Year: 2022

The unbelievably rough and wind-swept surface of Mars’ Greenheugh pediment

11:17 am

Gator-back terrain on Mars
Click for full image.

Since my last update on the travels of the Mars rover Curiosity on February 22, 2022, the rover has been been creeping ever so slowly westward across a plateau that scientists have dubbed the Greenheugh pediment.

Scientists have known for years that the surface of the pediment was going to be rough going. This panorama taken by Curiosity when it first climbed up to the pediment in March 2020 to take a peek before retreating revealed that roughness starkly.

In truth, since beginning its traverse of that pediment in February, the Curiosity team has found the ground not only as rough as expected, but beautiful in a strange sort of way, as illustrated by the March 20, 2022 photo to the right, reduced to post here. As Lauren Edgar, Planetary Geologist at USGS Astrogeology Science Center, noted yesterday in a Curiosity update that featured this image:
» Read more

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NASA: Europa Clipper’s cost rise; Mars sample return delayed

10:10 am

At a meeting this week NASA officials admitted that the cost of its Europa Clipper mission has risen by three quarters of a billion dollars, and that the sample return mission to bring back Perseverance’s core samples will be delayed, as well as now require two landers, not one.

NASA revealed significant changes to two of its flagship planetary science missions at today’s Space Science Week meeting at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. The cost for Europa Clipper, which will gather data as it makes multiple swingbys of Jupiter’s moon Europa, has grown from $4.25 billion to $5 billion. Separately, NASA and ESA are replanning the Mars Sample Return mission. Two landers are needed instead of one to retrieve samples from the surface of Mars and boost them into orbit for their trip back to Earth. The launches will be in 2028 instead of 2026.

The sample return mission itself is also growing in complexity:

A Sample Fetch Rover will be sent to collect them and take them to a Mars Ascent Vehicle — a rocket — that will shoot them into Martian orbit where they will be transferred to an Earth Return Orbiter for the trip back to Earth.

Initially the plan was for the fetch rover and ascent vehicle to be launched together in 2026, and the Earth Return Orbiter in 2027. But Zurbuchen decided to convene an Independent Review Board in 2020 to get an impartial assessment of the plan by outside experts. The Board cautioned that 2026 was “not achieveable” with 2028 a more realistic date, and that the “program’s schedule and cost are not aligned with its scope.”

Consequently, NASA now has replanned the mission with two landers — one each for the fetch rover and ascent vehicle — instead of one. Both landers will launch in 2028. The Earth Return Orbiter will still launch in 2027. The samples will get back to Earth in 2033.

Prediction: The launch of this fleet of sample return spacecraft will be further delayed, and its overall cost will rise, by a lot. In fact, it is very possible that SpaceX’s Starship will have already returned samples from Mars before NASA’s mission gets off the ground.

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Scientists: Enceladus’ tiger stripes come from underground ocean

9:58 am

The uncertainty of science: Using a new computer model, scientists now think they have shown how on the Saturn moon Enceladus pressure from an underground ocean can push through cracks to produce geysers on the surface.

Rudolph and his colleagues ran a physics-based model to map the conditions that could allow the cracks from the surface to reach the ocean and cause the eruptions. The model accounts for cycles of warming and cooling that last on the scale of a hundred million years, associated with changes in Enceladus’ orbit around Saturn. During each cycle, the ice shell undergoes a period of thinning and a period of thickening. The thickening happens through freezing at the base of the ice shell, which grows downward like the ice on a lake, Rudolph said.

The pressure exerted by this downward-expanding ice on the ocean below is one possible mechanism researchers have proposed to explain Enceladus’ geysers. As the outer ice shell cools and thickens, pressure increases on the ocean underneath because ice has more volume than water. The increasing pressure also generates stress in the ice, which could become pathways for fluid to reach the surface 20-30 kilometers away.

You can read the paper here.

Be warned: This is only a model. Moreover, its conclusions suggest that this mechanism will not work on Jupiter’s moon Europa, which has many planet-wide crack-like features that suggest (as yet unconfirmed) a bubbling up from below.

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Musk says Starship will be ready for first orbital launch in May

9:47 am

Capitalism in space: In a tweet yesterday Elon Musk said that Starship will be ready for first orbital launch in May, a delay of two months from his previous announcements.

“We’ll have 39 flightworthy engines built by next month, then another month to integrate, so hopefully May for orbital flight test,” Musk tweeted in response to CNBC.

