An evening pause: Worth watching more than once, if only to escape the insanity of our time.
I can’t help wondering however why they all are walking on this route, and what is it they stop to look at to the right at one point? And why is one crawling on its belly?
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
OSIRIS-REx has apparently successfully touched the surface of Bennu, grabbed a sample, and backed away without damage.
The link takes you to my embed of NASA’s live stream, which is mostly pr garbage. However, it is providing live updates from the mission control team, as it happens. Most of time, the NASA people running their pr effort even have the sense to shut up when such updates come it.
Right now we do not know how much of a sample was obtained. It will take some analysis of data and images to find out. They will know by the time of tomorrow’s press conference at 5 pm (Eastern).
Click for full image.
The photo to the right, released today by the science team of Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), takes a overhead view of the unusual crater dubbed Ryder (named after lunar scientist Graham Ryder).
The crater is located on the Moon’s far side, on the edge of the South Pole-Aitken Basin, the Moon’s largest and possibly oldest impact basin. What makes Ryder Crater intriguing is its strange shape, as well as its interior north-south interior ridge.
This crater was featured previously in 2012 in a spectacular oblique image looking east across the crater. Then, the scientists theorized its strange shape was caused by two factors, first that the impact was oblique, and second that it occurred on a steep slope.
Today’s release adds another factor that might explain the interior ridge. The context map below makes that explanation obvious.
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The Nightingale landing site on Bennu, with
OSIRIS-REx superimposed. Click for full image.
Spaceflight Now today published a nicely detailed article summarizing the entire OSIRIS-REx mission to the asteroid Bennu, in anticipation of today’s attempt to grab a sample from that asteroid’s surface.
If you want to understand what is happening today, this article does a nice job of outlining everything.
I have embedded the live stream of the sample grab below the fold. It begins at 5 pm (Eastern) today. Be warned that it will show very little of the actual event, as the spacecraft will not be sending much data back to Earth today, during these operations. All we will really find out is if the grab happened, or was aborted to avoid risks, or occurred but the spacecraft was impacted by flying material during the grab. (Let us hope that this last option does not occur.)
The first images and data will not arrive until tomorrow, to be released during a press conference scheduled for 5 pm (Eastern).
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Citizen scientist Gerald Eichstädt has created a two-image blink animation from Juno images of Jupiter that shows the changes in the two oppositely rotating storm vortices, shown on the right. As he notes.
Two vortices or eddies, one cyclonic, the other one anticyclonic, can propell themselves mutually and slowly within the overall context they are embedded in.
…The rotation of the two vortices is perceptible in the image sequence taken within nine minutes. The cyclonic eddy is located at the left, the anticyclonic one at the right. The motion of the vortex pair, however, is too slow to be resolved. But the morphology of the cloud tops points towards a relative upward motion in this rendition.
That the two storms also invoke face I am sure also had something to do with his decision to showcase this data. Unlike the face on Mars, this face is real, though relatively temporary. It will eventually break apart as Jupiter’s storms evolve.
The animation can be seen at the link.
The new colonial movement: China this week outlined some of its space ambitions for the 2020s, updating its planned lunar unmanned program as well as developments in its rocket industry.
For the Moon they plan the following:
Chang’e 6, a backup mission for this year’s sample-return launch, is scheduled to head to the moon in 2023 or 2024; Chang’e 7 is planned to launch around 2024 with the dual aims of landing on the south pole of the moon and closely studying the region from orbit. An eighth mission is also in the works for later this decade.
As for their rocket industry, CASIC, the government entity that supervises China’s commercial space activities (including a number of private companies operating independently but supervised closely by it) announced plans for a reusable two-stage reusable spaceplane, a new constellation of satellites, and a number of new quick-launch solid rockets aimed at doubling their launch rate.
Even though Russian astronauts have now patched with Kapton tape the 1-inch crack where they thought the leak in the Zvezda module on ISS was located, the loss of air has continued, and even increased.
The pressure in the Zvezda module of the International Space Station (ISS) keeps lowering, although the fissure was patched with Kapton tape, and even faster than before the fix, the crew told the ground control on Tuesday, as broadcast by NASA.
They are going to add more tape to the patch and see if this seals the leak.
Meanwhile, there has been little discussion about the nature of this 1-inch crack. Was it caused by a micrometeorite, or is it a stress fracture? And where exactly is it, and does that location help explain it?
Inquiring minds need to know!
Capitalism in space: SpaceX last night successfully completed the static fire test on its eighth Starship prototype, for the first time firing three Raptor engines simultanously.
Video of the test, cued to just before ignition, is embedded below the fold.
The company will now install the nosecone on the prototype, repeat this static fire test again in about a week, and then prepare it for its first flight, an expected 50,000 foot hop. I expect that hop to occur in early to mid-November, about the same time the next manned Dragon flight will occur.
An evening pause: Hat tip Phill Oltmann.
For today’s cool image, we are going to start from afar and zoom in, because I think that might be the best way to gain at least a rudimentary understanding of the strange geology visible at this one particular Martian location.
The first image, to the right, is the overview map. The red cross indicates our target, a chaotic canyon that flows into the larger Kasai Valles, one of Mars’ largest and longest canyons and possibly only exceeded in size by Valles Marineris. This part of Kasai is near its end, where it drains out into the vast northern lowland plains of Mars.
The second image, below, comes from the wide angle camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
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In June, shortly after George Floyd met his tragic death while in the hands of arresting police officers, former vice president and Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden was asked by a television reporter, “Do you believe there is systemic racism in law enforcement?” Biden responded as follows:
“Absolutely,” Biden responded. “But it’s not just in law enforcement, it’s across the board. It’s in housing, it’s in education, and it’s in everything we do. It’s real. It’s genuine. It’s serious.”
The absurdity of Biden’s response is immeasurable. What he says here is a lie, a lie so absurd it is both astonishing and horrifying that anyone believes it. There has been no systematic racism in America for generations, and anyone who thinks so is either lying to themselves, or trying to spread lies to others.
The biggest irony is that those who apparently believe this lie the most, our younger college-aged generation, have grown up in a society where for decades blacks with talent and determination have had no problem achieving success in all sorts of business and fields, with some even becoming the dominate figure in their field. (Think of Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey as only two examples.) They can also marry anyone they want, can go anywhere they want, and achieve anything they want. Nothing stops them but their own limitations.
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Embedded below the fold in two parts.
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