When in the early 1960s Europe too wanted to get a foothold in outer space, ELDO and ESRO were founded. A lot of European countries were involved, including the Netherlands. But although they financed the endeavour along with the rest, the Dutch were practically ignored when it came to active participation. The assignments for rockets and satellites always went to Germany, Italy and France.
The Dutch lacked experience, they said. Something they of course would never get when they couldn’t participate. So the Dutch delegation took a deep sigh and said to themselves: “Well, we’ll do it our bloody selves, then” (but of course they said it in Dutch, probably somewhere in the line of “Dan doen we het verdikke zelf wel!”).
They wanted their satellite to serve a scientific purpose, so it was decided it would be an astronomical satellite.
Skip forward a half a dozen years or so. With a big grant from the government the Dutch finally could start building in 1969. They named her ANS, which is an old-fashioned Dutch girl’s name but in fact stood for Astronomische Nederlandse Satelliet.
Two very special telescope systems would scan the Infrared and X-ray spectrum. The universities of Groningen and Utrecht would provide the telescopes and other astronomical instruments, the Philips company would create and build the brain and electronics, and Fokker would build it all together in a small frame, all under the supervision of the NLR, the Dutch Aeronautical institute.
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| ANS being tested, around 1973. On the forward facing part you can see the holes for the soft X-ray telescope (the round one and the little square one) and in the middle the opening for the bulky Cassegrain UV-telescope. On the side, just below the top is the US hard X-ray experiment. At the bottom, pointing away from the camera, is the on-board computer. Everything was connected with strings of long white cables. Photo: ICANS/Fokker/Philips/NLR |
The satellite, however small, wasn’t modest at all. In 1974, when ANS was launched, it was the first 100% digital spacecraft. NASA was deeply impressed by this little Dutch miracle. Everything on board was made especially for this purpose. No off-the-shelf components were used. Philips designed a truly unique feature with the solid-state on-board computer. It had a reprogrammable ferrite core memory of a whopping 28K. (we’re talking 1974 here!) This computer managed the whole spacecraft and could receive new assignments during the mission. Old ones could be erased. That was never been done before. NASA was also a bit worried because of the unproven system and also becasue of the amount of single-point failures in the satellite. There were no redundant or backup systems. None.
(There’s much more that was innovating and special about ANS, but I’ll keep it short. ish. (-;
And so, ANS was launched, the 30th of August, 1974. Thanks to a faulty fourth stage of the Scout launcher, ANS came into an highly erroneous elliptical orbit which took it right through the Van Allen Belt. The on-board computer was given a new set of codes to operate on, so the instruments wouldn’t give faulty data as the satellite flew through the radioactive region. And despite the wrong orbit, ANS still worked like a charm.
It started scanning the universe with an unprecedented precision. It helped to create a much more detailed image of the universe, because of the preciseness of the telescopes. ANS also discovered very interesting new things happening in pulsating X-ray stars and globular clusters.
As planned, ANS fell back into the atmosphere in 1977.
After that, the Dutch never ever made another satellite on their own.
Their next effort, called IRAS, was from the start intended to be a cooperation with the US and the UK. Nowadays, there are Dutch components in almost, if not, all ESA satellites. And outside the circle of Dutch astronomers, ANS seems to be just a footnote in Dutch space history and nearly forgotten.
Okay, enough history. Back to here. Now, For ages, fellow paper modeler Erik te Groen showed his ‘large’ model of ANS on his great space models website but at the moment it still is unavailable for download because Erik wants to improve it. He just didn’t have the right documentation to really dig in. Now, I happen to be working on developing a documentary film about this very satellite. So I could exchange some necessary info and pics with him. As a gesture, he in return sent me the -partially improved - model. And here is how I am working on it. Erik warned me that this model was created a long time ago, the resolution wasn’t up to modern standards, and not all measurements were correct. But in the end I just want to create a nice looking model of ANS. While Erik’s model makes a good rendition of ANS’ exterior, I wanted to add the interior too. It was what made ANS unique.
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| This is the actual thermic test model of ANS, nowadays stored in a room of the University Museum of Groningen. In 2015 when I took this picture it was dusty, battered and slightly abused. It lost one of its solar panels and looked neglected. But you can see the insides here. Cables galore! All instruments amusingly tagged with Dymo labels. Lots of the photos I took from this test vehicle were used in my attempt to create the insides in my model. |
I needed to start somewhere, so the top and bottom parts were cut out and I started to superdetail them. I used layers of coloured paper for the hooks and grappling points. Aluminium coloured paper was used for the edges, and I used chrome metallic card for the bigger three holes on top where the telescopes will come.
I wanted to make the insides out of black coloured paper and I doubled 270 gram card to get the preferred thickness. I realised when making the first rudimental frame, the parts all were completely warped. I think it might be because of the direction of the fibres in the paper. I just folded a strip and glued it, the fibres all pointing in the same direction. I think that is what made it warp. So I retried by placing the paper surfaces in an angle of 90ยบ, plywood style. This worked much better. Now I just used my eyes and all my sense of scale to try and get the places right to put the ‘shelves’ and the cut-outs in the walls where the cables would pass through.
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| The warped version. It was really, really warped. Although I left it to dry in a big book, still it warped. |
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| The new frame. Plywood style layering of card helped a lot. All the positions of the bulkheads are just by eyeballing the different drawings and photos I have. They may very well be incorrect. |
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| Here I added the reinforcing parts to attach the top and bootom plates. |
This was something special, in reality this was made from honeycomb magnesium plates. Very flammable and something completely new to the engineers at Fokker, who build the satellite’s frame for the electronics. I imitated the metallic honeycomb texture by colouring the edges of the black card in silver with a silver watercolour pencil.
And here's where I am right now. The top and bottom are still unglued. There's a lot of work to do in the frame itself. That is what will be up next.
So see you soon, I hope.
--PK
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