Jeff Kashiwa – The Night Is Young
An evening pause: Some light jazz to start the week.
Hat tip Ferris.
Category: Behind The Black
August 19, 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.
- Rocket Factory Augsburg offical claims first orbital launch at Saxavord “only weeks away”
The claim is meaningless, in that neither he nor the article provide any update on the approval of a launch license by the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA). The company might be ready, but so was Virgin Orbit, and it was made to wait so long (an extra six months) by the CAA that it ran out of money and went bankrupt. I am willing to bet that this first launch will not happen this year.
- Unconfirmed: If the two Starliner astronauts come home on Dragon the two astronauts to fly up on that capsule will be ” Zena Cardman as commander and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov as pilot”
The rumors continue to suggest NASA is going to bring Starliner back to Earth unoccupied.
- Juno’s next close fly-by of Io this coming weekend
It won’t get as close as previous fly-bys, with this close approch only getting to within 27,218 miles away. Since Juno’s camera is not particularly high resolutoin, it will only be able to see objects bigger than 18 miles across.
Mining Mars
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 22, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The picture’s focus of study is the bright strip running diagonally across the center, which the scientists label as a “linear feature exposure of infrared-bright material.”
This bright strip with all the swirls of alternating light and dark terrain is a fissure about 80 feet deep. What is interesting is that the parallel bright features to the north and south are actually ridges, not depressions, even though there appears to be some resemblance between them all. (Note that the patches of very thin parallel lines are likely ripple dunes sitting on top of the topography.)
So, what created this fissure? And why is its inner surface so strange? As is usually the case, a wider look provides some clues.
» Read more
Threatened with a lawsuit, Colorado lifts its ban of clothing with political messages
Jeffrey Hunt in his evil sweatshirt.
Photo courtesy of JeffreyGrounds Photography.
Pushback: Colorado has now been forced to lift its ban on visitors wearing clothing with political messages when they enter the gallery of the state legislature after it was threatened with a lawsuit for enforcing that ban arbitrarily and clearly favoring some political messages over others.
On March 31, 2023, Jeffrey Hunt came to that visiter gallery wearing a pro-life sweatshirt and was forced to leave by security, as described by the cease-and-desist letter sent to by Hunt’s lawyers.
Sergeant-At-Arms Ben Trujillo approached Hunt and instructed him to exit the gallery. Hunt complied. After leaving the gallery, Trujillo told Hunt that “Pro-Life U” was a “political statement” prohibited by a rule banning “pins or apparel expressing political statements”.
Yet, security had no problem with an entire group of demonstrators filling the gallery wear gun control shirts only two weeks earlier.
That letter, sent by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) on July 16, 2024, noted this unfair application of the rule. More importantly, it pointed out that the rule was a clear violation of the First Amendment. It demanded that the state cease enforcing this illegal law, or face a lawsuit.
Less than a month later, the state backed down, ending the rule.
Across the nation there have been numerous similar stories of security guard control freaks illegally censoring conservative speech. And in every case, when faced with legal action those venues have backed down every single time, proving the importance of fighting. See for example this story at the Smithsonian, or this story at the National Archives.
The news in space and science is very very slow today, so this short political news piece gets posted first, sent to me over the weekend by radio host Robert Pratt.
Sierra Space in negotiations to buy ULA
According to the Reuters news agency, Sierra Space is negotiating with the joint owners of ULA, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, to buy the rocket company.
The sources, which are all anonymous, said the sale price is in the range of $2 to $3 billion. Those same sources said no deal has yet been worked out, and might not happen at all.
For Sierra, the deal would give it its own launch vehicle, Vulcan, for placing its Dream Chaser mini-shuttles into orbit. It would also give it a profit stream from the many military and commercial launch contracts already on ULA’s manifest. The combined cababilities of ULA and Sierra will create a formidable new player in the aerospace launch market.
For Boeing, it would provide it some much needed cash that it will be able to use to both restructure and revitalize its presently questionable operations.
It is unclear what Lockheed Martin will gain from the sale, other than the cash and the removal of this Frankenstein-like partnership with Boeing, which in the long run has probably not done it a lot of good.
Rocket Lab ships its two Mars Escapade orbiters to Cape Canaveral
Rocket Lab has now shipped the two identical Mars Escapade orbiters to Cape Canaveral for launch in late September on the very first flight of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket.
