Mr. Skeleton – Good Golly Miss Molly
An evening pause: Hat tip Tom Biggar.
Author: Robert Zimmerman
Northrop Grumman’s MEV-2 successfully completes docking to commercial satellite
Capitalism in space: Northrop Grumman today announced that its second Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV-2) has successfully docked with an Intelsat geosynchronous communications satellite.
Northrop Grumman is the only provider of flight-proven life extension services for satellites, and this is the second time the company has docked two commercial spacecraft in orbit. The company’s MEV-1 made history when it successfully docked to the Intelsat 901 (IS-901) satellite in February 2020. Unlike MEV-1, which docked above the GEO orbit before moving IS-901 back into service, MEV-2 docked with IS-10-02 directly in its operational GEO orbital location.
…Under the terms of Intelsat’s satellite life-extension servicing contract, MEV-2 will provide five years of service to IS-10-02 before undocking and moving on to provide services for a new mission.
The image, provided by Northrop Grumman, was taken by MEV-2’s infrared wide field of view camera when it was still about 50 feet away from the Intelsat satellite. You can see the Earth in the background. As I understand it, MEV-2 uses the satellite’s own engine nozzle as a docking port, which is the smallest circular feature in the center of the satellite. If you look close you can see the nozzle’s shadow on the right.
NASA/Boeing begin prepping SLS core stage for transfer to Florida
NASA & Boeing have now agreed that the static fire test program of the core stage of their SLS rocket has ended successfully, and have begun preparing the stage for its shipment to Florida where it and the entire rocket will be assembled for launch.
While refurbishment activities continue, the team at Stennis has also started disconnecting the stage from the test stand to prepare for departure from Stennis. Weather will be a key factor in when the stage can be put on board the agency’s Pegasus barge to start the waterway tow trip from Stennis to Kennedy, but a late-April arrival at KSC is still possible — with KSC schedules currently forecasting attachment of the Core Stage to the SLS Boosters in the Vehicle Assembly Building in mid-May to prepare for launch of Artemis 1.
Though NASA still has a target of November for launch, NASA engineers estimate that it will take ten months to get the core stage in place and ready for launch. This places launch more likely in the February-March ’22 time frame. This schedule of course does not include any possible additional problems along the way, which may delay the launch further.
Even if all goes now as NASA plans, consider the length of this schedule. Though NASA will not require future SLS launches to do a static fire test, just transporting the stage and getting the rocket assembled will likely always take about this long, give or take a few months. Even if NASA streamlines this operation over time, I can’t see it getting shortened to less than five months. That means it will likely be impossible to launch more than one or maybe two SLS rockets per year, a pace that is not very effective if you really want to achieve anything in space. Moreover, that very very optimistic pace would cost about $3 to $5 billion per year, money that has not been appropriated, though considering Congress’s nonchalant attitude towards printing money these days that might not be a problem.
In the end, this rocket as designed is simply not practical or sustainable. It is a financial house of cards, and as soon as a more effective competitor like Starship (or even New Glenn) arrives that house will fall.
In fact, I still consider the odds of Starship/Super Heavy completing an orbital launch before SLS to be better than 50-50. With a likely spring ’22 SLS launch date and SpaceX aiming for a Starship orbital flight in ’21, the odds of SpaceX winning this race I think has just improved.
The start of avalanche season at Mars’ north pole
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Every spring for the last seven Martian years scientists have eagerly aimed the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) at the steep 1,500 to 3,000 foot high scarp at the edge of northern polar ice cap in order to capture images of what is Mars’s most spectacular annual event, the occurrence of tens of thousands springtime avalanches along that scarp.
Well, spring has returned to the northern hemisphere on Mars, and the scientists have begun another monitoring campaign. The photo to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on March 7, 2021 by MRO. It shows a particularly dramatic part of that scarp, a place where the scarp separates two curved alcoves and is thus narrowed down to a ridge about 1,000 feet high.
The nose of the ridge is sloping downward to the northwest, so the horizontal bands on its crest are actually evidence of older and older layers exposed as the elevation drops. The blue and black markings on the left slope are likely evidence of this season’s first avalanches, or might even be avalanches occurring as the picture was snapped! As explained to me by Shane Byrne of the Lunar and Planetary Lab University of Arizona during the last Martian avalanche season,
On Mars half of the images we take in the right season contain an avalanche. There’s one image that has four avalanches going off simultaneously at different parts of the scarp. There must be hundreds to thousands of these events each day.”
The overview map below shows the location of this picture, as well as all the other places the scientists have routinely monitored in the fourteen-plus Earth years since MRO reached Mars orbit.
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Today’s blacklisted Americans: Trump supporters blackballed by employers
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Blacklists are back and the Democrats got ’em: According to a new survey, those who publicly supported Trump or expressed conservative opinions on social media are being willingly blackballed by the hiring managers in corporate America.
A new survey of hiring managers provided to Secrets found that backing Trump on social media is the top reason to reject a job applicant.
The apparent reason: Human resources departments want to avoid “tiffs” between employees. “Likely to avoid future office tiffs, a significant portion of hiring managers admitted to negatively judging candidates based on the political content posted. For 27% of hiring managers, social media posts endorsing Donald Trump for president would negatively impact their decision to hire a candidate,” read the analysis of the poll done for Skynova, an online business software company.
