Year: 2023

January 19, 2023 Quick space links

3:44 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

  • ULA plans 10 Vulcan launches in 2023

    • My count of total planned ULA launches in ’23 is 11, but that includes two Delta Heavy launches and five Atlas-5 launches. It seems a complete fantasy to expect ULA to complete 17 launches this year (10 of which will be the as yet unlaunched Vulcan), when ULA has never completed more than 16 in a single year, and that record was set in 2009, more than a decade ago. In fact, the company has never completed more than 8 launches in a year since 2016.

 

 

 

 

 

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Machete Mesa on Mars

12:41 pm

Machete Mesa on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on November 30, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a variety of ridges in a region of Mars called Arabia Terra, which is also the largest transition zone between the Martian southern cratered highlands and the northern lowland plains.

While this picture illustrates some nice geological facts about Mars (see below), I post it simply because of the dramatic sharpness of the ridge on top of the mesa, which I guess is several hundred feet high, but only a few feet across, at most, at its peak. A hike along this ridgeline would be a truly thrilling experience, one that the future human settlers on Mars will almost certainly find irresistible. Put this location on your planned tourist maps of Mars. It will likely be an oft-visited site.
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Today’s blacklisted American: Court clerk fired despite having valid health and religious reasons to refuse jab

11:52 am

Judge Claire Bradley, petty tyrant

They’re coming for you next: Today’s blacklist story is only one of tens of thousands, but it illustrates starkly the cruel and vindictive intolerance of the petty dictators who now run American society. It doesn’t matter if the jab doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter if you have valid health reasons for avoiding it. It doesn’t matter that you have religious beliefs. It doesn’t matter if you offer to be tested frequently to prove you aren’t sick. It doesn’t even matter that no mandate has been imposed by the local government.

The boss demands you to get jabbed, and if you dare to refuse, the boss will fire you.

Less than three years from retirement, Kitsap County court clerk Tammy Duryea was terminated in 2021 from her job because she did not wish to get the COVID shots for both health and religious reasons.

She has now sued, but her chances of victory are quite slim, especially since it was the court judges, led by Judge Claire Bradley, the presiding judge of the District Court, who imposed the shot mandate.
» Read more

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Geotail mission finally ends after 30 years

9:18 am

Though initially planned as a four year mission, the Geotail probe — designed to study the Earth’s magnetosphere — finally failed on June 28, 2022 after 30 years of operation.

With an elongated orbit, Geotail sailed through the invisible boundaries of the magnetosphere, gathering data on the physical process at play there to help understand how the flow of energy and particles from the Sun reach Earth. Geotail made many scientific breakthroughs, including helping scientists understand how quickly material from the Sun passes into the magnetosphere, the physical processes at play at the magnetosphere’s boundary, and identifying oxygen, silicon, sodium, and aluminum in the lunar atmosphere.

The mission also helped identify the location of a process called magnetic reconnection, which is a major conveyor of material and energy from the Sun into the magnetosphere and one of the instigators of the aurora. This discovery laid the way for the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, or MMS, which launched in 2015.

Though it failed in June, engineers worked until November attempting to recover the spacecraft. When those efforts failed, NASA officially ended the mission.

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ABL completes investigation of January 10th launch failure

9:13 am

ABL yesterday released the results of its investigation into the January 10th launch failure of its RS1 rocket.

Just over ten seconds after launch the rocket suffered “a complete loss of power,” its engines shut down, and it came crashing back to Earth about 60 feet to the east of the launch pad. The resulting explosion and fire damaged and destroyed significant equipment, including a nearby “fabric hanger.” The report then goes on to describe the cause:
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SpaceX completes first Starlink launch of 2023

8:53 am

Using a new first stage, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched 51Starlink satellites into orbit this morning from Vandenberg Space Force Base, the first Starlink launch of 2023.

The first stage successfully landed on a drone ship in the Pacific.

At present, SpaceX and China are tied for the lead in the 2023 launch race, each having completed 5 launches so far this year. No one else has launched as yet.

