Supplies for ISS! The Russians today successfully launched a Progress freighter into orbit to bring cargo to ISS.
After three failures since October from three different cargo systems (Cygnus, Progress, and Dragon), this success is somewhat of a relief for both the astronauts on board ISS and the managers of the station. It gives everyone some breathing room until both Cygnus and Dragon fly again.
An evening pause: Taped on August 25, 2014. Hat tip Danae, who wrote, “It was 111.4 degrees under the side porch roof this afternoon, which explains why this video appeals to me. The visibility of the sea floor is just frosting on the cake.”
To me, this probably gives one who has never surfed (like myself) the best sense of what it is like to do it.
The competition stays hot! The Falcon 9 launch failure this past weekend has not harmed SpaceX’s certification to launch military payloads, according to the Air Force.
More on the comet sinkholes! New data from Rosetta has now confirmed that some of the plumes or jets that the spacecraft has seen emanating from Comet 67P/C-G come directly from the sinkholes that they have discovered on the nucleus.
In a study reported today in the science journal Nature, 18 quasi-circular pits have been identified in the northern hemisphere of the comet, some of which are the source of continuing activity. The pits are a few tens to a few hundreds of metres in diameter and extend up to 210 m below the surface to a smooth dust-covered floor. Material is seen to be streaming from the most active pits. “We see jets arising from the fractured areas of the walls inside the pits. These fractures mean that volatiles trapped under the surface can be warmed more easily and subsequently escape into space,” says Jean-Baptiste Vincent from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, lead author of the study.
The competition heats up: The small sat rocket company Rocket Labs has chosen a location in New Zealand as its future launch site.
Rocket Lab’s all-black Electron booster offers launch for less than $5 million. The company, whose investors include Lockheed Martin, is targeting clients such as university programs and small start-ups, Beck said, and it already has 30 potential clients.
The company didn’t specify how much it was investing in the site, which is due to be completed in the fourth quarter. New Zealand, which has been used in the past by the National Aeronautical and Space Administration, is considered a prime location because rockets launched from that deep in the Southern hemisphere can reach a wide range of Earth orbits. Rocket Lab’s remote site on the Kaitorete Spit in the Canterbury region also means it has less air and sea traffic, which translates into more frequent launches and economies of scale, the company said. It also will no longer compete for airspace with the U.S. government.
Rocket Labs will have to actually launch something to really make the competition heat up. This announcement, however, illustrates that in the long run, the United States has some significant disadvantages as a spaceport location.
The leader of the protest that is opposing the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) is now complaining about the road closure imposed by Hawaii’s government that is preventing him and his followers from returning to the mountain.
“The telescope employees have been able to access the mountain every single day to go up and come back down and even we as protectors of the mountain have been given daily access to conduct pule and religious practices on the mountain,” said Kahookahi Kanuha, a member of Ku Kia’i Mauna, which hopes to keep the telescope from being built. “So, if they do deem it unsafe, it is quite irresponsible of them to allow other individuals up the mountain.”
So let me get this straight: He thinks it is wrong for the people who own or lease the mountain — who have legal right to control access — to block the protesters, but he sees nothing wrong with him going there — trespassing — and blocking access to others. What a hypocrite.
This article proves that my analysis from Tuesday is correct. The government has shut the road mainly to quietly get the protesters out of the way and let things cool down. When construction resumes, I guarantee that road access will restricted to prevent the protesters from returning and blocking the road. (Update: The quotes here from the state’s attorney general provide even further confirmation that the state will not allow protests to obstruct future access to construction crews.)
One other note: The author of the first article above uses the typical dishonest mainstream media technique of only quoting one protester, the activist leader, while claiming that “protesters” are objecting. The data in the article, however, does not document this spin. As far as I can tell, the only one complaining about the road closure is this one guy.
The images above, released today by the New Horizons’ science team, provide the best global view so far of Pluto’s two hemispheres. I have cropped and rearranged the original to focus on Pluto.
The images illustrate some basic new knowledge about the planet. For one, scientists have now identified the planet’s poles, based upon its rotation. While scientists had had a very rough vague idea of Pluto’s rotation and inclination beforehand, they have now pinned it down pretty precisely.
The images also show the planet’s most striking and unique features, though not with enough resolution to tell us what they are.
New color images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft show two very different faces of the mysterious dwarf planet, one with a series of intriguing spots along the equator that are evenly spaced. Each of the spots is about 300 miles in diameter, with a surface area that’s roughly the size of the state of Missouri.
Scientists have yet to see anything quite like the dark spots; their presence has piqued the interest of the New Horizons science team, due to the remarkable consistency in their spacing and size. While the origin of the spots is a mystery for now, the answer may be revealed as the spacecraft continues its approach to the mysterious dwarf planet. “It’s a real puzzle—we don’t know what the spots are, and we can’t wait to find out,” said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder. “Also puzzling is the longstanding and dramatic difference in the colors and appearance of Pluto compared to its darker and grayer moon Charon.”
