Author: Robert Zimmerman

Infeeder to a Martian paleolake

1:47 pm

Infeeder to a Martian paleolake
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on December 21, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label as an “inlet to a paleolake.” I have used this context camera lower resolution image taken January 14, 2023 to fill in the blank central strip caused by a failed filter on the high resolution camera.

The elevation difference between the plateau on the lower left and the lake bottom on the upper right is about 700 feet. The inlet channel floor is about 200 feet below the plateau. We know it is ancient because of the number of small craters within it as well as on the lakebed below. It has been a very long time since any water or ice flowed down this channel to drain into the lake to the north.

While a lot of analysis of orbital data has found numerous examples of paleolakes in the dry equatoral regions of Mars (see here, here, here, here, and here , this particular example is so obvious not much analysis is needed, as shown in the overview map below.
» Read more

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Scientists think methane detections by Curiosity come from the salts in the local soil

10:09 am

According to experiments conducted on Earth, some scientists believe the unexpected puffs of methane detected by Curiosity periodically come from the salts in the local soil.

Led by Alexander Pavlov, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the researchers suggest the gas also can erupt in puffs when seals crack under the pressure of, say, a rover the size of a small SUV driving over it. The team’s hypothesis may help explain why methane is detected only in Gale Crater, Pavlov said, given that’s it’s one of two places on Mars where a robot is roving and drilling the surface. (The other is Jezero Crater, where NASA’s Perseverance rover is working, though that rover doesn’t have a methane-detecting instrument.)

The theory, based on those experiments, is complicated and unconfirmed, but if so it suggests that much of the soil of Mars, its regolith, will be somewhat toxic, requiring some processing to make it possible for plants to grow in it. This is not a new discovery, but confirms past data that suggested that perchlorate — a mild acid — is found everywhere on Mars.

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Hubble celebrates 34 years in orbit with a new photo of the Little Dumbbell Nebula

9:53 am

The Little Dumbbell Nebula
Click for original image.

Cool image time! To celebrate the 34th anniversay of its launch in 1990, astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope to take a new photo of the Little Dumbbell Nebula (also known as M76), located about 3,400 light years away and one of the most well-known planetary nebulae in the sky.

That picture is to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here. From the caption:

M76 is composed of a ring, seen edge-on as the central bar structure, and two lobes on either opening of the ring. Before the star burned out, it ejected the ring of gas and dust. The ring was probably sculpted by the effects of the star that once had a binary companion star. This sloughed off material created a thick disk of dust and gas along the plane of the companion’s orbit. The hypothetical companion star isn’t seen in the Hubble image, and so it could have been later swallowed by the central star. The disk would be forensic evidence for that stellar cannibalism.

The primary star is collapsing to form a white dwarf. It is one of the hottest stellar remnants known at a scorching 250,000 degrees Fahrenheit, 24 times our Sun’s surface temperature. 
The sizzling white dwarf can be seen as a pinpoint in the center of the nebula. A star visible in projection beneath it is not part of the nebula.



Pinched off by the disk, two lobes of hot gas are escaping from the top and bottom of the “belt,” along the star’s rotation axis that is perpendicular to the disk. They are being propelled by the hurricane-like outflow of material from the dying star, tearing across space at two million miles per hour.

Since launch Hubble has made 1.6 million observations of over 53,000 astronomical objects, and continues to be in high demand by astronomers, with only one request in six able to get time on the telescope. Not surprisingly, almost all of Hubble’s biggest discoveries were unexpected. Its future right now rests with its last three working gyroscopes used to orient it precisely. When one more fails, it will go to one-gyro mode, which will limit the precision of that orientation significantly. At that point the sharpness of the telescope’s imagery will sadly decline.

The only comparable orbital optical telescope now planned is China’s Xuntian optical telescope, scheduled for launch next year. It will fly in formation with the Tiangong-3 space station, allowing astronauts to periodically do maintenance missions to it. As I noted many times previously, American astronomers better start learning Chinese, assuming China even allows them access. Nor will these American astronomers have a right to complain, as it was their decision to not build a Hubble replacement, in their 2000, 2010, and 2020 decadal reports.

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German rocket startup Hyimpulse’s first suborbital rocket arrives in Australia

9:32 am

Australian commercial spaceports
Australia’s commercial spaceports. Click for original map.

