Category: Behind The Black

Problem with InSight’s weather station

3:18 pm

Engineers are troubleshooting a problem with the weather sensors on the InSight lander on Mars that has prevented them from collecting data since August 16th.

[The weather system] is in safe mode and unlikely to be reset before the end of the month while mission team members work toward a diagnosis. JPL engineers are optimistic that resetting the control computer may address the issue but need to investigate the situation further before returning the sensors to normal.

Overall InSight has turned out to be of mixed success. The seismometer has worked as planned, but the mole designed to drill the heat thermometer sixteen feet into the ground has so far failed to work, and now the weather station has shut down, though hopefully only temporarily.

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Confirmed: SpaceX plans two launches for tomorrow

1:02 pm

Capitalism in space: SpaceX has now confirmed that it will attempt two Falcon 9 launches tomorrow at its launch facility at Cape Canaveral, the first to launch 60 Starlink satellites at 10:12 am (Eastern) and the second to launch an Argentinian radar satellite at 7:18 pm (Eastern).

In the first launch the first stage, used once before, will attempt to land on the drone ship in the Atlantic. On the second launch the first stage, used three times previously, will return to Cape Canaveral for its landing attempt.

The live stream for both will be available here.

SpaceX will also tomorrow attempt a 500 meter hop of its sixth Starship prototype. The live stream of that can be seen here.

Meanwhile Rocket Lab has shifted its launch this weekend in New Zealand from tonight to tomorrow night at 11:05 pm (Eastern). The live stream will be aired here.

That means on August 30, 2020 there could be three American launches as well as another test flight of a new reusable rocket.

Note: Astra has delayed the first orbital test flight of its rocket to no early than September 10th due to poor weather in Kodiak, Alaska.

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ULA’s Delta 4 Heavy: Launch abort at T-3 seconds tonight

1:14 am

Delta 4 Heavy immediately after engine shutdown

UPDATE: It appears ULA will need at least a week to analyze the situation before attempting another launch. It also appears that SpaceX is going forward with its two launches on August 30.

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Tonight’s attempt by ULA to launch a National Reconnaissance Satellite on its Delta 4 Heavy rocket was aborted at T-3 seconds when the rocket’s main engines did an automatic abort. The image to the right shows the rocket immediately after the engines shut down, the smoke clearing and the rocket still sitting on the launch pad.

They are presently unfueling the rocket and will not launch tonight. They have not set a new launch date, and there is also no word on whether this launch delay will force delays in the two SpaceX launches set for August 30th. My guess is that the issue tonight will take time to assess, so they will give up their place in line and let SpaceX proceed as planned.

In watching ULA’s broadcast tonight, as well as reviewing the issues that prevented launch two days ago, I was struck by several things. First, ULA’s promo films to tout the wonders of the Delta family of rockets actually made them seem incredibly clunky and complex. There seemed to be too many pieces and complex operations to get the rocket ready for launch, which makes sense as Delta rockets are very costly and not competitive with today’s market. This is the exact reason ULA is in the process of retiring the entire Delta family. They will complete the already purchased and scheduled launches, but in the future will use their new Vulcan rocket for similar future bids.

Second, the number of minor and major technical issues during both countdowns reinforced my impressions above. This is a very complex rocket to launch, and that complexity apparently leads to many issues that make launch difficult.

For the scrub on August 26 they first had two blown fuses in a launchpad heater that had to be replaced, then a pneumatics system issue that was apparently not solved during the countdown. When they scrubbed, however, they said they did it because of “several problems,” not just this one.

On tonight’s launch they first had an issue with a fuel valve, then several fuel sensor alarms gave them problems, requiring them to disable them to proceed, then the temperatures in the payload electronics posed an issue that after some analysis was considered acceptable. These issues caused the launch to be delayed by about an hour and a half.

Finally, the rocket’s main engines shut down at the rescheduled lift-off time.

It might not be fair, but in comparing this ULA launch effort with the numerous countdowns by SpaceX the differences were stark. SpaceX has had comparable few issues during recent launches, with only one launch recently scrubbed due to a technical issue in July. Moreover, the company’s launch team has several times had similar launch aborts at T-0, and still were able to recycle everything and proceed to launch immediately.

All these impressions once again suggest that ULA is making the right decision to retire Delta. That it is going to take them several more years however to launch several more government surveillance satellites raises questions about the decisions of our government to pay for such a unwieldy and expensive rocket. There now are better and cheaper options available.

