Webb finds six exoplanets, all flying in interstellar space without a star

Astronomers using the Webb Space Telescope have discovered six different planets ranging in mass 5 to 10 times that of Jupiter, all unattached to any star or solar system.

The most intriguing of the starless objects is also the lightest, having an estimated mass of five Jupiters (about 1,600 Earths). The presence of a dusty disk means the object almost certainly formed like a star, as space dust generally spins around a central object in the early stages of star formation, said Langeveld, a postdoctoral researcher in Jayawardhana’s group.

All of these starless planets likely formed like this one, coalescing like a star does but unlike a star never having enough mass to ignite.

The astronomers are next going to attempt to detect the atmosphere’s of these rogue exoplanets, though it is not clear exactly how they will do this unless one of the exoplanets just happened to transit across a more distant star, something that simply does not happen very often.

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D-Orbit newest orbital tug deploys four smallsats

The Italian orbital tug company D-Orbit has now successfully deployed four smallsats from its newest tug, having been launched on August 16, 2024 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

The tug still has one more satellite to deploy, after which it will remain in orbit as it also carries four additional customer “hosted” payloads that are using the tug itself as their service module.

This is D-Orbit’s second demo mission, the first flying in 2023. It also appears be completely successful, which puts this company in an excellent position to garner future contracts from many small satellite companies. It is also a partner in a $256 million Italian project to test in-orbit robotic satellite repair.

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ABL completes investigation into launchpad fire in July

The rocket startup ABL yesterday released the results of its investigation into launchpad fire in July that destroyed its RS1 rocket during a static fire test prior to an orbital test launch.

In a statement, ABL Space Systems said it ignited the E2 engines in the first stage of the RS1 rocket in the test, but aborted the test after just half a second because of a low pressure reading in one engine that the company said was caused by a faulty pressure sensor. The engines shut down, but a fire then broke out under the base of the vehicle, fed by fuel leaks from two engines. That fire was contained but could not be extinguished by either water or inert gas systems, and the company started offloading kerosene and liquid oxygen propellants from the vehicle.

The launch pad the company uses at Kodiak does not have its own water supply, with the company instead using mobile tanks that ran out of water 11 and a half minutes after ignition. That caused the fire to spread “and a progressive loss of pad systems,” the company stated, including the inability to continue detanking the rocket and eventually telemetry from the rocket.

ABL’s first launch attempt of this rocket in January 2023 failed when the first stages shut down immediately after lift-off and the rocket crashed on the launchpad. It completed its investigation of that failure in October 2023 and was ready for its second launch attempt this summer when the fire described above occurred.

The company has raised several hundred million dollars, with its chief investor being Lockheed Martin, which has also signed a contract for as many as 58 RS1 launches. It increasingly appears those launches might very well go to other providers.

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Firefly delivers its first Blue Ghost lunar lander for final environmental testing

Blue Ghost in clean room
Blue Ghost in clean room

Firefly this week completed the integration of the ten customer payloads onto its first Blue Ghost lunar lander and shipped the lander to JPL in California for final environmental testing before its planned launch before the end of this year.

Following final testing, Firefly’s Blue Ghost will ship to Cape Canaveral, Florida, ahead of its launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket scheduled for Q4 2024. Blue Ghost will then begin its transit to the Moon, including approximately a month in Earth orbit and two weeks in lunar orbit. This approach provides ample time to conduct robust health checks on each subsystem and begin payload operations during transit.

Blue Ghost will then land in Mare Crisium, a basin in the northeast quadrant on the Moon’s near side, before deploying and operating 10 instruments for a lunar day (14 Earth days) and more than 5 hours into the lunar night.

Once launched, Firefly will become the third American company, after Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines, to build a privately owned lunar lander and attempt a lunar landing. Since the other two companies were not entirely successful in their landing attempts, Firefly has the chance to be the first to succeed.

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SpaceX blasts its satellite competitors for lobbying the government to shut down Starlink/T-Mobile partnership

SpaceX on August 22, 2024 responded harshly to the effort by its satellite competitors to get the FCC to shut down the planned partneship of Starlink and T-Mobile, whereby Starlink will fill the gaps in T-Mobile’s coverage.

You can read SpaceX’s letter here. Its language however is quite blunt:

While the petitions from AT&T, Verizon, DISH/EchoStar, and Omnispace lack technical basis or legal merit, their game is clear. AT&T and Verizon seek to hamstring their competitor T-Mobile by talking out of both sides of their mouths, on one hand demanding without technical support that T-Mobile and SpaceX operate at unnecessarily low power levels that will force Americans to sacrifice service, while giving their own partner AST a free pass. AT&T goes so far as to claim to have conducted a secret study it refuses to show the Commission to support suppressing SpaceX’s out-of-band emissions to an interference-protection level ten times below the limit sufficient to protect terrestrial networks, while allowing its partner AST to exceed that limit.

