Category: Behind The Black

A somewhat typical but strange crater in Mars’ Death Valley

1:57 pm

A somewhat typical crater in Mars' death valley
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 29, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The camera team labels the primary feature in this picture as “ridges,” but what I see is a strange crater that at first glance appears to be impact-caused, but at closer inspection might be something else entirely.

This unnamed crater is about one mile wide. It is only about fifty feet deep, but sits above the surround landscape by about 200 feet. That high position suggests strongly that this crater was not formed by an impact by is instead a caldera from some sort of volcanic activity, with the splash apron around it simply examples of past magma flows erupting from within.

The ridges inside the crater might be glacial debris, as this location is at 35 degrees south latitude, making near surface ice possible.
» Read more

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Boeing finally shuts down its DEI division

12:33 pm

Boeing's racist hiring goals in 2024
Boeing’s racist hiring goals in 2024

According to a report from Bloomberg news today, Boeing has now dismantled its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) division, with its head leaving the company.

Staff from Boeing’s DEI office will be combined with another human resources team focused on talent and employee experience, according to people familiar with the matter. Sara Liang Bowen, a Boeing vice president who led the now-defunct department, left the company on Thursday. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted phrase above tells us all we need to know. The focus under Boeing’s new CEO Kelly Ortberg will be “talent and employee experience,” not skin color or gender.

Bowen wrote the following in announcing her dismissal:

It has been the privilege of my lifetime to lead Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at the Boeing company these past 5+ years. Our team strived every day to support the evolving brilliance and creativity of our workforce. The team achieved so much – sometimes imperfectly, never easily – and dreamed of doing much more still. [emphasis mine]

As far as I can tell, all that Bowen accomplished was to destroy the reputation of Boeing as a quality manufacturer of aerospace products. Instead, it became a place which hired people based on their race, and didn’t care if they knew the difference between a screwdriver and a forklift. The screen capture to the right comes from the company’s 2024 Boeing Sustainability & Social Impact Report [pdf], which is still online, as is the webpage of Boeing’s DEI division. Both still tout the racist quota goals of this DEI department that forced the company to consider race and gender above talent and experience in its hiring. Hopefully that ugliness will vanish soon as well.

Meanwhile, Boeing union employees on the west coast are about to vote on a third contract proposal, having rejected the previous two and going on strike since mid-September. I suspect the decision above to get rid of this poisonous DEI department will sit well with those union employees, and likely help to encourage them to approve the plan.

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Scientists use Hubble and Webb to confirm there are as yet no planets forming in Vega’s accretion disk

11:16 am

Hubble and Webb images of Vega's accretion disk
Click for original image.

Using both the Hubble and Webb space telescopes, scientists have now confirmed, to their surprise, that the accretioni disk that surrounds the nearby star Vega is very smooth with almost no gaps, and thus apparently has not new exoplanets forming within it.

The two pictures to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, come from two different papers. The Hubble paper is here [pdf] while the Webb paper is here [pdf]. From the press release:

Webb sees the infrared glow from a disk of particles the size of sand swirling around the sizzling blue-white star that is 40 times brighter than our Sun. Hubble captures an outer halo of this disk, with particles no bigger than the consistency of smoke that are reflecting starlight.

The distribution of dust in the Vega debris disk is layered because the pressure of starlight pushes out the smaller grains faster than larger grains. “Different types of physics will locate different-sized particles at different locations,” said Schuyler Wolff of the University of Arizona team, lead author of the paper presenting the Hubble findings. “The fact that we’re seeing dust particle sizes sorted out can help us understand the underlying dynamics in circumstellar disks.”

The Vega disk does have a subtle gap, around 60 AU (astronomical units) from the star (twice the distance of Neptune from the Sun), but otherwise is very smooth all the way in until it is lost in the glare of the star. This shows that there are no planets down at least to Neptune-mass circulating in large orbits, as in our solar system, say the researchers.

At the moment astronomers consider the very smooth accretion disk surrounding Vega to be rare and exception to the rule, with most debris disks having gaps that suggest the presence of newly formed exoplanets within them. That Vega breaks the rule however suggests the rule might not be right in the first place.

