Year: 2022

Virgin Orbit successfully launches seven satellites

4:12 pm

Capitalism in space: Virgin Orbit today successfully launched seven smallsats into orbit using its LauncherOne rocket released from a 747.

The link takes you to the Virgin Orbit live stream, which has now ended but can be replayed. The upper stage is presently coasting to its apogee where it will fire again to circularize the orbit for satellite deployment.

This was Virgin Orbit’s third successful launch, and second commercial launch.

The 2022 launch race:

2 SpaceX
1 Virgin Orbit

No one else as yet launched this year.

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Today’s blacklisted child: McDonald’s evicts unjabbed children with cancer from Ronald McDonald House in Vancouver

12:33 pm

Already here in Canada and the United States
That child being rounded up for a death camp in this picture could easily
be the sick son of Austin Fergason. Soon it will be your children, and you.

Now they’re coming for the children: The management at a Ronald McDonald House for sick children in Vancouver has told the families of its residents that any child who has not gotten a COVID shot by next week will be evicted from the facility.

Austin Fergason is the father of a four-year-old child with leukemia who received a notice from Ronald McDonald House Charities – British Columbia & Yukon chapter, that he had a month to move his child and his family out unless they submitted to the jab.

“Beginning January 17, 2022, everyone five years and older who are working, staying or visiting our facilities (both the House at 4567 Heather St. Vancouver and at the Family Room in Surrey Memorial Hospital) must show proof of full vaccination (two doses), in addition to completing our existing screening, unless an Accommodation has been sought and has been explicitly approved and granted by RMHC (Ronald McDonald House Charities) in writing,” reads the notice.

It gives these families till the end of the month to comply. Fergason and his family have been at the House since October.

» Read more

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Curiosity’s wheels holding up despite very mountainous and rocky terrain

12:01 pm

Wheel comparison on Curiosity after five months of rough travel
Click here and here for original images.

In the past half year the Mars rover Curiosity has moved into the mountainous foothills of Mount Sharp, crossing the roughest and rockiest terrain seen during its entire decade-long sojourn on the red planet.

Such terrain poses a serious threat to the rover’s already damaged wheels. Since early in the mission the science team had discovered that the wheels were more easily damaged by the Martian surface than had been expected when they were designed. Since then engineers have been very careful about picking the rover’s route, weaving it in and out to avoid the worst ground. They also take images of the wheels every few months to see if any additional damage has occurred.

The bottom image to the right is part of the most recent wheel survey, taken on January 11, 2022, the 3,353 sol the rover has been on Mars. The top image was taken about six and a half months earlier, in early June 2021. The numbers indicate the same tread areas in both pictures.

Based on this one comparison of part of one wheel, it appears that Curiosity’s wheels have not experienced much new damage, even though during the last half year it has climbed into the mountains and has been traveling continuously over rocks, stones, and boulders. Even now, as its sits in the stone valley beyond Gordon Notch, the ground everywhere is stark and forbidding. Yet, this wheel appears to show no new damage, suggesting that the rover’s full set of wheels are also holding up quite well considering its recent travels.

I focus on this particular wheel because it is the same wheel I have used for comparison since 2017, and thus provides a nice baseline for change. In fact, a comparison of today’s image with the one from 2017 shows that in four years there has been practically no change.

This data is quite encouraging, and bodes well for the mission, suggesting there is really nothing to stop Curiosity from climbing Mount Sharp for years to come.

Of course, this is a comparison of only one part of one of Curiosity’s six wheels. A review of the other wheels might suggest a different conclusion. I suspect however that the other wheels show the same thing. The engineers of Curiosity have done a miraculous job protecting the wheels these last four years.

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Astronomers detect interstellar object invading another distant solar system

9:56 am

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) astronomers think they have detected for the first time an interstellar object that has invaded another distant solar system and disturbed material in its protoplanetary accretion disk.

From the paper’s abstract:

A point source ~4,700 au [astronomical unit, equal to about 100 million miles] from the binary has been discovered at both millimetre and centimetre wavelengths. It is located along the extension of a ~2,000 au streamer structure previously found in scattered light imaging, whose counterpart in dust and gas emission is also newly identified. Comparison with simulations shows signposts of a rare flyby event in action.

This data further confirms that interactions between interstellar objects occur with reasonably frequency, and can thus act to influence the formation of solar systems.

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India gets a new head of its space agency

9:36 am

The new colonial movement: The Modi government of India has put a new person in charge of its space agency ISRO, scientist Dr S Somanath.

As he takes over as the 10th ISRO chairman, succeeding K Sivan, that will be one of the biggest challenges before Somanath — putting the agency’s human space flight programme back on track following setbacks due to launch failures, the Covid-19 outbreak, and a general slowdown since the failure of the Chandrayaan 2 robotic moon landing mission in September 2019.

As director of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre since 2018, and as head of the Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre, Somanath has been closely associated with developing the key rocket technology that will go into the mission.

He was the project director and mission director for the development of the GSLV Mk-III rocket that will be used for the programme. He has also been involved in making it usable for human flight in recent days.

Like Sivan, Somanath’s appointment is for a limited period of time, presently set for three years. Sivan’s had been extended a year during the Wuhan panic. Whether the almost complete shut down of India’s space effort during that panic, plus several launch failures, were a factor in this change is unclear, though they likely played a part in the decision. If all had gone as originally planned, Sivan’s appointment might have been renewed.

Somanath’s extensive background as a rocket engineer however appears to make him ideal for heading ISRO in the next few years, when it attempts its first manned launch.

In related news, ISRO today announced that it has successfully completed a 720 second qualification test of the cryogenic engine to be used in that manned flight.

