Category: Behind The Black

Layered Martian mesa inside crater

1:43 pm

Layered mesa on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on May 14, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label as a “layered butte inside small crater.”

The crater is only about 1.8 miles across, and is only a couple of hundred feet deep, at the most. Because this crater sits on a large slope rising to the southwest, the mesa’s peak is actually about thirty feet higher than the crater’s northern rim, but is still below the southern rim by about 70 feet.

A close look at the mesa’s slopes suggests about a dozen obvious layers, though based on data from the rovers Curiosity and Perseverance, those obvious layers are probably divided into many hundreds of thinner layers in between.

What caused these layers? And how did such a small crater get such a relatively large mesa in its center? As always, the overview map provides some clues, but as always it does not provide a definitive answer.
» Read more

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SpaceX to FAA: Allow launches to resume before completion of July 11th launch failure investigation

10:59 am

SpaceX on July 15, 2024 submitted a request to the FAA to quickly determine that the July 11th Falcon-9 launch failure posed no threat to public safety, and thus allow the company to resume Falcon 9 launches before the investigation of that failure is completed.

The FAA has two means of allowing a rocket to return to flight operations following a mishap. The first is that it approves a launch operator-led mishap investigation final report, which would include “the identification of any corrective actions.” Those actions need to be put in place and all related licensing requirement need to be met.

The other option is for a public safety determination to be issued. This would be an option if “the mishap did not involve safety-critical systems or otherwise jeopardize public safety,” according to the FAA.

“The FAA will review the request, and if in agreement, authorize a return to flight operations while the mishap investigation remains open and provided the operator meets all relevant licensing requirements,” the FAA wrote on its website.

SpaceX is apparently expecting the FAA to quickly approve this request, as it has now scheduled its next Falcon 9 launch for July 19, 2024, at the end of this week.

The lower level workers at the FAA probably want to get out of the way, but they have to obey orders from above, and it is my suspicion that the White House is applying pressure to make life hard for SpaceX. As I have noted, the FAA has not required the same level of due diligence from either NASA and its SLS rocket, or Boeing’s Starliner capsule.

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Europe targets 2031 for the first mission of its own lunar lander

10:48 am

The European Space Agency (ESA) has approved a target date of 2031 for the first mission of its own unmanned lunar lander, dubbed Argonaut, and launched on the most powerful version of the Ariane-6.

On 16 July, the agency published a call for Argonaut Mission 1 Phase A/B1 development aimed at demonstrating the technical and programmatic feasibility of the Argonaut mission concept. The call included a proposed launch date of 2031 for the first Argonaut mission to the Moon.

The Argonaut lunar lander will be launched aboard an Ariane 64 rocket. Once operational, ESA envisions it being used for a wide variety of applications, from cargo logistics to acting as an in-situ resource utilization plant. The agency has already completed pre-phase A studies for what it calls the European Charging Station for the Moon. This system would be launched aboard an Argonaut lunar lander and would essentially act as a gas station on the Moon that would be used to support crewed missions on the surface of the Moon.

As I’ve noted previously, ESA routinely sets a glacial pace on all its government-run projects. Do not expect this government lander to fly on this schedule. More likely by 2031 there will be many cheaper and available options from the private sector, and European companies wanting to put payloads down on the Moon will turn to those, especially because Argonaut is apparently being forced to use the expensive expendable Ariane-6 rocket. The cost for going on Argonaut is simply going to be too high.

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July 16, 2024 Quick space links

3:28 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, who has now returned from a business trip to the People’s Republic of California. 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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Musk: SpaceX is moving its headquarters from California to Texas

2:33 pm

Because of the bill signed into law this week by California governor Gavin Newsom that allows schools to groom little kids sexually and hide that fact from their parents, Elon Musk announced today that SpaceX is moving its headquarters from California to Texas. From Musk’s tweet:

This is the final straw.

Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas.

Musk also noted that X will also relocate from California to Texas.

If you establish a government that oppresses and encourages insane behavior, you will discover that people will flee your tyranny enthusiastically. The Democrats who run California have achieved this goal quite skillfully. May they enjoy their enduring bankruptcy.

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Part 2: The left’s lies are now exposed to the non-political general public

2:17 pm

Trump defiant after being shot
Trump defiant

In my column yesterday, I described what I thought the short term cultural ramifications of the attempt on Donald Trump’s life on July 13, 2024 would be. I concluded that it is going to make it very hard for the Democrats to continue their slander campaigns against him and all Republicans.

Today I intend to write about the political ramifications.