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Astronauts complete Soyuz seat liner installation inside Endurance

9:31 pm

Astronauts today completed the installation of Frank Rubio’s Soyuz seat liner inside the Dragon capsule Endurance so that he can return to Earth should an emergency requiring evacuation occur on ISS.

On Jan. 17, NASA Flight Engineer Josh Cassada, with assistance from NASA Flight Engineer Nicole Mann, worked inside the SpaceX Dragon Endurance crew ship collecting tools and readying the spacecraft for a seat liner move. The seat liner move, completed today, Jan. 18, ensures NASA Flight Engineer Frank Rubio will be able to return to Earth in the unlikely event of an emergency evacuation from the International Space Station. Rubio originally launched to the station with cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin aboard the Soyuz MS-22 crew ship on Sept. 21, 2022. The change allows for increased crew protection by reducing the heat load inside the MS-22 spacecraft for Prokopyev and Petelin in case of an emergency return to Earth.

It would be fascinating to get more details about the work that was done to install this Soyuz seat liner in Endurance. Clearly some improvisation was required.

Regardless, this work is only temporary, since Rubio’s seat liner will be shifted again into the replacement Soyuz scheduled to arrive in mid-February.

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January 18, 2023 Quick space links

5:03 pm

Courtesy of Jay, BtB’s intrepid stringer.

 

 

 

 

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The COVID jab: An emerging health disaster whose name cannot be spoken

2:01 pm

Sudden collapse
One of many sudden collapses. Click for full video.

While from the beginning it appeared that the various COVID shots from different pharmaceutical companies were relatively safe to take, time is proving this assumption to be very false, with the data increasingly suggesting that the jab not only poses a significant, dangerous, and immediate health risk to young people, its long term effects on everyone who either chose to get it or was forced to by government mandate could very well be disastrous.

First the immediate risks. The numbers of individuals who have died suddenly and abruptly after getting the jab has been horrifying and shocking. Never in my life have I seen so many young and healthy people suddenly keeling over in public situations and dying. This story underlines the horror of the situation:

Such occurrences were unheard of prior to 2021. As noted at the link, “In fact, 500% more soccer players in the EU are dropping dead from heart attacks than just one year ago.” To capture the real horror of these events you need only watch the short video at this link. The thread that follows provides further documentation of this epidemic of “sudden death” and its apparent connection to the COVID shots.

Still, the actual medical link of these sudden heart failures to the COVID shots remains somewhat tentative, though more and more research is tying the two together.

From the last link:
» Read more

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Curiosity climbs onto the Marker Band

10:51 am

Panorama as of January 17, 2023
Click for full image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Curiosity’s exploration of the foothills of Mount Sharp continues. The panorama above, cropped, reduced, and annotated to post here, was taken on January 17, 2023 by the rover’s right navigation camera. It looks forward across the flat marker band terrain that the rover has been studying for the past few weeks.

From orbit, this marker band appears very smooth and flat, and is found in many places on the flanks of Mount Sharp, always at about the same elevation. The arrows in the overview map to the right mark several places near Curiosity where the band is evident. The blue dot marks Curiosity’s present location, the red dotted line its planned route, and the yellow lines indicate the approximate area covered by the panorama above. The distance across the marker band to the uphill slope is about 500 feet.

Now that Curiosity is on the marker band, it no longer looks smooth. Instead, it is a flat plain of many uneven paving stones interspersed with dust. While not as rough as the Greenheugh Pediment, which Curiosity had to retreat from because it was too hard on the rover’s wheels, the marker band is hardly the smooth soft terrain implied by the orbital images.

These paving stones have also proven difficult to drill into, with Curiosity’s drill already failing twice previously because the rock was too hard. That hardness should not be a surprise, however, as this layer’s flatness in many places shows its resistance to erosion.

As it crosses this wide section of the marker band the science team will obviously be looking for more candidate drill sites. Sooner or later one should work.

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