Year: 2024

September 16, 2024 Quick space links

3:31 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Partisan Democrats hate so much they are willing to commit murder, and worse, now admit it openly

11:52 am

The assassination of Abraham Lincoln
An earlier example of the Democratic Party’s
reasonablity, that time against Abraham Lincoln

They’re coming for you next: The words couldn’t have made it clearer. When asked by a reporter of the Daily Mail what he thought of his father’s actions, the son of attempted Trump assassin Ryan Routh said that his father hates Trump as “every reasonable person does. I don’t like Trump either.”

The problem is that reasonable people don’t hate. Reasonable people think about the differing opinions of others and decide as rationally as possible what they think might be the right answer. And if reasonable people are faced with true evil, they don’t act with hatred. They instead follow the biblical mantra, don’t condemn the sinner, only the sin.

Routh’s son however illustrates the contrasting attitude of the base as well as the leadership of today’s Democratic Party. They don’t simply disagree, they hate. Worse, they think that hatred is “reasonable,” and that everyone “reasonable” agrees with it.

Thus you get two assassination attempts in just over two months against Donald Trump, whose only crime — according to Democrats — is that he is running for president against them, and has said he will change the governmental policies they believe in. “Reasonable Democrats” can’t tolerate such a possibility, so therefore these “reasonable Democrats” appear out of nowhere, over and over again, attempting to kill the source of their hatred.

It is this same mindless hatred that allowed Kamala Harris as well as the Democratic Party operatives running the Trump-Harris debate last week to repeat slanderous lie after slanderous lie. The list below is only a sampling:
» Read more

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What the Milky Way would look like if it was presently a star forming powerhouse

9:15 am

A galaxy as seen by Hubble and Webb
For the original images go here and here.

Cool image time! The two pictures to the right, taken respectively by the Hubble and Webb space telescopes of the same galaxy, shows us many different features of a barred galaxy, located about 35 million light years away. From the caption for the Hubble image:

This picture is composed of a whopping ten different images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, each filtered to collect light from a specific wavelength or range of wavelengths. It spans Hubble’s sensitivity to light, from ultraviolet around 275 nanometres through blue, green and red to near-infrared at 1600 nanometres. This allows information about many different astrophysical processes in the galaxy to be recorded: a notable example is the red 656-nanometre filter used here. Hydrogen atoms which get ionised can emit light at this particular wavelength, called H-alpha emission. New stars forming in a molecular cloud, made mostly of hydrogen gas, emit copious amounts of ultraviolet light which is absorbed by the cloud, but which ionises it and causes it to glow with this H-alpha light.

Therefore, filtering to detect only this light provides a reliable means to detect areas of star formation (called H II regions), shown in this image by the bright red and pink colours of the blossoming patches filling NGC 1559’s spiral arms.

The Z-shaped blue indicates the stars and its most distinct spiral arms. Astronomers presently believe that the Milky Way is also a barred spiral like this, though its star-forming regions are thought to be far less extensive and distinct.

The Webb infrared image matches the Hubble data, with the false color blue indicating the near-infrared and the false color red the mid-infrared. As with the Hubble picture, the red indicates the galaxy’s extensive star forming regions.

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Investigation into upper stage failure during Ariane-6’s first launch completed

8:38 am

The Ariane-6 rocket investigation team, including people from the European Space Agency (ESA), CNES (France’s space agency), ArianeGroup (which built and owns the rocket), and Arianespace (which presently manages the rocket), has identified the issue that caused the rocket’s upper stage failure during the rocket’s first launch in July.

In a 16 September update, the Task Force announced that the investigation had identified a single temperature measurement that “exceeded a predefined limit” as the root cause of the anomaly. The tripped limit caused the software to trigger a shutdown of the APU which ensured the rocket’s Vinci upper stage engine could not be restarted for the final burn.

In order to remedy this issue and ensure a similar shutdown does not occur in the future, the ignition preparation sequence, specifically the APU chill-down sequence, has been changed. The updated flight software is already being tested as teams prepare for the rocket’s first commercial flight which is set to take place before the end of the year.

