2CELLOS – Mombasa
An evening pause: 2CELLOS is Luka Sulic and Stjepan Hauser. This was performed live in Tokyo in July 2015. And boy, were they all having fun doing it.
Hat tip David Eastman.
Category: Behind The Black
Bottom edge of Martian glacier?
Click for full image.
Today’s cool image, taken on May 25, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), provides a nice example of the typical foot of an inactive buried glacial flow on Mars. The image to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, focuses on the center of the full image. Uphill is to the right. The glacier’s edge runs down the middle left of the photo.
Scientists call this a lobate flow because its shape resembles a lobe, smooth and rounded as it comes down the slope. Located at 38 degrees south latitude to the east of Hellas Basin and just to the north of one of that basin’s major infeeding canyons, Harmakhis Valles, this flow comes down the west side of a large mountain. The overview map below provides the context, with the white rectangle indicating the photo’s location.
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Juno’s 28th fly-by of Jupiter
Cool movie time! Below is a short movie created by citizen scientist Gerald Eichstädt from images taken by Juno as it swung past Jupiter on its 28th close pass since arriving in orbit in 2016.
In natural colors, Jupiter looks pretty pale. Therefore, the still images are approximately illumination-adusted, i.e. almost flattened, and consecutively gamma-stretched to the 4th power of radiometric values, in order to enhance contrast and color.
Like for all its previous flybys, Juno approached Jupiter roughly from north, and left Jupiter looking towards the soutern hemisphere. Closest approach to Jupiter was 3,500 km above the nominal IAU 1-bar level, and near 25.3 degrees north (planetocentric), according to long-term planning of November 2017.
Oumuamua wasn’t made of hydrogen ice
The uncertainty of science: According to a new paper published today, Oumuamua wasn’t a hydrogen iceberg as proposed by other scientists earlier this year.
Traveling at a blistering speed of 196,000mph in 2017, ‘Oumuamua was first classified as an asteroid, and when it later sped up, was found to have properties more akin to comets. But the 0.2km radius interstellar object didn’t fit that category, either, and its point of origin has remained a mystery. Researchers focused on the giant molecular cloud (GMC) W51—one of the closest GMCs to Earth at just 17,000 light years away—as a potential point of origin for ‘Oumuamua, but hypothesize that it simply could not have made the journey intact. “The most likely place to make hydrogen icebergs is in the densest environments of the interstellar medium. These are giant molecular clouds,” said Loeb, confirming that these environments are both too far away and are not conducive to the development of hydrogen icebergs.
The hydrogen iceberg theory was for many reasons very very speculative, and not very convincing, which is why I never posted a link to it when it became clickbait for the mainstream press several months ago. The object’s behavior as it zipped through the solar system, combined with its elongated shape, still leave us with questions. While some scientists have definitely stated it could not have been an alien spacecraft, that likely conclusion remains as uncertain as the theory that it was a hydrogen iceberg.
The only way we will definitely know is to go and look at it. And such a mission remains possible, with launch dates in 2021, 2022, or 2023, with technology we presently have, if we were to move fast.
Skyrora completes first test launch from Iceland
Capitalism in space: The United Kingdom smallsat rocket startup Skyrora successfully completed its second test suborbital launch from Iceland on August 15.
The rocket was launched in two parts, or stages, in front of a crowd of onlookers. The first stage launch reached a height of six kilometres, the second, a height of 30 kilometres. Both parts landed in the sea, not far from shore, and were easily retrieved by Search and Rescue volunteers, thanks to GPS equipment inside each piece.
This was also the first rocket launch from Iceland in a half century.
Skyrora’s first flight was back in August 2018, but that was only a single stage flight. They are aiming for orbital flights by 2023.
Another Starship/construction update at Boca Chica
Link here.
The successfully flown fifth Starship prototype has been moved back to its assembly area while the sixth is now on the launchpad being prepped for its own hop. At the same time, the buildings that will be used for all future ship assembly are going up, as well as construction of the launchpad for Super Heavy, the first stage of this giant reusable rocket.
It appears that SpaceX is going to be alternating hops between prototypes 5 and 6, while it preps prototypes 8 and 9. The use of two alternating prototypes not only speeds testing of the vehicle itself, it also speeds testing of the procedures the company will need for transporting these vehicles about, from the assembly building to the launchpad and then from the landing site back to the assembly building.
Except another hop in mere weeks of Starship prototype #6. As for Super Heavy, the article notes this:
What can be confidently assumed is SpaceX is preparing the facility groundwork for the first assembly and testing of Super Heavy by 2021.
