The Mash Report – Northerner terrifies Londoners by saying “Hello”
An evening pause: Nice comedy piece, based on far more truth than it could possibly imagine, performed as it were in I think 2017.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
Year: 2020
Tests this weekend to pinpoint slow leak on ISS
The astronauts this weekend will shut all the hatches between different modules on ISS so that ground controllers can try to pinpoint the location of a long term slow air leak.
This leak was first spotted in September 2019, when there were “indications of a slight increase above the standard air leak rate,” NASA said in the statement. “Because of routine station operations like spacewalks and spacecraft arrivals and departures, it took time to gather enough data to characterize those measurements. That rate has slightly increased, so the teams are working a plan to isolate, identify and potentially repair the source.”
While the leak rate is higher than usual, it is still within specifications for the station and poses no immediate danger to the crew, NASA officials emphasized. Astronauts also deal with leak simulations during training for their stays on the space station, which typically are about six months long.
The weekend test will allow them to identify where the leak is located. They will then be better able to find it, and mitigate it.
Dying Democratic Cities
Saks Fifth Avenue in 2020 NYC.
Want to move to one of America’s big urban cities? Ever imagine having a penthouse apartment close to or even in downtown so that you could walk to the theater? Well, the options are endless, and the cost is plummeting. It’s a buyer’s market! Just take a look:
- New York: When Half of NYC’s Tax Base Leaves and Never Comes Back
- Chicago: Threat Of More Looting Leads To Concerns Of Downtown Chicago Exodus
- Portland: Multiple Portland companies to move out because of riots
- Seattle: Seattle Defunded Police. Now Businesses Are Leaving, and Rioters Still Aim Explosives at Cops
- San Francisco: Mass exodus: Twice as many homes for sale compared to last year as people flee city
None of these trends are new. American cities have been generally suffering since the end of World War II, though for the past few decades they have seen a partial renewal that did not bring them back to the halcyon days of the past but at least made them look vibrant and alive.
The last few months however have seen a perfect storm of circumstances that have led to a major crash, destroying all the gains made in the recent past.
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Musk: 100+ reuses of Falcon 9 1st stages possible
Capitalism in space: According to Elon Musk:, based on what SpaceX has learned so far in reusing the 1st stages of its Falcon 9 rocket, it is entirely possible that the present design could result a hundred or more reuses.
Now, with all that experience in hand and a Falcon 9 Block 5 booster already 60% of the way to the ten-flight reuse milestone, Musk says that “100+ flights are possible” and that “there isn’t an obvious limit.” While “some parts will need to be replaced or upgraded” to achieve dozens or hundreds of booster reuses, Musk says that SpaceX “almost never need[s] to replace a whole [Merlin 1D] engine.
Given that a Falcon 9 booster’s nine M1D engines are likely the most difficult part of each rocket to quickly and safely reuse, it’s extremely easy to believe that individual boosters can launch dozens – if not hundreds – of times with just a small amount of regular maintenance and repairs. In that sense, SpaceX has effectively achieved Musk’s long-lived dream of building a rocket that is (more or less, at least) approaching the reusability of aircraft.
The next step in this effort will be to shorten the turnaround times. At the moment the best time between any booster’s reflight has been just under two months. SpaceX has said they want to be able to refly boosters in just days.
August 18, 2020 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
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The Association – Cherish
An evening pause: Performed live 1979.
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
Movie of OSIRIS-REx’s last rehearsal before sample grab
Click image for full movie.
The OSIRIS-REx science team has released a movie made by the spacecraft’s navigation camera during its August 11th final rehearsal prior to the planned sample grab-and-go now set for October.
The image to the right is a capture of one image when the spacecraft was closest to the asteroid, about 131 feet above the surface. The target landing site, dubbed Nightingale, is the somewhat smooth area near the top half of the frame.
These images were captured over a three-hour period – the imaging sequence begins approximately one hour after the orbit departure maneuver and ends approximately two minutes after the back-away burn. In the middle of the sequence, the spacecraft slews, or rotates, so that NavCam 2 looks away from Bennu, toward space. Shortly after, it performs a final slew to point the camera (and the sampling arm) toward the surface again. Near the end of the sequence, site Nightingale comes into view at the top of the frame. The large, tall boulder situated on the crater’s rim (upper left) is 43 feet (13 meters) on its longest axis. The sequence was created using nearly 300 images taken by the spacecraft’s NavCam 2 camera.
Nightingale might be their best choice, but it remains about half the size they had originally wanted for their grab-and-go site, with far too many objects larger than planned. They designed the grab-and-go equipment to catch objects smaller than 0.8 inches. Little at this location, or on the entire surface of Bennu, is that small. The asteroid is truly a pile of gravel, with no dust.