Because of that incorrect temperature, the upper stage did not do its final burn, thereby stranding the stage and two demonstration return capsules in the wrong orbit. This prevented the test return of both capsules, as well as the test planned de-orbit of the stage over the ocean.

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Two Russian astronauts mark one year in orbit

11:38 am

Russian astronauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolay Chub today marked the one year anniversary of their launch in 2023, thus marking another Russian yearlong mission in space.

The two cosmonauts were sent to the orbit aboard the Soyuz MS-24 manned spacecraft, which blasted off from the Baikonur space launch center on September 15, 2023. The third crew member on board was NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara, who returned to the Earth on April 6, 2024. Kononenko and Chub, as well as NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson, will travel back aboard the Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft, whose departure is scheduled for September 23.

Their return next week will not mark a record for the longest flight in space. That belongs to Valeri Polykov, who occupied the Soviet-built Mir space station in the mid-1990s for one year, two months, and two weeks in the mid-nineties, or 438 days. The second longest flight was by Sergey Avdeev, 380 days on Mir in 1998-1999, with the third longest flight by Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitry Petelin, and Franco Rubio, 371 days in 2022-2023.

When Kononenko and Chub return on September 23rd, their flight will 373 days long, passing the 2022-2023 mission.

Note that only one American is on this list. A few have flown almost a year, but only Rubio has made it, and that was forced on him unplanned because of problems with the Soyuz capsule that brought him into orbit. He was forced to stay up an extra six months and come down on the next Soyuz.

The reason for this lack of long American flights is entirely NASA’s fault. It has consistently resisted doing such long missions, even holding the Russians back during the first two decades of ISS’s operation. The Russians no longer follow NASA’s timidity, and have been doing more such missions, because such missions will be the only way to gather the necessary medical data needed for future missions to Mars.

Meanwhile, NASA hesitates, and sometimes touts eleven-month missions (such as Scott Kelly’s) as year-long missions, a blatant lie that our propaganda press repeats mindlessly. I fully expect the first planned year-long American mission will be done privately, outside of our government, once Starship begins flying regularly.

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Iran completes third orbital launch in 2024

10:17 am

Iran's spaceports

According to Iran’s state-run press and now confirmed by independent sources, Iran yesterday completed its third orbital launch in 2024, its new solid-fueled three stage Qaem-100 rocket lifting off on its second launch from Iran’s interior Semnan spaceport. No word on where the rocket’s lower stages crashed.

The payload was an engineering test satellite, which according to the Iranian press is operating as planned.

At the moment Iran appears to aggressively accelerating its civilian space program. It now has two functioning rockets, the Simorgh rocket, which placed three satellites in orbit in January, and the Qaem-100, its first launch taking place also in January. The country is also building a coastal spaceport near the town of Chabahar, as shown on the map to the right. Moreover, this third launch is the most the country has ever achieved in a single year. Until 2024, Iran had never launched more than once in any year.

And while these rockets and satellites do not appear to be military in nature, the technology development will certainly result in advances in Iran’s missile capabilities. The Qaem-100’s solid-fueled design is exactly what most ballistic missiles use, since it allows the missile to be stored fueled for long periods.

The leader board in the 2024 launch race remains unchanged.

91 SpaceX
38 China
10 Rocket Lab
10 Russia

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 106 to 59, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 91 to 74.

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Resilience splashes down safely, ending Polaris Dawn commercial manned orbital mission

12:48 am

SpaceX’s Resilience capsule has just splashed down safely in the Gulf of Mexico, ending the five-day Polaris Dawn private manned orbital mission, commanded by billionaire and jet pilot Jared Isaacman.

As of posting the capsule is still in the water with divers and boats on the way.

This completes the first mission in Isaacman’s planned three mission Polaris program. It was a complete success, doing a great deal of medical research on the effects of high orbit radiation on the human body as well as the first private spacewalk using SpaceX’s first EVA spacesuits. For Isaacman’s next mission he has already proposed doing a Hubble repair mission. NASA has had mixed feelings about this idea, but after this success it will be interesting if that attitude changes.