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North Korea launches test ballistic missile for the 1st time in almost a year

10:59 am

North Korea not only successfully launched on October 30, 2024 a test ballistic missile for the 1st time in almost a year, the missile set a new altitude record, reaching an altitude of 4,350 miles, more than a thousand miles higher than the country’s previous missile record.

Japanese Defense Minister Gen Nakatani told reporters the missile’s flight duration of 86 minutes and its maximum altitude of more than 7,000 kilometers (4,350 miles) exceeded corresponding data from previous North Korean missile tests.

Having a missile fly higher and for a longer duration than before means its engine thrust has improved. Given that previous ICBM tests by North Korea have already proved they can theoretically reach the U.S. mainland, the latest launch was likely related to an effort to examine whether a missile can carry a bigger warhead, experts say.

In other words, North Korea is getting very close to having an operational ICBM that can deliver a nuclear warhead anywhere on the globe. Worse, it appears this solid-fueled rocket launches from a large mobile vehicle, making it impossible to locate and destroy beforehand.

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Hypersonic engine manufacturer Reaction Engines goes bankrupt

9:52 am

Reaction Engines, the British hypersonic engine company that since 2011 has been touting its Skylon spaceplane and winning a variety of development contracts to build it. has now gone bankrupt, shutting down all operations.

However, this year, the company found itself in major financial difficulties due to unexpectedly slow growth and the inability to secure an additional £150 million (US$193 million) in funding, followed by BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce being unwilling to put up bail-out capital.

As a result, as of October 31, Reaction Engines is in the hands of administrators PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). The company’s website forwards to PwC where there is a notice saying that further information will be released to creditors as the available assets are assessed. According to Sky News, 173 of the company’s 208 staff were made redundant.

After more than a decade of work and no apparent progress, it appears no one was willing to front the company any additional cash.

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European Commission finally awards contract to build its government Starlink-type constellation

9:38 am

The European Commission yesterday finally awarded a gigantic contract to a consortium of European satellite companises to build its government-conceived and government-designed communications constellation designed to duplicate constellations already in orbit and built by Starlink and OneWeb.

The full constellation, dubbed IRIS2 and first proposed in 2022, is expected to have 290 satellites. The consortium, dubbed SpaceRISE, is led by satellite companies SES, Eutelsat, and Hispasat, and also includes Thales Alenia Space, OHB, Airbus Defence and Space, Telespazio, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Hisdesat, and Thales SIX.

In other words, practically every major European aerospace company gets a piece of the pie.

According to a 31 October press release, the European Commission aims to have the IRIS2 service up and running by 2030. The project was initially expected to cost approximately €6 billion, of which the European Commission would provide 60%, with the rest being covered by private industry. However, recent reports have indicated that the project’s budget will likely reach as much as €10 billion.

Based on these numbers, it is going to take more than six years to launch, with each satellite costing about 3.5 million euros.

This is a very typical European government project, conceived not to fill a real need but to make sure there is a European version of something for Europe to use. It is also conceived as a way to transfer cash to as many European aerospace contractors as possible. Considering the number of companies involved and the fact that the whole constellation is government designed, expect the budget to well exceed ten billion euros before completion, and take far longer to become operational than presently planned. For example, the project was first proposed more than two years ago and only now has the contract been issued. In that time SpaceX conceived and has practically launched its entire direct-to-cell Starlink constellation of about the same number of satellites.

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October 31, 2024 Quick space links

3:14 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.

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Weird ring-mounds in one of Mars’ largest craters

3:03 pm

Weird ring mounds on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 16, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The science team labels these strange features “ring-mound landforms,” a term that has been used to describe [pdf] only vaguely similar features previously found in the Athabasca flood lava plain almost on the other side of Mars. That paper suggested that those ring mounds formed on the “thin, brittle crust of an active fluid flow” created by an explosive event. Since Athabasca is considered Mars’s most recent major flood lava event, the fluid was likely lava, which on Mars flows more quickly and thinly in the lower gravity.

Thus, in Athabasca the ring-mounds formed when a pimple of molten lava from below popped the surface.

But what about the ring mounds in the picture to the right?
» Read more

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Has there been a wave of fraudulent election ballots swamping PA? Let’s find out!

