The Hollies – Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress
An evening pause: Performed live 1973.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
Category: Behind The Black
August 21, 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.
- Blue Origin celebrates completion of full-duration static fire test of its BE-7 engine
The engine is for the company’s proposed lunar landers. I can’t help noticing how complex it is compared to SpaceX’s more recent engines.
- For the first time, two rockets are visible at the same time at China’s coastal Wenchang spaceport
The tweet says that the rockets are “Long March 7A in transfer and the Long March 12 in integration.”
- Relativity touts the advantages it sees from its use of 3D printing
The company still hasn’t successfully flown a rocket, but without doubt, its 3D printing operation gives it an asset it can sell for billions.
- ISRO details the mass and launch vehicle for each of the planned modules of its space station
All will fly on its largest rocket, using two different configuations. The image suggests it is following the simple design concepts first used by the Soviets and since copied by the Chinese.
- On this day in 1977, Voyager-2 was launched
It flew past Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus before leaving the solar system. Also, two years earlier on this same day Viking 1 was launched to Mars.
Pushback: Parent sues Denver school board and four of its board members for slander
The accused slanderers still serving on Denver’s Board of Education.
Click for details about each.
Fight! Fight! Fight! Kristen Fry, a parent in Denver, has now sued the four members of the Denver school board who teamed up with a political consultant they worked with to falsely accuse her of assaulting that political consultant at a public board meeting while also using a vicious racial slur against him.
Fry had been part of a group of parents and teachers that were desperately trying to get this board to change its policies in the schools that had were allowing violence to run rampant From Fry’s lawsuit [pdf]
In the period leading up to 2022-23 school year, the BOE [Board of Education] defendants pursued a number of significant changes to DPS [Denver Public Schools] policy that had severe consequences for the educational and safety environment in DPS schools.
Among other things, in an initiative spearheaded by Mr. Anderson, and supported by the other defendants, DPS removed public safety officers from district schools because of purported racial inequities in disciplinary enforcement. DPS further replaced clear behavioral and accountability rules with what are sometimes termed “restorative justice” principles that often have the effect of leaving students (especially low-income students) vulnerable to disruptive and even criminal behavior by their classmates. For example, under the new rules, schools were required to allow potentially violent students, including students facing criminal charges such as robbery and attempted murder, to attend in person, even where against the advice of law enforcement authorities.
These policies were doing nothing but bring chaos and violence to the schools, while seriously degrading the learning environment. The parents, teachers, and even students repeatedly attempted in private and in public to convince the board its policies were not working.
In every case, this effort was met with anger, disrespect, and retailation by the board. In one case the board immediately terminated a principal for expressing dissent about their policies to a television news reporter. In the case of Fry, these thugs not only repeated these false claims against her in many public forums, they teamed up to file criminal charges against her.
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The massive scale of Mars’ biggest canyon
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 24, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled merely a “terrain sample” by the camera team, it was likely taken not as part of any particular research project, but to fill a gap in the picture-taking schedule in order to maintain the camera’s proper temperature.
When the camera team needs to do this, they try to pick interesting targets within the required timeframe. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes not. In today’s example, they succeeded quite well. As shown by the overview map above, this picture captures (as indicated by the rectangle) the top of the southern rim of Valles Marineris, the biggest canyon on Mars and quite possibly the biggest in the entire solar system.
For scale, the drop from the rim to the low point in this picture is about 9,000 feet. That’s a 1,000 feet more than the drop from the north rim of the Grand Canyon to the canyon bottom at the Colorado River. In Valles Marineris however our descent has barely begun. To get to the bottom of the southern canyon here you still need to drop 15,000 more feet, for a total descent of 24,000 feet, an elevation change similar to most of the mountains in the Himalayas.
Nor are you yet at the bottom. If you climb over the ridge of 18,000-foot-high mountains that bisect Valles Marineris at this point, you can drop down even further, to a depth 31,000 feet below the southern rim.
Mount Everest is just over 29,000 feet high, which means if placed inside Valles Marineris is peak would still sit 2,000 feet below the rim.