I must comment that the coverage by SpaceX employees on this mission was somewhat annoying. For the first time, they spent a lot of time giggling and focusing on PR and how “cool” and “incredible” and “wonderful” everything was, from amusing new decals in the capsule to the spacewalk to Sarah Gillis’ violin performance.

All of this was as great as they kept saying, which is why they didn’t need to say it, over and over and over and over and over again. It would have been better if they had done what SpaceX has generally done on previous broadcasts and missions, focused on describing the technical aspects and then staying silent otherwise. Gushing like this is more like a NASA or Blue Origin broadcast, and does not do SpaceX credit.

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Sarah Gillis – Rey’s Theme

6:01 pm

An evening pause: The music is by John Williams. The lead violinist is space-walking Sarah Gillis, playing from the Resilience capsule in orbit right now.

Hat tip Gary.

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Bad consequences from the medical profession’s panic/lies over COVID continue to build

3:23 pm

The results of COVID policy decisions of our medical community
The results of COVID policy decisions
for our medical community

Several stories in the past week illustrate how the medical community dug itself a deep hole with its dishonest panic and over-reaction to COVID and its response to it.

First the background from 2020: Rather than follow past very successful policies involving new epidemics, whereby only the sick and aged were quarantined while everyone else went about their normal lives, intentionally spreading the new respiratory virus to those with which it was relatively harmless so that the entire population could quickly get herd immunity and thus quickly choke the virus out, our modern medical community, in conjunction with government health officials who had political motives, chose to quarantine everyone, destroying the economy and the livelihoods of millions while actually allowing the disease time to spread to the aged and sick, killing many more than were necessary.

Numerous studies have confirmed the failure of the lockdown and mandate policies during COVID. Sweden for example essentially followed those traditional policies, never locking down or mandating masks or shots. It was blasted for that decision, with many in the health community predicting massive deaths from COVID. Instead, studies have now proven that Sweden had the lowest mortality in Europe from 2020–2022.

That’s the background. The new stories this week illustrate the consequences. First, a recent peer-reviewed study found that trust in doctors has crashed since 2020. The numbers are quite shocking:
» Read more

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Perservance looks back from on high

10:25 am

Perservance's view looking back down Neretva Vallis
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture above, cropped to post here, was taken on September 9, 2024 by the left navigation camera on the Mars rover Perseverance, looking east and back along the route from which the rover had come.

The view is somewhat more spectacular than most Perseverance images because the rover took it during its on-going climb up unto the rim of Jezero Crater, as shown by the overview map below. The blue dot marks Perseverance’s present position, while the yellow lines indicate the area covered by the picture above, taken several days earlier.

The haze in the picture also suggests that the local dust storm first noted in late August might be clearing somewhat. This isn’t certain, however, as the previous picture was using the rover’s high resolution camera to look at distant hills (thus more obscured), while the picture above was taken by the left navigation camera looking more widely and at nearer objects.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

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Intuitive Machines targeting January 2025 for launch of its next lunar lander

9:37 am

The landers either at or targeting the Moon's south pole
The landers either at or targeting the Moon’s south pole

The company Intuitive Machines is now aiming to launch its second Nova-C lunar lander, dubbed Athena, during a January 1-5, 2025 launch window.

The landing site is indicated on the map to the right, on the rim of Shackleton crater and almost on top of the south pole. While Chang’e-7 is targeting the same crater rim, it is not scheduled for launch until 2026.

The lander will not only include a drill for studying the surface below it, it will release a small secondary payload, the Micro-Nova Hopper, which will hopefully hop down into the permanently shadowed craters nearby.

The launch will also carry a lunar orbiter, dubbed Lunar Trailblazar, which will not only do spectroscopy of the lunar surface, looking for water, it will also be used as a communications relay satellite with Athena. That orbiter, designed to demonstrate the ability to build a smallsat at low cost, was previously threatened with cancellation because its builder, Lockheed Martin, went way over budget.

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