An evening pause: This engineering not only illustrates the human ability to develop complex technology, it also illustrates how difficult it can be to accomplish what nature does naturally. Think about this the next time you hear someone talking about terraforming Mars.
Hat tip Cotour.
In its second quarterly report, Virgin Galactic’s losses grew from $46 million to $73 million, even as the public trading value of its stock value has skyrocketed in the past few months.
The company is also about to start taking deposits from new customers for suborbital tourist flights.
Whether this will happen, and be profitable, remains an unknown. The company has taken so long and spent so much developing its suborbital spaceship that they are now being overtaken by orbital space tourism.
Capitalism in space: Having abandoned plans to build its Starship/Super Heavy rocket factory at the Port of Los Angeles in 2019, SpaceX has changed its mind and now gotten approval for the factory from the LA City Council.
First announced in March 2018 and abandoned for about a year beginning in March 2019, SpaceX has refreshed plans to build giant rocket parts in a California port, simplifying aspects of the original proposal and relying heavily on the fact that steel is far easier to handle than carbon fiber. Now, the company wants to refurbish and repurpose a number of old abandoned buildings already present at Port of LA Berth 240, effectively replicating a somewhat smaller version of the Starship production facilities SpaceX is in the middle of building in South Texas.
With Los Angeles Harbor Commission and City Council approvals both safely in hand, SpaceX’s Port of LA Starship is now officially a question of “when”, not “if”. When the concept first popped back into the public discourse late last month, it came alongside a report from CNBC reporter Michael Sheetz that SpaceX wanted to start building Starship parts as few as 90 days after it reapproached Port officials.
The speed in which SpaceX is moving here is very typical for the company. Bodes well for real test flights both this year and next.
The Europe Space Agency (ESA) is considering delaying the launch of its ExoMars2020 Mars rover two years because of continuing problems with its parachutes.
According to a spokesperson for the European Space Agency (ESA), a “working-level review” for the project was held among ESA and Roscosmos officials in late January, and a preliminary assessment was forwarded to the respective heads of the space agencies, Jan Wörner of ESA and Dmitry Rogozin of Roscosmos, on February 3. “They instructed the respective inspectors general and program chiefs to submit an updated plan and schedule covering all the remaining activities necessary for an authorization to launch,” the ESA spokesperson said. “This plan will be examined by the two agency heads who will meet on 12 March to jointly agree the next steps.”
It appears that the European and Russian officials will make a public announcement about ExoMars next month. Their options include pressing ahead with a launch this year or delaying two years until the next favorable window for a launch to Mars opens. Given multiple issues with the mission, a source said a delay is the most likely option.
The parachutes are not the only problem. They have just discovered during thermal testing that the glue used in the the hinges of the rover’s solar panels comes unstuck.
In August 2019, when the parachute issues were first revealed (after much hemming and hawing by ESA officials), I predicted a 50-50 chance they’d delay. When in September 2019 the problems were found to be more serious than first admitted, I lowered the chances of meeting the 2020 launch date to less than 25%.
Right now I predict that the launch of ExoMars2020 will not occur this summer, but will be delayed until the next Martian launch window in 2022. You heard it here first.
An evening pause: Here what counts is the audience. From the youtube webpage:
Mongkol is a 61-year-old former logging elephant. His captive-held life was spent hauling trees in the Thai forest. His body shape is deformed through hard labor, he lost his right eye and tusk in this brutal logging practice. Mongkol was rescued and brought to Elephants World to spend the rest of his days relaxing peacefully in freedom by the River Kwai. I discovered Mongkol is an extremely gentle, sensitive elephant who enjoys music, especially this slow movement by Beethoven which I play to him occasionally in the day and night.
I think he listens with as much rapt pleasure as anyone who loves Beethoven.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo on the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on November 21, 2019. The uncaptioned image was simply entitled “Ice-filled Graben.”
