Author: Robert Zimmerman

FAA issues new revised regulations for private commercial manned space

9:48 am

The FAA on September 28, 2023 issued new revised safety regulations for the emerging private commercial manned space industry, updating the regulations first put forth in 2014.

The recommendations, which are the first since 2014, cover the gamut across design, manufacturing, and operations, and are based on lessons learned during the NASA Commercial Crew program, as well as recent commercial space fights, the FAA said Friday. “AST [the FAA office that handles commercial space] is issuing Version 2 of this document because significant progress has been made in the commercial human space flight industry since 2014, the year Version 1 was issued.”

These new recommendations were worked out by a committee that included many of the private companies that now fly space passengers, such as SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, and Boeing. Thus, the changes likely make some sense.

At the same time, it seems the effort to regulate has accelerated since Joe Biden became president. Under Trump there was a concerted effort to limit the impact of new regulations on this new space industry. Under Biden, it appears new regulations arrive almost weekly, and as a result there appears to be a significant slow down in development by new space companies.

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FCC fines Dish for failing to put a geosynchronous satellite in its proper graveyard orbit

9:39 am

The FCC on October 2, 2023 announced it is fining Dish Network $150K for failing to raise the orbit of one of its dying geosynchronous satellites so that it was in a proper graveyard orbit and out of the way.

The settlement includes an admission of liability from Dish for leaving EchoStar-7 at 122 kilometers above its operational geostationary arc, less than halfway to where the satellite broadcaster had agreed. EchoStar-7 could pose orbital debris concerns at this lower altitude, the FCC warned.

The regulator said it approved a plan from Dish in 2012 to move the satellite at the end of its mission 300 kilometers above geostationary orbit, which is about 35,786 kilometers above the Earth. Dish had estimated it would need to start moving the satellite in May 2022 to ensure it had enough fuel for the trip after two decades in orbit — but just three months ahead of the planned move the company found insufficient propellant remaining.

It is routine for satellite companies to raise the orbits of their geosynchonous satellites when their lifespan is over in order to make room for future satellites. This higher orbit, long dubbed a graveyard orbit, is presently filled with many past satellites no longer in use (though the refueling and reusing of some is now taking place).

What makes this story different is the fine. The FCC has claimed it has the right to regulate the de-orbiting plans for all satellites, even though its statutory authority does not include that right. This fine is the first since the agency made that claim. That Dish settled rather than fight was likely a decision by managment to choose the lesser evil. Even though the courts would likely cancel the fine, the fight would cost as much as the fine, and there is a chance Dish would lose. As the saying goes, better to pay the two dollars than end up in jail.

As a result, this government agency has now established a precedent whereby it can regulate and even fine private companies for not doing what it dictates when it comes to decommissioning satellites, even though no law was ever passed giving it that power. And the FCC agrees.

“This is a breakthrough settlement,” FCC Enforcement Bureau Chief Loyaan Egal said in a statement, “making very clear the FCC has strong enforcement authority and capability to enforce its vitally important space debris rules.”

The unelected administrative state continues its unstoppable growth in power.

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Northrop Grumman cancelling its NASA space station project?

9:22 am

According to anonymous sources, Northrop Grumman — one of four company partnerships chosen by NASA to build private commercial space stations to replace ISS — is considering cancelling its project for NASA.

At the International Astronautical Congress meeting this week in Azerbaijan, sources report that there is widespread speculation that one of these four companies, Northrop Grumman, is dropping out of the competition. Northrop’s plan had been to leverage its successful Cygnus spacecraft design to build a free-flying space station.

However, Northrop no longer plans to do so. Rather, it will join the venture backed by Voyager Space, which is partnering with Europe-based Airbus to develop a commercial space station. It’s likely that Northrop would provide cargo transportation services, with Cygnus as part of the team. Officials from Voyager and Northrop Grumman declined to comment on the change in strategy, which could be announced soon.

The original four were Axiom, Voyager Space (then called Nanoracks), Northrop Grumman, and Blue Origin. By teaming up with Voyager Space the number would drop to three, with Northrop simply providing freighter service to Voyager’s station.

Nor is this the only rumored change to these station projects. Last week sources suggested that the partnership between Blue Origin and Sierra Space was breaking up. If so, it remains unclear how that would effect its project for NASA.

