Category: Behind The Black

NASA’s second super pressure balloon develops leak, forcing termination of mission

9:24 am

After only a day and a half after launch NASA’s second super pressure balloon, this time carrying a detector for studying cosmic rays, developed a leak that forced its controllers to terminate the mission.

The scientific balloon launched from Wānaka Airport, New Zealand, May 13, 12:02 p.m. NZST (May 12, 8:02 p.m EDT). The balloon was in flight for 1 day, 12 hours, and 53 minutes before termination over the Pacific Ocean May 14 at 12:54 UTC (8:54 a.m. EDT). The launch was the second and final for NASA’s 2023 New Zealand balloon launch campaign.

During flight, the SPB began experiencing a leak and teams attempted to troubleshot by dropping ballast to maintain the balloon’s altitude. The determination was made to safely terminate over the Pacific Ocean. NASA will investigate the cause of the anomaly.

Meanwhile, the first balloon, dubbed SuperBIT, continues to fly, presently on its fourth circumnavigation of Antarctic while its telescope takes high resolution images of celestial objects.

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Stratolaunch’s giant airplane Roc successfully completes first drop test of payload

9:16 am

On May 13, 2023 Stratolaunch’s giant airplane Roc took off with a Talon-0 engineering test vehicle attached to its fuselage and successfully released that test vehicle, completing the plane’s first drop test.

Saturday’s outing was the 11th flight test for Stratolaunch’s flying launch pad — a twin-fuselage, six-engine airplane with a record-setting 385-foot wingspan. The plane is nicknamed Roc in honor of a giant bird in Middle East mythology.

Roc carried the Talon-A separation test vehicle, known as TA-0, during three previous test flights. But this was the first time TA-0 was released from Roc’s center-wing pylon to fly free. The release took place during a four-hour, eight-minute flight that involved operations in Vandenberg Space Force Base’s Western Range, off California’s central coast.

With this success the company appears ready to fulfill its military contract to use its Talon-1 payloads to fly hypersonic flight tests.

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SpaceX launches another 56 Starlink satellites into orbit

10:57 pm

Using its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX tonight successfully launched another 56 Starlink satellites into orbit from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage successfully completed its eleventh flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The two fairings completed their 7th and 8th flights, respectively.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

31 SpaceX
17 China
6 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads China 35 to 17 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 35 to 29. SpaceX by itself trails the entire world, including other American companies, only 31 to 33 in launches this year.

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Another study suggests Saturn’s rings are young, much younger than the planet

5:59 pm

Scientists using data from Cassini, which orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017, have confirmed earlier research that said Saturn’s rings are much younger than the planet, only about 400 million years old.

From 2004 to 2017, the team used an instrument called the Cosmic Dust Analyzer aboard NASA’s late Cassini spacecraft to analyze specks of dust flying around Saturn. Over those 13 years, the researchers collected just 163 grains that had originated from beyond the planet’s close neighborhood. But it was enough. Based on their calculations, Saturn’s rings have likely been gathering dust for only a few hundred million years.

Though I cannot cite the earlier research, I distinctly remember a study from about a decade ago that posited the rings being young, only a few hundred million years old. This research confirms this conclusion, and likely firms up the theory considerably.

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Intuitive Machines’ first mission to land on Moon delayed

5:52 pm

Intuitive Machines officials revealed during their quarterly report that the first mission of its Nova-C lunar lander has been delayed from June to late August or September.

The company announced in February plans for a June landing at Malapert A, a crater near the south pole of the moon. That date was a slip from a previously scheduled March launch, which the company said was linked to NASA’s decision to move the landing site to Malapert A.

Altemus said the company made “significant progress” in testing of the lander in recent months, such as structural tests to confirm the vehicle could handle the stresses of launch and cryogenic tanking demonstrations. “We have some functional testing” still to do on the lander, he said, but did not elaborate on the nature of those tests or their schedule ahead of shipping to Cape Canaveral for its Falcon 9 launch.

