Category: Behind The Black

X-37B sets new in-orbit record

9:23 am

The Space Force’s X-37B reusable mini-shuttle that is presently in orbit has now set a new mission record, spending more than 781 days in orbit.

As of today (July 7), the X-37B has been in Earth orbit for 781 days, breaking its previous record of 780. The reusable vehicle designed and built by Boeing is currently flying on its sixth mission, known as Orbital Test Vehicle-6 or OTV-6, which launched on May 17, 2020.

During this long flight one of the spacecraft’s few unclassified experiments successfully tested the conversion of solar power into beamed microwave energy.

The second X-37B in the fleet remains on the ground, having completed its 780 day mission in October 2019. We also do not know when the military will order the return of the X-37B in orbit. Only then will the mission really be a success.

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From the rim to the floor of Valles Marineris

5:01 pm

Overview map

From the rim to the floor of Valles Marineris
Click for full image.

For today’s cool Martian image, we begin from afar and zoom in. The overview map above shows the solar system’s largest canyon, Valles Marineris, 1,500 miles long, and 400 miles wide at its widest. The white dot on the north rim of the section of the canyon dubbed Melas marks the location of the photo to the right, rotated, cropped and reduced to post here and taken on January 28, 2011 by the wide angle context camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

I have added elevation numbers to this picture to give it some understandable scale. From the rim to the interior canyon floor — a distance of about ten miles — the canyon wall drops about 19,000 feet. Compare this with Bright Angel Trail in the Grand Canyon, which from the rim to the Colorado River drops about 4,400 feet in about the same distance. The wall of Valles Marineris is about four times steeper.

Even that doesn’t give you the full scale. Having hiked down to that interior canyon floor, you are still about 10,000 feet above Valles Marineris’s main canyon floor, with fifteen more miles of hiking to go to reach it.

The white rectangle marks the area covered by the MRO high resolution image below.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Thomas Jefferson and other important American historical figures banned by Cleveland school authorities

11:52 am

Thomas Jefferson banned in Cleveland
Thomas Jefferson, banned by Cleveland school officials

The modern dark age: Officials of Cleveland Metropolitan Schools have decided that its schools cannot be named after Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry because these great Americans — who trail-blazed the fight for individual freedom — had also owned slaves.

Guidelines implemented by the district last year with the urging of the Cleveland City Council require that schools not be named after people who have a documented history of enslaving other humans.

The district also prohibits naming schools for those who have actively participated in the institution of slavery, systemic racism, the oppression of people of color, women, or other minority groups, or who have been a member of a supremacist organization.

The two schools are now named after a black Democratic Party politician and a former school official. In our new dark age, these relatively minor individuals are now considered more important than two giants who made it possible to found the first country on Earth dedicated to freedom and individual liberty where the people were sovereign and the government was only their servant.
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CAPSTONE completes mid-course correction

10:39 am

Engineers at Advanced Space today successfully completed CAPSTONE’s first mid-course correction, following a quick investigation that determined why communications with the probe was lost for almost a full day.

The communications blackout was apparently due to software issues and human error.

During [in-flight] commissioning of NASA’s CAPSTONE (short for Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment) spacecraft, the Deep Space Network team noted inconsistent ranging data. While investigating this, the spacecraft operations team attempted to access diagnostic data on the spacecraft’s radio and sent an improperly formatted command that made the radio inoperable. The spacecraft fault detection system should have immediately rebooted the radio but did not because of a fault in the spacecraft flight software.

CAPSTONE’s autonomous flight software system eventually cleared the fault and brought the spacecraft back into communication with the ground, allowing the team to implement recovery procedures and begin commanding the spacecraft again.

All looks good for a November 13, 2022 arrival in lunar orbit.

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Scientists: Impacts on rubble-pile asteroid are different than on planets

10:27 am

Landslide on Bennu from impact
Click for full image.

Using data collected by OSIRIS-REx at the asteriod Bennu, scientists have determined that the ejecta from impacts on a rubble-pile asteroid behaves in a very different manner than on planets with higher gravity.

Instead of flying away at about the same speed as the impactor and escaping into space, as expected in the weak gravity, the material is lifted up at a very slow speed, falls back down, and then rolls downhill like a landslide. The graphic to the right from the press release, reduced and enhanced to post here, illustrates what the scientists think happened when one of Bennu’s larger craters was created.

[M]ost of that material, called ejecta, returned to the surface and slid down the face of the asteroid, starting a wide avalanche that slowly rolled toward Bennu’s equator. Perry said the only way this could happen on a small object like Bennu, which is less than 500 meters (1,640 feet) in diameter and has low gravity, is if the dust had low or next to no cohesion.

