Month: November 2018

Vector applies for license for launch in Kodiak, Alaska

9:35 am

Capitalism in space: Vector has applied for an FAA license for a suborbital test launch in Kodiak, Alaska of its Vector-R smallsat rocket.

The launch is planned to occur no later than April 2019.

Their original suborbital test schedule was supposed to have occurred already, but those were mere verbal announcements. This is more concrete.

Vector does need to get off the ground however. Two years ago it was considered in a close race with Rocket Lab. Now Rocket Lab has pulled far ahead, and Vector might be losing ground to other smallsat launch companies.

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India’s GSLV-Mark 3 rocket successfully launches communications satellite

9:15 am

The new colonial movement: India today successfully launched a new Indian communications satellite on the third launch of its larger GSLV-Mark 3 rocket.

The Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mk.III, or GSLV Mk.III, is India’s newest and most powerful rocket. After making a suborbital demonstration launch in late 2014, the rocket made its first orbital mission last June when it deployed the GSAT-19 spacecraft.

Wednesday’s launch was designated D2, indicating that it was the rocket’s second developmental launch, however like last year’s flight its payload – GSAT-29 – is a fully operational satellite.

I have embedded a video of the launch below the fold. The launch occurs at about 25 minutes in.

With this success, the fifth launch this year by India, that country will be able to move forward on the January launch by the GSLV of its Chandrayaan-2 lunar mission.

The leaders in the 2018 launch race remains unchanged:

31 China
17 SpaceX
10 Russia
8 ULA
8 Europe (Arianespace)

China continues to lead the U.S. in the national rankings, 31 to 28.
» Read more

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Another private lunar rover unveiled

3:19 pm

Capitalism in space: The private start-up company Lunar Outpost today unveiled its tiny 10 kilogram (22 pound) rover, designed to map lunar resources.

The first Prospector was demonstrated driving and drilling in Lunar regolith simulant at the Colorado School of Mines’ new Lunar testbed facility in the Earth Mechanics Institute overseen by the Center for Space Resources. This event marks the first commercial Lunar Prospector publicly tested in the United States.

Evidence of valuable resources on the Lunar surface, such as water, precious metals, and helium-3 have been established by remote sensing on flyby missions around the Moon. This scientific data has been used to create general resource models of the Lunar surface, which now require ground-truthing to establish optimal landing sites and plan future resource extraction operations. Groups of Lunar Outpost Prospectors will map the surface and subsurface resources of the Moon, while autonomously navigating along waypoints and avoiding hazards such as large rocks and craters. These Prospectors can also be teleoperated if needed and can utilize NASA’s Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway concept as a center of operations.

This is a tiny inexpensive rover, essentially an upgraded drone. Very smart, and efficent. Below the fold is the company’s video of this demo test. The drilling capability is especially impressive.

Their website does not say how much they will charge for this rover, but they also note that it has 5 kilograms of cargo capacity, meaning that they can also offer this to customers.
» Read more

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LSST’s giant coating chamber arrives in Chile

2:54 pm

The giant coating chamber that will be used to coat the mirrors for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope has arrived in Chile.

The Coating Chamber and its associated equipment will share this level with the camera maintenance rooms, the vertical platform lift, and the shipping and receiving area. The Coating Chamber will be used to coat LSST’s mirrors when they arrive on Cerro Pachón, and to re-coat the mirrors periodically during Operations.

LSST will conduct a 10-year survey, and during this period its mirrors will be exposed to the elements each night as the telescope surveys the sky through the open side of the observatory dome. Over time the mirrors will get dusty, and the mirror coatings may develop small blemishes that eventually affect the telescope’s performance. To ensure that LSST continues to collect the sharpest possible images of the night sky, its mirrors will undergo periodic washing and recoating. It’s anticipated that the Primary/Tertiary Mirror (M1M3) will need to be recoated every two years, and the Secondary Mirror (M2) every five years, during the 10-year survey. Both the washing and recoating will be done inside the observatory; special equipment will be used to remove and transport the mirrors from the telescope to the washing station and coating chamber.

LSST will essentially be imaging the entire visible sky nightly, making it possible over time to track sudden events, such as supernovae, as they happen.

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Evidence of nitrogen ice glaciers on Pluto

2:49 pm

Using data sent back by New Horizons during its fly-by of Pluto scientists now think they have identified land forms created by past nitrogen ice glaciers.

The washboard and fluted terrain … occur at the location on Sputnik Planitia’s perimeter where elevations and slopes leading into the surrounding uplands are lowest, and also where a major tectonic system coincides with the edge of Sputnik Planitia. The low elevation of the area makes it a natural setting for past coverage by nitrogen ice glaciers, as indicated by modeling of volatile behavior on Pluto performed by Dr. Bertrand at Ames.