The photo itself highlights part of the erosion process that formed Valles Marineris. This is the dry tropics, so no water was involved in shaping this terrain for many eons. Instead, what appear to be flows within the hollows is alluvial fill, material that over time breaks off and rolls downhill, filling the slopes below. Erosion will grind this material into smaller particles, so given enough time it flows almost like sand.
Pragyan data confirms theory that the Moon’s surface was once largely covered with molten lava oceans
Vikram as seen by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Click for interactive map. To see the original
image, go here.
Data from India’s Pragyan lunar rover that landed in the high southern latitudes of the Moon in August 2023 has now confirmed the theory that the Moon’s surface was once largely covered with molten lava oceans.
Santosh Vadawale, an X-ray astronomer at the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, India, and his colleagues analysed radiation data collected by the APXS [one of Pragyan’s instruments], and used this information to identify the elements in the regolith and their relative abundances, which, in turn, revealed the soil’s mineral composition. The team found that all 23 samples comprised mainly ferroan anorthosite, a mineral that is common on the Moon. The results were reported in Nature today.
“It’s sort of what we expected to be there based on orbital data, but the ground truth is always really good to get,” says Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University in Tempe.
Previous landers obtained similar results. However, the Chandrayaan-3 samples are the first from the subpolar region: previous landers visited equatorial and mid-latitude zones. Together, this suggests that the composition of the regolith is uniform across the Moon’s surface.
These results are no surprise, but they confirm the global nature of the Moon’s early molten history. More important, they demonstrate that India now has the capability to send landers and rovers to other planets that are also capable of doing real research.
Astroscale signs deal with JAXA to de-orbit old rocket upper stage
Click for original image.
The Japanese orbital tug startup Astroscale has now signed the final deal with Japan’s space agency JAXA to de-orbit the old H2A rocket upper stage that the company is presently flying a demonstration rendezvous and proximity mission dubbed ADRAS-J.
The photo to the right was taken by ADRAS-J in the spring, shortly after it rendezvoused with the stage. The data from this demo mission has not only shown Astroscale’s spacecraft can autonomously rendezvous and fly in close formation to the stage, the stage itself is in excellent condition after fifteen years in space.
The ADRAS-J follow-on active debris removal spacecraft, ADRAS-J2, will similarly attempt to safely approach the same rocket body through [rendezvous and proximity operations], obtain further images, then remove and deorbit the rocket body using in-house robotic arm technologies.
If successful, Astroscale will have the capability to offer this surface to others, both governments and private concerns, thus making the removal of space junk a viable business. Until the past decade, most upper stages ended up in orbit where they remain for long periods. There are a lot of such older stages. Some end up burning up in the atmosphere harmlessly, while others break up in orbit and produce a lot of debris that is a threat to other spacecraft. Astroscale’s mission here will demonstrate the ability to remove such stages.
The North Star has spots!
Click for original image.
Astronomers using an array of six ground-based telescopes have obtained best new data of Polaris, the North Star, including the first rough image of its surface, and discovered sunspots on its surface.
You can read the paper here [pdf]. The image to the right, taken from figure 4 of the paper, shows the surface as seen by the telescopes over two nights in April 2021. Polaris is what astronomers call a Cepheid variable star, which changes brightness on a very precise schedule as its diameter grows and shrinks. In the case of Polaris, that variation is four days long. The star’s brightness itself varies only slightly, and over the decades has even at times appeared to cease its variations.
As the true brightness of Cepheids is very predictable based on their pulse rate, these stars are one of the main tools astronomers use to determine distances to other galaxies. Knowing more about them thus has great importance to cosmological research.
The orbital motion showed that Polaris has a mass five times larger than that of the Sun. The images of Polaris showed that it has a diameter 46 times the size of the Sun.
The biggest surprise was the appearance of Polaris in close-up images. The CHARA observations provided the first glimpse of what the surface of a Cepheid variable looks like. “The CHARA images revealed large bright and dark spots on the surface of Polaris that changed over time,” said Gail Schaefer, director of the CHARA Array. The presence of spots and the rotation of the star might be linked to a 120-day variation in measured velocity.