Test programs and new vehicles will always stretch schedules. However, there remains the distinct possibility SpaceX could launch their first Super Heavy rocket before the Space Launch System (SLS – the orange one) is due to conduct her maiden launch at the end of next year. [emphasis mine]
Even if Super Heavy does not fly before SLS, I am very confident in predicting that the SpaceX rocket will fly many more times than SLS, and do it not as an expendable rocket but reused each time.
SpaceX ups fund-raising effort from one to two billion
Capitalism in space: SpaceX has apparently raised $2 billion during an on-going investment capital round, double what the company had initially expected.
This means that SpaceX has now raised $4 billion in private investment in the last year, the bulk of which the company says it is devoting to Starship. However, they have also said that for this most recent round some of the monies will go to making their Starlink satellite internet constellation operational. With 595 satellites already in orbit, and good testing ongoing, it appears a lot of investors want to get in on the game.
Criminal investigation begun against former NASA manned program head
The U.S. Attorney’s office for DC has opened a criminal investigation into actions taken by Doug Loverro, the former head of NASA’s manned program, during contract bidding for a NASA lunar lander project.
The grand jury investigation concerns communications between Doug Loverro, then the chief of human spaceflight for NASA, and Jim Chilton, senior vice president of Boeing’s space and launch division. These discussions occurred early this year, during a blackout period when NASA was taking bids to construct a Human Landing System for the Artemis Moon Program. It is not permissible to interfere with a competition for government contracts.
“Mr. Loverro, who wasn’t part of NASA’s official contracting staff, informed Mr.Chilton that the Chicago aerospace giant was about to be eliminated from the competition based on cost and technical evaluations,” the report states, citing unidentified sources. “Within days, Boeing submitted a revised proposal.”
The analysis at the link is excellent. Read it all.
NASA targets October 23rd for next manned Dragon flight
Capitalism in space: NASA and SpaceX yesterday announced that they have now set October 23rd as the earliest launch date for next manned Dragon flight.
The mission will carry Crew Dragon commander Michael Hopkins, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialist Shannon Walker, all of NASA, along with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission specialist Soichi Noguchi for a six-month science mission aboard the orbiting laboratory following launch from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
They had previously said they were aiming for a late September launch, but this extra delay allows them to better coordinate with other traffic to and from ISS, while also giving them an extra month to review the data from the first manned flight, just completed.
Ariane 5 launches three payloads into orbit
Capitalism in space: Arianespace’s Ariane 5 rocket today successfully launched three payloads into orbit, two communications satellites and Northrop Grumman’s second Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV-2), a robot designed to bring dead communications satellites back to life.
After several months of orbit-raising and phasing maneuvers, the MEV-2 mission will perform a similar docking and mission extension service [as done by the first MEV] beginning in 2021 for the Intelsat 10-02 communications satellite, which launched in 2004. MEV-2 will provide Intelsat 10-02 with five additional years of useful service life, helping it deliver media and broadband services across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and South America.
This was only Arianespace’s third launch this year, tying them with Japan but not enough to get on the leader board. The leaders in the 2020 launch race:
19 China
12 SpaceX
9 Russia
4 ULA
The U.S. still leads China 20 to 19 in the national rankings.
Luke Aikins – Sky diving without a parachute from 25,000 Feet
An evening pause: I admit I could not have watched this live.
Hat tip Phill Oltmann.
Corroded Martian southern highlands
Click for full image.
Today’s cool image is another example of strange terrain on Mars that is difficult to explain, though one can make some guesses. The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on May 29, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows an area in a region dubbed Aonia and located in the southern cratered highlands directly south of Valles Marineris.
This spot is in the high mid-latitudes, 55 degrees south. In the northern lowland plains one would expect to see a lot of evidence of ice, either as debris covered glaciers in craters or flowing off of mesas, or in an underground ice table that is revealed from impacts and other events that caused it to melt temporarily in the past for a brief instant.
No such features are apparent in this image however. In fact, the photo seems to show a very dry place, with the surface almost all hard bedrock that has been eroded to leave behind rough and sharp features. That a significant amount of erosion has occurred here is indicated by the pedestal crater near the image’s top. When its impact took place the topography was higher. Since then the ground around this crater has been worn away, with the mashed material under the impact at a higher density and more resistant to erosion.
If this spot has an ice table or any buried glacial material, it is not obvious, and certainly not revealed by this erosion.
The two square boxes indicate two insets that I have only cropped to show them at full resolution, and are posted below.
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