These changes to the four proposed NASA stations would leave only Axiom’s space station unchanged and on its original course. Meanwhile, another company, Vast, is developing its own independent station, and SpaceX is considering developing a space station version of Starship.

All these shifts and changes are not to be unexpected, nor are they really bad news. They simply indicate the uncertain nature of any new product, even if that product is as unconventional as a private space station.

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Psyche engineers discover and fix a major thruster problem only two weeks before launch

9:03 am

In a stroke of luck, the engineering team for the asteroid probe Psyche discovered an attitude thruster problem only two weeks before launch that could have destroyed the mission, and were able to fix it quickly.

The issue was discovered during pre-flight tests that showed the settings used to operate the thrusters were incorrect. At the planned 80 percent power level, analysis indicated higher-than-expected temperatures could cause damage.

As it turned out, the fix did not require any hardware or software changes. Just an updated table of parameters used by the probe’s flight computer, instructing it to fire the thrusters at what amounts to a lower power level. Maneuvers will take longer to complete, but that will not affect the mission.

Nonetheless, this problem should not have been discovered so late, and suggests that the management issues from other software problems that forced a year delay in the launch last year have not been completely solved. If I was the project scientist for this mission, I would be very uncomfortable about its future.

Hopefully, no more serious problems will occur, and after its Falcon Heavy launch on October 12 it will fly past Mars to aim for an August 2029 arrival at the metal asteroid Psyche.

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SLIM leaves Earth orbit and is on its way to the Moon

8:51 am

SLIM's planned route to the Moon

The Japanese lunar lander SLIM fired its engines on September 30, 2023 to begin its journey to the Moon. The map to the right indicates the planned route after this trans-lunar injection burn, first flying past the Moon to put it on a trajectory that will bring it back to the Moon at the proper speed and direction for its landing several months hence.

The main goal of this mission is engineering, to test the ability of an autonomous unmanned spacecraft to land precisely within a small target zone about 300 feet across. If proven, this ability will make it possible to send unmanned landers to many places that are presently impossible due to their rough topography.

The route that SLIM is taking to the Moon is also unusual, and is probably also an engineering test of its own. Flybys of planets to change a spacecraft’s path is not a new technique, but in the past it has been used to slingshot the probe to another object, not send it back to that planet.

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ESA completes investigation of Vega-C rocket failure

5:10 pm

The European Space Agency (ESA) today released its completed investigation of December 2022 launch failure of its Vega-C rocket’s second stage.

One of the recommendations was to implement a (delta-)qualification of the nozzle with a new Carbon-Carbon throat insert material different from that previously used on the Zefiro40, the solid rocket booster of the Vega-C second stage. On 28 June 2023, a static firing test of the modified Zefiro40 engine took place at the test bench in Salto di Quirra in Italy. During the test the engine nozzle suffered significant damages.

ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher has set up an Independent Enquiry Commission chaired by the ESA Inspector General, Giovanni Colangelo, and composed of experts from CNES, ASI, ESA, Arianespace and academia to understand the cause of the test anomaly and propose recommendations.

The Independent Enquiry Commission concluded that in the current design of the nozzle, the combination of the geometry of the Carbon-Carbon throat insert and the different thermo-mechanical properties of the new material caused progressive damage of other adjacent nozzle parts and a progressive degradation eventually leading to the nozzle’s failure.

In other words, the changes implemented based on the initial investigation that was completed in March did not work. The nozzle needs to redesigned, and will also require at least two more static fire engine tests to be certified.

At the moment ESA officials are predicting that Vega-C will resume launches in the fourth quarter of next year, but do not put any money on that prediction.

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October 2, 2023 Quick space links

3:50 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

 

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Pushback: Gestapo police chief who raided Kansas newspaper in August suspended

12:52 pm

Police Chief Gideon Cody, proud to emulate Nazi tactics
Police Chief Gideon Cody, proud to emulate
Nazi tactics

They’re coming for you next: For his part of a Gestapo-like raid in August of the town’s newspaper, the police chief of the town of Marion in Kansas, Gideon Cody, was suspended from his job on September 30, 2023 by the town’s mayor, Dave Mayfield.

