A timing conflict between two computers on board MAVEN has put the Mars probe into safe mode.
The issue seems relatively minor and something that engineers should resolve without difficulty. Even so, I refuse to use the bureaucratic term “glitch” to describe it, as the article does, as this term is often employed by government employees to disguise much more serious problems. Journalists shouldn’t help them do this.
An evening pause: Hat tip Keith Douglas. Recorded live during the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. The music is pure 60s pop, great to listen to. The opening intro, however, shows, as Keith wrote to me, that “nerds rock!”
That did not take long, Thank you Shane!
The competition heats up: An Air Force official on Wednesday admitted that SpaceX will likely be certified to launch military payloads.
The politics guarantee it. The Air Force can’t refuse this very successful and increasingly powerful company.
Posted from the West Bank settlement of Alon Shvut.
On arrival in Israel I have discovered that the comments feature on Behind the Black is not working. No one can post comments. This failure began when I update the ReCaptcha anti-spam feature earlier this week.
Shane of amixa is working on it and, if I know Shane, should have it fixed momentarily.
An evening pause: I think this is appropriate with the coming of the Thanksgiving and Christmas season.
Hat tip to Diane Zimmerman.
The competition heats up: A private consortium of scientists and entrepreneurs is planning to fund its unmanned lunar lander with a Kickstarter campaign followed by private sales..
The mission is raising initial development funding through Kickstarter, the crowdfunding platform. Following the initial public phase the remaining funding requirements will be met through sales of ‘digital memory boxes’ in which donors can have their biographies recorded and taken to the Moon. These will also include a strand of hair so that their DNA can exist in space. The team has claimed that around one per cent of the global population who can afford a memory box will buy one. Also included in the time capsule will be record of life on Earth. The archive will include a record of human history and civilisation to date alongside a species database showing the biodiversity of animals and plants.
This is essentially a UK project, backed by the government but with little funding. They hope to launch in 2024, with two missions planned, the first to drill into the lunar soil and the second to bring back samples.
The heat of competition: Space News takes a close look at five space companies that will face critical challenges in the next two years.
Some of the companies on the list will surprise you. The article also gives some good background on the entire industry and the challenges it all faces in the coming year.
Posted from Tucson International Airport.
This morning I will be boarding a plane to begin the long tedious airplane flight from Tucson to Jerusalem, Israel, arriving there Thursday afternoon. I might post along the way, but there are no guarantees.
For the next week I will once again be staying with my brother and sister-in-law in their apartment in the west bank settlement of Alon Shvut. It was here at the bus stop just outside the settlement, where Palestinians and Israelis routinely gather to either catch the bus or hitchhike a ride to Jerusalem, that three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped by Hamas operatives, sparking the recent conflict in the Gaza Strip. Then, just a few weeks ago an Arab terrorist when on a killing spree at this bus stop, killing one young woman before the guard at the settlement gate ran down the hill to shoot him.
I might post my impressions of the situation while I am there, or it might have to wait until I return. It depends on my schedule and my desire to work while visiting family. Yesterday’s attack in a Jewish synagogue, once again by Hamas operatives, killing five people whose only crime was that they were praying peacefully, might also touch my family directly, as I think that one of the rabbis killed was a friend of my brother, his wife, and their children. I will find out more when I get there.
Meanwhile, there were Arab celebrations in various locations in Gaza, the West Bank, and even in Jerusalem, congratulating these killers for their barbarous acts.
An evening pause: This video below was done during the narrator’s warm-up prior to actually recording a Rockwell International industrial touting that company’s first effort in building heavy duty automatic transmissions. As the website notes, “Now remember this is strictly off the cuff, nothing is written down. Nothing he says is true, it’s all meaningless drivel made up as he goes along.” It is also hilarious to watch.
Sadly, this is drivel we now hear every day from government officials. Unfortunately, not enough people seem capable of recognizing drivel when they hear it. If they could, we might be able to laugh about it more.
The heat of competition: A television industry trade journal looks at Arianespace’s future plans and finds them wanting, when compared to SpaceX.
Compare that [SpaceX’s] success with the money that’s been poured into Arianespace, and the lack of progress (perhaps wholly understandable when being managed by a Euro-committee!). Ariane’s mid-way ME version (for Midlife Extension) has been on the drawing board since 1995. And at a considerable investment, and for an initial scheduled flight of only 2017-2018.
The Ariane-62/64 concept calls for as much of the “ME” design to be incorporated into the 62/64 versions. But the planned launch of the first A-62 is not for some time; some observers suggest at best 2021-22. That’s more than 20 years of planning, development and immense costs.
