After two years of redesign, Orbital ATK’s Antares rocket tonight successfully put a Cygnus cargo capsule into orbit.
Considering that every single one of the vehicles that fly to ISS (Soyuz, Dragon/Falcon 9, Cygnus/Antares, HTV) has been experiencing some issue that has delayed each of their launches, this success tonight must be a relief to managers and engineers in both Russia and the U.S.
Next comes a manned Soyuz launch on Wednesday.
An evening pause: I’ve posted this song as an evening pause previously, but I think Audrey Hepburn’s performance of the song in the 1961 movie, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which introduced it to the world, deserves to be seen.
Hat tip Andrew_W.
This Nature article provides a nice summary of the European/Russian ExoMars 2016 mission that on Wednesday will try to place a lander on Mars as well as put an orbiter in orbit.
Neither probe is going to provide many exciting photos. The orbiter, dubbed boringly the Trace Gas Orbiter, is designed to study Mars’ atmosphere, while the lander, Schiaparelli, is essentially a technology test mission for planning and designing what Europe and Russia hope will be a more ambitious lander/orbiter mission in 2020.
Anyone expecting spectacular pictures from Schiaparelli itself might be disappointed — photos will be limited to 15 black-and-white shots of the Martian surface from the air, intended to help piece together the craft’s trajectory. No photos will be taken on the surface, because the lander lacks a surface camera.
Schiaparelli’s instruments will study the Martian atmosphere, including the possible global dust storm that might happen this month but so far has not yet appeared. The instruments will also be able to detect lightning, should it exist on Mars.
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The competition heats up: SpaceX has confirmed that they will reuse a Dragon capsule to bring cargo to ISS in the spring of 2017.
This plan had already been revealed earlier. The news here is simply that NASA and SpaceX have finalized the decision and picked the actual schedule cargo mission that will use a Dragon capsule. What is more significant is this:
SpaceX plans to reuse Dragon spacecraft through the remainder of its current CRS contract, which runs through SpX-20. [Benjamin Reed, SpaceX director of commercial crew mission management] did not discuss how many Dragon spacecraft are available to be reused, or how many times SpaceX believes a Dragon capsule can be flown.
If successful, Reed said it would allow SpaceX to end production of the cargo Dragon spacecraft. “We’ll be reflying Dragons going forward, and be able to close down the Dragon 1 line and move all the way into Dragon 2,” he said, referring to the next-generation version of the Dragon being developed for commercial crew missions.
In other words, their goal is to transition very quickly from disposable capsules to a fleet of capsules that they fly over and over again.
In preparation for its Mars landing on October 19, Schiaparelli has successfully separated from the Trace Gas Orbiter of the European/Russian ExoMars 2016 mission.
They had some initial communications issues soon after separation, all of which have now been resolved.
China today (Monday in China) launched two astronauts successfully on a 30-day mission to their second space station, Tiangong-2.
They have not yet docked with the station.
Valve problems detected during Juno’s orbital insert around Jupiter has caused engineers to delay the October 19 engine burn that would have lowered the probe’s orbit around Jupiter.
Mission managers for NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter have decided to postpone the upcoming burn of its main rocket motor originally scheduled for Oct. 19. This burn, called the period reduction maneuver (PRM), was to reduce Juno’s orbital period around Jupiter from 53.4 to 14 days. The decision was made in order to further study the performance of a set of valves that are part of the spacecraft’s fuel pressurization system. The period reduction maneuver was the final scheduled burn of Juno’s main engine. “Telemetry indicates that two helium check valves that play an important role in the firing of the spacecraft’s main engine did not operate as expected during a command sequence that was initiated yesterday,” said Rick Nybakken, Juno project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “The valves should have opened in a few seconds, but it took several minutes. We need to better understand this issue before moving forward with a burn of the main engine.”
Because of this, they will instead use this next close approach to Jupiter to do pure science, something that they would not have done during the engine burn. Though this is a good example of turning lemons into lemonade, it will not be a good thing if Juno can never reduce its orbit to 14 days. A 53 day orbit will mean that they can only do good research every two months, and will seriously limit what they can learn over the long run.
Orbital ATK has delayed its first launch in two years of its redesigned Antares rocket after discovering a cable needed to be replaced during prelaunch tests.
The launch is now scheduled for 7:40 pm (Eastern) Monday.
My posting this week has been somewhat slack, mostly because I am trying to finish up a caving monograph for a survey project that has been on-going for the past five years. I have also been swamped with the very last changes to my policy paper for the Center for New American Security, which now has the title Capitalism in Space: Private Enterprise and Competition reshape the Global Aerospace Launch Industry. (I am hoping that title causes a few liberal heads to explode when the paper is released in the coming days.) I am also off on another cave project this weekend, so I will not be posting again until Sunday night.
Hopefully, things will ease up next week. In the meantime, enjoy your weekends and do not get too depressed over the insanity and madness that appears to be taking over our society.
An evening pause: I thank God every day that I don’t work in the corporate world!
Hat tip Mike Nelson.
No matter how peaceful and friendly and tolerant the majority of Muslims might be, their religion continues to attract and generate the most intolerance and hate and violence worldwide. Below are just a few stories in the past 24 hours that illustrate the increasingly vicious nature of Islam:
This is only three stories. If I wanted, I could have listed dozens, from all over the world, all giving examples of Islamic hate for and violence against anyone that is not a practitioner of that religion.