Cody’s suspension is a reversal for the mayor, who previously said he would wait for results from a state police investigation before taking action. Vice-Mayor Ruth Herbel, whose home was also raided Aug. 11, praised Cody’s suspension as “the best thing that can happen to Marion right now” as the central Kansas town of about 1,900 people struggles to move forward under the national spotlight.

At the moment is not clear whether Cody’s suspension is with or without pay.

This is a followup on a previous blacklist column, posted in August when that raid occurred. The raid, which not only included the newspaper’s offices but the homes the town’s vice mayor, the newspaper’s 98-year-old owner, Joan Meyer (resulting in her death the next day from a heart attack), and one reporter.

As noted then, the raid was uncalled for on numerous levels. » Read more

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Layered ice sheets on Mars?

11:15 am

Overview map

Layered ices sheets on Mars?

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 22, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The white spot near the center of the overview map above marks its location, deep inside the 2,000-mile-long region in the northern mid-latitudes I call glacier country, as everything there seems covered with glacial features of some kind. All the features in this picture are smaller than 50 feet high, based on the resolution of the topographical data obtained by Mars Global Surveyor in the 1990s.

What makes this picture interesting are the layers, made most obvious in the terraced mesa in the upper left. Surrounding this mesa for dozens of miles in all directions are similar layered features, all suggesting that the glacial ice sheets that appear to coat this region have either have been sublimating away over time, or when growing grew less with each subsequent growth cycle.

Though both have or are likely happening, the latter most likely explains the terraces, as there is a lot of evidence on the surface of Mars showing that each subsequent growth cycle produced smaller glaciers and ice layers.

From the perspective of future colonists, this picture once again shows that water will readily accessible on Mars, as long as you travel north or south of the equator at least 30 degrees of latitude. This location is at 42 degrees north, and is very typical of this whole region.

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Perseverance spots a Martian dust devil

9:15 am

Panorama showing dust devil
Click for movie.

During their normal use of Perseverance’s navigation cameras to survey upcoming terrain for future travel, the rover’s science team captured a short movie of a Martian dust devil as moved across a nearby ridgeline. I have annotated a still from that move above to indicate the dust devil.

The lower portion of a Martian dust devil was captured by one of the Navcams on NASA’s Perseverance rover on Aug. 30, 2023, the 899th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. The video, which has been enhanced in order to show maximal detail, was sped up 20 times and composed of 21 frames taken four seconds apart.

Using data from the imagery, mission scientists determined that the dust devil was about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) away, at a location nicknamed “Thorofare Ridge,” and moving east to west at a clip of about 12 mph (19 kph). They calculated its width to be about 200 feet (60 meters). While only the bottom 387 feet (118 meters) of the swirling vortex are visible in the camera frame, scientists used the dust devil’s shadow to estimate its full height at about 1.2 miles (2 kilometers).

This Perseverance movie is not the first to catch a dust devil on the surface. Both Curiosity and Perseverance have done so previously, and I think the smaller earlier rovers Opportunity and Spirit did so as well. Nonetheless, this mini-twister provides more information about the atmosphere of Mars.

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Stopgap budget bill includes three-month extension of regulatory “learning-period”

9:00 am

The stopgap 45-day continuing resolution passed by Congress on September 30, 2023 also included a three-month extension of regulatory “learning-period” first established in 2004 and extended several times since then.

Among the provisions in that FAA reauthorization was a three-month extension of the existing restrictions on the FAA’s ability to regulate safety for commercial spaceflight participants. That restriction, often called a “learning period” by the industry, was set to expire Oct. 1 but now runs until Jan. 1.

It must be noted that this so-called limitation on FAA regulation of commercial spaceflight really does not exist any longer, no matter what law Congress passes. The administrative state really runs the show now, and both the FAA and Fish & Wildlife have decided heavy regulations are required, and are imposing such controls over SpaceX’s Superheavy/Starshp test program, while the FAA by itself is imposing strict regulation on Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spacecraft. The result is a slowdown in launches for both, extending months to a year.

It also appears that this heavy regulation is squelching launches of new rockets. Last year four new rocket startups attempted new launches (Astra, ABL, Firefly, Relativity), some making multiple attempts. This year, such test flights have essentially ceased, with only Firefly completing one launch for the military. Worse, two of those companies (Astra and Relativity) have abandoned their rockets entirely, claiming they are building new bigger versions, but one must now wonder.

