Year: 2022

Superheavy prototype #7 explodes during tanking test

8:37 am

Capitalism in space: SpaceX’s Superheavy prototype #7 exploded yesterday during a tanking test in Boca Chica, Texas.

I have embedded the video of the explosion below, cued to just before it occurred.

According to Musk, the engineering teams are presently assessing damage. The booster itself appeared relatively intact afterward, though leaning slightly to one side.

At a minimum this incident will delay the orbital launch attempt, especially if booster #7 must be replaced with booster #8, already being prepped in the assembly building nearby.

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First science image released from Webb

3:40 pm

Webb's first deep field image
Click for original image.

The first science image from the James Webb Space Telescope has now been unveiled.

That image is to the right, reduced to post here. From the press release:

Known as Webb’s First Deep Field, this image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is overflowing with detail. Thousands of galaxies – including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared – have appeared in Webb’s view for the first time. This slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground.

This deep field, taken by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is a composite made from images at different wavelengths, totaling 12.5 hours – achieving depths at infrared wavelengths beyond the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest fields, which took weeks.

The image shows the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago. The combined mass of this galaxy cluster acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying much more distant galaxies behind it. Webb’s NIRCam has brought those distant galaxies into sharp focus – they have tiny, faint structures that have never been seen before, including star clusters and diffuse features.

The smeared concentric arrangement of many reddish objects surrounding the picture’s center strongly suggests we are seeing distortion by the gravity of this galaxy cluster.

While nothing in this image appears at first glance to be different than many earlier Hubble images, it looks at objects in the infrared that are much farther away than anything ever seen before, farther than Hubble in the optical could see. To understand the new discoveries hidden in such an image will likely take several years of further research. For example, before astronomers can understand what this image shows they need to determine the red shift of each galaxy, thus roughly determining its distance and the overall 3D structure of the objects visible. Moreover, the consequences of the gravitational lensing must be unpacked.

The White House briefing itself was somewhat embarrassing to watch, as Vice President Kamala Harris, President Joe Biden, and NASA administrator Bill Nelson all struggled to explain what this image shows, and failed miserably. Moreover, the briefing had technical problems, started very late, and it appeared that Bill Nelson especially had no idea what he was looking at. The briefing also ended very abruptly when it shifted to reporters’ questions.

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Collapse pits on Mars

2:08 pm

Elongated collapse pit on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on May 21, 2022 and was today’s picture of the day from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Dubbed “An Elongated Collapse Pit” by the science team, their caption explains:

This observation can help to tell whether or not there is a subterranean connection to this pit. As an added bonus, the much smaller depression to its south also appears to be another collapse pit.

This image had already been in my queue for a future cool image post, but since the scientists have posted it, it is time that I did as well.

In the inset I have brightened the image drastically to try to illuminate the darkest spots in both pits. The elongated pit appears to slope downward towards a hole in the southeast corner, while the interior of the second pit to the south remains completely dark. Both appear to suggest a void below that both reach.

The wider context image and overview map below shows that there is further evidence of more voids in this region of Mars, dubbed Ceraunius Fossae, because of its many north-south parallel fissures.
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Today’s blacklisted American: Lake Superior State University bans free speech

12:17 pm

No first amendment allowed at Lake Superior State University
No free speech allowed at Lake Superior State University

The modern dark age: In June Lake Superior State University earned the Speech Code of the Month award from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) for having a vague and oppressive policy towards the placement of posters on campus.

Students wishing to put up posters on campus at Lake Superior State University better choose their words carefully, as the public university’s posting policy threatens “disciplinary sanctioning” over material deemed “offensive, sexist, vulgar, discriminatory or suggestive.” The trouble with this policy is that anyone, for just about any reason, can claim that someone else’s speech is “offensive” or “suggestive.”

Every month, FIRE highlights a university policy that hinders students’ free expression, and we’ve made Lake Superior State’s “Posting Policy” FIRE’s Speech Code of the Month for June.

FIRE’s main complaint about the college’s poster policy is that it is “overbroad” and “vague,” and could be abused to ban almost any speech. Students are thus forced to self-censor out of fear that any proposed poster he or she wishes to post could be deemed “offensive” and not only be banned, but cause the school to impose sanctions against the student.

The policy however is far worse. Note the highlighted phrases from that policy:
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More lacy Martian rocks

9:59 am

lacy Martian rock
Click for full image.