The location is on the lower flanks of the giant volcano Alba Mons, which in itself sits north of Olympus Mons and the volcanic Tharsis Bulge. The canyon is called a graben because it was formed when a section of the crust slips downward along parallel faults. It does not have the features of a rill, or lava flow, as it starts and stops suddenly. It probably formed due to the rise of the volcano, pulling apart its flanks along faults, causing some sections then to slip downward.
How do the scientists know this is ice-filled? I suspect they have other data that indicates the presence of water, but there are also clear features inside this canyon that resemble the glacial features found elsewhere on Mars. For example, note the parallel lines near the canyon walls. These indicate past surface levels as well as layers within the ice from cyclic climate processes. The line of pits along the southwest wall, where the surface gets more sunlight, also suggests that this sunlight is causing more ice to sublimate away.
Finally, the graben is located at 46 degrees north latitude, definitely far enough north for such ice to exist, based on ample other research.
The coming dark age: The head of the University of Oklahoma has publicly apologized for a journalism professor because that professor had, after warning the class, accurately read aloud an historical document that included the word “nigger.”
The heart of the apology says it all:
The professor, a faculty member in History, read from a historical document that used the “N-word” repeatedly. While she could have made the point without reciting the actual word, she chose otherwise. Her issuance of a “trigger warning” before her recitation does not lessen the pain caused by the use of the word. For students in the class, as well as members of our community, this was another painful experience. It is common sense to avoid uttering the most offensive word in the English language, especially in an environment where the speaker holds the power.
This apology is downright hostile to the pursuit of knowledge, and coming from the head of a university is especially appalling.
My regular readers know that I forbid the use of obscenities by commenters, as I oppose the recent cultural trend to make their use ubiquitous and casual. I think it debases everyone, and prevents thoughtful debate. However, if you want to get an accurate sense of history you must have the open-mindedness to tolerate hearing such things in order to understand that history.
Moreover, this administrator assumes that his students are so pathetically weak and delicate that hearing this word would destroy them. Poppy-cock! What is really happening is that he is bowing to the race-mongers and political bullies who have been using their demands on what language to speak to force everyone to endorse their political rule.
The future is grim if it will become impossible to learn anything that might offend you. In fact, in that culture you really will not be able to learn anything at all.
Capitalism in space: According to one former astronaut as well as a review of photos of the training being given to the astronauts who will fly on SpaceX’s first manned Dragon flight, this Space News article thinks that NASA will make that first flight a long-duration mission.
This Dragon demo mission is officially still planned as a short mission, no more than two weeks. To extend it requires additional training, which the photos appear to show, and would thus delay its launch by as yet an unspecified time period.
The article also cites a third reason NASA is now favoring the long-duration option: The issues with Boeing’s manned Starliner capsule:
Another factor in any decision to extend Demo-2 is the status of the other commercial crew vehicle, Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner. That vehicle flew an uncrewed test flight in December, but software problems during the flight, including one which shortened the mission and prevented a docking with the ISS, have raised questions about whether a second uncrewed test flight will be needed. An investigation into those problems is expected by the end of this month.
Even if NASA decides a second uncrewed test flight of Starliner is not needed, a review of all of the spacecraft’s one million lines of code, and other reviews, is likely to delay a crewed test flight of the spacecraft. NASA and Boeing had previously agreed to make that test flight a long-duration mission, with NASA astronauts Mike Fincke and Nicole Mann and Boeing astronaut Chris Ferguson performing space station training in addition to that for the Starliner itself.
The delay in Boeing’s long duration mission leaves a gap in the schedule for maintaining crews on ISS. Flying Dragon long-duration would help solve that.
More observations have now confirmed that Betelguese is once again brightening, as predicted.
Photometry secured over the last ~2 weeks shows that Betelgeuse has stopped its large decline of delta-V of ~1.0 mag relative to September 2019. The star reached a mean light minimum of = 1.614 +/- 0.008 mag during 07-13 February 2020. This is approximately 424+/-4 days after the last (shallower: V ~ +0.9 mag) light minimum was observed in mid-December 2018. Thus the present fading episode is consistent with the continuation of the persistent 420-430 day period present in prior photometry.