2:08 pm

What does the newly discovered election fraud in PA tell us?
What does the newly discovered election
fraud in PA tell us?

In the past week there have been a bunch of stories in the conservative press from three different counties in Pennsylvania, suggesting that each county has been swamped with thousands of fraudulent ballots, produced in bulk and then delivered in large numbers so as to make it difficult to trace or investigate them.

I decided to take a closer look, because this story could either be telling us how corrupt the upcoming election will be, or it might actually be telling us that it is going to be much more reliable than we have anticipated.

The three counties involved are Lancaster, York, and Monroe. All told, less than six thousand voter registration applications, all submitted apparently in bulk by a Arizona-based company called Field+Media Corps, were under review, the number from each county being 2,500, 3,087, and 30 respectively. Note that these do not appear to be actual ballots, but registration forms that would once approved would allow the individual to vote, either by mail or in person.

Of these applications, the reviews have already produced results. For example, York County has found that of the 3,087 submitted, 47% were verified and approved, 29% needed more information, and 24% were declined and are under further review. In Monroe County the investigation has apparently only flagged these 30 forms, with one coming from a deceased person and others flagged for different reasons that in the end might be legitimate.

In Lancaster County officials have not yet issued a report. Initially it announced:
» Read more

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Post-collision images of two galaxies

10:56 am

Post-collision imagery by Hubble and Webb
Click for original image.

Using both the Hubble and Webb space telescopes, astronomers have now produced multi-wavelength images of the galaxies NGC 2207and IC 2163, as shown to the right.

Millions of years ago the smaller galaxy, IC 2163, grazed against the larger, NGC 2207, resulting today in increased star formation in both galaxies, indicated by blue in the Hubble photo. From the caption of the combined images:

Combined, they are estimated to form the equivalent of two dozen new stars that are the size of the Sun annually. Our Milky Way galaxy forms the equivalent of two or three new Sun-like stars per year. Both galaxies have hosted seven known supernovae, each of which may have cleared space in their arms, rearranging gas and dust that later cooled, and allowed many new stars to form.

The two images to the left leaves the Hubble and Webb separate, making it easier to see the different features the different wavelengths reveal. From this caption:

In Hubble’s image, the star-filled spiral arms glow brightly in blue, and the galaxies’ cores in orange. Both galaxies are covered in dark brown dust lanes, which obscure the view of IC 2163’s core at left. In Webb’s image, cold dust takes centre stage, casting the galaxies’ arms in white. Areas where stars are still deeply embedded in the dust appear pink. Other pink dots may be objects that lie well behind these galaxies, including active supermassive black holes known as quasars.

The largest and brightest pink area in the Webb image, on the bottom right and a blue patch in the Hubble image, is where a strong cluster of star formation is presently occurring.

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Russia launches military satellite

9:38 am

Russia today (October 31st in Russia) successfully launched a classified military satellite, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from its Plesetsk spaceport in northern Russia.

The flight path took the satellite over the Arctic, where the rocket’s lower stages crashed harmlessly.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

107 SpaceX
49 China
12 Russia
11 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 124 to 73, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world, including American companies, 107 to 90.

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Nearly four dozen anti-SpaceX activists organize to flood public meeting

9:29 am

At a public meeting of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) on October 17, 2024 nearly four dozen anti-SpaceX activists apparently arrived en masse in order to overwhelm the public comment period with negative opinions about the company and its operation at Boca Chica.

The report at the link, from the San Antonio Express-News, is (as usual for a propaganda press outlet) decidedly in favor of these activists, and makes it sound as if these forty-plus individuals, apparently led by the activist group SaveRGV that has mounted most of the legal challenges to SpaceX, represent the opinions of the public at large.

What really happened here is that the Brownsville public has better things to do, like building businesses and making money, much of which now only exists because of SpaceX and that operation at Boca Chica. Thus, the only ones with time or desire to organize to show up at these kinds of meetings are these kinds of activists.

It might pay however for some of the more business-oriented organizations in Brownsville to make sure they are in the game at the next public meeting, scheduled for November 14, 2024 [pdf]. This would not be hard to do, and it would certainly help balance the scales, which at present are decidedly been warped by this small minority of protesters.

