Year: 2019

The travels of Moon’s scarce surface water

9:19 am

An analysis of data from one of Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s (LRO) instruments have allowed scientists to map the movements of the scarce water on the lunar surface.

Up until the last decade or so, scientists thought the Moon was arid, with any water existing mainly as pockets of ice in permanently shaded craters near the poles. More recently, scientists have identified surface water in sparse populations of molecules bound to the lunar soil, or regolith. The amount and locations vary based on the time of day. This water is more common at higher latitudes and tends to hop around as the surface heats up.

…Water molecules remain tightly bound to the regolith until surface temperatures peak near lunar noon. Then, molecules thermally desorb and can bounce to a nearby location that is cold enough for the molecule to stick or populate the Moon’s extremely tenuous atmosphere, or “exosphere”, until temperatures drop and the molecules return to the surface.

The quantities we are talking about here are very tiny. This will not be the water that future settlers will depend on. Instead, it will be those pockets of ice in the permanently shaded craters.

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Dragon successfully splashes down in Atlantic

8:58 am

Capitalism in space: SpaceX’s manned Dragon capsule has successfully returned to Earth, splashing down in the Atlantic this morning.

There is a short video at the link showing the splashdown.

As far as I can tell, this test mission went 100% right. They now have the capsule they will use for the launch abort flight, which they hope to do by June, if not sooner. Assuming that goes well, they will be ready to do the manned flight by July, as planned.

The only thing I can see preventing this would be elements in NASA’s bureaucracy, Congress, and the federal government that are hostile to SpaceX and the concept of independent free Americans doing great things. These elements prefer giving power and control to their big bloated government, even if it can’t accomplish anything and that failure gives aide and comfort to hostile foreign powers.

We shall see if those elements move to block this mission in the coming months.

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Air Force awards ULA and SpaceX three launch contracts each

1:20 pm

Capitalism in space: The Air Force this week released more details about the new launch contracts for both ULA and SpaceX worth just under three quarters of a billion dollars.

The contracts announced in February by the Air Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center were split between ULA and SpaceX, rivals in the U.S. launch industry. ULA won deals for up to three launches worth $441.76 million, and the Air Force awarded SpaceX contracts worth $297 million, also for three missions.

I had reported this back in February when it was first announced, but it was not then revealed that one of the SpaceX launches would be with the Falcon Heavy, the second such Air Force launch planned. That the Air Force awarded this contract prior to its first launch, now scheduled for no earlier than June 2019, is somewhat surprising. I would have expected them to wait to first see if that launch, only the second Falcon Heavy launch, was successful.

The article also notes a minor change by the Air Force in its launch program.

The Air Force has also given a new name to the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program, a multibillion initiative begun in the 1990s to fund and oversee the development and operations of the Atlas 5 and Delta 4 rockets now owned by ULA.

The Space and Missile Systems Center announced March 1 that the EELV program’s new name is the National Security Space Launch program, in response to language in the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act.

They really needed to eliminate “Expendable” from the name, since the first stage of SpaceX’s rockets are not expendable, and it is expected that future rockets will be reusable as well. Moreover, EELV was created in the 1990s to create a launch monopoly for Boeing and Lockheed Martin, which then merged to create ULA. That monopoly no longer exists, and the military is now aiming to widen the competition, opening it up to more companies.

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A Russian speaks truth to power about Roscosmos

10:40 am

Link here. The article outlines the obvious Russian ambivalence towards the success of SpaceX’s manned Dragon capsule this week, and then provides some insightful comments about this ambivalence from a Russian.

One person who would probably know is Vadim Lukashevich, a Russian-based space expert. He was fired from an aerospace think tank at Skolkovo in 2015 after writing articles opposing the transformation of Roscosmos from a government agency into a state corporation. On Monday, he gave an interview to Russian television station Moscow 24, which was published on YouTube and translated for Ars by Robinson Mitchell.

Lukashevich then proceeds to describe what readers of Behind the Black already know, but in much greater detail: The Soyuz capsule is outdated and cannot compete technologically or economically with SpaceX’s Dragon. Their business model of earning money by selling seats on it is over. And the Russian government is apparently unable or unwilling to do what must be done to make them competitive again. Its decision to form a single giant government-controlled aerospace corporation to run Russia’s entire space industry has failed, and they seem unable to recognize this.

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Hayabusa-2 to get close to Ryugu again to observe next touchdown point

9:16 am

Hayabusa-2’s engineering team has decided it will on March 8 do a close approach to within 75 feet of its next planned touchdown target site in order to inspect it.

The DO-S01 operation schedule is shown in Figure 2. The spacecraft will begin descending on March 7 at 13:27 (JST, onboard time: times below are stated similarly) at a speed of 0.4m/s. The speed will then be reduced to 0.1 m/s around 23:47 on the same day. Continuing descent at this rate, we will reach our lowest altitude at around 12:22 on March 8 and then immediately begin to rise. The altitude of this lowest point will be about 23m. Please note that the times stated here are the planned values but the actual operation times may differ.