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SpaceX launches 105 satellites on its third smallsat launch

9:14 am

Capitalism in space: SpaceX today successfully placed 105 satellites and other spacecraft into orbit using its Falcon 9 rocket.

The first stage successfully landed at Cape Canaveral, completing its 10th flight. The launch itself was SpaceX’s third launch dedicated to smallsats in its effort to compete against the small rockets of Rocket Lab, Virgin Orbit, and Astra for that the smallsat market.

Of those 105 satellites, I actually know the owners of two. First, Joe Latrell, frequent commenter here on BtB, put his first Pocketqube cubesat into orbit, testing a variety of space sensors that could be used to track global water use. Second, Jeremiah Pate’s first Lunarsonde prototype cubesat was launched. If successful, he hopes to launch a constellation of similar cubesats for detecting Earth mineral resources, with six more launches already scheduled in ’22 with SpaceX, Virgin Orbit, Rocket Lab, Northrop Grumman, and Arianespace.

This was SpaceX’s second launch in ’22. At the moment the company is the only entity worldwide to launch anything this year, though Virgin Orbit is targeting its own launch later today.

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Lucy update: Engineers testing solar panel fix on ground

3:44 pm

Engineers for the asteroid probe Lucy have begun doing ground tests on a duplicate solar array motor on Earth to see if their plan will work to get the partly deployed solar panel in space opened and latched.

If all goes right, they are aiming for an April attempt at deploying the panel.

In the meantime, the spacecraft continues its coast outwards, presently being about 30 million miles from Earth. Even though one solar array is not fully open, it appears the spacecraft is getting “ample power” for its present operations. It is unclear if this power — with one solar panel not fully opened — will be sufficient once the spacecraft reaches the region of Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, much farther from Earth.

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Pushback: Former employee sues Smith College for discrimination and harassment because she is white

1:33 pm

No civil rights allowed for whites at Smith College
No civil rights allowed for whites at Smith College

Fighting back against bigotry: Jodi Shaw, a former librarian at Smith College in Massachusetts, has sued the college for discriminating against her because she was white, and harassing her by forcing her to attend critical race theory indoctrination sessions that demanded she admit to racism and the evils of the white race.

While she worked there, Shaw “was denied a significant professional career advancement opportunity when she was told by her supervisors that they canceled an orientation program she organized ‘because you are white.’” She was also expected to run a “Residential Life Curriculum” in which students were directed “to project stereotypes and assumptions onto themselves and others based on skin color.” The college asked Shaw to maintain “affinity houses,” which consisted of student housing segregated along racial lines.

During a professional development retreat at which attendance was compulsory, Shaw “was publicly humiliated for not admitting to ‘white supremacy’ and ‘white privilege’ and was continually expected to submit to shaming and harassing group race therapy as an ongoing condition of employment.”

The college harassed her, Shaw claims in the complaint. When she objected to the offending policies and the racially hostile environment at Smith College, the “defendants retaliated against her, attempted to stymie her efforts to file an internal complaint, and then hedged and delayed their investigation. Defendants steadily removed Plaintiff’s job responsibilities, denied her promotional opportunities consistent with all of her colleagues, placed her on furlough, launched a pretextual investigation into her email usage, and deliberately made any further employment at Smith College impossible for Shaw.”

» Read more

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Roscosmos struggles to figure out how private enterprise works

12:25 pm

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Liberty for private enterprise in Russia’s space industry?

Doug Messier at Parabolic Arc today published a translation of an interview given by Oxana Wolf, Roscosmos Deputy Director of the Department of Advanced Programs and the Sphere Project, describing Roscosmos’ effort to work with Russian private commercial aerospace companies.

Though she declared near the end of the interview that “We want our private companies to succeed,” the rest of the interview indicated that she and Roscosmos don’t really understand how private enterprise works, though it also appeared both are struggling to figure it out.

For example, when asked why Russia is having so much difficulty changing its regulations to encourage private enterprise, Wolf said the following:

I wondered this question. I saw at what point the Americans decided to change their legislation in order to raise a whole galaxy of private owners and entrust them with tasks that were previously solved by the state. Changes in space laws began in the 1980s, and laws that got [Jeff] Bezos, [Elon] Musk and [Richard] Branson and others on their feet were passed in the mid-1990s. That is, the “era of private traders education” began more than 30 years ago!

When the “private traders” proved their ability to provide quality services, the American government agencies involved in space, on a competitive basis, gave them orders for launches. [emphasis mine]

To her mind, the government led this change. In Russia’s top-down culture, such change must always come from above, from government leadership. However, her impression of this history is wrong. » Read more

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Scientists discover that mid-sized dunes near Mars’ north pole move

11:41 am

Mars' North Pole

Scientists using images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) collected over six Martian years (6.5 Earth years) have found that the mid-sized dunes dubbed mega-dunes near the north pole actually do move from year to year, unlike similar sized dunes elsewhere on the planet.

Megaripples on Mars are about 1 to 2 meters tall and have 5 to 40 meter spacing, where there size falls between ripples that are about 40 centimeters tall with 1 to 5 meter spacing and dunes that can reach hundreds of meters in height with spacing of 100 to 300 meters. Whereas the megaripples migration rates are slow in comparison (average of 0.13 meters per Earth year), some of the nearby ripples were found to migrate an average equivalent of 9.6 meters (32 feet) per year over just 22 days in northern summer – unprecedented rates for Mars. These high rates of sand movement help explain the megaripple activity.

Previously it was believed that such dunes were static planetwide, left over from a time when Mars’ atmosphere was thicker and could then move them more easily. This data however suggests that the winds produced over the north pole when the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere freezes in winter and sublimates back to a gas in summer are sufficient to shift these dunes in the surrounding giant Olympia Undae dune sea.

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