Year: 2024

China releases movie taken by Chang’e-6 during its lunar descent

8:45 am

Chang'e-6 landing zone
Chang’e-6’s landing zone is indicated by the
red box, on the edge of Apollo Creater
(indicated by the wavy circle).

China’s state-run press yesterday released a short movie created from images taken by its Chang’e-6 lander during its descent to the lunar surface on the far side of the Moon this past weekend.

I have embedded that footage below. The final five frames however are very puzzling, in that they do not appear to show a smooth descent to a specific spot, but appear to jump about wildly. Moreover, the footage does not appear to show the actual landing itself, but appears to stop while the spacecraft is still above the ground.

It is possible that this footage is simply showing the spacecraft’s software searching for a good landing spot, combined with a decision in China not to release footage of the actual touchdown. It could also be that something has gone wrong, and they are stalling about saying so. This last possibility I think very unlikely, but it must be considered, based on the information available.
» Read more

3 comments

NASA confirms June 5th as new launch date for Starliner

8:33 am

NASA yesterday evening confirmed that the agency, ULA, and Boeing are now targeting June 5, 2024 at 10:52 am (Eastern) for the launch of the first manned launch of Boeing’s Starliner capsule carrying two astronauts to ISS for a two week checkout mission.

Technicians and engineers with ULA (United Launch Alliance) worked overnight and on Sunday to assess the ground support equipment at the launch pad that encountered issues during the countdown and scrubbed the June 1 launch attempt. The ULA team identified an issue with a single ground power supply within one of the three redundant chassis that provides power to a subset of computer cards controlling various system functions, including the card responsible for the stable replenishment topping valves for the Centaur upper stage. All three of these chassis are required to enter the terminal phase of the launch countdown to ensure crew safety.

On Sunday, the chassis containing the faulty ground power unit was removed, visually inspected, and replaced with a spare chassis. No signs of physical damage were observed. A full failure analysis of the power unit will be performed to better understand root cause. Meanwhile, ULA has completed functional checkouts of the new chassis and the cards, and all hardware is performing normally.

These kinds of technical issues happen too often on ULA launches. Company engineers always fix them, but it never appears they fix them permanently. Too often on launches they pop up again, causing more scrubs.

The goal should be to fix them so they never pop up again, and your launches can begin to launch reliably, on time. And we know it can be done, because SpaceX has done it.

8 comments

Chang’e-6’s lander successfully soft lands on far side of the Moon

8:47 pm

Chang'e-6 landing zone
Chang’e-6’s landing zone is indicated by the
red box, on the edge of Apollo Creater
(indicated by the wavy circle).

China today announced that today at 6:23 pm (Eastern) the lander of its Chang’e-6’s lunar orbiter successfully soft landed on far side of the Moon.

Teams will now begin initial checks of the lander’s systems and soon begin collecting samples. The lander will collect up to 2,000 grams of samples, using a scoop to grab surface regolith and a drill for subsurface material. Samples are expected to be sent into lunar orbit within around 48 hours. Chinese space authorities have yet to publish a timeline for the mission and its steps, however.

Once docked to the orbiter, the samples will get transferred to the return spacecraft, which will return to Earth and land in China, in the same manner as was done with its Chang’e-5 sample return mission in 2021. Unlike those earlier samples, which came from the Moon’s near side (where the Apollo and Soviet samples had come from), these new samples will be first obtained from the far side.

6 comments

Japanese billionaire cancels his “Dear Moon” Starship mission

10:35 am

The Japanese billionaire, Yusaku Maezawa, today announced he has canceled his “Dear Moon” Starship mission that was supposed to take him and a bunch of artists and writers on a fly-by mission to the Moon.

Maezawa suggested the cause of the cancellation was uncertainty over the project development, saying he signed the contract in 2018 based on the assumption the launch would come by the end of 2023. “It’s a developmental project so it is what it is, but it is still uncertain as to when Starship can launch,” Maezawa said. “I can’t plan my future in this situation, and I feel terrible making the crew members wait longer, hence the difficult decision to cancel at this point in time.”

This decision really suggests to me that Maezawa’s whole project was simply a PR stunt. It seems strange to cancel now, when actual test launches of Superheavy/Starship are taking place and showing solid and speedy progress.

No matter. I have no doubt others will show up and buy flights. I also would not be shocked in the slightest if another billionaire shows up to and offers to fly the artists and writers who won seats on Maezawa’s proposed flight.

13 comments

SpaceX last night launched 23 more Starlink satellites

10:28 am

Go bunny! Last night SpaceX successfully launched another 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage completed its 14th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

58 SpaceX
26 China
8 Russia
6 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the world combined in successful launches, 66 to 40, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including other American companies, 58 to 48.

3 comments

Hubble once again in safe mode due to gyro problem

10:23 am

On May 24, 2024 the Hubble Space Telescope once again paused its science operations and entered in safe mode, apparently due to gyroscope problem.