Two private companies have so far attempted and failed to land on the Moon, Israel’s SpaceIL and Japan’s Ispace. Two American companies, Intuitive Machines and Astrobotic, are both racing to achieve this goal in the coming months. This delay now puts Astrobotic in the lead, with its launch now targeting the summer.

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Engineers free stuck radar antenna on Juice probe to Jupiter’s big moons

4:24 pm

Engineers have successfully freed the 52-foot wide radar antenna on the Juice probe to Jupiter, shaking it enough to release a pin that was blocking deployment.

The pin was freed by employing “back-to-back jolts”. Imagine when you roll your car back and forth to get it freed from mud or snow. It appears this is what they did with the pin.

Juice will arrive in Jupiter orbit in 2031, where it will make numerous fly-bys of Europa, Calisto, and Ganymede, and then settle into an orbit around Ganymede alone. The radar antenna was essential for probing the ice content of these worlds, below the surface.

Hat tip to reader Mike Nelson.

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May 12, 2023 Quick space links

3:56 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

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Saturn now has 145 known moons

3:41 pm

Using ground-based images analyzed in a new way, astronomers have discovered an additional 62 small moons orbiting Saturn, giving the ringed gas giant a total of 145 known moons.

The data used by the team was collected between 2019 and 2021 in three-hour spans by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) on top of Maunakea in Hawaii. It allowed the astronomers to detect moons around Saturn as small as 1.6 miles (2.5 kilometers) in diameter. That’s about two-thirds the length of Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.

Though some of the moons had been spotted as early as 2019, it takes more than sighting an object close to a planet to confirm it is a moon and not an asteroid making a brief close passage to that planet. To change these objects from “suspected moons” to “confirmed moons” of Saturn, the astronomers had to track them for several years to ensure each is actually orbiting the gas giant.

Performing a painstaking process of matching objects detected on different nights over the course of 24 months, the team tracked 63 objects that they ended up confirming as moons. One of these satellites was revealed back in 2021, with the remaining 62 moons gradually announced over the past few weeks.

To a certain extent, this declared number of moons around Saturn is utterly irrelevant. Think about it. Every single object in its rings should be defined as a moon, totaling hundreds of thousands. At some point the question of what defines a moon becomes the relevant question.

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Endless dunes amidst Mars’ giant volcanoes

1:57 pm

Endless dunes amidst Mars' giant volcanoes
Click for originial image.

Past cool images on Behind the Black showing endless dune fields on Mars have generally focused on two places, the giant Medusae Fossae Formation volcanic ash deposits in the dry equatorial regions of Mars and the Olympia Undae dune sea that surrounds the Martian north pole.

Today’s image to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, takes us to a completely different dune sea. Taken on February 14, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), the picture also shows an endless dune sea, though there is faint evidence on those dune fields of buried features, such as the meandering east-west feature in the picture’s center.

This dune sea is also in the dry equatorial regions, like Medusae, but it is much farther east, and sits surrounded by Mars’ biggest volcanoes.
» Read more

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Pushback: Three teachers blacklisted by Rhode Island for refusing the jab score total victory in court

12:24 pm

Rhode Island: haven to oppression
Oppressive Rhode Island

Bring a gun to a knife fight: After a legal battle lasting more than a year, three teachers in Rhode Island have won a full victory in court after their school district fired them for refusing the COVID jab in 2021.

The school committee has agreed to full reinstatement with back pay, as well as attorney’s fees, it announced today: “The three teachers have the opportunity to return to teaching positions within the Barrington School District should they choose to do so, at the steps they would have been at had they worked continuously. Each individual will receive a payment of $33,333, along with back payments: Stephanie Hines ($65,000), Kerri Thurber ($128,000), and Brittany DiOrio ($150,000). Attorney fees totaling $50,000 will be paid to the teachers’ legal counsel.”