To understand those ramifications however you have to leave the bubble of political world. Numerous readers commenting on yesterday’s column noted quite rightly that many Democrats (both in and out of the party) are not going to change, that their hate of Republicans and Trump is too ingrained, that they will simply pause expressing that hate for a few weeks and then begin anew.

Some leftists have not even waited that long, as was seen during a Jack Black concert in Australia one day after the assassination attack, when one member of the band, Kyle Gass, publicly expressed disappointment that Trump was not murdered.
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Martian taffy terrain

11:08 am

Martian taffy terrain
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on April 11, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a typical area of what scientists have labeled “taffy terrain,” a landscape made up of strangely twisted bands that look like someone was pulling the ground repeatedly, just like taffy.

Based on the lower crater count found here, taffy terrain is thought to be relative young, formed around three billion years ago. While the exact formation process is not yet understood, scientists theorize that it was caused by some type of “viscous fluid” that settled into localized depressions.

The location is 40 degrees south latitude, so it is entirely possible we are seeing some form of glacial material, ice in these low spots that has no place to go but is warped over time by the same kind of tidal and rotational planetary effects that cause waves and tides in the oceans on Earth.
» Read more

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ESA announces asteroid mission to Apophis

9:06 am

Apophis' path past the Earth in 2029
A cartoon showing Apophis’s path in 2029

The European Space Agency (ESA) today announced that is beginning work on an asteroid mission, dubbed Ramses, to the potentially dangerous asteroid Apophis when it makes its next close-fly of the Earth in 2029.

Ramses needs to launch in April 2028 to allow for an arrival at Apophis in February 2029, two months before the close approach. In order to meet this deadline, ESA requested permission to begin preparatory work on the mission as soon as possible using existing resources. This permission has been granted by the Space Safety programme board. The decision whether to commit to the mission in full will take place at ESA’s Ministerial Council Meeting in November 2025.

Using a suite of scientific instruments, the spacecraft will conduct a thorough before-and-after survey of the asteroid’s shape, surface, orbit, rotation and orientation. By analysing how Apophis changes during the flyby, scientists will learn a lot about the response of an asteroid to external forces as well as asteroid composition, interior structure, cohesion, mass, density, and porosity.

Based on the track record of European space projects, which appear to always proceed at a glacial pace with late problems that cause the missions to miss their launch window (with the launch of the Franklin Mars rover as the poster child), the project is getting started far too late to meet its launch date of April 2028. We shall see if Europe surprises us this time and gets the project off the ground as planned.

Right now the only confirmed mission to Apophis is OSIRIS-APEX, which was redirected to the asteroid after it delivered its samples from Bennu to Earth. Many others have been proposed, including a commercial mission, but none appear to be confirmed or under construction.

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Part 1: The cultural silver lining around the Trump assassination attempt appears large and sustaining

2:51 pm

Trump defiant after being shot
Trump defiant

The consequences of significant events can never be determined in their immediate aftermath. History takes time to play out, so to guess at this moment the real aftermath of the attempt to kill Donald Trump this weekend at a Pennsylvania rally is probably foolish and premature.

Nonetheless, I am going to try, because in the past two days I think I begin to see the clouds breaking and a trend appearing. And most amazingly, I think the trends are all positive, in a way that might save this country in ways no one expects.

I will begin today by taking a look at what appear to be the cultural impacts. Tomorrow I will look at the political consequences.

First some background. For the past seven years, since Trump was elected in 2016, the left and its propaganda press (what others label the mainstream press) have gone insane in their hatred of this man, to a point that they repeatedly claimed he was Hitler reborn and that it was perfectly justified to consider having him killed to get him out of the way.

Nor do I exaggerate. Watch:
» Read more

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A blob in space

9:47 am

A blob in space
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the dwarf galaxy NGC 5238.

Its unexciting, blob-like appearance, resembling more an oversized star cluster than a galaxy, belies a complicated structure which has been the subject of much research by astronomers. Here, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is able to pick out the galaxy’s countless stars, as well as its associated globular clusters — the glowing spots both inside and around the galaxy that are swarmed by yet more stars.

NGC 5238 is theorised to have recently — here meaning no more than a billion years ago! — had a close encounter with another galaxy. The evidence for this is the tidal distortions of NGC 5238’s shape, the kind produced by two galaxies pulling on each other as they interact. There’s no nearby galaxy which could have caused this disturbance, so the hypothesis is that the culprit is a smaller satellite galaxy that was devoured by NGC 5238.

Astronomers are hoping to use this image to detect the two different populations of stars within this blob that come from those once interacting galaxies.

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