This image release also shows us what we will and will not see during the fly-by. The image on the left is the “encounter hemisphere.” This is the hemisphere that will be in view during New Horizons’ July 14 fly-by. We shall get very nice high resolutions of much of this hemisphere.
The other hemisphere, however, will not be facing us during the fly-by. Unless that can get some high resolution images before it rotates out of view, the row of large dark spots at the equator will remain a mystery.
The images also suggest that, because of Pluto’s tilt, much of the southern hemisphere is not going to be seen at all. It will remain an additional mystery for the many decades that are going to pass before another spacecraft finally returns to this distant place.
An evening pause: The conductor, Joe Hisaishi, is also the composer for the music in Hayao Miyazaki‘s best animated films.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
Cool image time! Using Rosetta’s high resolution camera scientists have located a number of active pits similar to sinkholes on Earth on Comet 67P/C-G.
Based on the Rosetta observations, the team has proposed a model for the formation of these sinkholes. A source of heat beneath the comet’s surface causes ices (primarily water, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide) to sublimate. The voids created by the loss of these ice chunks eventually grow large enough that their ceilings collapse under their own weight, giving rise to the deep, steep-sided circular pits seen on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
The collapse exposes comet ices to sunlight for the first time, which causes the ice chunks to begin sublimating immediately. These deeper pits are therefore thought to be relatively young. Their shallower counterparts, on the other hand, are most likely older sinkholes with more thoroughly eroded sidewalls and bottoms that have been filled in by dust and ice chunks.
Essentially, they have found that decay of the comet’s nucleus has been mostly gentle and steady, rather than explosive, punctuated with sudden abrupt events.
Sunday’s Falcon 9 failure has given us a great opportunity to learn something about the mainstream press and the elite culture that dominates it. As expected, while the space-oriented press focused on what happened and what will be done to fix the problem, almost every mainstream press outlet immediately concluded that the failure was a disaster that could and (with some outlets) should ring the death knell for private space. Here are just a few examples:
I could go on. Notice that these are almost all mainstream news sources. The few that specialize in science reporting, such as Scientific American, New Scientist, and National Geographic, also tend to push the left wing science agenda.
If you can force yourself to read these articles, as I have, you will find yourself inundated with negativity, pessimism, and a can’t-do attitude. Moreover, many of these articles seem expressly designed to encourage the public and politicians to withdraw their support for space exploration. For example, the Scientific American article, in outlining the history of recent ISS cargo failures, includes this quote:
Public support for the private space industry also took a blow last October (just three days after the Orbital Sciences ATK mishap) when Virgin Galactic’s suborbital space plane SpaceShipTwo crashed during a test flight, killing one of its pilots. [emphasis mine]
Does Scientific American provide us any evidence that public support had dropped after these failures? No. In fact, there is absolutely no evidence that support dropped, and if anything, based on the budget increases over the years for commercial space (despite Congressional efforts to trim that budget), support has continued to grow through thick and thin.
No, Scientific American inserted this statement because they want support to drop, and have tailored their article to help make that a self-fulfilling prophecy. The negativity of all these other articles suggest that their writers and outlets feel the same. Life is hard! Bad things can happen! Better that we stick our head in the sand and hide from the evil thunder gods rather than look up to try to figure out what thunder is!
For myself, I do not find the Falcon 9 failure this past weekend depressing in the slightest. This is a company and a rocket that hadn’t even existed a little more than decade ago, and in that short time they have revolutionized the rocket industry. Rockets fail. This is no surprise. Their track record, however, tells us that they will figure out what went wrong and start flying again, as soon as they can.
What I do find depressing is the failure culture of today’s modern intellectual society. It is one reason I do not depend on them for news, and in general try to depend on them for as little as possible for anything else.
The competition heats up: Spire, a cubesat satellite company focused on data gathering from space, has raised an additional $40 million in investment capital, bringing the total it has raised since 2012 to $80 million.
With the new funds, the company will support further growth and expand its constellation from 20 satellites in 2015 to more than 100 by the end of 2017.
The latest round of financing comes at a time when the need for advancements in weather and maritime data is at an all-time high. With the potentially catastrophic 2016 Weather Gap right around the corner, Spire offers a solution to the $2.4 trillion dollar global problem. Emerging as a leader in the ‘Space Race 2.0,’ Spire is the only commercial weather data provider with scheduled launches in 2015. The company will begin deploying its satellites on a near monthly basis beginning September 2015.
Though the company is willing to gather data in more ways than just weather, its offer to provide weather data suggests that the transition from government to private weather satellites is soon approaching. And there is no reason it shouldn’t. Weather data is very valuable. Just as private cable companies put up satellites to provide communications, so should weather outlets like the Weather Channel. It will pay for itself, and will likely provide us better data than any NOAA satellite.
In addition, this story indicates once again that the age of cubesats is now upon us.
In the heat of competition: Government officials have seized the assets of one of the contractors at Russia’s new Vostochny spaceport, still under construction, for failing to pay its debts to another contractor.
For a project that has been under the close supervision of Vladimir Putin since September, there sure has been a lot of hanky-panky going on.