The German rocket startup Hyimpulse today announced that its first suborbital rocket, the SR75, had arrived in Australia for its planned first test launch.

On 28 February, Southern Launch, the commercial outfit that manages the Koonibba Test Range, revealed that a launch attempt of the suborbital SR75 rocket would occur between late April and early May. This likely gives the team little room for the unexpected as it prepares for launch.

Those launch dates depend on whether Australia’s government will issue the launch licenses on time. So far its ability to do so in a timely manner has been difficult if not impossible. For example, the rocket startup Gilmour, which wants to launch from Bowen at about the same time, has been waiting more than two years to get its approval, delaying its first orbital test launch by more than a year.

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PLD Space announces its upcoming plans

9:22 am

Capitalism in space: Having received in late January a $43.5 million grant, bringing its total funding to more than $120 million, the Spanish rocket startup PLD Space today announced its upcoming plans.

[T]he company intends to inaugurate the first serial space rocket factory in Spain in mid-2024. The facilities will also enable vertical integration of the launchers. The industrial site, whose building work is already underway, will house the factory for the first MIURA 5 units [the company’s orbital rocket] as well as the company’s head offices. In total, PLD Space will be able to count on 18,400 square metres of industrial facilities in Elche (Alicante).

…Also scheduled for 2024, construction work is to begin on the launch base at the European CSG spaceport in Kourou (French Guiana), which belongs to CNES [France’s space agency]. This site, covering over 15,700 square metres, will host MIURA 5’s first launches.

That France is now leasing launch facilities to private companies illustrates starkly how Europe is steadily abandoning Arianespace, the European Space Agency’s government-run commercial company. Instead, Europe is now choosing competition and private enterprise as its model. Expect these new companies, including PLD, to achieve big things in the coming years.

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Voyager-1 back on line after software patch works

9:09 am

For the first time since November, Voyager-1 is sending data back to Earth coherently, after engineers figured out a way to isolate a corrupted computer chip.

The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.

So they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.

The software patch was sent to the spacecraft on April 18, 2024, taking 22.5 hours to get there. It then took 22.5 hours for a response. On April 20th they received a confirmation that the patch had worked. Over the next few weeks more patches will be sent to Voyager-1 to allow it to resume sending science data back to Earth.

Both Voyager-1 and Voyager-2 were launched almost a half century ago, in 1977, and both are now more than more than 15 billion miles from Earth, traveling in interstellar space. Their computers are also the longest continuously running operating systems. Both only have a little more than two years left in their nuclear power supply, which was always expected to run out of power about a half century after launch. That both have continued to function for that entire time is a magnificent testament to the engineers who designed them.

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On the left, certainty and violent passion; On the right, doubt and fearful timidity; This must change!

3:11 pm

What the left wants to destroy
What the left wants to destroy

“If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.” ― Winston S. Churchill

It is said that if you want to win a war, it is essential to know your enemy almost better than you know yourself, so that you know what will be required of you to win.

Americans, those who still believe in the Constitution and the basic values of our country — limited government and the right of each individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — routinely still think they are in the majority, that given a fair fight they will always win against the fascists of the left because the general public will immediately recognize the justice of the right’s cause.

This is not only a grave error, it is an error that Americans have been making for decades. Year by year since the 1960s Americans of all stripes have been unwilling to fight for right when it could have been easily won without bloodshed. Now bloodshed is almost certainly required, and the right continues to be unwilling to fight hard. Instead it still thinks its victories can be won easily, and so it is lazy about fighting those battles.

The left

To understand best why the right continues to lose, we first have to look closely at the left. As a movement, it has for decades been passionate and unwilling to compromise. Its leaders and followers are filled with certainty, and have been willing to do whatever is necessary to win.
» Read more

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Patchy arms in a nearby spiral galaxy

9:16 am

Patchy arms in spiral galaxy
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope to study this southern hemisphere galaxy in detail. The galaxy, dubbed ESO 422-41, is located about 34 million light years away, and thus is a relatively close neighbor. From the caption:

A spiral galaxy, with a brightly shining core and two large arms. The arms are broad, faint overall and quite patchy, and feature several small bright spots where stars are forming. A few foreground stars with small diffraction spikes can be seen in front of the galaxy.