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SpaceX: Only five more launches needed to complete Starlink direct-to-cell constellation

9:11 am

According to a tweet posted by SpaceX shortly after yesterday’s first launch from Vandenberg, the company needs only five more launches to complete its first constellation of Starlink direct-to-cell satellites.

More information here. At the moment the company has launched 260 of this version of its Starlink satellites. Since each launch places 13 more satellites in orbit, that means the first full iteration of the constellation will contain 325 satellites.

The satellites will allow cell phone users on the ground to use the constellations like a cell tower, thus providing service in areas where ground cell tower service does not exist. At the moment T-Mobile has a deal with SpaceX, so its subscribers will be able to use this service as soon as it is operational.

When when this be achieved? This story once again illustrates the speed in which SpaceX operates. The first launch of direct-to-cell Starlink satellites occurred on January 2, 2024, and in the last ten months the company has completed 23 launches to get the constellation where it is presently. At that pace the entire consellation might be complete before the end of this year.

The competition for this service is certainly fierce. The other satellite company offering this service, AST Mobile, has launched the first five satellites in its constellation, and has deals with AT&T and Verizon. Its design is different, and will only require 110 satellites to complete the constellation. At the moment five are about to become operational. It hopes to start regular launches next year to complete the constellation.

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October 30, 2024 Quick space links

3:32 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.

  • Chinese pseudo-company AZSpace plans first launch of its cargo capsule to Tiangong-3 in November
    It also has unveiled its own New Shepard copycat suborbital capsule. I will consider both real, when they fly.
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SpaceX launches another 23 Starlink satellites

3:13 pm

SpaceX this afternoon completed its second launch today, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral carrying 23 Starlink satellites.

The first stage completed its fourteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The earlier launch was from Vandenberg, also with a payload of Starlink satellites.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

107 SpaceX
49 China
11 Russia
11 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 124 to 72, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world, including American companies, 107 to 89.

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“What the heck?” lava on Mars

1:47 pm


Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 19, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled merely as a “terrain sample,” it was likely snapped not for any specific research project, but to fill a gap in the camera schedule in order to maintain its proper temperature.

When the science team does this they try to pick interesting locations. Sometimes the picture is relatively boring. Sometimes, like the picture to the right, it reveals weird geology that is somewhat difficult to explain. The picture covers the transition from the smooth featureless plain to the north, and the twisting and complex ridges to the south, all of which are less than a few feet high.

Note the gaps. The downgrade here is to the west, and the gaps appear to vaguely indicate places where flows had occurred.
» Read more

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SpaceX launches 20 more Starlink satellites

9:38 am

SpaceX early this morning successfully launched another 20 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.

The first stage completed its fourteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

106 SpaceX
49 China
11 Russia
11 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 123 to 72, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world, including American companies, 106 to 89.

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JAXA confirms first hop of Callisto delayed until ’26

9:32 am

Callisto's basic design
Callisto’s basic design

Japan’s space agency JAXA has now confirmed what France’s space agency CNES had revealed in August, that the first 100-meter-high hop of the government-proposed Callisto engineering Grasshopper-type test rocket will not take place any earlier than 2026.

This joint project of JAXA, CNES, and Germany’s space agency DLR was first proposed in 2015, and by 2018 was aiming for a 2020 launch. Four years past that target date and they are still not ready to launch. Remember too that even after it completes its test hop program an operational orbital rocket would have to be created. It does not appear this can easily be scaled up to fit Ariane-6.

SpaceX meanwhile conceived its Grasshopper vertical test prototype in 2011, began flying that year, and resulted in an actual Falcon 9 first stage landing in 2015. It has subsequently completed well over 300 actual commercial flights, reusing first stages up to 23 times.

The contrast between these government agencies and that private company is quite illustrative.

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Sutherland finally gets the okay from local council

9:16 am

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea.

After multiple submissions of its plan to build a spaceport off the coast of Scotland, the Sutherland spaceport’s most recent proposal has finally been approved by the local council.

