Year: 2014

Yutu is slowly dying

4:00 pm

China’s lunar rover Yutu, unable to move since its first few weeks on the moon, is slowly dying.

The rover is currently in good condition and works normally, but its control problem persists, said Yu Dengyun, deputy chief designer of China’s lunar probe mission. “Yutu has gone through freezing lunar nights under abnormal status, and its functions are gradually degrading,” Yu told Xinhua at an exclusive interview. He said that the moon rover and the lander of the Chang’e-3 lunar mission have completed their tasks very well. The rover’s designed lifetime is just three months, but it has survived for over nine.

As China’s first planetary rover mission, the limited roving success of Yutu is well balanced by its ability to continue functioning on the lunar survey for so long. The engineering data obtained from this mission will serve Chinese engineers well as they plan future missions.

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SpaceShipTwo poised for powered test flights

3:51 pm

Virgin Galactic officials outline the status of SpaceShipTwo, suggesting that powered flight tests are finally about to begin.

Providing a rare glimpse of progress on a second spacecraft under assembly at sister organization, The Spaceship Co., Virgin Galactic Vice President of Operations Mike Moses says, “we are ready for space.” A former NASA launch integration manager for the space shuttle, Moses adds that SS2 “has been in modification, getting retrofitted ready to resume powered flights.” He notes that “those are going to start imminently—literally very imminently.”

Commenting on the extensive gap between now and the last rocket flight in January, Moses says, “It might seem a long time since our last powered flight-testing and that maybe nothing has been happening, but [ground testing] has been happening.” Tests have largely focused on ground-firings of a hybrid rocket motor fueled with polyamide-based plastic in place of the hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene, a form of rubber used for the first series of powered tests. Although this fuel had been used successfully in SpaceShipOne, the vehicle developer Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic encountered fuel-burn stability and power issues as they tried to scale the Sierra Nevada Corp.-provided hybrid motor up to the size required by the larger SS2.

It appears my guess was right and that the last two glide tests were to retrofit SpaceShipTwo for the new fuel and engine. This has now been accomplished, and they are preparing to begin powered flight tests.

The article also describes work on a second SpaceShipTwo, which when completed will give Virgin Galactic the beginnings of a fleet of ships.

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New measurements cut dark matter in Milky Way by half

7:10 pm

The uncertainty of science: New more robust measurements by Australian astronomers has shown that the amount of dark matter in the Milky Way galaxy is about half of what previous measurements had estimated.

Without doubt something is causing the outer stars in galaxies to orbit their galaxies at much greater speeds than they should. The answer that astronomers have posited since the late 1950s is that there is additional unidentified mass, dubbed dark matter, lurking as a halo around each galaxy, pulling on those outer stars and making them move faster.

The problem remains that no one has as yet detected this unidentified dark matter. Moreover, there are enormous uncertainties in the measurements of the motions of stars. This result helps narrow those uncertainties.

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EPA tells court it has lost text messages

3:21 pm

The most transparent administration ever: The EPA has admitted that text messages demanded in a lawsuit, which the agency is required by law to retain, have been lost.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told a federal court that it may have lost the text messages at the center of a lawsuit by a libertarian think tank.The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) sued the EPA last year in federal court to compel the release of text messages to and from Administrator Gina McCarthy and her predecessor under the Freedom of Information Act. In the Tuesday filing to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Justice Department lawyers representing the EPA said the agency will soon file a notice that it may have misplaced records that it was legally required to retain.

It seems pretty clear that the Obama administration has decided to follow the same playbook with all its many scandals: stonewall and coverup, legally or illegally.

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Construction of Angara launchpad at Vostochny delayed

9:23 am

In order to complete construction of the Soyuz rocket launchpad at Russia’s new spaceport in Vostochny as quickly as possible, Russian managers have decided to delay completion by one year of the launchpad for the new Angara rocket.

I would not conclude from this decision that the construction at Vostochny is lagging. Instead, it appears that the Russian government continues to give it a high priority, and is merely beginning to structure that priority as effectively as possible. The Soyuz rocket is already in operation and will be ready to fly as soon as Vostochny is operational. Angara meanwhile is still under development. I suspect a delay in getting its launchpad ready will have no effect in the overall schedule of that rocket, as they need to do several additional test flights before it will be ready to be declared operational.