The long term historical significance of these facts extends far beyond the space industry. Increasingly the unelected bureaucracy in Washington is taking on powers it is not supposed to have, while Congress (which is delegated those powers) increasingly is irrelevant. The shift in power signals a major reshaping of American governance, in a direction that is not good for freedom or the fundamental concepts that established the country and made it a success.

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SpaceX puts another 22 Starlink satellites into orbit

1:57 pm

SpaceX last night successfully launched another 22 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

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

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

69 SpaceX
44 China
13 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 79 to 44, and the entire world combined 79 to 71. SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world combined (excluding American companies), 69 to 71.

Note that this was the 151th successful launch in 2023, all done in the first three quarters, and strongly suggesting the world will complete more than 200 launches this year. This number will top the record of 179 set last year by more than ten percent, and be more than double the number of launches achieved almost every year since Sputnik in 1957.

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Hadar Nehemya – Song of Songs

6:01 pm

An evening pause: As Friday night begins the Sabbath in the Jewish faith, this seems appropriate tonight. The group is called 12 Tribes Music. Watch with closed captions turned on to see the King James English translation of these the lyrics, from the Song of Solomon of the Old Testament. The improvised sections of the performance however are wholly modern.

Hat tip Judd Clark.

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September 29, 2023 Quick space links

3:10 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

  • China announces a few basic details of its Chang’e-6 sample return mission

    • All they say is it will launch on a Long March 5 rocket in May 2024, head to the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the far side of the Moon, and operate for 53 days (which likely includes the return of the sample to Earth). Jay spotted one mystery however: The coordinates provided (“S43, W154”) are no where near the south pole, though it is likely in the northernmost part of Aitken Basin.

 

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Updated map of Yutu-2’s travels on far side of the Moon

3:01 pm

Map showing Yutu-2 full route on Moon
Click for original image.

The Chinese agency operating the Yutu-2 rover on the far side of the Moon today released an updated map showing the rover’s full route since landing, the first update since January 2023. That map is to the right, reduced to post here. The landing site is in the lower right, with the rover presently in the upper left.

Since January the rover has apparently traveled only about 300 feet, even though it has had about eight lunar days to travel. Note too that the last update was also the first in three months. It appears the Chinese are either having issues with the rover (not surprising as it has been operating on the Moon for almost five years, since January 2019), or they have decided they don’t need to tell anyone what they are doing.

Since the rover was not expected to last more than a few lunar days (several Earth months), the former is more likely.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Coach fired by Vermont school for simply expressing some facts during a civil conversation

2:11 pm

Vermont: Where you are only allowed to say things that support the queer agenda
Vermont: Where the only speech allowed must
support the queer agenda

They’re coming for you next: Despite founding the snowboarding program at Woodstock Union High School in Vermont in 2011 and heading it for its entire history, David Bloch was immediately fired without due process by his school the day after he had a very civil private conversation with his students about males claiming to be female and competing against women.

This is what he did, according to his non-profit legal firm, the Alliance Defending Freedom:

In February [2023], Bloch and his team were waiting in the lodge for a competition to start. That day, Bloch’s team was set to compete against a team that had a male snowboarder who identifies as a female and competes against females. During downtime in the lodge, Bloch overheard a conversation between two of his athletes about that male competing against females. Bloch joined the conversation to comment that people express themselves differently and that there can be masculine women and feminine men. He also affirmed that as a matter of biology, males and females have different DNA, which causes males to develop differently from females and have different physical characteristics, and that those biological differences give males an advantage in athletic competitions.

The conversation was respectful among all parties and lasted no more than three minutes. It took place entirely outside the presence of the male snowboarder who identifies as female, and Bloch’s team and the other team went on to compete without incident. After the competition, the two teams and their coaches, including Bloch, shared a bus home.

The very next day the superintendent of the Windsor Central Supervisory Union, Sherry Sousa, called Bloch into her office to tell him he was fired, even though the investigation against him was incomplete.
» Read more

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Is this the source of the sand for the giant dune sea that surrounds the Martian North Pole?

12:49 pm

Overview map

Circling the north pole of Mars is a gigantic dune field dubbed Olympia Undae, with its densest regions (marked in red on the overview map to the right) estimated to be 700 miles long and covering 120 degrees of longitude.