Most significant about the decision is that it rejected the legal objections of billionaire landowner Anders Holch Povlsen, who has previously fought the spaceport and is also an investor in the competing spaceport SaxaVord in the Shetland Islands. Povlsen had objected to the spaceport placing small tracking antennas on a nearby mountain where other larger communications antennas already operated.

This decison could still face the veto of the Scottish ministry. It will be no surprise if Povlsen uses his clout to cause difficulties at this level.

Meanwhile, it is more than two and a half years since Sutherland’s prime launch customer, Orbex, submitted its launch license to the United Kingdom’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), with no approval. At the moment the company hopes to launch next year.

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October 29, 2024 Quick space links

4:13 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.

7 comments

China launches new crew to its space station

3:55 pm

China today successfully launched a new three-person crew to its Tiangong-3 space station, its Long March 2F rocket lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.

No word on where the rocket’s side boosters or lower stages, using toxic hypergolic fuel, crashed inside China. The crew will dock with the station mid-day tomorrow.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

105 SpaceX
49 China
11 Russia
11 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 122 to 72, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world, including American companies, 105 to 89.

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Pushback: Workers fired from San Fran’s subway for refusing jab win $1 million jury award

3:36 pm

Are Americans finally waking up and emulating their country's founders?

Fight! Fight! Fight! Six workers who were fired from San Francisco’s
BART subway system for refusing to get a COVID jab have won a $7.8 million judgment from a jury, with each person taking home more than a million dollars in damages.

The employees claimed religious exemptions to the vaccine mandate but say they were not accommodated by the transit agency, and subsequently lost their job.

BART did initially grant vaccine exemptions, but the plaintiffs argued they weren’t accommodated. An accommodation could have meant that they were able to work from home or get tested regularly for COVID. They argued none of that happened and they lost their jobs.

More information here and here. There were not the only fired employees who sued. Another sixteen had sued and then settled in July. It also appears that further suits by fired employees are pending.

Do not expect these stories to stop. Over the next five years we will see story after story of blacklisted individuals winning case after case, because almost all the blacklisting in the past five years due to politics, COVID, and racial bigotry has been blatantly illegal, not only breaking numerous civil rights laws but in direct violation of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the very fundamental principles of American culture. When these cases get before juries, the plantiffs are going to win, and win big, as these former BART employees have.

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A return to Phantom and the reminiscences of an Apollo astronaut

3:04 pm

Charles Duke, Apollo 16 astronaut
Charles Duke, Apollo 16 astronaut

Yesterday I had to pleasure of getting my second tour of the Phantom Space facilities, located here in Tucson. Jim Cantrell, the founder of the Tucson-based rocket/satellite company Phantom Space, had last week graciously invited me to attend the event he was holding there, where astronaut Charles Duke, from the April 1972 Apollo 16 lunar landing, would be giving a talk to the company’s employees, investors, and customers. Duke had become an advisor for the company, and this would be his first visit to its operations.

First, the talk by Charles Duke, describing his life and Apollo 16 walk on the Moon, was as usual awe-inspiring, mostly because Duke spoke like every astronaut I’ve ever met so matter-of-factly about what he had done. During the second of three excusions on the surface with his commander John Young, they drove their rover up the slope of nearby Stone Mountain, climbing to an elevation of 500 feet, the highest any human has so far been on the lunar surface. From there he could look back and see for miles, including the entire valley where the lunar module was nestled as well as the mountains and craters that surrounded it.

When I asked him if he had had any sense of his remoteness from humanity, his response was a good-natured laugh. “We felt at home there!” They had done so much study of the terrain beforehand, including simulations, that from the moment they approached to land it all looked very familiar. This is where they were supposed to be!

Following Duke’s presentation we all were given a tour of the facility. My first visit there had been in 2022. At the time Cantrell’s effort was to aggressively succeed from his earlier failure at the rocket startup Vector, focusing this new company on building its Daytona rocket. After the tour I concluded as follows:
» Read more

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Arecibo telescope collapsed because of a surprising engineering failure that inspections still should have spotted

1:41 pm

Illustration of cable failure at Arecibo

According to a new very detailed engineering analysis into the causes of the collapse of the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico in 2020, the failure was caused first by a surprising interaction between the radio electronics of Arecibo and the traditional methods used to anchor the cables, and second by a failure of inspections to spot the problem as it became obvious.

