Category: Behind The Black

A Martian crater, ice, and dust devil tracks

3:20 pm

A Martian crater, ice, and dust devil tracks
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on January 2, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It is once again a terrain sample image, taken not for any specific research but to fill a gap in the schedule so as to maintain the camera’s proper temperature.

What this picture shows is that even though Mars has a thin atmosphere that produces dust devils, the propagation of dust devils is not uniform across the red planet’s surface. In this picture there are a lot of devil tracks, going in many different directions. Yet few of the many cool images I post from MRO show this number of tracks. In many cases the ground might not be agreeable to leaving tracks, but that cannot be the entire explanation.
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Today’s blacklisted American: Eventbrite routinely blacklists conservative events

1:52 pm

Eventbrite: hostile to freedom

They’re coming for you next: Eventbrite, an online “self-service ticketing platform”, has been routinely blacklisting conservative events, often cancelling already existing events or telling customers the event no longer exists, always for vague and often contradictory reasons.

What Eventbrite did to one Matt Walsh event is typical:

In late February, the website removed from its page for a [March 1st] Matt Walsh event on transgenderism sponsored by Young America’s Foundation at Stanford University. Organizers were forced to set up an alternative event page just before Walsh’s appearance. Not only did Eventbrite remove the page, “[h]undreds of registered attendees were surprised to receive emails from the company informing them that their tickets had been canceled,” YAF wrote in a Feb. 27 news release.

Though students at Stanford set fire to promotional flyers put up by YAF prior to the event, the event itself went off without incident.

The article at the first link above lists numerous other times Eventbrite cancelled conservative events without explanation, including several other Walsh university events, a screening of Dinesh D’Souza’s film 2000 Mules that documents fraud and election tampering in the 2020 election, a event in support of the U.S. military, and a Memorial Day event honoring veterans.

All of this blacklisting contradicts Eventbrite’s own mission statement:
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Potential Artemis-3 landing site on the Moon

10:54 am

The landing zone for the Artemis-3 mission to the Moon

Overview map

The panorama above was released today by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) science team, and shows one of the candidate landing sites (arrow) where Starship could land as part of the Artemis-3 mission to the Moon.

The map of the south pole to the right, created from LRO images and annotated by me, gives the context. The yellow lines indicate the approximate area covered by the panorama. The terrain here is rugged, to put it mildly. As the science team notes,

Imagine the view from the summit; it rises more than 5000 meters (16,400 feet) above its base. Off in the distance, you could see a 3500 meter (11,480 feet) tall cliff. One could argue that the sheer grandeur of this region makes it a prime candidate. But then again, a landing here might be too exciting?

That 11,480-foot-high cliff is the crater wall to the right of the arrow. Make sure you go to the link to view the original image. This will be a spectacular place to visit. Whether the astronauts however will be able to find out anything about ice in the shadowed crater floor thousands of feet below them remains questionable.

Artemis-3 is presently scheduled for 2025 but no one should be surprised if it is delayed.

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LeoLabs to establish radar facility in Argentina

9:41 am

LeoLabs, a private commercial company aiming to provide orbital tracking of all space objects as small as two centimeters, has announced plans to establish its seventh global radar facility in Argentina.

The S-band radar, scheduled to be completed by the end of the year, will be located on the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego. “The Southern Hemisphere has not been well covered for space safety and space domain awareness,” LeoLabs CEO Dan Ceperley told SpaceNews. “There are a lot of conjunctions close to the North Pole and the South Pole. This radar will make a very meaningful improvement in the tracking of those conjunctions.”

Currently, LeoLabs tracks objects in low-Earth orbit with phased array radars in Alaska, Australia, Portugal’s Azores archipelago, New Zealand, Texas and Costa Rica.

The company essentially competes with the Space Force in tracking object in orbit, and has raised more than $100 million in private investment capital to build its ground stations.

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Space startups get their SVB assets back when Feds move in

9:34 am

Because of the decision of the federal government to guarantee all deposits at the failed Silcon Valley Bank (SVB), even those above the $250K limit set by the FDIC law, several space rocket startups are no longer threatened with failure, for now.