While the delay could certainly be because the company needed to prepare enough Superheavy engines, I also suspect it is also because Musk now expects the FAA to not approve the environmental reassessment of Starship’s Boca Chica launch site by the end of March, as has been promised. I predict that sometime in the next few days the FAA will announce another one-month delay in that process, the fourth such delay by that federal agency.

In late-December, when the FAA announced the first delay, I predicted that the first orbital launch of Starship would not happen until the latter half of ’22. I now think that prediction was optimistic. I firmly believe the federal government, controlled by Democrats, will delay that launch until after the mid-term elections in November. It appears to me that the Biden administration wants to reject the environmental reassessment, which would block Starship flights from Boca Chica for years. It just doesn’t want to do it before November, because of the negative election consequences.

I truly hope my cynical and pessimistic analysis is utterly wrong. So far, however, my prediction has proven to be more right than wrong.

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South Korea to build its own unmanned lunar lander

9:31 am

The new colonial movement: The government of South Korea has begun a project to build its own unmanned lunar lander, scheduled for launch sometime in the 2030s.

South Korea presented an action plan to develop a lunar lander weighing more than 1.5 tons that would carry out scientific research on the surface of the moon in the 2030s. The project is to begin in 2024 after a preliminary feasibility study.

The Ministry of Science and ICT would form a working group of industry-academic experts to conduct research on a lunar lander and draw up strategies and detailed plans by August 2022. It is a follow-up project to launch a lunar orbiter in August 2022. The lunar lander will be lifted by a next-generation homemade rocket.

The goal is to encourage the country’s own aerospace industry. The working group will spend the next month recruiting South Korean companies to join the project.

South Korea however has to first get its own homemade rocket, Nuri, to successfully launch. The first launch attempt in October 2021 failed, and the second has been delayed to fix the cause.

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SpaceX ends future business with launch services company Spaceflight

9:24 am

Capitalism in space: For reasons not explained, SpaceX has ended all further business with the launch services company Spaceflight, which acts to find and integrate smallsats from many different companies into a package for launch.

Spaceflight also provides many of those smallsats with a small tug, dubbed Sherpa-LTC, to move them into their preferred orbit once deployed from the Falcon 9 upper stage. It looks like there have recently been problems with this tug that Spaceflight has not been able to resolve to SpaceX’s satisfaction.

The propulsion leak on Spaceflight’s Sherpa-LTC vehicle was discovered about three weeks before the Jan. 13 SpaceX Falcon 9 Transporter-3 launch. Root-cause analysis of the leak traced the problem to an oxidizer circuit in the propulsion system, which worked as designed but vented some trapped liquid due to a design flaw.

…Regarding the upcoming launch, Spaceflight began working with SpaceX to address concerns about “the analysis and test results of Sherpa and its customer payloads” as soon as it became aware of them.

Despite Spaceflight’s “best efforts, SpaceX chose not to fly the Sherpa vehicle until the analysis and test approaches could be better understood,” Sorensen said. “We continue to work with SpaceX to understand their decision and address any concerns for future missions.”

It appears, though not confirmed, that SpaceX is not just worried about Sherpa, but is also concerned about Spaceflight’s quality control efforts, and that might be the reason it has reject Spaceflight from future launches.

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Sharpest radio image ever taken of newly discovered space object

9:11 am

The first known Odd Radio Circle (ORC)
Click for full image.

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers, using the MeerKat radio telescope in South Africa, have taken the best radio image yet of a newly discovered type of astronomical object, dubbed whimsically as an odd radio circle (ORC).

The photo to the right is that image. While it is reminiscent of the many planetary nebulae seen in visible light that astronomers have been studying since the 1800s, this weird shape is only seen in radio frequencies, and it is much much larger.

Odd radio circles are so named because they’re large, circular objects which are bright around the edges at radio wavelengths, but which can’t be seen with optical, infrared or X-ray telescopes – and at this stage, astronomers don’t really know what they are.

And they’re massive – about a million light years across, making them sixteen times larger than our own galaxy. But despite their gargantuan size, the objects are difficult to spot, hiding in plain sight.

Planetary nebulae are generally the size of solar systems.

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Russia launches military communications satellite with Soyuz-2 rocket

8:57 am

Russia today successfully launched its tenth Meridian military communications satellite from its Plesetsk spaceport in the Russian interior, using a Soyuz-2 rocket.