The surprising engineering discovery is illustrated to the right, taken from figure 2-6 of the report. The main antenna of Arecibo was suspended above the bowl below by three main cables. The figure shows the basic design of the system used to anchor the cable ends to their sockets. The end of the cable bunches would be inserted into the socket, spread apart, and then zinc would be poured in to fill the gap and then act as a plug and glue to hold the cables in place. According to the report, this system has been used for decades in many applications very successfully.

What the report found however was at Arecibo over time the cable bunch and zinc plug slowly began to pull out of the socket, what the report labels as “zinc creep.” This was noted by inspectors, but dismissed as a concern because they still believed the engineering margins were still high enough to prevent failure at this point. In fact, this is exactly where the structure failed in 2020, with the first cable separating as shown in August 2020. The second cable did so in a similar manner in November 2020.

The report concluded that the “only hypothesis the committee could develop that provides a plausible but unprovable answer to all these questions and the observed socket failure pattern is that the socket zinc creep was unexpectedly accelerated in the Arecibo Telescope’s uniquely powerful electromagnetic radiation environment. The Arecibo Telescope cables were suspended across the beam of ‘the most powerful radio transmitter on Earth.'”

The report however also notes that the regular engineering inspections of the telescope had spotted this creep, which was clearly unusual and steadily becoming significant, and did not take action to address the issue when it should have. It also noted the slow response of the bureaucracy, not only to the damage caused earlier to the facility by Hurriane Maria in 2017, but to obtaining the funding for any repairs.

Ray Lugo [the principal investigator for Arecibo] described to the committee how months of his time during 2018 were spent writing, resubmitting, and justifying repair funding proposals. Repairs had to go through the traditional “bid and proposal” process, described in more detail below, which added years of delay.

We can forgive the inspectors somewhat for not noting the creep when they should, as its cause appears to be very unusual, still uncertain and rare, but the red tape that prevented proper and quick repair effort after the hurricane is shameful. Had the telescope gotten the proper support on time, the creep itself might have even been addressed, because the resources would have been there to deal with it.

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Successful deployment of large array antennas on all five AST’s satellites

12:48 pm

AST SpaceMobile has now successfully unfolded the large array antennas on all five the satellites it launched in September, and did so six weeks ahead of schedule.

“The unfolding of the first five commercial satellites is a significant milestone for the company. These five satellites are the largest commercial communications arrays ever launched in low Earth orbit,” commented Abel Avellan, founder, Chairman and CEO of AST SpaceMobile, in a statement. “It is a significant achievement to commission these satellites, and we are now accelerating our path to commercial activity.”

The satellites are designed to act like cell towers in space, providing direct satellite-to-cellphone coverage and fill gaps in ground-based cell service. ATT has already signed a contract with AST to use these satellites.

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Lab tests suggest water brines could also exist on large asteroids

12:28 pm

Gullies in crater on Vesta
Click for original image.

In attempting to explain the existence of flow features that have been found on the interior walls of craters on the asteroids Ceres and Vesta — as shown in the image above — scientists recently performed a laboratory experiment which determined that a mixture of water and salt could produce those gullies.

The team modified a test chamber at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to rapidly decrease pressure over a liquid sample to simulate the dramatic drop in pressure as the temporary atmosphere created after an impact on an airless body like Vesta dissipates. According to Poston, the pressure drop was so fast that test liquids immediately and dramatically expanded, ejecting material from the sample containers.

“Through our simulated impacts, we found that the pure water froze too quickly in a vacuum to effect meaningful change, but salt and water mixtures, or brines, stayed liquid and flowing for a minimum of one hour,” said Poston. “This is sufficient for the brine to destabilize slopes on crater walls on rocky bodies, cause erosion and landslides, and potentially form other unique geological features found on icy moons.”

The press release makes it sound as if this result makes the existence of subsurface water ice more likely on such asteroids as Ceres and Vesta, but previous research from the Dawn asteroid probe made that fact very clear, especially for Ceres, years ago. All this does is provide some evidence of what might be one process by which these erosion gullies form.

Hat tip to reader Milt.

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