Where does all the sand come from that created this dune ocean? We now have a rough idea. The arrows on the map to the right indicate the direction of the prevailing winds, as recently determined by scientists studying the orientation of dunes. From this it appears that much of the dust comes from the north polar icecap itself, from its lower layers where dust and ice are cemented together. The prevailing winds, especially in the canyons that cut into the icecap, drive that dust out from the lower layers, where it over eons has piled up in that circular ocean of sand.

The white cross marks the location of today’s cool image, an attempt by scientists to photograph at high resolution one of the sources of this sand, on the edge of the icecap.
» Read more

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Hubble data shows expansion of supernova remnant

9:57 am

Cygnus loop filament

Astronomers have created a four-second long movie using Hubble images collected over twenty years that shows the expansion of one filament in the Cygnus Loop supernova remnant, the explosion of which is thought to have occurred 20,000 years ago.

The picture above is one frame of that movie. The filament is estimated to be two light years in length.

By analyzing the shock’s location, astronomers found that the shock hasn’t slowed down at all in the last 20 years, and is speeding into interstellar space at over half a million miles per hour – fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in less than half an hour. While this seems incredibly fast, it’s actually on the slow end for the speed of a supernova shock wave.

Two versions of the movie are at the link, with the longer providing excellent context.

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Parker completes 17th close fly-by of the Sun, setting new records

9:43 am

The Parker Solar Probe on September 27, 2023 completed its seventeenth close fly-by of the Sun, setting new speed and distance records.

Set up by a gravity-assist flyby of Venus on Aug. 21, the close approach (known as perihelion) occurred at 7:28 p.m. EDT, with Parker Solar Probe moving 394,736 miles per hour (635,266 kilometers per hour) around the Sun – another record. The milestone also marked the midway point in the mission’s 17th solar encounter, which began Sept. 22 and continues through Oct. 3.

It zipped past the Sun at a distance of only 4.51 million miles, also a record.

Whether it survived this fly-by will not be confirmed until October 1, when it is able to safely send its first data back after moving far enough away from the Sun to reopen communications.

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Orbital Reef partnership between Blue Origin and Sierra Space in trouble

9:36 am

According to anonymous sources, CNBC reports that the partnership between Blue Origin and Sierra Space to build the private commerical Orbital Reef space station is possibly breaking up.

The companies announced Orbital Reef as a co-led project in 2021, but updates about the project dried up in the past year. The pair of private space companies are now navigating a potential end to the Orbital Reef partnership, according to three people who spoke to CNBC about the situation.

Those people, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss nonpublic matters, emphasized that discussions are ongoing and described the situation as fluid. But other development projects with more significant current contracts – such as Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lunar lander and Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser spaceplane – have taken higher priority for both companies, those people said.

To readers of Behind the Black, this possible break-up is not a surprise. In June Sierra’s announcement of its own independent space station based on its LIFE modules suggested it had its own doubts about Orbital Reef. Then in August, when Sierra announced a partnership with Redwire to launch LIFE as an independent station, I wrote this:

What struck me about this deal is the shrinking mention of Blue Origin. Originally that company was listed as one of the major players in building this private space station, dubbed Orbital Reef, in which LIFE is only the first module. In the past year however its participation seems less and less significant in every subsequent press release. It appears to still be part of the project, but it is Sierra Space that is leading the effort, and appears to be making things happen.

But then, the track record of Blue Origin is to not make things happen. It could very well be that events are once again overtaking it. Sierra Space can’t wait for Blue Origin to slowly get its act together. It is finding ways to get things done, even if that means Blue Origin gets left behind.

Today’s CNBC story reinforces this conclusion. So does its timing with the removal of Blue Origin’s CEO, Bob Smith, earlier this week. It could be that the failure of Blue Origin in the Orbital Reef partnership was the final straw for Jeff Bezos.

The problem for NASA in this is that the agency awarded a $130 million contract to the Orbital Reef partnership, with Blue Origin listed as the lead contractor which controls the contract. If that partnership ends, that contract must get renegotiated or cancelled, or gets transferred from Blue Origin to Sierra Space (the most likely outcome).

