Lucas Vaskange – Infinite Zoom
An evening pause: This has been going around, but with a French narration that has no translation. The version below overlays a pleasant music track that I think enhances it nicely.
Hat tip Rex Ridenoure.
Year: 2022
Cones south of Starship’s prime landing sites on Mars
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on May 7, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissnace Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists have labeled as “Cones in Phlegra.”
Cones such as these are one of the prime geological mysteries of Mars’ northern lowland plains. Scientists do not know yet whether they are either mud or lava volcanoes, or even if they are sedimentary mesas that resisted subsequent erosion. In fact, it was hoped by some American scientists that the Chinese would send its Zhurong rover north towards a nearby cone to find out, but alas, the Chinese decided to head south instead.
Zhurong however was on the other side of Mars. The overview map below shows us where these cones are located.
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August 15, 2022 Quick space links
From Jay, BtB’s stringer:
- Chinese pseudo-company AAEngine reveals its resuable first stage engine
- SLS to roll out to the launchpad beginning tomorrow
- Army hands over satellite operations to Space Force
- Virgin Orbit reduces its launch prediction for ’22, while saying it will garner more revenue
- Chinese pseudo company SpaceTai claims it will launch its new rocket by ’24
As Jay notes, it looks like an obvious knockoff of SpaceX’s Merlin engine.
The army however will continue to build instruments and payloads for satellites, as well as continue to maintain its 1st Space Brigade, which monitors satellite data and health during military deployments.
Today’s blacklisted American: White teachers blacklisted by union contract in Minnesota
Minnesota public schools and teachers unions:
dedicated to the new segregation!
“Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” According to clauses in a new union contract in Minneeapolis, white teachers must be laid off or reassigned first should a layoff be required, and that “educators of color” will be exempt from such layoffs.
“Starting with the Spring 2023 Budget Tie-Out Cycle, if excessing a teacher who is a member of a population underrepresented among licensed teachers in the site, the District shall excess the next least senior teacher, who is not a member of an underrepresented population,” the agreement reads.
According to the United Federation of Teachers, “excessing” means “reducing staff in a particular school when there is a reduction in the number of available positions in a title or license area in that school.”
The agreement adds that non-white teachers, as well as those working in various programs, “may be exempted from district-wide layoff[s] outside seniority order.” The agreement also prioritizes the reinstatement of teachers from “underrepresented populations” over white teachers.
A distant cliff and a rocky path forward
Click for full image.
Click for full image.
Two cool images arrived today from Curiosity, as it is about to enter the Martian canyon of Gediz Vallis. The mosaic above, cropped, reduced, and annotated to post here, was assembled from photos taken by the rover’s right navigation camera on August 15, 2022. The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken the same day by the rover’s Chemistry camera, normally designed to take very close-up pictures of nearby features. In this case the science team aimed it at a distant cliff face, marked by the arrow in the panorama above, to get a preview of some of the many layers in that mesa.
And has become quite expected from Mars, the number and types and variety of layers is astonishing. The layer that forms the flat bright area at the center of this image is what scientists have dubbed “the marker layer”, since they have found it at similar elevations in many places on the flanks of Mount Sharp. (See the annotated overview map from a post last week.)
Curiosity’s planned route is to head to the right of this mesa, circling around it to get into the upper reaches of Gediz Vallis. First however engineers are going to have to figure out how to get the rover past the somewhat large scattered rocks on the ground directly ahead, without further damaging Curiosity’s already tattered wheels. At first glance there does not appear to be any clear path.
Russia to launch Tunisian astronaut to ISS
As part of an agreement between the two nations, Russia yesterday announced that it will fly a Tunisian woman to ISS in 2024.
On August 13, Women’s Day in Tunisia, eight women candidates for a space flight were presented. They are currently undergoing medical examination. Six of them will go to Russia for the final stage of pre-qualification to choose two best candidates: one will be a member of the main crew, the other one – of the standby crew.
No longer able to make money selling the spare seats on Soyuz to NASA, and apparently not getting much interest from the private sector inside or outside of Russia to buy these seats, the Putin government is now using them for international diplomacy, just as it did during the Soviet era.
Russia unveils small model of its proposed space station
The Russian space agency Roscosmos today unveiled a small tabletop model of the independent Russian space station it proposes to build that will replace its portion on ISS.
The picture to the right shows that model. It shows four large modules, a second docking hub, and a Russian manned Federatsiya (“Federation” in English) capsule (intended to replace Soyuz) docked to the nearest port.
Roskosmos said in a statement that the new space station would be launched in two phases, without giving dates. The first phase would see a four-module space station start operating. That would later be followed by a further two modules and a service platform, it said. That would be enough, when completed, to accommodate up to four cosmonauts as well as scientific equipment.
Roskosmos has said the new station would afford Russian cosmonauts a much wider view of the Earth for monitoring purposes than they enjoy in their current segment. Although designs for some of the new station already exist, design work is still underway on other segments.
Russian state media have suggested that the launch of the first stage is planned for 2025-26 and no later than 2030. Launch of the second and final stage is planned for 2030-35, they have reported.