DISH/EchoStar repeats its demand to siphon proprietary information from SpaceX to aid its own flailing ambitions, while stoutly refusing SpaceX’s repeated requests to engage in actual good faith coordination the way a company with actual technical concerns would.

And although it still has no commercial satellite service anywhere in the world, Omnispace continues to make unfounded claims of prospective harmful interference to prop up a decade-old spectrum play that it fears will lose financial value if American consumers can enjoy ubiquitous mobile connectivity using the PCS G Block downlink.

Fortunately, none of these unfounded arguments present any reasonable basis to delay swift grant of SpaceX’s request to bring ubiquitous mobile connectivity to American consumers.

The FCC has not yet responded to any of these demand letters. Nor has it yet issued the waiver SpaceX had requested in June 2024 allowing its Starlink system to operate beyond its licensed radio frequencies in order to facilitate cell surface with T-Mobile.

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NASA reveals technical problem during solar sail deployment of test mission

NASA today revealed that a technical problem occurred during the deployment of a demonstration solar sail mission launched in April on Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket.

Upon an initial attempt to unfurl, the solar sail paused when an onboard power monitor detected higher than expected motor currents. Communications, power, and attitude control for the spacecraft all remain normal while mission managers work to understand and resolve the cause of the interruption by analyzing data from the spacecraft.

The goal had been test the boom deployment of a 860 square foot sail from a cubesat only about 4 feet in size.

The concept of the solar sail is simple: Use the pressure produced by sunlight to maneuver and fly controlled throughout the solar system. The idea has been tested successfully several times, with the Japanese IKAROS test solar sail and the Planetary Society’s Lightsail-2 the most successful. Sadly almost all other attempts to test this idea have had technical problems of one kind or another.

Ironically, one test solar sail proved that such a deployment from a cubesat could be done very cheaply, unlike NASA’s effort above. Brown University students in 2023 used cheap off-the-shelf parts to launch a smallsat sail that successfully deployed and was then used to lower the satellite’s orbit in order to de-orbit it more quickly. Total cost, $10,000. And it worked.

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August 26, 2024 Quick space links

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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Launch of Jared Isaacman’s second spaceflight scheduled for tonight

The real rocket behind tonight's launch
The real rocket behind tonight’s launch

UPDATE: The launch tonight was scrubbed due to a helium leak in a “ground side umbilical disconnect.” SpaceX is now targeting Wednesday, August 28 at 3:38 AM (Eastern) for the next launch attempt.
Original post:
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At 3:38 am (Eastern) tonight, SpaceX’s will attempt the launch of the Polaris Dawn mission carrying billionaire Jared Isaacman (on his second spaceflight) and three other private passengers (two of which are SpaceX employees), its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida carrying the Resilience capsule on its third flight.

I have embedded a live stream of the launch below. SpaceX says it will begin 3.5 hours before launch. For those on the west coast the timing is reasonable. East coasters will have to do without sleep tonight if they wish to watch.

The mission’s main engineering goal during its five-day duration is to complete the first all private spacewalk using EVA suits developed by SpaceX. Two of the crew will exit the capsule, but all four will be in the suits because the capsule has no airlock and will be entirely vented of air during the spacewalk. The mission’s secondary goal (which it actually will do first) will be to raise the orbit to about 870 miles, the highest orbit for a manned flight since the Apollo missions in the 1970s. During that high orbit the crew will do radiation research, which they will continue after the orbit is lowered. More information about the mission goals can be read here.

The mission’s real goal however has nothing to do with engineering and everything to do with freedom and the American dream. This is an entirely private mission. The rocket is privately built. The capsule is privately built. The launchpad is privately built. The launch crew is privately employed. The astronauts are all private citizens, with one paying the way for the entire flight and two flying as employees of SpaceX to test the operation of its capsule in orbit.

No government money is involved. The government had little or no say on what will happen. The mission will illustrate in very stark terms what the American dream is all about, since it has been conceived, paid for, and created entirely by private citizens following their own dreams and goals.

Hail to freedom! May the bell of liberty always ring.
» Read more

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The fall of DEI accelerates

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

Fight! Fight! Fight! In the past two months it has become very clear that if Americans are willing to stand up to the left and its Marxist bigoted agenda, Americans will win.

Since late June, five different university systems have shut down their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices. Each is listed below, in chronological order:

And this list does not include the University of Florida, which in March shut down its own DEI office because the state legislature not only banned such offices, it cut the budgets of them.