Astra for example is now seeking to move as quickly as it can its assets, equaling about 15% of the company, to other financial institutions.

I would expect this incident will cause every company to make sure their assets are distributed more widely, as a hedge against the failure of one bank.

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Splats on Mars!

5:03 pm

Splats on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 3, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a number of crater splats of varying sizes. If you look at the full image, you will find several even bigger splats to the north of the one in the picture to the right. You will also see many more similar-sized crater splats to the south.

I cannot provide any confident explanation about what caused these splats, other than to assume that most here are secondary impacts from ejecta thrown out by a larger impact somewhere nearby. I also assume all these small impacts occurred at the same time because they all appear to have hit the ground when it had the same thick liquid consistency, a condition that was probably temporary. Note for example how many of the other craters in the full image do not have this same splattered look.
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March 13, 2023 Quick space links

3:48 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

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The sad state of free speech in America illustrated by three top universities

1:03 pm

Cancelling the Bill of Rights

Events in the last two weeks at three of America’s top universities, Stanford, Cornell, and Yale, have illustrated starkly how many young Americans and their teachers now either support censorship and violence against dissenters, or are too cowardly to defend the rights of Americans when their free speech rights are attacked.

At the Stanford Law School a 5th Circuit Judge, Stuart Kyle Duncan, was shouted down and then lectured by a dean at the school for daring to have opinions she disagreed with. Stanford officials have issued a weak apology, but have done nothing concrete to discipline anyone for enforcing a heckler’s veto at the school.

At Cornell, the promise of university officials to punish students who participated in a protest that shouted down Ann Coulter has apparently been put aside once the heat died down.

Cornell University’s media team has not responded to multiple inquiries in the past months on possible punishments for the student activists. The College Fix also emailed communications director Rebecca Valli on March 6 and asked for an update on investigations into the students involved and what Cornell planned to do in the future to prevent similar problems.

The silence comes despite an initial strong statement from university leadership that criticized the Nov. 9 disruption.

Finally, officials at Yale Law School have attempted to fix things after being badly embarrassed by a similar violent protest in March 2022, when students shouted down Kristen Waggoner, the president of the non-profit law firm the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). » Read more

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Chinese pseudo-commercial rocket industry gearing up to launch numerous times from interior spaceport

12:07 pm

China's spaceports

Even as China is presently building a commercial launch facility at its Wenchang spaceport on the coast, at least four of China’s pseudo-commercial rocket companies are gearing up to launch numerous times from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the interior of China.

The link above shows the launch sites being built at Jiuquan by pseudo-companies Landspace, Expace, CAS Space, and Space Pioneer. The map to the right illustrates what these interior launches will mean. Since none of these pseudo-companies will be vertically landing their first stages — at least not for several years — it means that numerous first stages will be coming down in many areas in China and Mongolia, most of which will be uncontrolled descents.

Eventually the Wenchang launch facility on the coast will become available, but based on past Chinese actions, do not expect these pseudo-companies to end their operations at Jiuquan at that time. All are controlled by the Chinese government, which has made it very clear it really doesn’t care if first stages crash near habitable areas.

Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay for this story.

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Hubble looks at a nearby dwarf galaxy

9:38 am

A nearby dwarf galaxy
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a continuing project to capture high resolution images of every nearby galaxy, which in this particular case the caption describes as follows:

UGCA 307 hangs against an irregular backdrop of distant galaxies in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The small galaxy consists of a diffuse band of stars containing red bubbles of gas that mark regions of recent star formation, and lies roughly 26 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Corvus. Appearing as just a small patch of stars, UGCA 307 is a diminutive dwarf galaxy without a defined structure — resembling nothing more than a hazy patch of passing cloud.

The red regions of star formation are significant, as they indicate that even in a tiny galaxy like this it is possible for there to be enough gas and dust to coalesce into new stars.