Russia officials have also said that it will stick with its partnership at ISS until this new station has begun operations.
It will be very revealing how successful Russia is at meeting this timetable. For the past thirty years, since the fall of the Soviet Union and the advent of international cooperation at ISS, its aerospace sector has routinely failed to meet any schedule at all, promising a lot but never delivering, or delivering literally decades late. (For example, Federatsiya has been under development for almost a decade, with no apparent progress.) Forced to go it alone, and in competition with the rest of the world, that sector, now controlled and owned by the government (like the Soviet days), might finally have some incentive to produce.
Or not. The corruption that permeates Russia’s government is deep and widespread. It is entirely possible that a large percentage of the money budgeted for this project ends up in the pockets of its managers instead of used to build anything.
We shall have to wait and see.
August 14, 2022 Quick space links
Some weekend news from BtB’s top stringer, Jay.
- China shows off fairing used to launch suspected X-37B copy
- Fairing analysis strongly confirms China’s reusable spaceplane is a copy of the X-37B
- Big SpaceX hardware delivered to Cape Canaveral, likely part of launch tower.
- Status of the debris from Russia’s anti-satellite test
- First spacewalk using the airlock on the new Wentian module on Tiangong-3 expected any day now
Of the 1,784 objects tracked, 1,132 have burned up in the atmosphere, with the orbits of another 539 to decay in the next three years. The fate of the remaining 113 objects is unclear, but they will clearly be a threat for longer.
Biden administration to formulate new regulations governing in-space commercial activities
We’re here to help you: The Biden administration has now officially announced its plans to formulate new regulations governing in-space commercial activities, such as satellite repair, orbital refueling stations, and removal of space junk, as part of a space strategy workshop statement released last week by the FCC.
The new White House initiative is a follow-on effort [to one started during the Trump administration], aimed at fleshing out the domestic rules, and possibly future regulations, for “non-traditional” space activities that today either fall between jurisdictional cracks or simply are not covered by current law, according to a US government source involved.
Another thrust of the Biden administration effort is to get in front of the governance issues in order to shape future global norms and rules, including for military activities — ahead of China, which also is seeking to be a leader in how humankind expands its reach to the stars.
Kamala Harris announced this new regulatory effort, outlined in this strategy document [pdf], and added that it will be led by the National Space Council, despite the fact that the FCC scooped her by a full week in announcing it. This quote below from her speech announcing this initiative also illustrated her empty-headed, cliche-ridden mentality:
“We will do this work to make sure our nation remains a role model for the responsible use of space,” Harris said in a speech during a visit to the Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, Calif. noting that the US “must write new rules to provide the clarity” needed by government and industry for 21st century space operations.
“We must think about where we now stand and where we must go,” she said. “The opportunity of space must guide our work in the 21st century. to do so, must deepen our partnerships with the private sector.”
Despite the vapid content of Harris’s speech, make no mistake she and the federal bureaucracy that is dominated and controlled by the Democratic Party knows exactly where it wants things to go: It wants power and control, and is very unhappy that in the past five years private enterprise has wrested that power and control from it in space. These new regulations will be shaped entirely with the goal of squelching the freedom of private companies so that the government runs things again.
Professional software hacker demonstrates how to hack Starlink terminals
A professional software hacker not only recently succeeded in hacking the terminals SpaceX sells customers to use its Starlink satellite internet service, he first got a bounty from SpaceX for doing so, then made his technique freely available on the web for everyone else.
[Lennert] Wouters is now making his hacking tool open source on GitHub, including some of the details needed to launch the attack. “As an attacker, let’s say you wanted to attack the satellite itself,” Wouters explains, “You could try to build your own system that allows you to talk to the satellite, but that’s quite difficult. So if you want to attack the satellites, you would like to go through the user terminal as that likely makes your life easier.”
The researcher notified Starlink of the flaws last year and the company paid Wouters through its bug bounty scheme for identifying the vulnerabilities. Wouters says that while SpaceX has issued an update to make the attack harder (he changed the modchip in response), the underlying issue can’t be fixed unless the company creates a new version of the main chip. All existing user terminals are vulnerable, Wouters says.
Starlink says it plans to release a “public update” following Wouters’ presentation at Black Hat this afternoon, but declined to share any details about that update with WIRED prior to publication.
Wouters is a researcher at the Belgian university KU Leuven.
While it can certainly help SpaceX to figure this out, by publishing the hack to the world Wouters looks like a blackmailer unsatisfied with his payoff who is now following through with his blackmail threat. One also wonders why SpaceX, as part of its bounty payment, did not require Wouters to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
August 12, 2022 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, well worth your time, go here.
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Formula 1 crash right after start
An evening pause: This short analysis of a spectacular race track crash right at the start of a Formula 1 race illustrates well the sophistication of modern technology, not only in protecting the driver’s life but in providing the information for reconstructing the cause of the accident. And it all happens during an ordinary sports broadcast.
You’ll probably want to watch this more than once to catch how one car gets flipped over on its back.
Hat tip Tom Wilson.