The spacecraft, known as Blue and Gold, recently completed comprehensive assembly, integration, and test at Rocket Lab’s Spacecraft Production Complex and headquarters in Long Beach, California. Following this milestone, the Rocket Lab team conducted final closeout activities, including the installation of spacecraft solar arrays and multi-layer insulation (MLI) blankets, before they were packaged and shipped to Florida for launch.
Once in orbit around Mars, the two spacecraft over eleven months will study the interaction of the Martian atmosphere and its weak magnetoshere with the solar wind and solar storms, providing two different data points for a better geographic perspective.
August 16, 2024 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
» Read more
Laufey & Iceland Symphony Orchestra – I Wish You Love
An evening pause: A nice piece to start the weekend.
Hat tip Doug Johnson.
August 16, 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.
- The Exploration Company touts a picture of its first test Nyx cargo capsule
Sadly the tweet tells us nothing about the capsule and its status. For all we know, this might not even be flight model, or it might be a smaller scale test capsule (which is what I think it is).
- Sierra Space touts its Shooting Star cargo module, which will fly with its Tenacity mini-shuttle
This module is essentially Tenacity’s service module. It will carry cargo into orbit, but will not return to Earth, but burn up in the atmosphere. Still no word on an actual launch date.
SpaceX launches 116 payloads on its eleventh smallsat Transporter mission
SpaceX today successfully launched 116 payloads, including 108 satellites, on its eleventh smallsat Transporter mission, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.
The first stage completed its twelfth flight, landing back at Vandenberg. As of posting the satellites had not deployed.
The payloads included a wide variety of satellites and demonstration missions, including one orbital tug from the European tug company D-Orbit, its Ion tug deploying five satellites. In addition, five different companies will be using their own deployment equipment to release about fifty of the satellites from the Falcon 9.
These SpaceX Transporter smallsat launches demonstrate the value of lowering the cost to launch. Almost none of these satellites could have obtained investment capital when the cost high. Now that SpaceX has lowered that cost, a plethora of new satellite companies of all kinds can get that capital and build and launch their projects. And that burst of new companies is more than enough to provide business not only to SpaceX but to a lot of other new rocket startups.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
82 SpaceX
34 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia
American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 97 to 52, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world combined, including American companies, 82 to 67.
Martian gullies flowing down to a Martian river of ice
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 16, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
The scientists label this as “gullies previously identified in the walls of Harmakhis Vallis.” The gullies are obvious, the series of erosion features on the cliff wall. The cliff itself drops about 2,800 feet from the rim to the floor, and also appears to have internal horizontal layers that the gullies cut through.
What causes the gullies? Planetary scientists have a number of theories, none of which appear to explain the gullies everywhere on the Martian surface. They all appear in the mid-latitudes, where the most glaciers on Mars are found, and appear to be related to ice or frost freeze-thaw processes, with some gullies actually very ancient and formed when the planet’s rotational tilt was significantly different.
» Read more
New data continues to refine the margin of error for the Hubble constant
The uncertainty of science: New data using the Webb Space Telescope’s spectroscopic capabilities has provided a more refined measure of the expansion rate of the universe, dubbed the Hubble constant.
According to previous research, that rate could be anywhere from 67.4 to 73.2 kilometers per second per megaparsecs, depending on whether you rely on data from the Planck orbiter or that of the Hubble Space Telescope. Though this difference appears reasonable considering the uncertainties and assumptions that go into research that determines both numbers, astronomers have been unhappy with the difference. The numbers should match and they don’t.
Now new data from Webb suggests this difference really is nothing more than the margin of error caused by the many uncertainties and assumptions involved. That new Webb data measured the Hubble constant using three different methods, all similar to that used by Hubble, and came up with 67.85, 67.96, and 72.04, all in the middle of the previous two numbers from Hubble and Planck.
In other words, all the data is beginning to fall within this margin of error.
Astronomers are without doubt still going to argue about this, but it does appear that the research is beginning to coalesce around an approximate number. More important, in terms of cosmology these results confirm the theory that the expansion of the universe is accelerating (dubbed “dark energy” simply because it needs a name), since they confirm the method used to measure that expansion rate in the very distant universe.
Keep your minds open however. There remain many questions and uncertainties with all these conclusions. Nothing is settled, nor will it be likely for decades if not centuries.