Piccirilli says the school has also agreed to pay punitive damages totaling $100,000 to be split three ways among the teachers. The teachers’ two-year battle with the district also took a toll on their names and reputations. The agreement requires their termination records to be expunged, Piccirilli explained today in an interview.

The teachers have been made whole in every respect, he says. It is as if they were never fired. [emphasis mine]

These three teachers join the small select group of blacklisted individuals who lost their jobs because they refused the jab but later won in court. Sadly, they are the exception, not the rule. In general, the vast majority of people hurt by all the COVID mandates — from lockdowns to jab mandates — have not been made whole. For example, even though the Biden administration has lost in court repeatedly over its attempt to force government employees to get the jab, it continues to refuse to rehire the many military and civilian employees it fired. In the case of the military this refusal is even more insane and petty, as the Pentagon has been in the last few years falling far short of its recruitment quotas.

Note also that the full announcement by the Barrington school district (available here) not only admits no error, it even underlines how correct it considered its draconian policies. Despite extensive data beginning in the summer of 2021 that the various COVID shots did nothing to prevent transmission, the district still claims everything it did was proper. To quote:
» Read more

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Scientists rediscover the advantages of nuclear power for moving probes through the solar system

10:21 am

Scientists appear to have once again discovered the advantages of nuclear powered thrusters for moving much heavier interplanetary missions more quickly and more efficiently to the farther reaches of the solar system.

A new paper published last month in the journal Acta Astronautica argues that a fusion-powered drive, capable of delivering propulsion while powering onboard electronics, could be a way to get more power and cargo to outer moons like Titan, and designed a scenario revealing what a DFD-powered [direct-fusion-drive] Titan mission would look like.

A 2021 study from an international research team revealed that a DFD could transport 2,220 lbs to Titan in 31 months. Right now, the Dragonfly mission [to Saturn’s moon Titan] weighs in at about 990 lbs. This new paper says that the Princeton Field-Reversed Configuration (PFRC) concept developed at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory is essential for powering the mission.

The irony of this story is that scientists and engineers knew these obvious facts and proposed many versions of nuclear-powered thrusters back in the 1960s. NASA even had a very successful project called NERVA in the last 1960s, with plans to begin using the technology by the 1980s.

All such research was canceled however in the 1970s, partly because of budget cutbacks but mostly because of the paranoia that began developing at that time against using nuclear power for anything. The idea of launching a rocket into space that carried a nuclear rocket engine was considered environmentally too risky.

Has that fear now subsided? We shall see. There are plenty of environmental activist groups that we can expect to immediately oppose such technology. The question will be whether a large enough private industry will evolve capable of exerting its own political weight to resist that opposition.

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Perseverance data suggests a strong river rushed down the delta in Jezero Crater

10:07 am

Skrinkle Haven on Mars
Click for original image.

Based on the images and geology so far gathered by the Mars rover Perseverance as it has climbed up onto the delta that flowed into Jezero Crater sometime in the far past, scientists now think a roaring river once flowed down that delta.

Years ago, scientists noticed a series of curving bands of layered rock within Jezero Crater that they dubbed “the curvilinear unit.” They could see these layers from space but are finally able to see them up close, thanks to Perseverance.

One location within the curvilinear unit, nicknamed “Skrinkle Haven,” is captured in one of the new Mastcam-Z mosaics [a section of which is posted to the right]. Scientists are sure the curved layers here were formed by powerfully flowing water, but Mastcam-Z’s detailed shots have left them debating what kind: a river such as the Mississippi, which winds snakelike across the landscape, or a braided river like Nebraska’s Platte, which forms small islands of sediment called sandbars.

When viewed from the ground, the curved layers appear arranged in rows that ripple out across the landscape. They could be the remnants of a river’s banks that shifted over time – or the remnants of sandbars that formed in the river. The layers were likely much taller in the past. Scientists suspect that after these piles of sediment turned to rock, they were sandblasted by wind over the eons and carved down to their present size.