Though it is true these states are all solidly conservative with legislatures largely controlled by Republicans, this fact on its face proves that voting can make a difference, with Florida the biggest proof. Unlike the other states, Florida had for decades been a swing state between the Democrats and Republicans. Voters however changed that in the past decade, so that today the state legisilature is solidly Republican. The result has been a definitive policy shift acting to eliminate these racist Marxist programs from state-financed universities.

There is no reason similar changes cannot be forced in other battleground states. Nor should we consider it impossible in the coastal states (California, Oregon, Washington, New York, Massachusetts, etc) where Democrats maintain full control. DEI concepts are inherently racist and divisive, and serve only to encourage anger, resentment, and hate across all ethnic groups. Ordinary voters recognize this routinely, when they make the effort to look.

Nor are things changing solely in the unversities because of the willingness of voters to force change. The boycott of Bud Light because of its endorsement of the queer agenda last year is having profound impact on corporate culture. In just the last few months a number of major companies have announced the elimination of their own DEI departments and programs, also listed below in chronological order:

The first three stories are from NPR and CNN, which explains the effort of the headlines to blame the evil “pouncing” of conservatives for this action (thus also implying that conservatives are bigots) . In truth, what these leftist news outlets refuse to recognize is that DEI programs are bigoted by their very nature, designed to favor some races over others merely because of skin color. These programs thus violate numerous civil rights laws, not to mention basic human morality and fair treatment. In addition, it appears the customers of all these companies, not simply conservatives, made it clear they would stop buying these products if company management did not take action to shut down these DEI policies.

Faced with a public backlash and the real threat of lawsuits and legal action against them, these companies are now recognizing that it makes no sense legally, financially, and morally to promote such things.

Trump defiant after being shot
Trump defiant

Increasingly, Americans are no longer willing to make believe that DEI and Marxism has a rightful place on the intellectual landscape. These ideas are garbage and downright evil, and it is a great tragedy that American academia allowed them to flourish on campuses for the past half century. The public is now beginning to make it clear that such ideas need to be sent to the ash heap of history, and legislators, academic administrations, and corporate managements are being forced to listen.

The trend is very obvious. If people actually pay attention and make it clear they will no longer tolerate the imposition of these bigoted leftist policies, those policies can be canceled and eliminated. One simply has to have the courage to fight, as Donald Trump said with such defiance immediately after getting shot.

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A real whirlpool in space

A real whirlpool in space
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture above, cropped to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a survey of nearby galaxies that have what astronomers call an Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), because the supermassive black hole at the center is devouring nearby material at a great rate and thus producing high energy emissions as it does so.

Many active galaxies are known to astronomers at vast distances from Earth, thanks to the great brightness of their nuclei highlighting them next to other, dimmer galaxies. At 128 million light-years from Earth, UGC 3478 is positively neighbourly to us. The data used to make this image comes from a Hubble survey of nearby powerful AGNs found in relatively high-energy X-rays, like this one, which it is hoped can help astronomers to understand how the galaxies interact with the supermassive black holes at their hearts.

The bottom line is that this spiral galaxy literally is a whirlpool, the entire galaxy spiralling down into that massive black hole in its center. One cannot help wondering why such galaxies don’t end up eventually getting completely swallowed by that black hole.

Or maybe they do, and we don’t see such things because all that is left is a supermassive black hole that emits no light or energy at all, a dark silent ghost traveling between the galaxies unseen and undetectable.

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First high resolution images released from Juice’s fly-by of the Earth & Moon

Juice's high resolution view of the Moon
Click for original image.

The Italian science team that runs the high resolution camera on the asteroid probe Juice have now released that camera’s first images, taken to test its operation during the spacecraft’s close fly-by of both the Moon and then the Earth a week ago.

The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, shows the Moon’s surface during that close fly-by, which got within 435 miles. The camera is dubbed Janus, and was developed by Italy and operated by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics.

JANUS will study global, regional and local features and processes on the moons, as well as map the clouds of Jupiter. It will have a resolution up to 2.4 m per pixel on Ganymede and about 10 km per pixel at Jupiter.

The main aim of JANUS’s observations during the lunar-Earth flyby was to evaluate how well the instrument is performing, not to make scientific measurements. For this reason, JANUS took images with various camera settings and time intervals – a bit like if you’re going out to test a DSLR camera for the first time. In some cases, researchers intentionally ‘blurred’ the images so that they can test out resolution recovery algorithms. In other cases, they partially saturated the image to study the effects induced on the unsaturated areas.

As can be seen by the sample image above, the test images appear to have demonstrated that Janus will function as planned when Juice arrives in orbit around Jupiter in 2031 in order to study that gas giant’s upper atmosphere as well as its larger icy moons, Ganymede, Calisto, and Europa.

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