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Launch abort system installed on Orion for December test flight

9:14 am

Engineers have installed a test version of the launch abort system (LAS) for the first test flight of the Orion capsule in December.

The LAS will not be active during the uncrewed EFT-1 mission, but during future missions it will be equipped to act within milliseconds to pull the spacecraft and its crew away from its rocket so that Orion could parachute safely back to Earth.  While the abort motors  are inert and not filled with solid fuel, the LAS will have an active jettison motor so that it can pull itself and the nose fairing away from the spacecraft shortly before Orion goes into orbit. The flight test will provide data on the abort system’s performance during Orion’s trip to space.

Based on what I know of the Orion/SLS launch schedule, I don’t think NASA ever intends to test it during a full launch of the SLS rocket. For one thing, the rocket is too expensive and NASA can’t afford to waste a launch just to test this one component. For another, the rocket’s development is too slow as it is, with the first launch not scheduled until 2018 and the first manned flight not until 2021, at the earliest. If they add a launch test of the abort system, NASA might not fly an SLS manned mission until late in the 2020s.

Meanwhile, NASA is sure insisting that SpaceX do such tests. And they will, since their capsule and rocket is affordable and quick to launch. What does that tell us about the two systems? Which would you buy if you were the paying customer?

Oh wait, you are the paying customer! Too bad you your managers in Congress don’t seem interested in managing your money very wisely.

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Air Force to take over two former shuttle hangers in Florida for its X-37B program

8:47 am

In an effort to find tenants for its facilities, the Kennedy Space Center is going to rent two former shuttle processing hangers to Boeing for the Air Force’s X-37B program.

NASA built three Orbiter Processing Facilities, or OPFs, to service its space shuttle fleet between missions. All three are located next to the iconic Vehicle Assembly Building at the Florida spaceport where Apollo Saturn 5 moon rockets and space shuttles were “stacked” for launch. Under an agreement with NASA, Boeing will modify OPF bays 1 and 2 for the X-37B program, completing upgrades by the end of the year.

The company already has an agreement with NASA to use OPF-3 and the shuttle engine shop in the VAB to assemble its CST-100 commercial crew craft being built to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The company says up to six capsules can be processed in the facility at the same time.

The most important take-away from this news is that it strongly suggests the Air Force now intends to expand the X-37B program. They will not only be flying both X37B’s again, they might even planning to increase the fleet’s size from two ships.

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A pulsar that’s eating a galaxy

8:32 am

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers have discovered a pulsar emitting energy at a rate far greater than ever predicted and which is believed caused by the very fast in-fall of matter into the neutron star.

Astronomers have found a pulsating, dead star beaming with the energy of about 10 million suns. This is the brightest pulsar – a dense stellar remnant left over from a supernova explosion – ever recorded. The discovery was made with NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR. “You might think of this pulsar as the ‘Mighty Mouse’ of stellar remnants,” said Fiona Harrison, the NuSTAR principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. “It has all the power of a black hole, but with much less mass.”

More here. The galaxy where this pulsar resides, M82, has been known for decades to be one of the most interesting, with evidence of vast explosions tearing it apart. This pulsar is at its center, and appears to be sucking in matter at a rate previously believed impossible, suggesting that the supermassive black holes found at the center of many galaxies could form much faster that any theory predicted.

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Obamacare forces 13 states to cancel insurance plans

10:50 pm

Finding out what’s in it: Thirteen states plus the District of Columbia are expected to force the cancellation of hundreds of thousands of health care policies just before the November elections because they are not in compliance with ObamaCare.

In coming weeks, 13 states and the District of Columbia plan to cancel such policies, which generally fall out of compliance with the Affordable Care Act because they don’t offer the level of coverage the law requires. Virginia will be hardest hit, with 250,000 policies expected to be canceled. And because federal law requires a 60-day notice of any plan changes, voters will be notified no later than November 1, right before the Nov. 4 midterms.Many of those forced out of their current plans and into ObamaCare may not be able to keep their doctors. They also could face higher deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses, making ObamaCare an election issue on the eve of voting.

But we all know none of this is possible because Obama promised us multiple times that “If you like your plan you get to keep your plan. Period.” And everything Obama and every Democrat says is always true!

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