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Another Chinese national arrested for spying

5:52 pm

The Department of Justice on August 25th arrested a Chinese national as he was trying to leave the country with classified military computer software.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection stopped Hu Haizhou, a researcher from the University of Virginia’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering [who] also work[ed] for a Chinese military-linked university too, before he could board a flight to Qingdao, China, from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport on Tuesday, said an FBI special agent in an 11-page affidavit filed on Friday in federal court in Virginia.

According to the agent, Matthew Rader, CBP investigators questioned Hu and searched his electronic devices, which revealed UVA-research-related files stored on his laptop, including “bio-inspired research simulation software code” developed by “Professor 1.” Bio-inspired research relates to studying the complexities of flying and swimming creatures in nature and applying that to manned flight or submersibles — often with military applications.

Hu “did not have lawful, authorized access to this material, and he admitted that Professor 1 would not want him to have it and would be upset to learn that HU possessed it,” the FBI said. The professor, who runs the multiuniversity Flow Simulations Group, has been developing this code over the last 17 years and is sponsored by the U.S. government’s National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research. The FBI special agent said that probable cause existed to charge Hu federally with fraud-related illicit computer intrusions and the theft of trade secrets.

More here.

These stories are beginning to sound repetitious, as they keep happening on almost a weekly basis. It appears that until the Trump administration the swamp in Washington had absolutely no interest for decades in protecting this nation from spying and the theft of military secrets from China or from anyone else.

Seems par for the course. At best our so-called elites are incredibly incompetent. At worst they have shown themselves to be traitors, with their loyalties aligned more with foreign powers than with the United States.

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AI software beats real pilot in simulated dogfight

5:35 pm

The Terminator is coming: In a DARPA competition between a number of AI software teams, the finalist AI team, called Heron Systems, went up against a real F-16 pilot in a simulated dogfight and went undefeated, beating him five times in a row.

Heron Systems, a company with just 30 employees, had beaten out Aurora Flight Sciences, EpiSys Science, Georgia Tech Research Institute, Lockheed Martin, Perspecta Labs, PhysicsAI, and SoarTech to claim the top spot in the last of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) AlphaDogfight Trials. This three-day event had started on Aug. 18, 2020.

The software then beat the real pilot.

There is a lot of blather on the website, though there is this interesting analysis by F/A-18 Squadron commander that in the end concludes that we are only a generation or two away from making all fighter pilots obsolete.

Or to look at it from another perspective, we are only a short time away from putting the ability to fight war entirely into the hands of computers and software, with abilities that humans will not be able to match.

Does no one but me see the potential problems with this? Have all of these military experts never seen any science fiction movies or read any science fiction novels?

Hat tip Tom Biggar.

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Boeing’s CEO vows to hire based on race, not qualifications

3:40 pm

The coming dark age: Boeing’s CEO today vowed to raise the number of blacks working at the company by 20%, apparently with no regard to qualifications.

Boeing is seeking to increase black US employees throughout the company by 20 percent and mandate benchmarks for hiring people of color, Chief Executive Dave Calhoun told employees in a memo on Friday reviewed by Reuters.

…The changes at Boeing, a stalwart defense contractor with its corporate headquarters in Chicago and largest factories in Washington state and South Carolina, appeared to mark the first concrete steps by the planemaker to address the issue. “We understand we have work to do,” Calhoun said in the memo, which was released on the 57th anniversary of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech and included references to the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Wisconsin on Sunday.

Boeing declined to provide its current number of black employees or a timeline for the new target.

The planemaker separately has had to lay off thousands of workers as it grapples with the financial fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic and the 17-month-old grounding of the 737 MAX after two fatal crashes.

In the memo, Calhoun said the company would establish an internal Racial Justice think-tank to guide its policies.

As a company, Boeing’s bad performance in almost every area in the last year is bad enough. If they are going to lay off thousands and then replace some with workers based merely on racial quotas the company’s future will be worse, since their ability to produce quality airplanes and spacecraft is certain to go down.

And for those hate-mongers who will immediately try to accuse me of saying blacks are not as smart, go to hell. The goal should be to hire the best, instead of members of a specific race. If you favor one race over another you simply prove yourself to be a bigot, as this company’s CEO is now amply doing.

I also hope a lot of fired Boeing employees sue Boeing for racial discrimination.

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Cracks and scallops on the lowland plains of Mars

2:37 pm

Utopia Basin cracks and scallops
Click for full image.

Cool image time! To the right is some of the strange terrain seen in the northern lowland plains of Mars. The photo, cropped to post here, was taken on May 4, 2020 by the high resolution camera of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) of an area in the northwest part of Utopia Planitia.

Next year China’s first attempt to soft land a rover on Mars will occur somewhere in Utopia Planitia. Utopia Planitia, also called Utopia Basin, is quite large, however, and in fact is the largest recognizable impact basin on Mars, with a diameter of more than 2,000 miles or about two thirds the width of the United States. If this strange spot was put near Seattle, Tianwen-1 is expected to touch down somewhere near Houston, Texas.