The press release say nothing about glacial activity here, but I am willing to bet the scientists have considered this. As it requires a greater leap into the unknown, involving geological processes not yet understood on an alien planet, it is makes sense that they have put it aside at this point. I also am willing to bet that it will pop up again, with time and additional data.

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Ariane-6’s first launch now likely delayed again, until 2024

9:49 am

According to officials from the German company OHB, which makes parts of Europe’s new Ariane-6 rocket, its first launch will not take place before the end of this year, as presently scheduled by Arianespace, the commercial arm of the European Space Agency (ESA).

In a May 10 earnings call, executives with German aerospace company OHB predicted that the rocket will make its long-delayed debut within the first several months of 2024, the strongest indication yet by those involved with the rocket’s development that it will not be ready for launch before the end of this year.

“It’s not yet launched, but we hope that it will launch in the early part of next year,” said Marco Fuchs, chief executive of OHB, of Ariane 6 during a presentation about the company’s first quarter financial results. A subsidiary of OHB, MT Aerospace, produces tanks and structures for the rocket. Later in the call, he estimated the rocket was no more than a year away from that inaugural flight. “I am getting more and more confident we will see the first launch of Ariane 6 early next year,” he said. “I think we are within a year of the first launch and that is psychologically very important.”

These delays seriously impact many projects of ESA and other European companies. Ariane-6 was originally supposed to launch by 2020, overlapping the retirement of its Ariane-5 rocket by several years. Ariane-5 now has only one launch left, presently scheduled for June. Once that flies, Europe will have no large rocket available until Ariane-6 begins operations. This situation is worsened for Europe in that its other smaller rocket, the Vega-C, failed on its last launch and has not yet resumed operations.

It is not surprising therefore that many European projects have been shifting their launch contracts away from Ariane-6 to SpaceX and others. It is also not surprising that there is now an increasing move in Europe to develop new competing private rocket companies, rather than relying on a government-owned entity like Arianespace.

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Space Perspective buys ship to use for launching and recovering its passenger balloons

9:38 am

The high altitude balloon company Space Perspective has now purchased a 292-foot long ship to use as both a launch and recovery vessel for its planned flights of its Neptune capsule carrying tourists to 20-plus miles above the Earth.

Named in honor of the Voyager 1 space probe, the vessel was acquired to allow the company to launch and recover its spacecraft capsule Neptune from anywhere in the world, starting with pre-approved locations near Florida. The company completed its first test flight in June 2021, launching from land near Kennedy Space Center. The capsule splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico roughly seven hours later. On that occasion, the capsule was recovered from the water using a chartered commercial vessel, GO America.

Building on that first recovery, Voyager will have the capability to both launch and recover the spacecraft in an integrated, flexible solution that can also relocate to avoid bad weather — a problem that often plagues traditional rocket launches and marine capsule recovery operations. Space Perspective has previously stated it expects Voyager to be the first in a fleet of marine spaceports globally.

It is now expected that Voyager will begin operations late this year, when Space Perspective begins test flights of Neptune.

The article also notes near the end the growing congestion at Port Canaveral due to the numbers of space-related ships, either already operating or anticipated. It appears a marina for these ships will soon become necessary, as the port does not want them taking up docking space when not in use.

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Astronomers find largest explosion yet discovered

9:26 am

Using a large variety of telescopes, astronomers have confirmed the discovery of the largest and longest explosion ever discovered, dubbed AT2021lwx and more than eight billion light years away yet ten times brighter than any supernovae previously recorded while lasting years rather than months.

The researchers believe that the explosion is a result of a vast cloud of gas, possibly thousands of times larger than our sun, that has been violently disrupted by a supermassive black hole. Fragments of the cloud would have been swallowed up, sending shockwaves through its remnants, as well as into a large dusty doughnut-shaped formation surrounding the black hole. Such events are very rare and nothing on this scale has been witnessed before.