“Because Bennu is so small, its escape velocity is less than a few tenths of a mile per hour, so any particle ejected faster than that would leave the surface,” he said. “These slow speeds are possible only if Bennu’s surface is weaker than we thought, even weaker than very loose, dry sand. This extremely low surface strength also means material on a slope is easily disturbed, and that’s what led to the landslide.”

In other words, the low cohesion prevents the impact’s energy from being transferred efficiently to the asteroid’s particles. They move, but only slowly, and thus end up sliding away more or less along the asteroid’s surface.

This discovery helps explain how these rubble-pile asteroids accumulate material, despite their low gravity.

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U.S. missile test explodes 11 seconds after launch

9:33 am

A test flight of a Minotaur missile with an updated warhead delivery system exploded 11 seconds after liftoff from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on July 6th.

Despite a news release saying the Minotaur II+ test would take place Thursday morning from the northern section of the base, the launch occurred the night before, at 11:01 p.m.

More than an hour after liftoff, Vandenberg officials confirmed the booster had exploded approximately 11 seconds after launching from Test Pad 01. There were no injuries in the explosion and the debris was contained to the immediate vicinity of the launch pad, Vandenberg officials said in a statement released early Thursday.

The military would not explain the change in launch time, nor provide much information about the explosion. According to the article, it is even possible that the contradiction between the announced launch time and when it actually occurred was because “military officials failed to account for the one-hour time difference between California and the home of the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico.”

Seems utterly absurd, but completely possible considering the general overall incompetence of our modern federal government.

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Virgin Galactic is replacing its WhiteKnightTwo mother ship

9:21 am

Virgin Galactic yesterday announced that it has hired Aurora, a Boeing subsidiary, to build two new mother ships to to replace WhiteKnightTwo and launch its SpaceShipTwo suborbital space planes.

Virgin Galactic Chief Executive Officer Michael Colglazier said: “Our next generation motherships are integral to scaling our operations. They will be faster to produce, easier to maintain and will allow us to fly substantially more missions each year. Supported by the scale and strength of Boeing, Aurora is the ideal manufacturing partner for us as we build our fleet to support 400 flights per year at Spaceport America.” [emphasis mine]

The press release claims the first new mother ship will begin operations in 2025.

Forgive me if I am very very skeptical. The highlighted words tell us a lot about this company. First, we now have confirmation that the company has had problems maintaining WhiteKnightTwo. This fact was strongly implied when all planned flights in ’21 and ’22 were cancelled following that first passenger flight in July ’21 in order to do a full maintenance refit of WhiteKnightTwo. This press release tells us that the company’s management has recognized that WhiteKnightTwo cannot be maintained much longer.

Second, the company continues to overhype its future, even without Richard Branson. The chances of it flying 400 times per year, anytime in the near future, is so slim as to be non-existent.

Third, the need to hire an outside company to build these new mother ships also suggests that Virgin Galactic no longer has the capability of doing it itself.

Right now the company’s stock is selling for about $7 per share, well below its initial price of about $12. Expect it to fall again.

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SpaceX launches another 53 Starlink satellites

8:38 am

Capitalism in space: Earlier this morning SpaceX successfully launched 53 Starlink satellites, using its Falcon 9 rocket.

The first stage was flying its thirteenth flight, and supposedly landed successfully, though the stage’s video cut off just before landing, the drone ship video did not show it on the pad, and the confirmation of that landing was very late. It is possible it landed on a spot that the camera did not show, or that the landing occurred in the ocean and the stage was lost. We shall have to wait and see.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

28 SpaceX
21 China
8 Russia
4 Rocket Lab
4 ULA

The U.S. now leads China 40 to 21 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 40 to 35.

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Having regained communications with CAPSTONE, engineers prepare for first mid-course burn

8:55 pm

Engineers are now preparing CAPSTONE for its first first mid-course engine burn, slightly late due to a loss of communications during the past two days.

The spacecraft is in good health and functioning properly.

The CAPSTONE team is still actively working to fully establish the root cause of the issue. Ground-based testing suggests the issue was triggered during commissioning activities of the communications system. The team will continue to evaluate the data leading up to the communications issue and monitor CAPSTONE’s status.

If all goes well, that engine burn will occur as early as 11:30 am (Eastern) on July 7th.

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How did sand dunes get to the top of a Martian mesa?

