might not be a good idea.)  I live in a complex called HighVille in a new part of the city.  About a forty minute walk or a fifteen minute bus ride away is the start of the old town.  Even in my short time I have found a hairdresser, electrologist, and a cosmetologist.  They are all in the old town.  I have also done much of my shopping in a Soviet-era mall called Evraziya, in the process making friends with a young woman in a cosmetics store who is in her final year at the university.  Her major?  Nuclear physics!  She is working in the mall on weekends to make extra money.  I wonder how often in the US I might find myself buying facial powder from a future nuclear physicist?

Evraziya Shopping Mall

On the streets and in the stores I'm hearing more Russian than Kazakh even though signs tend to be in both languages.  Television has both Kazakh and Russian language channels.  The largest supermarket chain is Ramstor, the same chain where I used to shop in Moscow.

In my first days here, I had to acknowledge that my Russian had suffered over the past four years while I lived in Romania and the the US.  Fortunately, it's been returning quickly.  It has just been a matter of getting out of the Embassy.

View from Top of Baiterek Looking Toward
Presidential Palace and Esil' River

Now there's the rub: “getting our of the Embassy.”  This has been a very busy month.  The learning curve hasn't been a curve at all but rather a vertical, almost a technical climb up a rock face with the summit still out of sight.  My start here reminds me of my start on the Russia Desk some ten years ago.  There are so many issues and events at play that one can easily be sucked into spending all one's time feeding the e-mail dragon and never getting out of one's cubicle.  In my darker moments I think that giving electronic communication to the State Department, where our business is the diplomacy of words, was akin to giving drugs to an addict.  No amount of electronic communication ever seems to be enough as rings of e-communication feed upon themselves and suck us, the humans, into them.

Those are the dark moments.  Then I remind myself that I'm a woman of a certain age who has little left to prove but who has decades of experience behind her.  In the end, I will tame the dragon.

Esil' River Waterfront

Meanwhile, I sit in a plane that is about to land in Almaty.  Tomorrow I assist at a conference on seismology; on Tuesday I fly off to Uzbekistan for a conference on water issues.  I'll return to Astana only on Friday and collapse into an exhausted heap on Saturday.  As our planed descends, I fasten my seat belt and put my seat back in the upright position.  My first foray out of Astana to the wider Central Asian horizons is about to begin..

A Timely Remembrance of Chester A. Arthur

It's time to say a few timely words about President Chester A. Arthur.

We don't think about time zones much when we are at home in the US.  We all know that California is three time zones away from the East Coast, but for the most part we don't give them much thought.

President Chester A. Arthur

It's a different story for me in Astana.  Even after getting over the jet lag of my arrival, I find that time has acquired a greater significance.  The East Coast is ten hours away from Kazakhstan in the summer and eleven time zones away during the winter months when the US -- well, Arizona and a few other jurisdictions excluded -- go off daylight saving time and return to standard time.  Those time zones are in the way when I want to talk by Skype with a friend or loved one at home.  

The imposition is all that much greater when one flies home or returns to Central Asia.  The human body just wasn't designed to absorb a 10-11 hour time difference in the blink of an eye unless, of course, it takes a week or ten days to blink that eye. 

It wasn't always this way, you know.   Two hundred years ago there were no time zones.  Each major city maintained its own time based on the daily passage of the Sun across the meridian, the line that connects due North with due South that passes through the zenith. Life was easy.  When the Sun was on the meridian, it was noon.   It's what we would call today local apparent time.  The time it took to travel from one city to another in Europe or the American colonies was so great that the local definition of time in any one city was not an issue. 

Things began to change in the early nineteenth century.  By then local mean time had begun to replace local apparent time.   Instead of the actual, physical Sun, the mean Sun's passage through the meridian is what determined the noon hour.  It had long been noted that the physical Sun sometimes took more than 24 hours between meridian crossings, sometimes less, with the deviation reaching as much as 16 minutes. 

 “The reason?” 

 “Why, it's elementary, dear Newton!” 

This discrepancy is caused first of all by the 23.44-deg obliquity of the ecliptic, the angle between the Earth's equator and the plane of the Earth's orbital motion around the Sun.  Secondly, the Earth's orbit is not exactly circular but is, rather, an ellipse, which means that the Earth's orbital motion around the Sun is faster at the time of perihelion -- closest approach to the Sun -- than it is six months later at aphelion. 

Now enter the railroads.  The first transcontinental railroad in the US was completed in 1869.  Each major city through which this and later railroads passed maintained its own time.  Roughly speaking, the time difference between two cities separated by 1-deg of longitude was four minutes.   If we complain of jet lag today, we should also pity the designers of the first railroad schedules.  Not only was it a pain to try to keep track of independent time systems maintained by hundreds of U.S. cities.  It was also a safety problem that could lead to head-on collisions of trains heading in opposite directions where one train engineer was using one time system and the other was using a different one. 
  
The U.S. experience in the mid-ninteenth century was quickly being replicated in much of the industrialized world.   It was compounded by the circumstance that different countries were using different prime meridians relative to which to measure longtitude and time. France used the Paris meridian.   Russia used the Pulkovo meridian.   Great Britain measured longtitude from Greenwich.  The US at times used the meridian of the U.S. Naval Observatory.   Several meetings and conferences were held beginning in the mid-nineteenth century to try to resolve the joint problem of standardized time and longitude.  In 1870, U.S. educator Charles F. Dowd proposed a system of U.S. time zones.  He was followed a few years later by Canadian railroad engineer Sanford Fleming who proposed that there be a worldwide system of time zones.  

Delegates to the International Meridian Conference

The Third International Geographical Congress in Venice in 1881 proposed adoption of a universal prime meridian.  Another conference in 1883 began to work through the details, and the U.S. Contress passed an Act in 1882 authorizing President Chester A. Arthur to call an international conference to fix the prime meridian for measuring time and longitude.  The International Meridian Conference convened in Washington in October 1884.  By a vote of 22-1, the Greenwich Meridian was adopted as the prime meridian for use by all nations. (Santo Domingo voted against; France and Brazil abstained with France only giving up on the Paris Meridian in 1911.)  A year earlier, in November 1883, U.S. and Canadian railroads instituted standard time in time zones in the US and Canada.  Between the Meridian Conference and the action taken by the railroads, the stage was set for the entire world to be divided up into standard time zones that were nominally 1-hour or 15-deg in width.  The Calder Act of 1918 made standard time in time zones the law in the US.  At the same time, the concept of Greenwich Mean Time, the time as determined by the mean Sun at the Greenwich meridian, had taken hold with each time zone measured in number of hours east or west of Greenwich.  

The Greenwich Meridian

And so, dear readers, you get some of the picture of how we got to where we are today.  Some countries and even U.S. states have chosen to bend time zone boundaries for their own convenience.   Some time zones, Newfoundland is a good example, differ by a half hour rather than an hour from their neighbors.  All in all, however, it's a system that works for commerce even as the physical human body groans under the the strain of jet lag.  The adoption of standard time and a prime meridian was also a triumph of international nineteenth century diplomacy when the needs of commerce and government brought all parties to the table to find a common solution to the common problem of longitude and time measurement. 

Is it all over?  Has time been resolved for all civil purposes?  Well, not really.   For the answer to that and more, look for a possible future entry on atomic time, Coordinated Universal Time, and leap seconds.  The story is just beginning.   

(Dramatic foreshadowing:   Greenwich Mean Time has not existed as an intenational time standard since Richard Nixon was President of the US.)