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Ispace wins $55 million NASA contract for lunar landing mission

9:17 am

The Japanese company Ispace, which is also establishing operations in the U.S., has won a $55 million NASA contract to send a lunar landing plus communications relay satellites to the Moon in 2026.

Ispace’s Hakuto-R1 lander attempted a landing on the Moon in April, but crashed. The company has a second Hakuto-R mission presently targeting launch next year. The NASA contract would the company’s third, which will be built in its new U.S. facility and be called Apex-1.

In today’s briefing, Ispace representatives announced that the primary customer for its upcoming Mission 3 is NASA, which has selected the company as part of its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program (CLPS). Ispace stated during the briefing that it has signed a $55 million contract with NASA for Mission 3 in order to land near the lunar south pole carrying approximately 210 pounds (95 kg) of scientific payloads.

But that’s not all the mission will do. On its way to the lunar surface, Mission 3 will deliver relay satellites that will remain in orbit around the moon to serve as communication relays.

Though it will not be surprising if these launch dates slip, Ispace is in a strong position to succeed, considering it is presently the only private company to launch a Moon lander, and got very close to putting it down on the lunar surface successfully.

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California school district blacklists Christian club from elementary school

1:45 pm

Hayward Unified School District: hostile to religion

They’re coming for you next: Despite allowing the Good News Clubs of the Child Evangelism Fellowship to meet in its Fairview Elementary School for years prior to the COVID lockdowns, the Hayward Unified School District has since blocked further meetings with no explanation, even as it has allowed many other similar but secular clubs to return.

As a result, the non-profit legal firm Liberty Council has sent a demand letter [pdf] to Hayward, threatening it with legal action if it does not immediately allow the Good News Clubs meeting space. As the letter notes,

California law and District policies do not permit the District to deny the use of facilities to
the GNC [Good News Club], particularly where such are made available to Scouts and GOTR [Girls on the Run]. District practice has been to make facilities freely available to these and other groups similarly situated to the GNC, immediately after school. Moreover, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, made applicable to the States (and the District) by the Fourteenth Amendment, also prohibits discriminatory denials of facilities use based on unbridled administrator discretion, or based upon religious viewpoint.

» Read more

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A gully in Mars’ glacier country

12:40 pm

Overview map

A gully in Mars' glacier country
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, sharpened, and brightened to post here, was taken on July 8, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter (MRO).

The white dot in the southwest corner of 146-mile-wide Lyot Crater on the overview map above marks the location, smack dab in the middle of the 2,000-mile-long northern mid-latitude strip I dub glacier country, since practically every high resolution picture shows some glacial features. This picture is no different. The material in the upper right of the picture appears to be ice that fills the crater and laps up against its interior slope. The gully appears to suggest a drainage down into that ice that partly covered it.

The elevation change from the high to low points is about 4,500 feet. What drained down this slope to carve this gully however remains an unsolved mystery, though most scientists presently favor some form of water or brine flow in the past and no longer active.

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The global wind patterns on Mars, determined by the orientation of dunes

10:54 am

Mars global wind patterns

Wind patterns at the Martina North Pole

Scientists have now roughly determined the global wind patterns on Mars, based on the orientation of one type of crescent-shaped dune called barchan dunes.

The global map above and the north pole map to the right come from figure 2 of the paper. The colored letters indicate the location of additional close-up images. On the polar map Olympia Undae is Mars’ largest dune field. From the abstract:

Crescent-shaped sand dunes are prevalent across the deserts of Mars. Here, we use the physical relationship between the shape of these dunes and the winds that form them to infer the directions of surface winds on Mars on a global scale. We find that dunes typically adhere to the global circulation patterns of Mars’ atmosphere, and that local topographic winds are mostly important in areas with high topographic roughness such as inside deep impact craters. Our global wind map can serve to calibrate numerical climate models, which in turn can help us learn about the recent and modern-day climate of Mars.

The arrows on both maps indicate the direction of the prevailing winds. This data will also help clarify the orientation of many surface features seen by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s high resolution camera. This data also helps explain why the lander InSight never got a burst of wind to clear the dust from its solar panels, while the rovers Spirit and Opportunity did. The rovers were located in regions with clear prevailing winds. InSight was not.

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Webb takes an infared look at Saturn

10:36 am

Webb's five images of Saturn
Webb’s five images of Saturn. Click for original.