1:51 pm

Sand dunes at the top of a Martian mountain
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on January 1, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and shows one of the peaks of a 5,000+ foot high mesa inside Juventai Chasma, one of Mars’ deep mostly-enclosed chasms north of Valles Marineris.

I grabbed this picture because its label, “Bedform Change Detection in Juventae Chasma”, suggested something had changed from past photos, probably related to the sand dunes that hug the upper slopes of this peak. Unfortunately, in comparing this image with the earliest high-res image taken by MRO back in February 2018, I could not spot any change, probably because the resolution of the pictures released is not as high as MRO’s raw images.

However, the caption written for that 2018 image tells us where that change has likely occurred:

This image reveals a unique situation where this small dune field occurs along the summit of the large 1-mile-tall [mesa] near the center of Juventae Chasma. The layered [mesa] slopes are far too steep for dunes to climb, and bedform sand is unlikely to come from purely airborne material. Instead, the mound’s summit displays several dark-toned, mantled deposits that are adjacent to the dunes and appear to be eroding into fans of sandy material.

In other words, somewhere in the full resolution image scientists have spotted a change in the bedform sands that make-up these high mountain dunes that hug the peak. Since the data so far has suggested that the source for the sand of these high elevation dunes likely comes from the mesa itself — not from any distant source — any change found will help confirm or disprove that hypothesis.

The white box indicates the area covered by the close-up higher resolution picture below. Also below is an overview map, showing both the location of this mountain in Juventai Chasma as well as Juventai’s location relative to Valles Marineris.
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Today’s blacklisted American: Google blacklists Republican Party fund-raising emails

12:24 pm

Google: a place that loves to censor

Blacklists are back and Democrats at Google have got ’em: According to evidence presented by the Republican National Committee last week, Google is tactically blocking all fund-raising emails from the committee at the end of the month, when such emails are routinely sent.

To quote the twitter thread from Ronna McDaniel, GOP chairwoman:

Every single month – for 7 months in a row – Google has systematically attacked the RNC’s email fundraising during important donation days at the end of the month. Our emails go from strong inbox delivery (90-100%) down to 0%.

These are emails that go to our most engaged, opt-in supporters without any increase in user complaints, changes to the content, email frequency or target audiences that could account for the suppression.

Yet month after month – like clockwork – right ahead of a CRITICAL period when voters are most engaged, Google blocks our emails. They even block GOTV emails.

Google has failed to explain why this is happening. It’s unacceptable. We have filed a complaint with the FEC over this practice of censoring Republican emails and it just keeps happening.

The graphic below, including in McDaniel’s tweets, shows how the GOP’s emails are suddenly considered spam by Google at the end of every month, conveniently at the very moment the party sends out its fund-raising pleas.
» Read more

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China begins construction of commercial spaceport

9:39 am

The new colonial movement: China’s state-run press today announced the ground-breaking of a spaceport on the southern island of Hainan that will be dedicated to launches by that country’s pseudo-commercial companies.

The location is in Wenchang City, the same location of the country’s Wenchang spaceport used to launch government’s newest Long March rockets. While it isn’t clear from the Chinese news report, this new facility is likely at the same location.

Though China touts this as a commercial facility for private commercial launch companies, everything in China is still controlled and owned by the government. Nothing will happen at this new site that China’s military does not approve.

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Rocket Lab to launch twice in 10 days for NRO

9:11 am

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab announced yesterday that its next two launches, scheduled for July 12th and July 22nd, will demonstrate the ability of the company to quickly launch reconnaissance satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).

The NROL-162 and NROL-199 missions will carry national security payloads designed, built, and operated by the National Reconnaissance Office in partnership with the Australian Department of Defence as part of a broad range of cooperative satellite activities with Australia. The satellites will support the NRO to provide critical information to government agencies and decision makers monitoring international issues.

These twin missions will be a demonstration of responsive launch under NRO’s Rapid Acquisition of a Small Rocket (RASR) contract for launching small satellite through a streamlined, commercial approach, and are the third and fourth missions contracted to Rocket Lab by the NRO under the contract.

Several federal military agencies have been testing this capability with almost all the new rocket companies, from the large, such as SpaceX, to the small, such as Rocket Lab and Astra.

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Engineers propose flying gliders on Mars

9:00 am

Proposed sailplane flights in Valles Marineris
Proposed sailplane flights in Valles Marineris. Click for full image.

Engineers at the University of Arizona are developing a prototype sailplane that they think could fly for long distances on Mars at higher altitudes than a helicopter and not be reliant on solar batteries.