Read the whole thing. It illustrates the almost impossible challenge faced by Arianespace — a company designed by a committee of nations and run to distribute funding as widely as possible to those nations. For that company to successfully reshape its approach quickly so that it can successfully compete with SpaceX seems quite unlikely, and will likely result in Arianespace evolving into Europe’s government launch service, with the commercial market shifting back to the U.S.
Another article has been published in Russia describing the possibility of that country pulling out of ISS and building its own space station, as soon as 2017.
My impression of these stories is that the Russian government is considering taking the modules it has been slowly building for ISS and instead using them to assembly an independent station orbiting the Earth at an almost polar orbit, thereby giving them a much more complete view of their own country as well as the rest of the world.
Based on the data that Philae beamed down prior to going into hibernation, scientists believe the landing site on Comet 67P/C-G is made of a layer of dust 4 to 8 inches thick covering solid ice.
At Philae’s final landing spot, the MUPUS probe recorded a temperature of –153°C close to the floor of the lander’s balcony before it was deployed. Then, after deployment, the sensors near the tip cooled by about 10°C over a period of roughly half an hour. “We think this is either due to radiative transfer of heat to the cold nearby wall seen in the CIVA images or because the probe had been pushed into a cold dust pile,” says Jörg Knollenberg, instrument scientist for MUPUS at DLR.
The probe then started to hammer itself into the subsurface, but was unable to make more than a few millimetres of progress even at the highest power level of the hammer motor. “If we compare the data with laboratory measurements, we think that the probe encountered a hard surface with strength comparable to that of solid ice,” says Tilman Spohn, principal investigator for MUPUS.
Looking at the results of the thermal mapper and the probe together, the team have made the preliminary assessment that the upper layers of the comet’s surface consist of dust of 10–20 cm thickness, overlaying mechanically strong ice or ice and dust mixtures.
In many ways, this result is a testament to the magnificence of science and the industrial revolution. The methods and technology that made it possible for scientists to predict the make up of comets (dirty snowballs) were developed in the period from the 16th to the 19th centuries, hundreds of years before it was even possible to see Comet 67P, no less land on it and sample its surface. And what do we find when we do land there? The data gathered beforehand from far away is confirmed, as precisely as one can imagine.
Update: Another of Philae’s instruments also detected organics on the surface, though the reports so far are very vague.
An evening pause: Hat tip Danae.
Just in case you happen to see a press conference or speech in the next few weeks where you see Barack Obama denying knowing or ever working with Jon Gruber — the man who has been called the architect of Obamacare and of whom numerous videos have now been discovered where he contemptuously describes Americans as “stupid” while explaining how the Obama administration deliberately lied to get the law passed — watch this video below from a 2006 event.
Obama is simply a bald-faced liar in almost everything he does. Don’t be fooled by him anymore. He is dangerous, untrustworthy, and should no longer be supported by anyone, from the left or the right or by Republicans or Democrats.
The scientists who used Dawn to map Vesta have now published detailed geological maps of the large asteroid.
More here.
The competition heats up: SpaceX has begun the construction work necessary to convert the launchpad it will use at the Kennedy Space Center for its first test flight of the Falcon Heavy rocket, now scheduled for summer 2015.
Most of the current work appears to be taking place on the perimeter area of the pad, with the construction of a hanger building – known as the Horizontal Integration Facility (HIF) – that will house the Falcon Heavy rocket and associated hardware and payloads during processing. During rollout, the Falcon Heavy will be transported atop the Transporter Erector (TE), which will ride on rails, up the famous 39A ramp that once saw Space Shuttle and Apollo stacks arrive via the Crawler Transporters.
The July launch date is considered preliminary and a target date only and is of course subject to change.
Another news story from Russia has confirmed that the Russian government intends to break off its partnership at ISS in 2020, and that it will instead start assembling its owns space station in 2017 and will use some modules now docked with ISS to do it.
This event was always possible, and one of the many reasons I always opposed Bill Clinton’s decision to form the ISS partnership. The partnership acted as a crutch for NASA and the U.S, allowing us to avoid spending the money to build a self-sufficient space station. When the Russians leave in 2020 ISS will lack some crucial facilities that it now depends on, and will require some fast scrambling and additions to the station by NASA to keep it going at that point.
A close review of a series of Rosetta images has identified Philae’s first landing site, as well as the spacecraft itself as it approached and bounced away.
The second link is especially amazing, as it includes a gif animation of the landing site, showing the before situation, the puff of dust just after impact, and then Philae drifting away with its shadow hitting the surface of the comet.
Despite several attempts to reposition the lander to get more sunlight to its solar panels, Philae went into hibernation on Saturday.
There is still a chance the lander will come back awake, but right now the Rosetta science team considers its mission complete. Meanwhile, Rosetta will continue its flight with Comet 67P/C-G, tracking it closely for the next year as it makes its next close approach to the sun.