The patchy nature of the two arms makes each somewhat indistinct, so that at first glance this galaxy looks more like a elliptical blob, until you look close and notice those arms winding around that bright core. And as patchy as those arms are, the patches of blue are regions where new stars are forming.

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China launches “remote-sensing” satellite

10:41 am

China today successfully launched what its state-run press stated was “a remote-sensing” satellite, its Long March 2D rocket lifting off from its Xichang spaceport in southwest China.

No other information about the satellite was released. The state-run press also provided no information about where the rocket’s lower stages, which carry very toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed within China.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

41 SpaceX
16 China
6 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 47 to 28, while SpaceX by itself still leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 41 to 34.

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Computer models suggest there is no life in Europa’s underground ocean

11:22 am

The uncertainty of science: Several different computer simulations now suggest that the underground ocean inside the Jupiter moon Europa is inert and likely harbors no existing lifeforms.

He and his colleagues constructed computer simulations of Europa’s seafloor, accounting for its gravity, the weight of the overlying ocean and the pressure of water within the seafloor itself. From the simulations, the team computed the strength of the rocks about 1 kilometer below the seafloor, or the stress required to force faults in the seafloor to slide and expose fresh rock to seawater.

Compared with the stress applied to the seafloor by Jupiter’s gravity and by the convection of material in Europa’s underlying mantle, the rocks comprising Europa’s seafloor are at least 10 times as strong, Byrne said. “The take home message is that the seafloor is likely geologically inert.”

A second computer model also suggested that the moon’s deep magna is not capable to pushing upward into that sea, further reinforcing the first model that the sea is geological inert, lacking the heat or energy required for life.

Though unconfirmed and uncertain, these results when looked at honestly make sense. Europa is a very cold world. An underground ocean might exist due to tidal forces imposed by Jupiter, but that dark and sunless ocean is also likely to be very hostile to life. Not enough energy to sustain it.

Like the water imagined to exist at poles of the Moon, we go to Europa on the hope of finding life, even if that hope is very ephermal.

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Update on SpaceX’s preparations for the 4th test flight of Superheavy/Starship

11:10 am

Link here. The article is definitely worth reading, as it tells us that SpaceX is pushing hard to be ready to launch in early May, as Musk has promised. The article also thinks SpaceX will be able to ramp up later launches to one every two months.

The article however is I think being naively optimistic about this timeline, because it naively assumes the FAA will quickly approve the launch licenses to meet that schedule. I guarantee the FAA won’t, as it has taken it one to four months after SpaceX was ready to launch to approve the licenses for the previous launches. The length of that approval process has shrunk each time, but FAA still made Space X wait each time, for no reason.

Making that schedule even more unlikely is SpaceX’s desire to do as many as nine test launches per year at Boca Chica. While the company could certainly do this, the environment reassessment issued in 2022 limits it to only five launches per year. It needs a waiver from the FAA and the Biden administration,
a waiver no one should expect considering the Biden administrations hostility to Musk.

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Slovenia signs Artemis Accords

10:58 am

NASA announced yesterday that Slovenia has become the 39th nation to sign the Artemis Accords, joining the American alliance for exploring the Moon and the solar system.

The alliance now includes these nations: Angola, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Columbia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Poland, Romania, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, the United States and Uruguay.

As with all the recent announcements, the NASA press release now insists that the accords are designed to “reinforce and implement key obligations in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty,” the exact opposite of the original goals of the accords. Rather than overvcome the Outer Space Treaty’s restriction on private property in space, the Biden administration is now using the accords to strengthen that restriction. To quote someone (Mussolini) whose policies the modern globalist world clearly admires, “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”

This could all change with different leadership in Washington, but whether the administrative state, led by the Democratic Party, will allow such a thing at this point in history is very questionable. And they appear aided in this totalitarian effort by a meek and largely ignorant American public.

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April 19, 2024 Quick space links

3:00 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.

 

 

 

  • Anonymous sources say NASA is considering restructuring the entire Artemis lunar program

    • One idea is to insert an extra mission before the lunar landing flight, during which Orion and Starship would dock in Earth orbit to test out their systems prior to going to the Moon. Since the whole Artemis program has always been haphazardly planned, this change makes sense, as it should have been considered from the beginning. In fact, it should be flown before the second Artemis flight, which presently intends to take astronauts around the Moon, on the first flight using Orion’s environmental systems.