Nauka finally arrives at launch site, thirteen years late
Russia’s Nauka module for ISS has finally arrived at its launch site at Baikonur, Kazakhstan, to be prepared for its launch, now scheduled for April 2021.
After its arrival and fitting-out, Nauka will become the primary laboratory module on the Russian segment. Currently, Russia has two small laboratory modules – Rassvet and Poisk – both of which will be dwarfed by Nauka. Additionally, Nauka will take the title of the heaviest Russian module on the Station, at 24.2 tons. Zvezda currently holds this honor, at 20.3 tons.
The module is thirteen years later than first planned and has been under construction for more than a quarter century.
Hope completes first course correction on trip to Mars
The new colonial movement: The United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) Mars Hope orbiter has successfully completed its first course correction on its journey to Mars.
The success of this maneuver is a big deal, as it appears it was controlled from the UAE’s control center by its engineers. Up to now this project has mostly been a joint U.S/UAE project, launched by Japan, with U.S. universities doing the heavy lifting while training UAE personnel. Now the UAE engineers are in charge, and so they have to get it right.
They have another half dozen course corrections scheduled before arrival in February 2021, when the spacecraft will have its big maneuver, entering Martian orbit.
Another SLS screw-up related to Europa Clipper
Despite being required for years by a legal congressional mandate to use SLS to launch Europa Clipper to the moon of Jupiter, NASA engineers have suddenly discovered unspecified “compatibility issues” that might make use of the rocket problematic.
At an Aug. 17 meeting of NASA’s Planetary Science Advisory Committee, Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, said the Europa Clipper mission had recently discovered compatibility issues involving the Space Launch System, the vehicle preferred by Congress to launch the spacecraft. “There have been some issues that have been uncovered just recently,” she said of the use of SLS for Europa Clipper. “We are in a lot of conversations right now with human exploration and others within the agency about what kind of steps we can take going forward.”
She did not elaborate on the compatibility issues regarding SLS. Such issues, industry sources say, likely involve the environment the spacecraft would experience during launch, such as vibrations. That environment would be very different for Europa Clipper, a relatively small spacecraft encapsulated within a payload fairing, than for the Orion spacecraft that will be the payload for most SLS launches.
“We are currently working to identify and resolve potential hardware compatibility issues and will have more information once a full analysis has been conducted,” NASA spokesperson Alana Johnson said in an Aug. 18 statement to SpaceNews. “Preliminary analysis suggests that launching Clipper may require special hardware adjustments, depending on the launch vehicle.”
This is a joke. It is also absurd and disgusting. Finally, it is also par for the course for NASA and all of today’s government, at all levels. They can’t do anything competently. From the beginning Europa Clipper was mandated to fly on SLS. And yet, they didn’t design the two to be compatible?
Based on this example we should of course demand that the government and these bureaucrats be given more power and more control over our lives. Of course.
Majestic dunes on Mars
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on May 10, 2020, and shows the dune field inside a large unnamed sixty-mile-wide crater in the highlands of Mars.
Scientists have been using MRO to monitor this site to track both dust devils and dune changes since at least 2009. In 2009 the focus was on the numerous dust devil tracks, and in fact I posted in March 2020 a comparison of an earlier image with a more recent picture, showing how the earlier tracks had vanished in recent pictures, probably wiped clean by the global dust storm in 2018.
This time however I am less interested in the science, which I covered in detail in that previous post, but in the beauty of these dunes. They are large and majestic, and the color strip tells us that they exhibit striking colors of green, gold, and tan. Is there a place on Earth with dunes of such colors? If so, it is rare.
Make sure you click on the image to see the full resolution photograph. It is even more breath-taking.
Tiny asteroid sets record for closest fly-by of Earth
Astronomers using the robotic Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) at the Palomar Observatory in California on August 16 spotted a tiny asteroid just after it had zipped past the Earth at a distance of only 1,830 miles, the closest any asteroid has ever been seen to do so without hitting the ground.
Asteroid 2020 QG is about 10 to 20 feet (3 to 6 meters) across, or roughly the size of an SUV, so it was not big enough to do any damage even if it had been pointed at Earth; instead, it would have burned up in our planet’s atmosphere.
“The asteroid flew close enough to Earth that Earth’s gravity significantly changed its orbit,” says ZTF co-investigator Tom Prince, the Ira S. Bowen Professor of Physics at Caltech and a senior research scientist at JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA. Asteroids of this size that fly roughly as close to Earth as 2020 QG do occur about once a year or less, but many of them are never detected.
The ability to spot these things is continuing to improve, though it does not appear they have yet obtained enough information to predict 2020 QG’s full orbit, or when or if it will return.