Astronomers living on a world inside this galaxy have an advantage over astronomers on Earth. There is no large galaxy like the Milky Way blocking their view of the cosmos in one direction. They can see it all, even in directions looking through UGCA 307.

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Russia and China launch satellites

9:20 am

Two launches today in Russia and China.

First China used its Long March 2C rocket to launch a “remote sensing satellite” into orbit. No other information about the satellite was released. Nor was any information about whether the rocket’s first stage landed near habitable areas.

Next Russia used its Proton rocket to launch a classified satellite, likely a military surveillance satellite, into orbit. Like China Russia launches from an interior spaceport, with its first stage falling “in Karaganda Region of Kazakhstan,” with the second stage landing in drop zones in Russia. Russia, which has been doing this regularly for more than a half century, has always done a good job either avoiding habitable areas with the first stage crash, or keeping such stories out of the international press.

The 2023 launch race:

16 SpaceX
9 China
4 Russia
1 Rocket Lab
1 Japan
1 India

American private enterprise still leads China 17 to 9 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 17 to 15. SpaceX alone is now tied with the entire world, including all other American companies, 16 all.

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Curiosity looks ahead: Which way to go?

10:23 pm

Curiosity's view on March 11, 2023
Click for high resolution version. For original images, go here and here.

Overview map

How about a bonus weekend cool image! The panorama above, created from two pictures taken on March 11, 2023 by the right navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity, gives us a wonderful view of the alien Martian terrain that the rover is presently within. It also shows us the dilemma mission planners have in planning the rover’s future travels.

The red dotted line on both the panorama and the overview map to the right indicates the planned route. The yellow lines on the map indicates the approximate area viewed by the panorama. The blue dot marks Curiosity’s present position, where it is presently in the middle of a drilling campaign in the marker layer where it sits.

The plan had been to travel to the east of what I like to call the the hill of pillows (in the middle of the panorama). Yet, it appears from this navigation image that the terrain might be less difficult to the west. Both routes will get the rover to its goal in Gediz Vallis.

I have no idea what the mission planners will decide to do. I am just a tourist going along for the ride, and sharing the journey with my readers. This is the first time any human spacecraft has ever traveled through such mountainous terrain on any planet.

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Relativity scrubs launch today again

2:06 pm

Relativity today was once again unable to complete the first launch of its Terran-1 prototype rocket.

The failure to launch was not for want of trying. The first countdown was first put on hold at T-1:10 when a boat entered the range. Once removed, the launch team picked up the count from that point without any recycle, but at T-0 the rocket’s internal computer sensed an issue and aborted the launch.

The launch team then reassessed, adjusted that issue, and tried again for a launch at the last second of the launch window, essentially duplicating the circumstances of an instantaneous launch window. The count this time got down to T-45 seconds when once again the rocket’s internal computer sensed an issue and aborted the launch.

No word yet on when the company will try again. If anything, Relativity’s launch team is getting a lot of practice and training with each launch attempt, critical knowledge needed for future launches.

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Some space startups threatened by Silicon Valley Bank failure

9:41 am

Link here. The companies mentioned in the article are Astra, BlackSky, Planet, Redwire, Rocket Lab, and Space Perspective.

Rocket Lab has about 8% of its cash assets now trapped by the closure. All the companies had loans from Silicon Valley Bank, some of which were paid off prior to the crash. This quote suggests the situation is critical for some space startups:

“It’s a very serious situation,” said a space sector entrepreneur who asked not to be identified. “Our balance is suddenly only $450. There has been no communication from SVB even after the event became known. Our primary SVB liaison, who has been very attentive in the past, is unreachable by any means. It’s appalling.”

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Live stream of the first launch attempt of Relativity’s Terran-1 rocket

9:15 am

I have embedded below the live stream of the first launch attempt of Relativity’s Terran-1 rocket, presently scheduled with a three hour launch window that opens at 1:00 pm (Eastern). The live stream will go live at noon.

The first launch of a new rocket is exceedingly challenging, and almost never succeeds. The key however is the data obtained that can be used to make the next launch attempt a success.