 

 

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Blue Origin completes delivery of the two BE-4 engines for ULA’s second Vulcan launch

10:04 am

Blue Origin this week completed delivery of the two BE-4 engines needed for the second launch of ULA’s Vulcan rocket, presently scheduled for sometime this fall.

That launch was originally targeting an April launch, but according to official announcements has been delayed until the fall because final ground testing of its payload, Sierra Space’s Tenacity mini-shuttle, is not complete. It appears that Blue Origin also contributed to that delay, as it is now obvious that its engines were not available as planned in time for that April launch.

This delay also raises questions about Blue Origin’s ability to ramp up BE-4 engine production to meet the needs of ULA’s Vulcan rocket and Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. Both have large launch contracts with Amazon to launch its Kuiper constellation, while ULA also has almost as many contracts with the U.S. military. To meet those contracts, Blue Origin will have to produce several hundred BE-4 engines yearly in the very near future. Right now it appears it can only produce about one per year.

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Boeing to reduce staffing for SLS due to overall delays in Artemis

9:53 am

Boeing announced yesterday that it is going to reduce the staffing for its SLS rocket, caused by delays in other parts of the program that force it to stretch out operations.

When Boeing cites “external factors,” it is referring to the slipping timelines for NASA’s Artemis Program. In January officials with the space agency announced approximately one-year delays for both the Artemis II mission, a crewed lunar flyby, to September 2025; and Artemis III, a lunar landing, to September 2026. Neither of these schedules are set in stone, either. Further delays are possible for Artemis II, and likely for Artemis III if NASA sticks to the current mission plans.

Although the SLS rocket will be ready for the current schedule, barring a catastrophe, the other elements are in doubt. For Artemis II, NASA still has not cleared a heat shield issue with the Orion spacecraft. That must be resolved before the mission gets a green light to proceed next year. The challenges are even greater for Artemis III. For that mission NASA needs to have a lunar lander—which is being provided by SpaceX with its Starship vehicle—in addition to spacesuits provided by Axiom Space for the lunar surface. Both of these elements remain solidly in the development phase.

What Boeing is telling us indirectly is that, though NASA has not yet announced any further delays in those launch dates for Artemis-2 and Artemis-3, those dates are going to be delayed, quite possibly by one or more years.

None of this is a surprise. I have long been predicting that the first manned lunar landing in the Artemis program will not take place before 2030. In fact, that date was obvious the moment NASA announced its plan to make the Lunar Gateway space station an integral part of the program, back in 2018, when it was called LOP-G.

Now that SLS development is complete and NASA considers it “operational”, Boeing is merely reducing the staffing to maintain its assembly line, reducing it accordingly because of expected delays when additional rockets will be needed.

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Analysis of Io’s atmosphere suggests it has been volcanically active for its entire 4+ billion year history

9:34 am

By analysizing the isotobes in Io’s atmosphere, scientists now believe that it has been volcanically active since its initial formation at the birth of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.

de Kleer et al. found that both elements [ sulfer- and chlorine-bearing molecules] are highly enriched in heavy isotopes compared to average Solar System values due to the loss of lighter isotopes from the upper atmosphere as material is continuously recycled between Io’s interior and atmosphere. The findings indicate that Io has lost 94% to 99% of the sulfur that undergoes this outgassing and recycling process. According to the authors, this would require Io to have had its current level of volcanic activity for its entire lifetime.

This data suggests that Io, as well as Jupter’s other three large Galilean moons (Europa, Calisto, and Ganymeded) have been in their present orbits since their formation 4.5 billion years ago. It also means that, while Io’s geological history keeps getting wiped out by its volcanic activity, the other three contain detailed geological records of the solar system’s entire history. Combine that with the geological data we will eventually get from Mars, it appears that we shall someday be able to document that history far beyond anything expected.

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April 18, 2024 Quick space links

4:13 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.

Both tweets are devoid of any real information, so who knows? It is likely the second is real and happening, but there continue to be rumors about Blue Origin’s production rate.

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FAA to now require that reentry spacecraft get landing license before launch

4:05 pm

We’re here to help you! The FAA is now going to require that any company planning to launch a payload or spacecraft into orbit to get both its launch and landing licenses before launch, in order to avoid the situation that occurred last year when Varda launched its capsule and then had difficulties getting its landing license approved due to red-tape confusion between government agencies.