While the list of political positions that causes employees heartburn in the graph above also includes some pro-Democratic Party positions — such as endorsing Joe Biden, supporting unions and a minimum wage — the majority are pro-Trump or conservative positions. Though there is a small chance you might be denied a job if you publicly stated your leftist beliefs, you almost certainly will be blackballed if you dared speak out against such beliefs.
Moreover, leftist workers are now eagerly looking for ways to blacklist conservative companies as well. From the survey:
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UAE picks two more astronauts
The new colonial movement: UAE has announced that it has chosen two more astronauts to raise its astronaut corp to four, one of whom has already flown to ISS.
The UAE government announced it picked Nora AlMatrooshi and Mohammad AlMulla from a pool of 4,305 applicants to join the country’s small astronaut corps. They join Hazzaa AlMansoori and Sultan AlNeyadi, the first Emirati astronauts selected in 2018.
AlMatrooshi is the first woman selected as an Emirati astronaut. A mechanical engineer, she has been working for the National Petroleum Construction Company in the UAE. AlMulla is a pilot and head of the training department of the Dubai Police’s Air Wing Centre.
Obviously, for an Islamic nation to pick a woman to be an astronaut is significant, and indicates the UAE’s commitment to moderating the more oppressive aspects of its religion.
As significant however is the fact that all four of these UAE astronauts are now undergoing training in the United States. Previously UAE’s astronauts trained in Russia. Though the UAE has not announced when its next manned flight will be, and has also said it wants to use both American and Russia spacecraft, the training in the U.S. strongly suggests the UAE wants to buy an American flight next time, most likely on a SpaceX Dragon capsule.
CDC admits its almost impossible to catch COVID from surfaces
The CDC last week finally admitted what had been well determined since May of last year, that there is no point in endlessly cleaning all surfaces everywhere because there is practically no chance of catching COVID-19 from surface contamination.
Turns out the risk of getting COVID-19 from touching an infected surface is “generally” 1 in 10,000, according to a new CDC study. That means “that each contact with a contaminated surface has less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of causing an infection,” the CDC explained in a statement.
Instead, the virus is mainly transmitted via the air — which essentially defeats the purpose of all the disinfecting wipes, and business owners feeling the need to obsessively make certain everything in their respective establishments was thoroughly scrubbed.
Of course, the CDC is still demanding everyone wear masks, even though the research for decades shows that unless you wear the right kind of mask properly, it likely does more harm then good. At a minimum it is nothing more than empty theater, a recommendation that has nothing to do with science and data and everything to do with emotions.
From the beginning of this epidemic the CDC has failed at being a trustworthy scientific organization, instead making pronouncements not based on scientific research but on feelings and sometimes a political agenda (defeating Donald Trump). Until there is a real-house-cleaning in that corrupt organization, there is no reason for anyone to trust anything they say.
April 9, 2021 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
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Ingenuity test flight delayed
Due to a software issue identified during testing of the helicopter’s rotary blades, Ingenuity’s engineers have decided to delay its first flight for at least three days.
During a high-speed spin test of the rotors on Friday, the command sequence controlling the test ended early due to a “watchdog” timer expiration. This occurred as it was trying to transition the flight computer from ‘Pre-Flight’ to ‘Flight’ mode. The helicopter is safe and healthy and communicated its full telemetry set to Earth.
They are presently trouble-shooting the issue.
Ingenuity’s flight schedule
Ingenuity’s first flight on Mars is now a go for late on April 11th, with the first data arriving in the early hours of April 12th.
The flight plan should that first flight go as expected is as follows:
The helicopter team has 30 Martian sols (roughly 31 days on Earth) to take the first tentative flights. Assuming Ingenuity survives the first flight, it will rest and transmit data before attempting a second flight with lateral movement. Subsequent flights will happen every three or four Martian sols. The fifth flight — if Ingenuity gets that far — will be a chance to really soar. “The probability is it would be unlikely it will land safely because we will go into unsurveyed areas,” Aung said.
They have unlocked and tested the rotary blades, with all working as planned.
To watch JPL will have a live stream which I will embed on Behind the Black when it goes live at about 3:30 am Eastern on the morning of April 12th.
Bird Box Studio – Streat
An evening pause: Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
Lava flooded mountains on Mars
Click for full image.
Today’s cool image to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken in January 2012 by the context camera of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The location is a small section of the Tartarus mountain range that is cut by the Cerberus Fossae fissures, all located in Elysium Planitia, the large volcanic lava plain that lies between Mars’ big volcanoes. The white cross on the overview map below marks the location of the photo.
I picked this photo because it quickly shows us in one picture many of the typical features one finds in that lava plain.
For example, the distinct fissure that cuts across the mountains near the top of the picture is the northernmost large fissure of Cerberus Fossae. In my initial post on Cerberus I mistaken thought its large and many hundreds of miles-long fissures might be evidence of underground lava tubes. Since then I have learned while the depressions may signal underground voids, they are not a lava tubes but graben, cracks formed by the movement of the terrain on each side. The cracks opened when past volcanic activity caused the ground to swell upward, stretching and splitting it.
The dark splotch in the flat area just south of the fissure remains me of the maculae found in these lava plains to the west of Olympus Mons, splotches that for still undetermined reasons dust devils like to congregate, blowing off the red dust so that the dark basalt lava becomes visible. No high resolution image of this spot has yet been taken, so this is a pure guess on my part.
The mountains near the bottom of the photo illustrate the ancient lava flood that inundated these mountain peaks. The white box shows the area covered by the recent MRO high resolution image that I include below.
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