As before, they will upload navigation images as this approach is happening.

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Russia to install security cameras inside ISS

8:59 am

Roscosmos has decided to install security cameras on its portion of ISS, apparently to prevent the possibility of future sabotage.

The article does not say this outright, but that it specifically mentioned the hole that someone drilled in a Soyuz capsule makes me think so.

The equipment required will be ordered and dispatched to the ISS. The places where the cameras are to be installed will be determined by the space rocket corporation Energia.

At the end of August 2018 there occurred a drop in air pressure on the ISS. It took specialists several days to find out that the hull of the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft had been drilled from the inside.

This report also suggests that the December spacewalk to inspect the hole from the outside did not help them solve the mystery.

I am skeptical these cameras will prevent future sabotage. First of all, it will be impossible to cover every spot. Second, the sabotage was not on ISS, it was on a Soyuz capsule. Are they also installing cameras there as well, and have simply not made that fact public? Third, what will prevent a saboteur on ISS to block the camera anonymously? I can’t imagine they will be installed in such a way that their locations will be unknown to ISS astronauts.

Unless of course they still suspect an American astronaut did the sabotage, and they plan to specifically deny NASA and its astronauts any information about the camera locations. If so, this partnership is truly beginning to fall apart.

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Next Rocket Lab launch delayed because of late delivery of payload

8:45 am

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab’s next Electron launch, initial scheduled for late February, has been rescheduled for late march because its DARPA payload arrived late.

Rocket Lab confirmed the new schedule March 6. “Following a delay to payload arrival, the R3D2 spacecraft is now at LC-1 and integration is underway,” the company tweeted. In a later statement, the company said the launch would take place between March 16 and 30 (U.S. time), with four-hour windows each day from 6:30 to 10:30 p.m. Eastern.

Being a very new rocket, with only three launches under its belt. it is important to learn that the delay was caused by the payload, not the rocket.

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Hubble’s main camera resumes science work

8:41 am

The main camera on the Hubble Space Telescope has resumed science operations after going into safe mode last week.

At 8:31 p.m. EST on Feb. 28, the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope suspended operations after an error was detected as the instrument was performing a routine boot procedure. The error indicated that software inside the camera had not loaded correctly in a small section of computer memory. The Hubble operations team ran repeated tests to reload the memory and check the entire process. No errors have been detected since the initial incident, and it appears that all circuits, computer memory and processors that are part of that boot process are now operating normally. The instrument has now been brought back to its standard operating mode for normal operations.

From the press release, it appears that they have not been able to trace why the error occurred. However, much like a typical Windows computer, after a mysterious crash and reboot now all appears well, so they have shrugged their shoulders and moved on.

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InSight hits a rock

8:36 am

Engineers have called a pause in InSight’s drilling operation to insert a heat sensor as much as 16 feet into the Martian soil because it appears the drill has hit a large obstruction.

It penetrated to a depth between 18cm and 50cm into the Martian soil with 4,000 hammer blows over a period of four hours, explained Tilman Spohn, HP3’s principal investigator from the German space agency (DLR). “On its way into the depths, the mole seems to have hit a stone, tilted about 15 degrees and pushed it aside or passed it,” he added. “The mole then worked its way up against another stone at an advanced depth until the planned four-hour operating time of the first sequence expired.”

Prof Spohn said there would now be a break in operations of two weeks while the situation was assessed.

When these facts were first reported on March 1st, the press release did not make it clear at that time that the hammer drill was actually blocked. If it cannot drill down further, this will put a crimp in the heat sensor’s ability to measure Mars’s internal temperature. Right now it is only about a foot down, which on Earth would still have it influenced by surface temperatures.

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Possible cure for AIDS?

9:17 pm

In the past week researchers have revealed that two different patients have apparently had the AIDS HIV virus eliminated from their bodies.

The virus infects cells of the immune system, which are made in the bone marrow. A man known as the “Berlin patient” was the first person to become HIV-free after cancer treatment, back in 2007. To treat his leukaemia – a cancer of the immune system – he was given a treatment that involved killing nearly all his immune cells with radiotherapy or drugs, and then replacing them with cells from a donor. This donor was naturally resistant to HIV, thanks to a rare but natural mutation in a gene called CCR5.

Since then, no one else had had HIV eliminated from their body in the same way, until a second case was announced on Monday. This person, known as the London patient, was given bone marrow from a donor with the CCR5 mutation as a treatment for Hodgkin’s lymphoma, another immune cell cancer. He was advised to stop taking the antiviral drugs that keep the virus in check about a year afterwards. Eighteen months later, the virus hasn’t returned.

A possible third case was then announced today, at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Seattle.

The more than dozen year gap between the first cure and the two this week is partly because it takes so long to perform the treatment and then confirm the virus is gone. Moreover, this treatment can only be given to a limited number of patients, because of the risks involved.

Nonetheless, if this cure is proven viable, it will be a great triumph for modern science.

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