Charles Apple

So I got into work Monday to discover a story by Virginian-Pilot reporter John Hopkins about looking into the night sky to find the spy satellite the military is planning to shoot down soon.

I immediately thought back to the plea Juan Antonio Giner blogged last Friday for cool graphics showing how this thing is supposed to work:

The shooting down of a U.S. spy satellite deserves great infographics.

…Let’s see what our colleagues from the infographics world are able to deliver.

And it dawned on me that I hadn’t seen any yet.

Perhaps they’re out there. I just haven’t seen them.

So I checked our wires: L.A. Times/Washington Post, New York Times, McClatchy/Tribune and the Associated Press. All I found was two pieces from MCT: A small one-column ‘bio-box’ diagram of the missile to be used, the Raytheon Standard Missile 3. And a file graphic explaining orbital space junk.

This would never do. Not only do I want to see a graphic on this mission, I’ll bet our readers do, too. After all, the missiles will be launched from Navy ships. Norfolk is a big Navy town.

So I decided to see if I could find enough information to build my own piece.

About a half-hour later, Paul Nelson, the Pilot’s Design Director, came in and asked me if I might could do something for the story. What perfect timing.
Fully vetted, I dumped what I was supposed to be working on and dove into Missiles and Orbits and Satellites; Oh, my!

I love space stories.

Here’s what we ended up with:

This is about four-and-a-half columns wide. John’s story ran to the right, in a white box that I reversed out of the black background. The package occupies our “Spotlight” position on Tuesday’s A3. Unfortunately, it’s a black-and-white page.

Click on the thumbnail for a larger view:

I was surprised at how easy it was to round up all the information.

I started out by printing out all the stories I could find — I hit the AP, The New York Times, Space.com and the Navy’s press release site.

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WILL IT GO ‘ROUND IN CIRCLES?

A really nice story about spy satellite spotting at Space.com mentioned a site called Heavens-Above.com. That site gave me all sorts of information about the tilt of the spy satellite’s orbit and how fast it’s decaying:

You’ll have to do two things to get at the info, though. First, you’ll have to register. But at least it’s free. Once you’re logged in, a link to a helpful page of data about the spy satellite will pop right up.

For example, the site gives you maps that show where US 193 is at any given time. Here it is just before 3 a.m. Tuesday:

Pretty cool, huh?

Secondly, in order to calculate viewing times for your area, you’ll need longitude and latitude data for your city. Do yourself a favor and look it up before you go to the site.

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DOUBLE-SECRET PROBATION

When you need info about military hardware, there are two sites you’ll want to rely on: GlobalSecurity.org and the Federation of American Scientists.

Global Security had a nice article about the spy satellite, including a good-sized photo of it being blasted into space by a Delta II rocket from Vandenburg Air Force Base on Dec. 14, 2006:

GlobalSecurity.org

The site also had posted a rendering of what the spy satellite — called US 193 — might look like. It appeared to be a pencil sketch and contained a copyright notice but very little other attribution:

Charles Vick/GlobalSecurity.org

I decided not to include it. Later, though, when I needed a generic satellite silhouette to represent US 193, I used it as the basis for an icon:

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WHERE DO YOU SHOP FOR HARDWARE?

The meat of my piece, of course, is the big missile diagram:

I liked the MCT piece, but since I found my own source material from Raytheon — the manufacturer of the missile — I decided to draw my own. That proved to be a good call later when I needed a color rendering of the missile.

I used information from Designation Systems to fill out the specs on the SM-3 missile:

The Navy itself posted an ultra-high-rez photo of a nighttime launch one of these puppies. Very dramatic. I couldn’t find a way to use it, but perhaps you can:

U.S. Navy photo

Geez, will you look at that exhaust? Somebody, please pass the marshmallows.

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ON THE GOOD SHIP LOLLIPOP

I was amazed at the amount of information I could find about the three-ship fleet that will launch the missiles. A Friday New York Times story actually named the ships.

The aforementioned Navy release — which was posted last Thursday — added lots of detail and color.

By this time, I was really kicking myself. I could have built this graphic on Friday or over the weekend. I must be slipping in my old age.

Info on the ships — and reference for the little thumbnail silhouettes — was the easiest part of the day. We’ve been using the Federation of American Scientists site for years for this type of information.

The primary launch ship will be the USS Lake Erie, which is a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser. The two backup ships — the Decatur and the Russell — are both Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.

The ships, on station in the north Pacific, will fire on the satellite just as it begins to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere. The missile won’t even be armed with a warhead. Just spearing the satellite at 6,000 mph should be enough to release the toxic Hydrazine rocket fuel, removing it as a hazard should the tanks make it to the ground in one piece.

Just incredibly fascinating stuff. Better than any Star Trek episode, I think.

This story at Space.com contained a lot of info about how the Navy hopes to pull this off. The rest came mostly from NYT and AP wire stories.

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NOT SO EASY TO SEE, AS IT TURNS OUT

I had hoped to work in a chart showing when, here in Hampton Roads, you can see the satellite fly over. But a chart really wasn’t necessary:

Tuesday, Feb. 19 - 6:16 p.m.
Passes Southwest to Northeast, about 41 degrees over the horizon

Wednesday, Feb. 20 - 6:09 p.m.
Passes Southwest to Northeast, about 24 degrees over the horizon

There are also passes on Thursday and Friday, but John said anything lower than 20 degrees isn’t worth mentioning.

The next good passes won’t be until March 8. There’s a good chance US 193 will be toast by then.

Therefore, we left this info in John’s story and ran it down the side of the graphic.

Again, though, if you’re building a piece on satellite spotting, check out this story at Space.com and also visit Heavens-Above.com. Not only will Heavens Above calculate viewing times for your area, it’ll also produce start charts to help you find it. Here’s the map for Tuesday night’s pass over Virginia Beach:

Heavens-Above.com

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A LITTLE SOMETHING FOR OUR WEB AUDIENCE

Getting all this done kept me a little over Monday night. It was OK, though — between last week’s election coverage and now this, I’m on a bit of a roll. I love space graphics almost as much as I love political graphics.

So when our web folks asked me what I could do for them, I felt great pain that i still don’t know how to do the Flash thing. However, I had more than enough data for a cool web graphic.

So I suggested to our night online guy, Ron Crow, that I cbreak up my big graphic into digestible little chunks and we could run them as a slide show. And that’s what we did:

Ron gave me parameters to follow: No wider or taller than 600 pixels and no text smaller than 10 points. These samples here are 400 pixels wide; the ones posted at HamptonRoads.com are larger. And the text is larger.

Throwing together this web version taught me a number of things:

* Web graphics don’t have to be complicated. This slide show might not be fancy, but it gets the story told.

* I really need to be careful with readability online. I added a drop shadow to lift the white text off the stock Earth photo, but it’s not quite enough. I shouldn’t make my readers work that hard.

* I thought I had pulled in all this text in the correct typefaces, but apparently I didn’t. Instead of Poynter Agate, this looks a lot like Franklin Gothic. Dammit.

Oh, well, the graphic still serves its purpose. And that’s not too many mistakes — I hope — for my first real web-based graphic.

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And that’s how I spent my Monday.

Bring on Tuesday!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 2:53 am and is filed under Charles Apple, Graphics, Virginian-Pilot, VizEds Blog, Web news design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.