In the first story, the UNESCO declaration that these Jerusalem sites are exclusively Muslim didn’t only rub out thousands of years of Jewish history, it also wiped out thousands of years of Christian history as well. As has been historically typical of Islam, it cannot tolerate other religions. When Islam conquered Israel it did not respect the site of the Jewish Second Temple, it instead immediately built its own temple on top of it, claimed ownership, and has since worked to exclude Jews and Christians from the site. Now Muslim countries are trying to use the UN to strengthen their claim and to justify their effort to remove all Jews from the Middle East, an effort that is well illustrated by the .third story.
Finding out what’s in it: More than a million people are losing their health insurance plans this year as insurers increasingly flee Obamacare.
The number above was determined by
At least 1.4 million people in 32 states will lose the Obamacare plan they have now, according to state officials contacted by Bloomberg. That’s largely caused by Aetna Inc., UnitedHealth Group Inc. and some state or regional insurers quitting the law’s markets for individual coverage.
…Nationwide estimates of the number of people losing their current plans are higher. For example, Charles Gaba, who tracks the law at ACASignups.net, estimates that 2 million to 2.5 million people in the U.S. will lose their current plans, compared with 2 million a year ago. Gaba’s estimate is based on insurance company membership data.
For the people losing plans, there are fewer and fewer choices. One estimate by the Kaiser Family Foundation predicts that for at least 19 percent of the people in Obamacare’s individual market next year there will be only one insurer to choose from.
Obviously, the solution is to ask the people that wrote this bad law to fix it. We should all vote Democratic on election day, and help make this disaster even worse!
Seven years after the mission ended Japan has finally released the full catalog of images and videos taken by its lunar orbiter Kaguya.
No explanation for the long delay has been provided. Overall, this is just another example of what to me appears to be a bloated, bureaucratic, and slow to move Japanese space program. Their rockets are expensive, their planetary probes have had repeated problems, and they seem to be very uninterested in stepping up their game to compete in the increasingly competitive international race to explore and settle the solar system. That it took them more than seven years to release this data is quite shameful.
This article provides a detailed look at Sunday’s arrival of ExoMars 2016 at Mars.
If all goes right the Schiaparelli lander will soft land on the surface while the Trace Gas Orbiter will enter an initial 185 by 60,000 mile orbit, which will slowly be adjusted so that by January it can begin its atmospheric research.
Though the Russian contribution to this mission was only the rocket that sent it to Mars, if the mission succeeds it will be the first time any Mars mission with major Russian participation has succeeded. The failure rate for any Russian effort to go to Mars has been 100%. And it hasn’t been because the missions have been particularly difficult. The majority of their failures occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, even as they were very successfully completing much harder lander missions to Venus.
It has almost as if there is a curse against any Russian attempt to visit the Red Planet. Hopefully, that curse will finally be broken on Sunday.
The competition heats up: Both Boeing and SpaceX better get their manned capsules working by 2019, because NASA at this point has no plans to buy more seats on Russian Soyuz capsules after the present contract runs out.
Even as the commercial crew schedules move later into 2018, NASA officials say they are not considering extending the contract with Roscosmos — the Russian space agency — for more launches in 2019. The last Soyuz launch seats reserved for U.S. astronauts are at the end of 2018.
It takes more than two years to procure components and assemble new Soyuz capsules, so Russia needed to receive new Soyuz orders from NASA by some time this fall to ensure the spacecraft would be ready for liftoff in early 2019.
The second paragraph above notes that even if NASA decided it needed more Soyuz launches, it is probably too late to buy them and have them available by 2019.
This article provides some details about the design changes being made to Starliner that have caused its first test flight to be delayed until 2018.
An evening pause: What I think makes these performances by Rieu and his orchestra so especially appealing is that he finds musicians who are glad to show how much they enjoy playing this lovely music. He recognizes the importance of fun.
And yes, as a child of the 1960s, I cannot help listening to this music and see spaceships docking. Those of my generation will of course immediately know to what I am referring. Will anyone younger?
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
Research at JPL has developed new materials called skutterudites that have the potential of increasing the efficiency and power output of the radioisotope electric generators used on deep space missions where solar power will not work.
The new eMMRTG would provide 25 percent more power than Curiosity’s generator at the start of a mission, according to current analyses. Additionally, since skutterudites naturally degrade more slowly that the current materials in the MMRTG, a spacecraft outfitted with an eMMRTG would have at least 50 percent more power at the end of a 17-year design life than it does today.
“Having a more efficient thermoelectric system means we’d need to use less plutonium. We could go farther, for longer and do more,” Bux said.
This being NASA research, they are moving somewhat slowly in testing and confirming whether these new materials will work. They hope that after passing further reviews in 2017 and 2018 the agency might finally approve their use in subsequent missions.
The uncertainty of science: A new analysis from Hubble and other telescope data suggests that the universe actually contains ten times more galaxies than previously estimated, several trillion instead of the past estimate of 100 to 200 billion.
I would not bet much money on this conclusion. I suspect that further research will find even more galaxies, since our deep observations of the universe are at the moment confined to a mere handful of Hubble deep field images that cover only a few tiny specks of space.
This new analysis however did confirm previous estimates that suggest the universe has evolved and changed significantly over time.
In analysing the data the team looked more than 13 billion years into the past. This showed them that galaxies are not evenly distributed throughout the Universe’s history. In fact, it appears that there were a factor of 10 more galaxies per unit volume when the Universe was only a few billion years old compared with today. Most of these galaxies were relatively small and faint, with masses similar to those of the satellite galaxies surrounding the Milky Way.
These results are powerful evidence that a significant evolution has taken place throughout the Universe’s history, an evolution during which galaxies merged together, dramatically reducing their total number. “This gives us a verification of the so-called top-down formation of structure in the Universe,” explains Conselice.