Using dynamic soaring, the sailplane utilises increases in horizontal wind speed with gaining altitude to continue flying long distances. It’s the same process albatrosses use to fly long distances without flapping their wings and expending crucial energy.

After lifting themselves up into fast, high-altitude air, albatrosses then turn their bodies to descend rapidly into regions of slower, low-altitude air. With the force of gravity providing downward acceleration, the albatross uses this momentum to slingshot itself back to higher altitudes. Continuously repeating this process enables albatross and other seabird species to cover thousands of kilometres of ocean, flap-free.

It’s the inspiration for the sailplane’s own propulsion system, enabling it to cover the canyons and volcanoes dotted across the red planet currently inaccessible to Mars rovers.

The graphic above, figure 1 from the engineers’ research paper, shows one possible sailplane mission, deploying two gliders, one to observe the canyon wall and a second to survey the canyon floor. Both would become a weather station upon landing. While the paper doesn’t state a Mars location for this concept, the graphic strikes a strong resemblance to the section of Valles Marineris where scientists have recently taken “Mars Helicopter” high resolution images using Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). This paper and those images might be related, or they could be illustrating the general interest by many scientists for this Mars’ location.

Regardless, the engineers are now planning test flights at 15,000 feet elevation, an elevation that will most closely simulate the atmosphere of Mars, on Earth.

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On the radio

7:06 pm

I forgot to post this earlier, but I am doing the Space Show tonight, beginning at 7 pm (Pacific). The info is in the right column or on the bottom of the page, depending on the device you use to read this.

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How to find the least dishonest politician to vote for

3:54 pm

The American flag

As the state election primaries roll on from state to state, conservative Americans today have a difficult problem: How to determine which Republican candidate is the least likely to stick a knife in our back once we have elected them into office and they have power.

My phrasing here is no accident. Politicians by definition are never to be trusted. Never. The problem is that some can be trusted less than others. To find out who to vote for you need to determine who is least likely to break the promises they make during the campaign trail.

I am also only talking about Republicans, because for me based on the history of the last three decades, there is no Democrat worthy of my vote. That party has become so corrupt and power-hungry that it needs a full house-cleaning before I would ever again trust any of its candidates. Worse, in the past four years it has also begun to endorse and campaign for some downright sick policies, from aggressive blackballing and the arrest of its opponents to including the teaching of the queer sexual agenda to very young school children. Such people must be removed from power, for the sake of everyone.

Let me now show you how I have determined who I will vote for in the Republican Senate primary in Arizona to choose who will run against Democrat Senator Mark Kelly. The primary election is on August 2nd, but early mail-in voting begins on July 6th, so now is the time to start making decisions.

The leading candidates are as follows:
» Read more

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Engineers lose contact with CAPSTONE on its way to Moon

2:24 pm

Shortly after the spacecraft was successfully deployed from its Proton upper stage on yesterday, engineers lost contact with the spacecraft as it headed towards the Moon.

“The spacecraft team currently is working to understand the cause and re-establish contact. The team has good trajectory data for the spacecraft based on the first full and second partial ground station pass with the Deep Space Network,” NASA spokesperson Sarah Frazier wrote in an emailed statement today (July 5).

“If needed, the mission has enough fuel to delay the initial post-separation trajectory correction maneuver for several days,” Frazier added. “Additional updates will be provided as soon as possible.”

The spacecraft will not arrive in lunar orbit until November, but along the way it needs to do a number of course corrections. Thus, there is some time pressure to reestablishing communications. That task now falls with the private company Advanced Space, which won a contract to operate the spacecraft for NASA.

UPDATE: More details are provided by the operators of the spacecraft, Advanced Space press, here. Though they canceled a course correction burn today, they apparently have plenty of time to do it, since the probe is already on a course to reach lunar orbit. The burn was simply intended to increase the accuracy of the trajectory.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Democrat politicians threaten local Aspen newspaper for its news coverage

12:29 pm

The goal of Democrats everywhere
The goal of Democrats everywhere

Blacklists are back and the Democrats have got ’em: Because a bunch of local Aspen, Colorado, politicians dislike how the Aspen Times has been covering one story, they wrote a letter to that newspaper demanding it change its coverage and hire their preferred journalists or they would use their power to silence it.

From their letter, written to Robert Nutting, CEO of Ogden Newspapers which owns the Aspen Times:

Our faith in Ogden Newspapers is shattered and we are individually considering separate reactions as a result, including: directing our individual organizations to pull advertisements and notices from the paper; encouraging local businesses to do the same; refusing interviews with reporters at the Aspen Times; or calling for a community boycott of the paper.