Using the Webb Space Telescope, scientists have obtained five infrared images of Saturn to get a more detailed look at the gas giant’s atmosphere and the molecules within it.

The image to the right is Figure 1 from the paper, showing the location of those five images on Saturn, placed over a much higher resolution Hubble Space Telescope optical image. The graph on the bottom shows the molecules revealed from spectroscopic data obtained by Webb’s infrared view. From the abstract:

We show evidence that a stratospheric circulation pattern detected by Cassini during northern winter has now fully reversed in northern summer, with the low-latitude stratosphere being cool and depleted in aerosols due to summertime upwelling. MIRI [Webb’s mid-infrared instrument] provides access to spectral regions that were not possible with the Cassini spacecraft, particularly in the 5–7 μm region where reflected sunlight and thermal emission blend together. Ammonia and phosphine are enriched at Saturn’s equator, suggesting strong mixing from the deeper troposphere. MIRI’s high sensitivity enables the first identification of previously unseen emission propane bands, along with the first measurements of the distribution of several gaseous species: tropospheric water, and stratospheric ethylene, benzene, methyl, and carbon dioxide.

The paper notes that this work still has uncertainty because when the infrared images were taken engineers were still working out the kinks for using Webb. Nonetheless, the results illustrate the large potential for future planetary discoveries from Webb.

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Another retraction looms of research claiming the discovery of superconductivity at room temperature

10:22 am

A March research paper that claimed the discovery of a compound that allowed superconductivity at room temperature is now facing retraction, making it the third superconductivity paper in which physicist Ranga Dias of University of Rochester was the lead author.

On 1 September, Nature attached an editor’s note to the March paper, warning readers that “the reliability of data presented in this manuscript is currently in question.” A week later, eight of the co-authors on the 11-person paper submitted a letter to Nature requesting the study be retracted, The Wall Street Journal first reported on Tuesday. Science has obtained the letter and additional documents, which raise concerns about the reliability of the data and Dias’s treatment of his co-authors. “We respectfully request and recommend that Nature issue a retraction,” conclude the signatories, who include five recent graduate students of Dias’s.

The article at the link is worth reading, as it details at length the bullying efforts of Dias to intimidate his co-authors by threatening legal action.

Before the co-authors sent their letter to Nature, Dias sent a cease-and-desist letter to six of them—five of his former graduate students and one U of R faculty member. He warned them about the “potential legal consequences of your actions and to consider the ethical implications of making baseless allegations against a colleague and fellow scientist.” Dias has previously sent cease-and-desist letters to other critics of his work.

This is not all. It appears that Dias used his position of authority to prevent an honest appraisal of his work, actions that are in utter violation of ethics and the scientific method.

While it is good that Dias’s chickens are now coming home to roost, his corrupt behavior is unfortunately too common now in the academic world, as indicated by the increase in retractions by 13,750% since 2000.

The good news however is that these retractions are helping to clean out that corruption. Though cleaning house will take time, it does appears to be happening. For example, according to the article, absolutely no students have enrolled in any of Dias’s classes at the University of Rochester.

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SpaceX’s military version of Starlink wins $70 million Space Force contract

10:08 am

Capitalism in space: The Space Force yesterday awarded SpaceX a $70 million contract to provide it communications and broadband capabilities though the military version of Starlink, dubbed Starshield.

A Space Force spokesperson confirmed that SpaceX on Sept. 1 was awarded a one-year contract for Starshield with a maximum value of $70 million. The award came alongside 18 other companies through a program run by the Space Force’s commercial satellite communications office.

“The SpaceX contract provides for Starshield end-to-end service (via the Starlink constellation), user terminals, ancillary equipment, network management and other related services,” Space Force spokesperson Ann Stefanek told CNBC.

Though this contract is for satellite services, it will increase SpaceX’s need to launch and complete its Starlink constellation. Though it has successfully launched a lot of satellites using the Falcon 9 rocket, it has always said it needs Starship/Superheavy to properly build and maintain the constellation.

Thus, NASA is no longer the only government agency with a strong motive to get Starship/Superheavy launched. Expect both NASA and the Pentagon to apply pressure on the White House to ease up on SpaceX. Expect that pressure to have little influence, unless the public joins in loudly.

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