January 30, 2018 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts. Long discussion in part one on the Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia failures, and how NASA responded for each.
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Author: Robert Zimmerman
André Rieu & Carmen Monarcha – Habanera
An evening pause: I especially like the silent interplay between the two. Very much all in fun, but with a nice spark.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
Curiosity takes a panorama that shows its entire journey so far
Cool image time! The Curiosity science team has released a panorama taken in October 2017 that looks north across the floor of Gale Crater and shows the rover’s entire journey since it landed in 2012.
Rather than post the image here, I have posted below the fold a video produced by the science team that pans across the entire panorama, and then shows where Curiosity has traveled in that panorama. Look close, and you will realize how truly little of Mars we have so far explored.
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SpaceX seeks more government money for Texas spaceport
It appears that SpaceX is asking for an additional $5 million in government subsidies to build local infrastructure for its Boca Chica spaceport in Texas.
This new money would be in addition to about $15 million already set aside for SpaceX’s spaceport. It is unclear however what it will exactly pay for.
Update: Meanwhile, the New Mexico state legislature is considering dumping another $10 million to Spaceport America. (Hat tip Robert Pratt) From the article:
Other provisions of the updated budget proposal might raise eyebrows. One is $10 million for Spaceport America to build a new hangar. State officials hope the Spaceport can become a tourist draw.
I don’t know how they can imagine this will ever be a tourist draw, since Spaceport America is a spaceport with practically no customers except for Virgin Galactic, which unlike SpaceX will likely never fly.
Note: A reader noted that I mistakenly wrote that Spaceport America was in Texas in the initial post. The reader is correct. I wrote without thinking, and now have fixed the post.
Aaron Tippin – You Gotta Stand for Something
An evening pause: Hat tip Sayomara.
House committee votes to release memo on Justice Dept surveillance abuse
The House Intelligence committee today voted to release a memo the Republicans there have written that supposedly outlines the surveillance abuse committed at the Justice Department in connection with Special Counsel Robert Meullers Russian collusion investigation.
It is hard to say how much impact this much ballyhooed memo will have. Without the underlying original material (which they are likely to hold back because it is classified), the memo can easily be written off merely as Republican talking points, as the article notes Democrats are already doing.
It does appear however that it was connected with the removal of McCabe earlier today, as that event occurred after his boss, FBI Director Christopher Wray, was allowed to review the memo this past weekend.
Another anti-Trump FBI official steps down
Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe today officially stepped down from his post two months before he had planned to retire.
There have been numerous stories about McCabe (who has definite partisan connections to the Democratic Party) as a leaker and as maybe the instigator of the underground effort at the FBI to sabotage the results of the 2016 election.
The landing site of NASA’s next Mars lander
InSight, NASA’s next Mars lander scheduled to launch later this year (two years late), is aiming for a landing site in a region called Elysium Planitia, a flat plain north of the equator.
InSight’s scientific success and safe landing depends on landing in a relatively flat area, with an elevation low enough to have sufficient atmosphere above the site for a safe landing. It also depends on landing in an area where rocks are few in number. Elysium Planitia has just the right surface for the instruments to be able to probe the deep interior, and its proximity to the equator ensures that the solar-powered lander is exposed to plenty of sunlight.
The target area is centered at 4.5 N latitude and 135.9 East longitude. If you zoom in on that latitude and longitude at the archive of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) high resolution images, you get the red blob on the right, which shows how many images they have taken of this area in preparation for InSight’s mission. The X indicates the location of lat/long above.
Below the fold is a reduced version of the MRO image for the center of this target area. The black spots near the center are thought to be a recent crater impact site. In general, this image shows an area with more features than the region around it. Most of the landing area of Elysium Planitia is a featureless flat plain with scattered small craters. Since InSight is not a rover, where it lands will be where it does its research, so there was no reason to pick a site with lots of interesting surface features. Moreover, since InSight is focused not on studying the surface but the interior geology of Mars, it matters little what the surface looks like anyway. One instrument will be a seismograph, while another will insert a thermometer about sixteen feet into the ground to measure the interior temperature.
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Every shuttle launch, simultaneously
An evening pause: A special evening pause, to remember what happened on this date 32 years ago. Despite the many successes shown here, there of course is one that stands out for different and tragic reasons.
Hat tip Wayne DeVette.
Problem with new ISS robot arm hand
Update: Software patch fixes robot arm latching mechanism. (Hat tip reader jburn.)
Less that a week after astronauts did a spacewalk to install a new latching end effector on the end of one of the station’s robot arms NASA has decided to do another spacewalk to put the old “hand” back on.
Hints of an issue cropped up during the previous spacewalk when two of the six Expedition 54 astronauts—NASA’s Mark Vande Hei and Scott Tingle—replaced the end effector, called LEE-B, but ground teams were unable to communicate with the mechanism. “The spacewalking crew demated and remated the connectors and ground teams were able to power up the arm to an operational state on its secondary communications sting leaving the arm operational but without a redundant communications string,” a NASA statement reads.