To reinstate our trust in the Aspen Times, we would like to see clear action from Ogden Newspapers such as the following: reinstatement of Andrew Travers as the Editor in Chief; re-publication of Marolt’s June 10 column; a joint statement from Travers, Allison Pattillo, the publisher of the Times, and yourself, detailing the editorial freedom and standards of transparency that will be carried forward; and, public clarity about the settlement that was reached by Doronin’s lawsuit.

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Europe’s new long term space strategy calls for its own independent and competing manned program

10:25 am

Figure 6 from the Terrae Novae policy paper

The new colonial movement: The European Space Agency (ESA) yesterday unveiled a new roadmap for its future space effort, aimed primarily in developing an independent space program capable of launching its own astronauts and taking them to both the Moon and Mars.

The program is dubbed Terrae Novae (“New Worlds”) and aims to put European astronauts on other worlds using its own rockets and landers by the 2030s. The graphic to the right, figure 6 from the policy paper, illustrates this long term goal.

From the full document [pdf]:
» Read more

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ArianeGroup chosen by Europe to develop reusable rockets

9:47 am

The new colonial movement: The European Commission, which makes the major decisions for the European Space Agency, has chosen the European commercial company ArianeGroup to run two programs designed to produce that continent’s first reusable rocket.

From the press release [pdf]:

The SALTO project will facilitate the first flight tests of the Themis reusable stage demonstrator in Kiruna, Sweden. The ENLIGHTEN project will speed up the development and introduction of reusable engine technologies.

The main goal of SALTO will be to develop the kind of vertical landing technology that SpaceX now does routinely. ENLIGHTEN in turn will develop rocket engines using either methane or hydrogen as the fuel. The total budget allocated for both is just under 50 million euros, which seems quite small. The press release also made no mention of a schedule for accomplishing these tasks.

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Scientists: Comet 67P/C-G’s make-up matches the rest of the solar system

9:33 am

A detailed review of the archived data from the Rosetta mission that studied Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko closely in 2014-2016 now strongly suggests that the comet’s overall make-up closely matches the rest of the solar system.

“It turned out that, on average, [the comet’s] complex organics budget is identical to the soluble part of meteoritic organic matter”, explains [Nora Hänni of the University of Bern] and adds: “Moreover, apart from the relative amount of hydrogen atoms, the molecular budget of [comet 67P/C-G] also strongly resembles the organic material raining down on Saturn from its innermost ring, as detected by the INMS mass spectrometer onboard NASA’s Cassini spacecraft”.

“We do not only find similarities of the organic reservoirs in the Solar System, but many of [comet 67P/C-G]’s organic molecules are also present in molecular clouds, the birthplaces of new stars”, complements Prof. Dr. Susanne Wampfler, astrophysicist at the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH) at the University of Bern and co-author of the publication. “Our findings are consistent with and support the scenario of a shared presolar origin of the different reservoirs of Solar System organics, confirming that comets indeed carry material from the times long before our Solar System emerged.”

These results are not unexpected, but having those expectations confirmed was one of the main scientific goals of the Rosetta mission. Now, almost a decade later, the results are in.

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South Korea ships its first lunar orbiter to U.S. for August launch

9:22 am

The new colonial movement: South Korea today packed and shipped its first lunar orbiter, dubbed Danuri, to the United States for an August 3, 2022 launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

According to the Ministry of Science and ICT, Danuri was sent from the Korea Aerospace Research Institute in Daejeon, 160 kilometers south of Seoul, to Incheon International Airport, west of Seoul, in a specially designed container. The orbiter will be flown to Orlando International Airport and arrive at the Floridian space center Thursday. It will later undergo maintenance, assembly and other pre-launch preparations for about a month before launch.

If all goes right, Danuri will orbit the Moon for a year, both testing its own technology as well as observing the lunar surface.

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Food fight! China denies NASA chief’s charge that it wants to dominate space

9:16 am

On July 2, 2022, in an interview for a German news outlet, NASA administrator described in somewhat overbroad terms the long range goals of the Chinese space program.

“We must be very concerned that China is landing on the moon and saying: ‘It’s ours now and you stay out,’” Mr. Nelson said in an interview published Saturday in the German newspaper Bild.

….China’s space program, at its heart, is a military space program, Mr. Nelson said. “China is good. But China is also good because they steal ideas and technology from others,” he said, according to Bild.

A China spokesman for its Foreign Ministry, Zhao Lijian, immediately slammed Nelson’s comments, adding some of his own overbroad accusations against the U.S.
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