Like China, Russian launches drop the expendable first stages and boosters on land. From the article:

On March 17, 2022, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced danger zones in three areas of the Komi Republic: the “Vashka” site in the Udorsky District, and “Zheleznodorozhny” site in the Knyazhpogostsky and Kortkerossky districts. According to the warning, the launch of the Soyuz-2 rocket was planned for March 22, 2022, between 15:00 and 17:00 Moscow Time (8:00 – 10:00 a.m. EDT). Backup launch opportunities were reserved for March 23, 24 and 25.

The announced impact sites matched the ground track required for the mission to access an orbit with an inclination 62.8 degrees toward the Equator, which is used by Meridian military communications satellites.

Such danger zones in Russia are the routine for every launch since Sputnik in 1957. And unlike China Russia never made any effort to develop methods for controlling the crash landing of its first stages.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

11 SpaceX
6 China
4 Russia

The U.S. still leads China 17 to 6 in the national rankings.

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Colorful Mars

4:54 pm

Colorful Mars
Click for full image.

Today’s cool image illustrates that Mars is not merely the Red Planet, but actually does have places on its surface that are colorful and interesting. The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was today’s picture of the day for the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). As Alfred McEwen of the Lunar & Planetary Laboratory in Arizona notes in the caption:

This region of Mars has a diversity of minerals resulting in especially colorful images. However, the geology is complex and not easy to understand. Nili Fossae has often been on the list for potential landing sites for robotic exploration, and will likely continue to be so given its rich landscape.

When I asked McEwen what minerals are indicated by the different colors, he responded that at the scale provided by MRO, the reddish colors indicated dust or water-altered minerals like clays, and the blue/green colors indicated mafic minerals like pyroxene and olivine.

You can get a sense of the scale by looking at the wider image below. The overview map below that provides some interesting context, including a hint as to why Perseverance landed where it did.
» Read more

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Pushback: Judge rules university officials can be held personally responsible for firing a professor for his political opinions

12:36 pm

Speech that is forbidden at the University of North Texas
Speech that is forbidden at the University of North Texas

A major victory for free speech: A federal judge ruled on March 11th that officials at the University of North Texas can be held personally responsible for firing a professor because they did not like his political opinions.

In his 69-page order of March 11, Judge Sean Jordan, of the United States District Court for Eastern Texas, found that university officials should have known that math professor Nathaniel Hiers’ speech “touched on a matter of public concern and that discontinuing his employment because of his speech violated the First Amendment,” before they fired him for going public with his disagreement with the left-wing concept of “microaggressions.”

The university was claiming qualified immunity for school officials in the case, meaning that the school wanted its officials to be excluded from being held responsible for their actions merely because they were acting in their position as state employees. Jordan denied the claim of qualified immunity and also denied the school’s demand to have the case dismissed outright.

You can read the judge’s order here [pdf].

The background: Hiers, having found flyers in math department’s lounge warning faculty against triggering “microaggessions” in their conversations, responded as shown in the picture above, placing one flyer on the chalk rack of the blackboard and wrote his own opinion of it above.

Ralf Schmidt, the Math department’s head, immediately criticized Hiers for doing this, and within a week fired him without notice.
» Read more

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OneWeb signs deal with SpaceX to launch its remaining satellites, replacing Russia

9:07 am

Capitalism in space: Just 18 days after its contract with Arianespace was suspended because of Russia invasion of the Ukraine, OneWeb has now signed a deal with SpaceX to use its Falcon 9 rocket to launch the remaining 200+ satellites in its satellite constellation.

Few details about the agreement were released Monday morning. “Terms of the agreement with SpaceX are confidential,” OneWeb said in a statement.

OneWeb said the “first launch” with SpaceX is expected before the end of this year, suggesting the company anticipates multiple flights on SpaceX rockets.

It appears that launches could start before the end of this year

There are two big losers in this story. The obvious one is Russia, as it has lost OneWeb as a satellite customer. The second, less obvious, is Arianespace, as it appears it has also lost OneWeb as a customer. It will also have to refund OneWeb any payments the satellite company made for launches that have not occurred, even those that Arianespace had paid Russia for which Russia is refusing to refund.

Though no details have been released about the deal, I would not be surprised if OneWeb got a better price than what it was paying Arianespace. I also suspect that Elon Musk was willing to make this deal with OneWeb, the prime competitor to his Starlink satellite constellation, because he favors the Ukraine in this war.

Finally, this deal will not only make Russia look bad, it will make SpaceX look magnificent. Its PR value cannot be measured for the company.

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