After several days of troubleshooting, NASA and the Canadian Space Agency—which built the 57.7-foot (17.6-meter) long Canadarm2—said the decision was made to use the upcoming spacewalk to re-install the old LEE-B to restore the redundant capability with the arm. The space agency said if Canada and its robotics specialists find a way to solve the issue, the Jan. 29 spacewalk could be delayed.
SpaceX sets February 6 for first Falcon Heavy launch attempt
Capitalism in space: SpaceX has now scheduled February 6 as the date for its first attempt to launch its Falcon Heavy rocket.
I was amused by this tidbit from the article:
While a launch date has been set, the company still faces a regulatory obstacle ahead of the launch. The Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation has not yet issued a launch license for the Falcon Heavy, a requirement for a commercial launch such as this. Such licenses are often issued days ahead of a launch.
I dare the FAA to deny this launch a license. I just dare them.
Bad times fall on Russian Proton rocket
Link here. The key quote is this:
All this means that after 53 years in service, the venerable Proton rocket might set an anti-record in 2018 by flying only a couple of missions. And, for the first time since its entrance onto the world market at the end of the Cold War, it may not bring any money to its cash-strapped developer.
This story confirms much of what I have been reporting about Proton and the loss of its customer base in the past three years.
Moon Express loses lawsuit by subcontractor
Capitalism in space: Moon Express has lost a lawsuit by one of its subcontractors, who had claimed it had ceased work because the former Google Lunar X-Prize finalist had failed to pay for its work.
Intuitive Machines further claimed that Moon Express’s failure to pay harmed its business. The jury found in favor of Intuitive Machines and awarded the company $1.125 million in cash and $2.5 million in Moon Express equity related to the flight software claim. The jury also awarded Intuitive Machines $732,000 related to its work on the terrestrial return vehicle.
The importance of this story is that it suggests that Moon Express lacks sufficient capital to do what it claims. The decision further robs it of more capital.
Now it could be that Moon Express stopped paying because Intuitive Machines was not delivering good product, as Moon Express claims. The jury did not agree with this claim, however. I do wonder if the jury was sufficiently educated about the product itself.
January 25, 2018 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold. This podcast was taped just after the Ariane 5 launch yesterday but slightly before we had heard that the satellites had made orbit, so it is a little inaccurate, though the main point that Arianespace had had its first launch anomaly after 83 successfully launches remains true.
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The Continental Divide Trail in Four Minutes
An evening pause: The music is Paper Tigers by Javier Dunn.
Hat tip Jeff Poplin.
Amateur discovers long-dead NASA satellite has come back to life
Back from the dead: In his hunt to locate Zuma an amateur astronomer has discovered that a long-dead NASA satellite, designed to study the magnetosphere, has come back to life.
IMAGE went dead in 2005, and though NASA thought it might come back to life after experiencing a total eclipse in 2007 that would force a reboot, no evidence of life was seen then. It now appears that the satellite came to life sometime between then and 2018, and was chattering away at Earth waiting for a response. NASA is now looking at what it must do to take control of the spacecraft and resume science operations.
Weird Martian geology: Kaiser Crater
Cool image time! This week JPL’s image site highlighted a picture taken by Mars Odyssey of the floor and dunes inside Kaiser Crater, located to the west of Helles basin in an area dubbed the Noachis Region.
To my eye, the Mars Odyssey picture was interesting, but not worth a post here on Behind the Black. However, I decided to take a look at what HiRise, the high resolution camera of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), had taken of the same area, just out of curiosity. A search at the master HiRise image site at the same latitude and longitude (-45 latitude, 180 longitude) showed that HiRise had imaged a part of the same area, but at much higher resolution.
When I zoomed in on this hi resolution image I came across some interesting and weird geology, cropped to show here on the right. Now this, I thought, is worth posting. Notice how the dark tracks, caused by dust devils, leave no tracks as they cut across the brighter areas. Obviously, these bright areas have no dust or sand, and are likely solid bedrock of some kind. The depressions might be craters, but they also might not. The raised area around the depressions might have been caused by the impact, or it might have been caused by some internal geological process that caused the depression while also raising the surrounding bulge. Since then the wind has been steadily depositing sand in the depressions, causing it to get trapped there.
January 24, 2018 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold.
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Forensic experts baffled about FBI claims about lost texts
They were lying: Forensic experts consider absurd the FBI claim that the texts between two anti-Trump FBI investigators were lost.
A former FBI special agent, who worked extensively on counterterrorism related cases, stated they were “dumbfounded” by the FBI’s original excuse that the text messages were irretrievable.
“Even though the servers ‘lost’ the text messages of Strzok they would still be on his actual device, even if he deleted them,” stated the former FBI special agent, who asked to speak on background due to the sensitivity of the case. “That’s how we catch bad guys, we forensically search their phones. Nothing disappears off the device, nothing… unless they take a hammer to it or microwave it. The question is, the FBI knows this, so why did the bureau say they couldn’t retrieve them – why did they mislead Congress.”
Makes sense to me. They are lying. They are trying to cover-up. And what they are lying about and trying to cover up is down-right treasonous.
Gaither Vocal Band & Jake Hess – Cool Water
An evening pause: The intro is long, but stick with it, it will all be worthwhile.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.