Last year, astronomers witnessed the brightest explosion on record – a gamma-ray burst known as GRB 221009A. While this was brighter than AT2021lwx, it lasted for just a fraction of the time, meaning the overall energy released by the AT2021lwx explosion is far greater. The physical size of the explosion is about 100 times larger than the entire solar system, and at its brightest, it was about 2 trillion times brighter than the Sun.

The only things in the universe that are as bright as AT2021lwx are quasars – supermassive black holes with a constant flow of gas falling onto them at high velocity.

Any theories at this moment about the cause of this explosion are very tentative, pending acquisition of more data. What is certain is that the tools of astronomers are far more sophisticated today, allowing for such discoveries that were once impossible. And it also appears that the existence of thousands of Starlink satellites in orbit did nothing to hinder this research.

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May 11, 2023 Quick space links

4:27 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

 

 

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Court victory in PA requiring a clean-up in voter rolls will do nothing to fix that state’s voter tampering

2:08 pm

Judicial Watch today announced a court settlement that requires five counties in Pennsylvania to remove more than 178K ineligible registrations from their voter rolls.

Pennsylvania admitted in court filings that it removed 178,258 ineligible registrations in response to communications from Judicial Watch. The settlement commits Pennsylvania and five of its counties to extensive public reporting of statistics regarding their ongoing voter roll clean-up efforts for the next five years, along with a payment to Judicial Watch of $15,000 for legal costs and fees.

Sounds great doesn’t it? Bah. The five counties involved — Luzerne County, Cumberland County, Washington County, Indiana County and Carbon County — are all in relatively rural areas or cover the smaller cities of Pennsylvania. None of this effects Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, where rampant voter fraud, voter tampering, and election rigging in solid Democratic Party districts appeared to produce enough fake votes in the last two elections to give the statewide vote to the Democratic Party.

Until some action is taken to clean up the fraud in these Democrat strongholds, Pennsylvania is going to go Democrat, no matter what its total population really wants.

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China’s X-37B copy appears to have tested docking and rendezvous while in orbit

12:41 pm

Tracking data during the 276-day flight of China’s copy of Boeing’S X-37B reusable mini-shuttle suggests that it tested docking and rendezvous operations with an object it released while in orbit.

U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Defense Squadron tracking data revealed an object in a closely-matching orbit to the spaceplane Oct. 31, 2022 (NORAD ID 54218 (2022-093J COSPAR ID)).

This companion subsatellite was then used in a series of rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) with the spacecraft, according to Leolabs. “Analyzing data from our global radar network, we’ve determined that the Test Spacecraft2 has propulsive capability and engaged in proximity operations with Object J, including what appeared to be at least two and possibly three capture/docking operations,” a Leolabs statement said.

None of this is a surprise. Such reusable shuttles allow for a great deal of testing and experimentation in orbit, that can then be returned to Earth for analysis.

Hat tip Jay, BtB’s stringer.

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Is this ice or lava in the death valley of Mars?

12:21 pm

Ice or lava on Mars?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 28, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

To put it mildly this is strange terrain. The curving east-west feature resembles a glacial flow, but it also has features that say otherwise. For example, what could cause that gap in the middle of the picture? Such things are not usually seen in an ice flow. Then there is that filled crater on the center left edge of the picture, inside the flow. Though filled with material, the flow itself does not flow around the crater, suggesting the impact occurred after the flow. Moreover the crater is a pedestal crater, whereby the surrounding terrain has eroded away so that the crater ends up standing above it.

These facts suggest that this flow is very old, and has not flowed for a very very very long time. This in turn suggests it isn’t ice but solidified lava, though for a lava flow it also has features that are anomalous when compared to typical flood lava on Mars.
» Read more

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Scientists: Stars orbiting close to Milky Way’s supermassive black hole do it alone

10:07 am

The stars orbiting Sag A*
The stars orbiting Sag A*. Click for original image.

Based on a ten year study of the motions of nine stars orbiting close to Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star), the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, scientists have concluded that they are single stars, not binaries as would be expected.