The researchers plan to take regular images again of Polaris to better track the changes to its surface.
NASA delays Starliner return decision to end of month
In a short FAQ posted by NASA today, the agency quietly revealed that the decision on whether to bring Starliner back with its astronauts on board has been delayed till the end of August.
NASA now plans to conduct two reviews – a Program Control Board and an Agency Flight Readiness Review – before deciding how it will safely return Wilmore and Williams from the station. NASA expects to decide on the path forward by the end of August.
It appears the agency has decided to bring more people into the decision-making process. In the briefing last week, it was then planning only one review, expected to be completed before the end of this week. It now sounds like a second review will occur after the first, pushing the decision back one more week.
All of NASA’s actions in the past three weeks have suggested an increasing involvement by upper management, possibly including White House officials. With an election coming up, the politicans who are supposed to be in charge have apparently inserted themselves into this process and are demanding greater review. I expect in the end the decision will fall to them, and might even be announced by NASA administrator Bill Nelson himself.
These actions have also suggested that upper management does not like the risks involved in returning the crew on Starliner. Politicians do not like to have bad things happen on their watch. We should therefore not be surprised if the decision is made to send Starliner home unmanned.
Juice completes Earth fly-by, heads for Venus fly-by
Earth as seen by Juice during fly-by.
Click for original image.
The European probe Juice yesterday successfully completed a close fly-by of the Earth and was thus successfully slingshoted on its way to its next fly-by, of Venus, on its way to Jupiter.
This fly-by was actually a double event. First Juice zipped past the Moon the day before, coming within 435 miles. Then, only one day later it passed the Earth at a distance of 4,230 miles, thus completing the first dual fly-by of the both the Earth and the Moon.
The flyby of the Moon increased Juice’s speed by 0.9 km/s relative to the Sun, guiding Juice towards Earth. The flyby of Earth reduced Juice’s speed by 4.8 km/s relative to the Sun, guiding Juice onto a new trajectory towards Venus. Overall, the lunar-Earth flyby deflected Juice by an angle of 100° compared to its pre-flyby path.
The inherently risky flyby required ultra-precise, real-time navigation, but is saving the mission around 100–150 kg of fuel. In the month before the flyby, spacecraft operators gave Juice slight nudges to put it on exactly the right approach trajectory. Then they tracked Juice 24/7 between 17–22 August.
The Venus fly-by will occur in August 2025, followed by additional Earth flys in September 2026 and January 2029. The spacecraft will finally arrive in Jupiter orbit in July 2031, where it is designed to study the large icy moons (Europa, Gandymede, and Calisto) of that gas giant.
Tina Charles – I Love To Love
An evening pause: Performed live in 1976.
Hat tip James Street.
August 20, 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.
- Viasat has lost more than half its subscribers since Starlink arrived
In 2020 its U.S. subscriber count was 603K. Now it is 257K. The article also notes that Hughes has lost 200K subscribers over that same time period.
- Two Chinese satellites, stranded in Earth orbit when the rocket’s upper stage did not function properly, have apparently reached lunar orbit using their attitude thrusters
The two satellites are part of a planned three-satellite constellation (the third was launched separately and is in Earth orbit) to test orbital communications and navigation technology in retrograde lunar orbits.
What the heck caused these cones to align on Mars?
Click for original image.
Time for another “What the heck?” cool image! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 23, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the science team labels as “longitudinally aligned cones”.
To my eye the cones visibile in this picture seem more aligned latitudinally, to the east-west, instead of longitudinally, north-south, but the larger view in the inset on the overview map below shows that on a larger scale, the cones do appear aligned in a north-south direction.
Either way, this is one of those photos from Mars orbit that leaves me entirely baffled. The cones and the flow feature that cuts across the middle of the image might be either volcanic or glacial, but it is beyond my pay grade to explain what caused this patch of aligned cones.
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