A lot rides on this launch. Relativity already has obtained $1.2 billion in launch contracts plus more than $1 billion in private investment capital, despite having never launched anything. Moreover, the Terran-1 rocket is really a prototype for its larger Terran-R rocket, which is intended to compete directly for the larger payloads that companies like SpaceX and ULA launch.

» Read more

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March 10, 2023 Quick space links

3:44 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

 

  • Chinese pseudo-company Laser-Starcom, a startup of space laser communication, “raises 10s of millions of Chinese Yuan in round A”

 

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Today’s blacklisted American: Mother sued by teacher’s union for requesting her child’s kindergarten curriculum

2:14 pm

Nicoletta-Solas
Nicoletta-Solas testifying to Congress

They’re coming for you next: Nicoletta Solas, a Rhode Island mother of a 5-year-old, was harassed by her school board and sued by the National Education Association (NEA), the largest teacher’s union in the nation, for simply requesting her child’s kindergarten curriculum. As she stated bluntly during her testimony at House hearing on March 2, 2023,

If you ask questions about public education, they will come after you. … My school district and my teachers’ union didn’t want to just hide the curriculum from me, they wanted to ruin my life.

Below is video of her full testimony. All she wanted to know was whether the school would be teaching queer theory to her 5-year-old. The ugly and vicious response to this request, by the school, the school board, and the NEA, is striking.
» Read more

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Ingenuity completes 47th flight, scouting ahead of Perseverance

11:55 am

Ingenuity sitting ahead of Perseverance, on the delta
Click for original image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Though the science team has not, as of this posting, added the flight to Ingenuity’s flight log, according to the interactive map showing the positions of both Ingenuity and Perseverance on Mars, the helicopter completed its 47th flight yesterday as planned.

An annotated version of that map is to the right. The larger green dot marks Ingenuity’s new position. The smaller green dot marks its position when the panorama above was taken on February 27, 2023, capturing the helicopter in the distance (as indicated by the arrow). The yellow lines indicate the approximate area covered by that panorama. The blue dot marks Perseverance’s present position.

The flight’s planned distance was to go 1,410 feet to the southwest and “image science targets along the way.” As the helicopter also flew above Perseverance’s planned route, as indicated by the red dotted line, it also provided the rover team information about the ground Perseverance will travel along the way. Since the terrain here is generally not very rough, the information is not critical for route-picking. It might however spot some geological feature that bears a closer look that would not have been noticed by the rover alone.

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Biden administration proposes more budget increases for NASA

10:25 am

In releasing its proposed federal budget for 2024 with many major spending increases, the Biden administration has also proposed a significant increase in NASA’s budget. the third year in a row it has done so.

The shortened summary version of the Biden budget proposal [pdf] covers its proposals for NASA in two pages, with the most important proposals as follows:

  • A half billion dollar increase in the budget for the Artemis program for a total of $8.1 billion.
  • A commitment to partner on Europe’s ExoMars Franklin rover mission, replacing Russia.
  • $949 million to develop the Mars sample return mission to bring back Perseverance’s core samples.
  • $180 million to begin development of “a space tug” that can de-orbit ISS as well as “be useful for other space transportation missions.”
  • $1.39 billion for developing new space technologies, an increase of $190 million.

The last two items will likely be money offered to many new commercial startups.

Though we can expect some resistance by the Republican House to most of the budget increases in the overall Biden budget proposal, expect Congress to rubber stamp the NASA increases, as it has done routinely in recent years. Congress might shift or reject some of these ideas, but generally, when all is said and done, it will only make superficial changes. NASA will likely more money.

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House subcommittee proposes five bills that would change FCC operations

10:06 am

The House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on March 8, 2023 approved five bills affecting the FCC and how it operates.