Using W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaiʻi Island, Devin Chu of Hilo, an astronomer with the UCLA Galactic Center Orbits Initiative, led a 10-year survey that found these ‘S-stars,’ where ‘S’ stands for Sagittarius A*, the name of the monster black hole at our galaxy’s core, are all single.

The result is surprising given the S-stars Chu’s team observed included young, massive main-sequence stars that are only about six million years old. Normally, stars at this age that are 10 times more massive than our Sun spend their childhood years paired with a twin in a binary system, or sometimes even as triplets.

This finding suggests that the black hole’s massive gravitational field causes the binaries to be pulled apart, or somehow to merge during their formation.

This data point and the questions it raises pales before the more fundamental question that astronomers have been asking since these stars were first discovered in the 1990s: How is it possible for any stars to form so close to such a disruptive gravitational field?

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May 10, 2023 Quick space links

5:08 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

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A rash on Mars

4:25 pm

A Martian rash
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on January 30, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The science team labeled this a “Circular Outcrop of Bright Rock.

What I see is a Martian skin rash. Based on the ripple pattern below the ridge one might think we are looking at sand dunes, except that the rash above the cliff has no such pattern. Instead, the ground in this one particular area looks very roughened in a random sort of way.

The location at 27 degrees south latitude suggests there is little near surface ice at this location to cause this feature. The overview map below provides another but not very helpful possibility.
» Read more

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Hiking in a most unusual way, for others

1:51 pm

The Tucson crew for Luke 5 Adventures takes a hiker uphill
The Tucson crew for Luke 5 Adventures takes a hiker uphill

Since I was blacklisted by the caving community in 2021, I have been searching for a new outdoor hobby that would satisfy my interests and provide me a new social community.

This search has landed me in a very unusual place (a circumstance that for me has actually been very typical in my life). During a loop hike in October last year, Diane and I met a couple who were doing the loop in the opposite direction. The first time we met we chatted for a few minutes, and then moved on in opposite directions. When we met the second time, however, we talked longer and exchanged contact information. It appears that Angelo and Bonnie Piro also love hiking, recently moved to Tucson from New Jersey (which meant I had a lot in common with them), and were looking for people they could hike with.

Since then we have hiked together numerous times. One day in late November Angelo mentioned that they had the day before participated in a short hike whereby they helped transport a 9-year-old boy who could not walk on his own in a one-wheel chair — dubbed Rosie — over a trail, as part of a volunteer organization called Luke5Adventures. From its national webpage:

For those who aren’t physically able to hike it, forge it, climb it, cross it, or ascend it, we
we can make it possible.

As the founder of this organization, Kevin Schwieger, explains on the webpage,

I knew we needed to give this venture a name. My thoughts went to the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 5, and the account of the group of friends who took their paralytic friend to go see Jesus. The house where Jesus was speaking was so crowded that they could not get in. That didn’t stop them. They were determined to enable their friend to see something amazing. They carried him to the roof, cut the thatch away, and lowered him down through the hole in the roof to see Jesus! I pictured in my mind’s eye, groups of friends by the hundreds, using Rosies to take their new friends to see places and things that heretofore have been impossible. Not figuratively impossible, but, literally impossible.

It seemed to me that volunteering for this organization would give me an opportunity to do some fun outdoor stuff in a way that was new and interesting while doing good as well. It would also likely introduce me to some decent and righteous people with whom I could make some friends. That they were Christians and I was a secular Jew made no different to me, and I was quite confident it would make no difference to them either.

Not surprisingly, I was right.
» Read more

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SpaceX successfully launches another 51 Starlink satellites

1:18 pm

SpaceX today successfully launched another 51 Starlink satellites, using its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The first stage successfully completed its third flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific. Both fairings completed their second flight in space.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

30 SpaceX
17 China
6 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads China 34 to 17 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 34 to 29. SpaceX by itself trails the entire world, including other American companies, only 30 to 33 in launches this year.

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