The MRO science team labeled the image “Scalloped terrain in Utopia Planitia.” The curved cliffs in the image illustrate those scallops, found frequently in Utopia. Their formation is believed related to the sublimation of underground ice, changing directly from ice to gas. The theories of this process however are somewhat uncertain at this time.

What stuck me about the image were the north-south oriented cracks. They extend through the full image, all oriented in the same direction. I haven’t the faintest idea what caused them, but they are intriguing, are they not?

This terrain is also different than most Utopia Planitia images I have previously posted. Most look squishy and blobby and distorted, suggesting the presence of soft slush and underground ice. This image instead suggests hard bedrock, even though it is farther north than the previous images and should thus be expected to have more ice underground. Quite mysterious.

I suspect the ice is here, but is simply not made obvious by any surface event. Then again, who knows? The geology of Mars is definitely not obvious, no matter how obvious it sometimes seems.

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Curiosity captures a dust devil

11:33 am

During its recent and last several-week-long drilling effort in the clay unit in Gale Crater, the rover Curiosity was also able to luckily capture the passing of a nearby dust devil.

It’s almost summer in Gale crater, which puts us in a period of strong surface heating that lasts from early spring through mid-summer. Stronger surface heating tends to produce stronger convection and convective vortices, which consist of fast winds whipping around low pressure cores. If those vortices are strong enough, they can raise dust from the surface and become visible as “dust devils” that we can image with our cameras. The animated GIF shows a dust devil movie we took with Navcam on Sol 2847, covering a period of about five minutes. We often have to process these images, by enhancing what’s changed between them, before dust devils clearly show up. But this dust devil was so impressive that – if you look closely! – you can just see it moving to the right, at the border between the darker and lighter slopes, even in the raw images.

I have embedded the movie below the fold. The dust devil looks like a ghostly white tower moving from the left to the right just above the darkest band of landscape cutting across the middle of the image.
» Read more

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SpaceX wins launch contract for unmanned lunar lander

11:24 am

Capitalism in space: Masten Space Systems has awarded SpaceX the launch contract for its unmanned lunar lander, being built to carry nine NASA science payloads to the south pole of the Moon.

Launch is tentatively scheduled for late ’22.

NASA will be an anchor customer for the mission but Masten intends to sign up others. “There is a tremendous amount of interest,” he said, including from both the public and private sector, although he didn’t mention any specific potential customers.

Mahoney said the level of customer interest soared after Masten won the CLPS award and had a firm schedule for the mission. “Once the CLPS award was made and we crossed from speculative to having a schedule, the tenor and tone of our conversations have changed dramatically.”

The limiting factor for the lander mission has not been the amount of mass available for payloads, he said, but instead positions on the lander that have views of the surface desired by payloads. “There’s a game of positioning among the various instruments so that they can get the view angles that they need and not interfere,” he said.

However, he said the company isn’t considering major changes in the lander’s design to accommodate payloads. “The design principle is the ‘pickup truck’ that can haul a bunch of different things,” he said. “We’re trying to escape the completely unique, bespoke system that does one job and one mission really well.”

I guarantee that at least one university student-built payload will end up on the lander.

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FCC approves expansion of OneWeb constellation to 2,000 satellites

11:19 am

Capitalism in space: The FCC has approved the request by the satellite company OneWeb to increase the size of its satellite constellation from 720 to 2,000 satellites, at 50% of which must be launched by August ’26.

The company, now exiting bankruptcy with its purchase by a partnership of the UK government and an Indian-based communications company, appears gearing up to resume launches.

The FCC’s approval was partly because it would “increase competition for broadband services.” Under the Trump administration the goal is to encourage as many private space companies as possible, to promote innovation and the lowering of costs to the consumer. This decision continues that policy.

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NASA’s first Orbiting Geophysical Observatory to burn up in atmosphere

11:11 am

The first of six Orbiting Geophysical Observatories, dubbed OGO-1, is set to to burn up in the atmosphere sometime in the next week.

Launched September 5, 1964, OGO-1 operated until 1969. It along with the five later OGO satellites were designed to study the Earth’s magnetic field as well as the Van Allen Belts across a solar minimum and maximum. Together they proved the magnetosphere was homogeneous, somewhat the same wherever data was obtained.

As the first such observatory, the spacecraft was also a technology test. Thus, the failure of its attitude control system, preventing about half its instruments from gathering data, was not really a failure. It laid the groundwork for all such research satellites to follow over the next half century.

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