The telescope automatically entered safe mode when one of its three gyroscopes gave faulty telemetry readings. Hubble’s gyros measure the telescope’s slew rates and are part of the system that determines and controls precisely the direction the telescope is pointed. NASA will provide more information early the first week of June.

It is not clear if this is the same gyroscope that caused the last two safe mode events.

With each such event the telescope gets closer and closer to having only two gyroscopes. At that point it will shift to one-gyro mode, using only one and holding the second in reserve. From then on it will no longer be able to take perfectly sharp pictures. Science will still be possible, but not like before.

9 comments

Boeing Starliner launch scrubbed at T-3:50

10:10 am

UPDATE: The launch is now scheduled for June 5, 2024 at 10:52 am (Eastern).

For reasons that appeared related to the ground system’s of ULA’s Atlas-5 rocket, the first manned launch of Boeing’s Starliner’s capsule was scrubbed today at T-3:50.

It appears they want to try again tomorrow at 12:03 pm (Eastern), assuming ULA can figure out what happened.

The repeated scrubs and delays that have so far prevented this launch are beginning to remind my of my childhood watching the early NASA launch attempts during the Mercury program. Then, they hadn’t done this before, and were being very careful about everything.

Now, it seems that NASA, ULA, and Boeing are acting the same way, and that is probably because they are very nervous about Starliner and don’t want anything to go wrong.

I had intended to embed the live stream, but slept late (it IS the weekend, y’know). Sorry.

11 comments

Jess Erskine – The Prisoner Intro, re-visited

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Those familiar with the original series, The Prisoner, will find this quite amusing. As the filmmaker notes on the youtube webpage, “And yes, this is cheesy as crap. I made it that way on purpose. Be seeing you!”

And if you aren’t familiar with the original, which was a truly unique and very surreal spy TV show of the 1960s, watch the original opening first. It is amazing how close this new version matches, in a ridiculous way, the shot angles and action of the actual opening sequence.

Hat tip Wayne DeVette.

10 comments

Beware the cornered rat!

1:14 pm

Trump is only in the way

The absurd guilty verdict against Donald Trump yesterday by a jury of twelve partisan New York Democrats confirms something that we should have recognized back in 2016. The Democratic Party and its partisan supporters will brook no opposition, and are willing to do anything — including throwing the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the entire legal system in the trash can — in order to maintain their control of the government.

In 2016 they were outraged that an outsider like Donald Trump could become president, and for the next four years exhibited that irrational outrage by pushing one fake and slanderous scandal against him after another, from idiotic claims that he deprived visitors of the same portions of ice cream as he got to the utterly false accusations that he won the election due to Russian help.

To defeat him in 2020 it appears the administrative state teamed up with many Democratic Party governors to create the panic over COVID as well as the outrage over the drug overdose death of an addict during his arrest in Minnesota. The former allowed those governors and state governments to corrupt the election system.

The latter outrage over George Floyd allowed the armed wing of the Democratic Party, its BLM and Antifa thugs, to loot and riot throughout the country, thus reinforcing the absurd lockdown rules imposed because of COVID.

It remains unclear whether the the election shenanigans that followed gave Biden the victory, but any objective review of the facts and the many vote tampering allegiations put forth by numerous election officials nationwide suggests it was very possible.

Thus, Biden became president, and since then the Democrats have been on an aggressive blacklisting campaign to destroy anyone who opposed them. That campaign reached its summit yesterday with Trump’s conviction in what could be called the most ludicrous and disgusting legal case ever brought against any American. Not only can no one name the crime that Trump was supposed to have committed, the jury was given instructions that it could find him guilty even if they themselves couldn’t agree on that crime.

As expected, the public’s response to Trump’s conviction has been to increase his support. » Read more

76 comments

The recovered diary of Columbia’s Israeli astronaut now on loan to Israel’s national library

9:50 am

One page from Ilon Ramon's space diary
One page from Ilon Ramon’s space diary

According to a May 29, 2024 announcement by the National Libary of Israel, the recovered diary of astronaut Ilan Ramon — who died when the space shuttle Columba broke up on its return to Earth — has now been transferred from the Israel Museum to the National Library of Israel so that it can finally be put on display.

The diary, a personal and national treasure, should have disintegrated along with the shuttle and its crew, but a few weeks after the disaster, to the surprise of the search party, someone found the remains of the diary on a muddy patch of land in Texas.

How is it possible that it survived? It withstood the explosion, and then a journey of several kilometers till it hit the earth. No one knows for sure, but leading researchers in the field believe that due to the light weight of the pages, the diary didn’t fall directly to the ground but probably glided slowly downwards, carried on wind currents that eventually allowed for a soft landing. Most of the damage to its pages probably only happened after it reached the ground, resulting from the humid conditions in the marshy area where it landed.

Since then the Israel Museum has been carefully documenting its contents, which included daily accounts by Ramon of his experience in space. One example:
» Read more

6 comments
1 … 110 111 112 113 114 … 191