0 - Forever spinning… Introduction

MSG on the spinning machine in TAS-F

MSG-4 is definitely the last ESA spinning spacecraft and likely one of the very the last spinning spacecrafts of the space history still to be launched. MTG, the Third Generation of Meteosat spacecrafts that will come after MSG in few years, won't be spinning anymore. MTG spacecrafts will be three-axis stabilized meaning that the MTG Imager will look at the Earth from GEO orbit permanently while the MSG Imager (SEVIRI) looks at the Earth only a limited amount of time (when SEVIRI aperture is facing the Earth). There are quiet a lot of other improvements between MSG and future MTG spacecrafts but let's celebrate for the moment  the end of the generation of the spinning spacecrafts !

To remember MSG still for long, the MSG team found this nice short slogan "forever spinning"… that will be reproduced on several Public Relation items during the MSG-4 Launch Campaign. We picked it up in this blog in order to contribute, our way, to this celebration.

No intentions to give boring lectures on electrons spin and anti spin but instead we will try to revisit the "forever spinning" motto through things that rotate on themselves, whirl, swing round and round, revolve rapidly, etc…This trip will definitely bring us beyond the usual engineering fields opening this blog to new borders. "Spinning ideas" will be derived  from our daily life, architecture, paintings, sculpture, literature, film, music, etc... Was Georges Braque not saying "Avec l'Age, l'Art et la Vie ne font qu'un/With Ageing, Art and Life become a single thing" *

Let's start this  "forever spinning" series with a simple sketch specially made for MSG-4 :-)

Artist view of spinning MSG...

 Credit: Oscar Aubry, 2015

To be continued in separated posts...

* quotation from Le jour et la nuit, Cahiers de Georges Braque, 1917-1952