The first bill [pdf], Satellite and Telecommunications Streamlining Act, is the most significant, as it appears to try to establish legal limitations and rules specifically designed to address the FCC’s recent effort to expand its power and regulatory authority beyond what its legal authority allows. While most of the bill’s language appears to allow the FCC to do what it wants (including limiting or regulating future space stations and setting lifetime limits on all orbiting spacecraft), it also insists that licenses be approved quickly and adds this caveat:

[T]he Commission may not establish performance objectives that conflict with any standard practice adopted by the Secretary of Commerce.

In other words, the FCC cannot grab the regulatory responsibilities of other agencies, especially the Commerce Department, where Congress in recent years has been trying to shift most commercial regulatory authority.

Nonetheless, this bill appears to mostly endorse the FCC ‘s power grab.

The bills still have to be approved by the full committee, then approved by the full House, then approved by the Senate, and then signed by the president.

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Russia considering bringing Soyuz launched on February 23rd home earlier

9:35 am

According to unnamed sources in the Russian press, Roscosmos officials are considering bringing the Soyuz capsule launched on February 23rd to ISS back to Earth in June rather than September, while moving up the launch of the next Soyuz manned mission.

As noted by space journalist Anatoly Zak:

The existence of such plans indicated that specialists had still been concerned about the possibility of a critical leak in the thermal control system of the fresh crew vehicle similar to those that hit two previous transport ships. Such change in schedule would also debunk the official explanation of previous two accidents by Roskosmos and NASA as caused by meteors rather than production defects.

The two previous coolant leaks occurred about three months after launch. Bringing the Soyuz home in June would get it home in about three and a half months, suggesting the Russians are no longer confident their Soyuz and Progress spacecraft can withstand six months in space.

If this plan is adopted it will also put less strain on the crew slated to come home on that Soyuz. Their mission has been planned for six months. Extending it to a full year without any prior preparation risks serious health issues.

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China’s Long March 4C rocket launches two Earth observation satellites

9:23 am

China today used its Long March 4C rocket to launch two Earth observation satellites from one of its interior spaceports.

No word on whether the expendable first stage landed near habitable areas. In related news the upper stage of a Long March 2D rocket, launched in June 2022, burned up over Texas on March 8, 2023. Such upper stage uncontrolled de-orbits are not unusual, and the effort by this news outlet to make a big deal about it is just politics. Unlike the lower stages of China’s rockets that hit the ground right after launch, it is very unlikely any pieces reached the surface, and any that did were small and posed a small risk.

The 2023 launch race:

16 SpaceX
8 China
3 Russia
1 Rocket Lab
1 Japan
1 India

American private enterprise still leads China 17 to 8 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 17 to 13. SpaceX alone still leads the entire world, including American companies, 16 to 14.

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March 9, 2023 Quick space links

3:55 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

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SpaceX successfully launches 40 OneWeb satellites

1:19 pm

SpaceX today successfully launched another 40 OneWeb satellites, using its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

This was SpaceX’s third launch for OneWeb, helping to replace the Russians who broke its contract with OneWeb after its invasion of the Ukraine. The first stage completed its thirteenth flight, landing safely on a landing pad at Cape Canaveral. As amazing as this record is, it is not a record for the most reflights, which presently stands at fifteen. The fairings completed their sixth flight.

As of posting not all of OneWeb’s satellites have been deployed.

The 2023 launch race:

16 SpaceX
7 China
3 Russia
1 Rocket Lab
1 Japan
1 India

American private enterprise now leads China 17 to 7 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 17 to 12. SpaceX alone leads the entire world combined, including American companies, 16 to 13.

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Ice volcano in the Martian high northern latitudes?

1:03 pm

Ice volcano on Mars
Click for original image.

That the Martian surface becomes increasingly icy as one approaches its poles is becoming increasingly evident from orbital images. Today’s cool image provides us another data point.

The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on January 4, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It is once again another terrain sample image, taken not as part of any particular research project but to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule so as to maintain its temperature. With such pictures, it is hard to predict what will be seen, though the scientists try to find interesting things. In this case the camera team succeeded quite nicely, capturing what appears to me to be a small volcano with two calderas.

This volcano however has almost certainly not spouted lava but mud and water.
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