In a notice published in the Federal Register April 17, the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation announced it will no longer approve the launch of spacecraft designed to reenter unless they already have a reentry license. The office said that it will, going forward, check that a spacecraft designed to return to Earth has a reentry license as part of the standard payload review process.

In the notice, the FAA said that decision was linked to safety concerns of allowing spacecraft to launch without approvals to return. “Unlike typical payloads designed to operate in outer space, a reentry vehicle has primary components that are designed to withstand reentry substantially intact and therefore have a near-guaranteed ground impact as a result of either a controlled reentry or a random reentry,” it states.

While this seems to fall directly under the FAA’s basic authority, to make sure launches and landings pose no risk to the general public, I guarantee it is also going to slow the growth of the new space manufacture industry. I fear that with time approvals will be delayed, some so much that companies will go bankrupt waiting for approval. The FAA will never be able to guarantee perfection in this matter, and as bureaucrats tend to be cautious, expect it to increasingly oppose re-entries by new companies.

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SpaceX launches 23 more Starlink satellites

3:48 pm

Bunny march on! SpaceX today successfully launched another 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

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

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

41 SpaceX
15 China
6 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined 47 to 27, while SpaceX by itself now leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 41 to 33.

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Ancient flood lava in the Martian cratered highlands

2:13 pm

Ancient flood lava on the cratered highlands of Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 4, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The ridges were the primary reason this photo was taken, as they cover a 50-mile-square region of relatively flat terrain that also appears to be a series of steps downward to the west. The dotted line on the picture indicates one of those steps downward, with the plain to the west of that line about 100 to 200 feet lower that the plain to the east.

My first guess was that these ridges might be inverted channels, but that really didn’t make sense considering their random nature completely divorced from the downward grade. Then I took a wider view, and came up with a better guess.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Former Trump lawyer, already disbarred in California because he took Trump’s case, now blackballed by his banks

11:43 am

Banks blacklisting conservatives
What many banks are now doing to conservatives.

They’re coming for you next: John Eastman — a former Trump lawyer who was fired from a professorship, was banned from speaking at conferences and colleges, is being prosecuted by Fanni Willis in Georgia, and was then disbarred in California, all because he simply made a legal arguement in favor of Trump — has now been blackballed by his banks, USAA and Bank of America.

Bank of America alerted Eastman in September of 2023 that it would be closing his accounts, a letter obtained by the Daily Caller shows. Shortly thereafter, USAA notified Eastman in November that his two bank accounts with the company would be closed, a separate letter shows.

“And then two months later, we get a similar letter from USAA saying that they’ve decided that they’re going to close your account and they did like three weeks later,” Eastman told the Daily Caller. “And so that was where all of our automatic payments were coming out of, all our automatic deposits. So it was a real pain to shift everything. We had to get a new bank account opened and shift everything over.”

It is important to emphasize that Eastman has done nothing wrong. » Read more

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Rocket startup Orbex raises another $16.7 million in private investment capital

9:28 am

The British rocket startup Orbex has raised another $16.7 million in private investment capital, bringing the total it has raised now to over $100 million.

It remains unclear when the company’s Prime rocket will complete its first launch. It now says it will have its rocket and launch facility at the Sutherland spaceport ready by the end of this year, but it had previously hoped to launch the rocket in 2023. It appears that goal failed because the spaceport could not get either the spaceport license or its own launch license approved by the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA). Those licenses have still not been issued, even though the applications had been submitted in Feburary 2022, more than two years ago.

Those delays by the CAA probably explains why the company has had four different CEO’s in the past year. Though the fault of the delays lies with the government, others have had to take the blame. Meanwhile, company officials now state that it is now exploring using other launch sites, including its own near the equator.

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TESS has resumed science operations

9:15 am

Engineers have successfully returned TESS to full science operations, without providing as yet any explanaton as to why on April 8, 2024 it went into safe mode or what they did to fix the issue.

The Aprill 11 press release announcing the safe mode had only mentioned that the shut down had occurred “during scheduled engineering activities.” The lack of information continues to suggest that someone did an “Oops!” during those activities, and NASA is too embarassed to reveal that fact.

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April 17, 2024 Quick space links

3:55 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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