Through comparison of the washboard and fluted texture with parallel chains of elongated sublimation pits (depressions in the surface formed where ice turns directly into a gas) seen in southern Sputnik Planitia, the ridges are interpreted to represent water ice debris liberated by tectonism of underlying crust. This water ice debris was buoyant in the denser, pitted glacial nitrogen ice that is interpreted to have formerly covered this area, and collected on the floors of the elongated pits. After the nitrogen ice receded via sublimation, the debris was left as the aligned ridges, mimicking the sublimation texture – washboard ridges where deposited on flat terrain, and fluted ridges where deposited on steeper slopes.

This is strange stuff. The solid bedrock here, water ice, will float on the nitrogen ice sitting on top of it. Thus, the material that wants to sublimate away, nitrogen, sometimes has to fight its way past the water ice that has risen to the top of the pile.

To put it mildly, we hardly understand these alien processes. This research is merely a first stab, the first hand-waving.

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Fox reporter threatened, chased from bar

9:19 am

They’re coming for you next: A Fox news reporter was threatened and then chased from a Brooklyn bar this week, merely because one patron discovered where she works.

Timpf was confronted by a woman, who, after hearing she worked at Fox News, became enraged and began shouting at her in a threatening manner.

“This girl started going nuts on me, screaming at me to get out of the bar. I found her very threatening,” Timpf said of the woman, whom she had never met before. She said she tried to move to another section of the large bar but the young woman followed her while continuing to scream.

The woman, who was visibly intoxicated at the time, was surrounded by a large group of men and women who all stood by and laughed as she harassed Timpf and followed her around the bar. After realizing no one in the group would defend her in what might become a violent situation, Timpf was forced to flee the bar.

“It was super uncomfortable and I didn’t want things to get physical,” she said. [emphasis mine]

It is the audience that counts. One person was bullying this reporter, and everyone else “stood by and laughed.”

Bad times are coming. You will not be defended should you be attacked physically because of your conservative political beliefs. Be prepared.

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Earth’s atmosphere cooling as solar minimum arrives

8:59 am

The uncertainty of science: With the early arrival of the solar minimum, the Earth’s atmosphere has quickly shown signs of cooling.

New research shows that Earth’s upper atmosphere is responding. “We see a cooling trend,” says Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center. “High above Earth’s surface, near the edge of space, our atmosphere is losing heat energy. If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold.”

These results come from the SABER instrument onboard NASA’s TIMED satellite. SABER monitors infrared emissions from carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitric oxide (NO), two substances that play a key role in the energy balance of air 100 to 300 kilometers above our planet’s surface. By measuring the infrared glow of these molecules, SABER can assess the thermal state of gas at the very top of the atmosphere–a layer researchers call “the thermosphere.”

“The thermosphere always cools off during Solar Minimum. It’s one of the most important ways the solar cycle affects our planet,” explains Mlynczak, who is the associate principal investigator for SABER.

What effect this upper atmosphere cooling will have on the surface climate is somewhat uncertain, though there is a great deal of evidence suggesting the surface climate will cool also.

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Is Rocket Lab an American or New Zealand company?

8:53 am

Link here. According to Rocket Lab’s own president, his company is American, even though much of its history is based in New Zealand.

When I asked Peter Beck whether his company was Kiwi or American, he didn’t shirk from waving the Stars and Stripes. “Look, we’ve been an American company and proud of it for many years,” he said.

“The New Zealand element is very important and very special to us but we never tried to hide the fact we’re a US company and this is where New Zealand companies go wrong in the fact that if you want to be a large, successful global company, it’s very difficult to be that out of New Zealand.”

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ArianeGroup to cut 2300 jobs

8:48 am

Capitalism in space: Faced with a significant loss of market share, taken by SpaceX, the European rocket manufacturer ArianeGroup has announced it will reduce its staffing by 2,300 jobs by 2022.

A joint venture by European aerospace company Airbus and the French group Safran, it currently employs 9,000 people in France and Germany. Constructor of the Ariane rockets, the European Space Agency workhorse, ArianeGroup also produces ballistic missiles.

Ariane 5 rockets are soon to be replaced by the Ariane 6 which will be an estimated 40 percent cheaper to make, under pressure in particular from Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

But European buyers have so far ordered only three Ariane 6 rockets ahead of the first scheduled launch in 2020.

The article at the link, produced by a French news service, is somewhat amusing. It repeatedly blames the lack of demand for the Ariane 6 on the U.S. government, which provides business to SpaceX. It doesn’t mention that ArianeGroup’s Ariane 6 rocket meanwhile is being built with government funds from the European Space Agency, and once completed in the 2020s will have a launch price that exceeds that of the Falcon 9 today. No wonder it hasn’t garnered many customers.

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More Pits on Mars!

3:30 pm

Pits near Arsia Mons

Cool image time! In the November image release from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) were three images, dubbed by me in the collage above as number one, number two, and number three, showing pits south of Arsia Mons, the southernmost volcano in the chain of three giant volcanoes to the east of Mars’s largest volcano, Olympus Mons, and to the west of the Marineris Valles valley.