Cool image time! Because the Curiosity team is presently conducting a drilling campaign at its present position in the lower mountains of Gale Crater, the rover has not moved in the past few weeks. At these times, the science team also has the rover’s other cameras do extensive surveys of the surrounding terrain, including high resolution mosaics by its high resolution camera.

To the right is one photo from the most recent mosaic, cropped to post here. It was taken on July 10, 2022, and shows one many layered rock on the ground near the rover. Though no scale is provided, I suspect the extended flake from this rock is somewhere between six to twelve inches long.

Another illustration of the alien nature of Mars. This flake could not exist on Earth, where the heavier gravity and atmosphere would have acted to break it.

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Biden to unveil first Webb science image today

9:27 am

This should be entertaining: NASA today announced that the unveiling of the first science image from the James Webb Space Telescope has been moved up to later today, so that President Joe Biden can do the unveiling from the White House. From the NASA tweet:

We can’t contain the excitement for @NASAWebb’s first full-color images!

On Monday, July 11 at 5pm ET (21:00 UTC), President Biden will unveil one of the space telescope’s first images of deep space as a preview of what’s ahead.

It appears that the picture Biden will use in this photo op will be the only deep field cosmological picture scheduled for release:

SMACS 0723: Massive foreground galaxy clusters magnify and distort the light of objects behind them, permitting a deep field view into both the extremely distant and intrinsically faint galaxy populations.

The remaining four images will still be released on July 12, 2022, as originally planned.

The live stream of this event will be broadcast on NASA TV.

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SpaceX launches another 46 Starlink satellites

6:49 pm

Capitalism in space: Using its Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX today successfully launched another 46 Starlink satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The first stage completed its sixth flight, landing on the drone ship in the Pacific.

A minor note: SpaceX has clearly decided to simplify these broadcasts. Each is now starting much closer to launch, and the announcers have reduced their narration to the absolute minimum. Overall, this seems a wise policy, because though these live streams are good advertising, most of the people listening at this point do not need detailed explanations of everything. If anything, too much chatter is annoying, and as always less is more.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

29 SpaceX
21 China
9 Russia
4 Rocket Lab
4 ULA

The U.S. now leads China 41 to 21 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 41 to 36. The forty-one launches in just over half of ’22 beats the U.S.’s total for the whole year just two years ago.

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Elon Musk gives a tutorial on the Raptor-2 engine

6:16 pm

Tim Dodd of Everyday Astronaut on Friday released another video from his most recent tour of Starbase at Boca Chica with Elon Musk. I have embedded it below.

Essentially, this 41 minute video is Elon Musk giving us a tutorial on how SpaceX simplified and improved its Raptor engines from its first iteration to the present Raptor-2. He does this while standing in front of a long row of finished Raptor-2s, all meant for installation in the seventh prototype of Superheavy, the booster now on the launchpad with those engines installed and being prepared for its first static fire test prior to the orbital flight.

Musk revealed two interesting factoids during this video. First SpaceX blew up approximately 20 to 30 Raptor engines during the development phase, and melted the chambers on another 50. All of this was perfectly acceptable, because they designed engine manufacture so that a high production rate was built in. As Musk noted, “A high production rate solves many ills.” Losing engines during testing and development was no big deal because they were able to quickly replace them, with revisions and upgrades.

Secondly, Musk claimed that the Raptor-2 engine has a 99% efficiency, a level of efficiency that is unheard of in any engine for any purpose ever. I wonder if that claim will hold up as new companies and engineers work to beat SpaceX in the coming centuries.

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A galaxy with swirling arms

9:17 am

A galaxy with swirling arms
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was released yesterday by the science team that operates the Hubble Space Telescope. It captures a galaxy about 520 million light years away that appears to have been reshaped due to a galaxy merger.

That merger somehow distorted the disk of the inner galaxy, the brightest area, while also producing two sweeping spiral streams in the surrounding periphery.

Despite its unusual shape, astronomers did not choose to study this galaxy. From the caption:

This observation is a gem from the Galaxy Zoo project, a citizen science project involving hundreds of thousands of volunteers from around the world who classified galaxies to help scientists solve a problem of astronomical proportions: how to sort through the vast amounts of data generated by telescopes. A public vote selected the most astronomically intriguing objects for follow-up observations with Hubble. CGCG 396-2 is one such object, imaged here by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys.

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