An evening pause: I don’t know if it’s possible to two instruments to be farther apart in range. Yet they work together here very nicely. Nigel Wood plays the soprillo while Jim Cheek plays the tubax.
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
Cassini images taken in 2007, 2013, and 2014 of one of Titan’s largest hydrocarbon seas find that a mysterious feature there keeps appearing and disappearing.
The mysterious feature, which appears bright in radar images against the dark background of the liquid sea, was first spotted during Cassini’s July 2013 Titan flyby. Previous observations showed no sign of bright features in that part of Ligeia Mare. Scientists were perplexed to find the feature had vanished when they looked again, over several months, with low-resolution radar and Cassini’s infrared imager. This led some team members to suggest it might have been a transient feature. But during Cassini’s flyby on August 21, 2014, the feature was again visible, and its appearance had changed during the 11 months since it was last seen.
Scientists on the radar team are confident that the feature is not an artifact, or flaw, in their data, which would have been one of the simplest explanations. They also do not see evidence that its appearance results from evaporation in the sea, as the overall shoreline of Ligeia Mare has not changed noticeably. The team has suggested the feature could be surface waves, rising bubbles, floating solids, solids suspended just below the surface, or perhaps something more exotic.
That the seasons are slowly changing on Titan is probably contributing to the transient nature of this feature.
The competition heats up: A Proton rocket has successfully placed two classified Russian satellites into orbit, the first time a Proton has launched since a May 16 launch failure.
The Russians have established an investigation committee to look into the failure of a solar array to deploy during the most recent Soyuz manned launch.
They are also going to have the array inspected by Russian astronauts during a planned spacewalk in October. Still no word, however, on the capsule’s viability as a lifeboat for the next five months with one failed solar array.
Rosetta engineers have set November 12 as the date they will deploy and land the Philae lander on Comet 67P/C-G.
The competition heats up: Sierra Nevada has formally protested NASA’s decision to award Boeing and SpaceX manned spacecraft contracts.
The company said late Friday that its bid in the NASA Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCTCap) was $900 million less than the bid submitted by Boeing, which won a contract worth as much as $4.2 billion to complete development, test fly and operate its CST-100 crew capsule. At the same time, SNC said, its proposal was “near equivalent [in] technical and past performance” source-selection scoring.
“[T]he official NASA solicitation for the CCtCap contract prioritized price as the primary evaluation criteria for the proposals, setting it equal to the combined value of the other two primary evaluation criteria: mission suitability and past performance,” the company stated. “SNC’s Dream Chaser proposal was the second lowest priced proposal in the CCtCap competition.”
In other words, they are challenging NASA’s decision to pick Boeing over them, as their proposal was far cheaper.
We all know that Boeing got the contract as much for its political clout as for its technical expertise. NASA wanted to make sure that members of Congress who promote the Boeing jobs in their districts would have nothing to complain about. Whether Sierra Nevada can get the government to look past that political clout is very doubtful, though I think I support them whole-heartedly in their effort.
An evening pause: Believe me, this has everything to do with engineering.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
The law is for the little people: A recent ACLU audit finds that the TSA routinely gives a pass to government employees and politicians while blacklisting ordinary citizens.
Meanwhile, conservative writers are quickly put on the terrorist watch list. That’s keeping us safe TSA!
Even as India celebrates the success of its Mars orbiter Mangalyaan, its aerospace industry complains of red tape and a slow-moving bureaucracy.
Between 2007 and 2012, ISRO accomplished about half of its planned 60 missions, government data showed. The government cited “development complexity” as the reason for the delay in some missions. Between 2012 and 2017 the target is 58 missions. The agency has completed 17 missions so far, and ISRO did not say why the number remained low. Some company executives and experts do not see that changing any time soon, with the absence of heavy rocket launchers, too few launch facilities and bureaucratic delays hampering growth.
I could also say that the battle is now joined between India’s military-industrial complex and private enterprise. With a government now in power that claims to be pro-business, we shall see where this battle leads.
Despite the failure of one solar array to deploy, a Soyuz capsule carrying three astronauts successfully docked with ISS today.
The solar array issue, still unresolved, needs to be figured out, as this Soyuz spacecraft must serve as one of ISS’s lifeboats for the next few months. Without that array the spacecraft will have limited power, and will definitely not be considered the best way home should something go wrong on the station.
An evening pause: Hat tip Danae.
One of the two solar panels on the manned Soyuz capsule transporting three astronauts to ISS has failed to deploy.
“According to our data, one of the solar panels is still unable to unfold for reasons unknown. But preliminary data suggest that it will not impede [the spacecraft] from docking to the ISS. They have carried out a maneuver just now which involved all of the spacecraft’s engines, all systems are running smoothly, the crew is OK,” the source in the agency said.
Because they are flying the fast route to ISS a shortage of power is not as critical. However, this failure once again indicates the increasing quality control problems faced by the Russian aerospace industry. In past decades these problems simply did not happen, especially on their manned missions. Now they are happening with increasing frequency.