Mars overview showing pit locations

The image on the right provides the geographical context of the three pits. They are all south of the volcano on the vast lava flow plains that surround it. The location of pits #1 and #2 is especially intriguing, on the east and west edges of what appears to be a large lava flow that had burst out from the volcano, leaving a large lava field covering a vast area several hundred miles across just to the south. You can also see a similar large lava field to the north of the volcano. Both fields appear to have been formed when lava poured through the breaks created by the fault that cuts through the volcano from the northeast to the southwest.
» Read more

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Stan Lee dies at 95

12:16 pm

R.I.P. Stan Lee, the central writers for Marvel Comics in the 1960s and co-creator of all its most popular creations, has passed away at 95.

Lee was credited as the writer for almost every single comic book Marvel published throughout most of the 1960s. Teamed with a variety of artists (Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were the most important), these individuals helped shape much of the culture of that time, while influencing, for good or ill, almost all artistic culture to have since followed.

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The ExoMars 2020 landing site

10:23 am

ExoMars 2020 landing site

Last week the European Space Agency (ESA) announced the final chosen landing site for their 2020 ExoMars rover, a region called Oxia Planum.

Since then they have posted several detailed overview maps describing this region. The image on the right, reduced slightly to post here, shows the final two candidate elliptical landing sites in black, with Oxia Planum on the left. The caption for this image adds this tantalizing detail:

Both landing site candidates lie close to the transition between the cratered northern highlands and the southern lowlands of Mars. They lie just north of the equator, in a region with many channels cutting through from the southern highlands to the northern lowlands. As such, they preserve a rich record of geological history from the planet’s wetter past, billions of years ago.

To understand better what they mean by this, we need to zoom out.
» Read more

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Japan successfully sends small recoverable capsule back from ISS

9:07 pm

Japan’s most recent cargo freighter to ISS, after undocking and beginning its de-orbit maneuvers, released a small recoverable capsule that was successfully recovered on Earth.

A capsule ejected from a space cargo vessel returned to Earth on Sunday, bringing back experiment samples from the International Space Station (ISS) in the first such mission for Japan.

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said the capsule, measuring 84 wide and 66 cm high, made a parachute-assisted splashdown in the Pacific near the island of Minamitorishima early in the morning and was retrieved later in the day.

“I think we’ve succeeded almost as planned,” Hirohiko Uematsu, technology director of JAXA, told a press conference at the agency’s Tsukuba Space Center in Ibaraki Prefecture.

The last quote above suggests that the recovery was not entirely successful, but no details were provided. Regardless, this gives the users of ISS a second way to bring experiments back from the station, with SpaceX’s Dragon the first.

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Rocket Lab successfully completes its first operational Electron launch

10:01 pm

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab today successfully completed its first operational launch, the third Electron rocket launch attempt (two of which succeeded) and the second successful launch this year.

You can see a replay of the launch here. The payload was six smallsats and a “drag sail” designed to test technology for deorbiting satellites more efficiently.

They plan to follow with another launch in a month.

The leaders in the 2018 launch race remained unchanged:

31 China
17 SpaceX
10 Russia
8 ULA
8 Europe (Arianespace)

China continues to lead in the national rankings. Last year I initially counted Rocket Lab as an American company, but was convinced by others that it was better labeled as New Zealand, since the rocket was assembled and launched there, using a local team. I now have decided this is a mistake. The rocket is essentially American-made, and the company that markets it is American-based. It also plans to add an American launch site at Wallops Island. This is a tough call, but I have decided to change Rocket Lab back in my listings as an American launch company. This means China now leads the U.S. 31 to 28.

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Jupiter’s upper clouds

9:02 am

Jupiter's upper clouds

Cool image time! The photograph on the right, reduced to post here, was created by citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran from the raw images taken by Juno during the spacecraft’s 16th close fly-by of Jupiter on October 29, 2018. If you click on it you can see the full resolution image.

At the time, Juno was about 4,400 miles (7,000 kilometers) from the planet’s cloud tops, at a latitude of approximately 40 degrees north.

What attracts me to this image is its dimensionality. First, it looks at Jupiter from an oblique angle. Second, the shadows of the upper clouds can clearly be seen being cast on the lower clouds. Third, if you look at the full resolution image you can even see this effect in the middle of the big white storm in the image’s top left.

What frustrates me about this image is that Juno is not in an orbit around Jupiter allowing it to make extended movies of the evolution of these cloud features. Gaining even a limited understanding the meteorology of this gas giant will simply not be possible until we can do this, and that will require many satellites orbiting the planet.

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Watch Rocket Lab launch tonight

8:41 am

You can watch Rocket Lab’s launch of its smallsat Electron rocket tonight at 10 pm (Eastern) at Space.com, or at the company’s own website.

A lot hinges on the success of this launch. The company is gearing up to move to monthly and eventually weekly launches, but to do so it must still demonstrate it can launch successfully and with some regularity. If they succeed tonight, they plan to follow with another launch in a month.

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