In other words, the star’s dimming, though deeper than earlier dips, was right in line with a well-known variation cycle. While absolutely worth close observation and study, the data now strongly suggests that this is relatively normal behavior for this aging red giant star. It will likely go supernova sometime in the future, not likely now.
The first seismic results from InSight’s seismometer now show that the interior of Mars is active, with regular moderately-sized quakes.
The Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument – a seismometer developed by an international consortium under the leadership of the French space agency CNES – recorded a total of 174 seismic events between February and September 2019. Twenty of these marsquakes had a magnitude of between three and four. Quakes of this intensity correspond to weak seismic activity of the kind that occurs repeatedly on Earth in the middle of continental plates, for example in Germany on the southern edge of the Swabian Jura hills.
Although only one measurement station is available, models of wave propagation in the Martian soil have been used to determine the probable source of two of these quakes. It is located in the Cerberus Fossae region, a young volcanic area approximately 1700 kilometres east of the landing site.
Cerberus Fossae is a land of cracks and linear depressions located between the giant volcanoes, Elysium Mons to the north and Olympus Mons to the east. It is believed those fissures were caused by the rise of those volcanoes, stretching the crust and cracking it.
This new data from InSight strengthens this theory.
Since the 2016 election campaign, the number of examples of physical attacks by leftists against conservatives, journalists, Trump supporters at campaign events, on college campuses, in restaurants, or simply on the street, has grown so much that they now seem to occur almost every day, and have become ubiquitous. In fact, they have grown so frequent that there are no longer unique and — in that sense — no longer newsworthy.
Just last week for example a couple was arrested for trying to run down two teenage boys with their car because the boys were riding bicycles with Trump flags.
According to an affidavit from Lake County, Indiana, Cailyn Smith, 18, and Kyren Jones, 23, were each charged on Thursday with two felony counts of intimidation and criminal recklessness over the incident involving the teens, who are brothers.
The brothers told police that they were riding their bikes at around 8:30 p.m. when a blue Chevy Malibu “swerved as if the driver wanted to hit them” and they had to ride their bikes into the grass, the affidavit stated.
A woman later identified as Smith then yelled “y’all scared just like your president” and “America is not great [expletive].” The couple reportedly sped off after the boys threatened to call the police.
As I say, this behavior has becoming horribly typical. The American left has become the most intolerant, close-minded, and vicious community I have ever seen in the U.S. in my entire life.
And with each passing day it is becoming even more violent and intolerant, its behavior rising to such levels of blind emotional hatred that we can almost guarantee it will soon lead to murder.
Don’t believe me? Then watch the video below.
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The Space Force has put forth an extra wish list of missions/projects that require an $1 billion more above the $15 billion the agency has already requested in the next federal budget for 2021.
While about 10 percent of the request is for classified programs, the remaining funding runs the gamut, from bolstering space situational awareness to accelerating the development of navigational satellites to establishing new commercial satellite communication capabilities in low earth orbit.
Overall this wish list appears properly focused, aimed at upgrading or improving existing space military assets rather than growing the Space Force’s bureaucracy. We shall see over time if this proves true. I can’t help having doubts.
Embedded below the fold in two posts.
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Click for full image.
The OSIRIS-REx science team today released one of the images taken during the spacecraft’s recent close reconnaissance of its secondary touch-and-go landing site on the asteroid Bennu.
I have cropped their oblique image to focus, in full resolution, on that landing site, dubbed Osprey, which is the crater on the left side of the photo. The boulder in that crater “is 17 ft (5.2 m) long, which is about the length of a box truck.”
After the fly-by, the science team had announced that the spacecraft’s laser altimeter had failed to operate, and the images taken by its highest resolution camera (not the camera that took today’s image) “are likely out of focus.”
Based on this image, what look like tiny pebbles inside the crater are actually boulders ranging in size from mere inches to as much as five feet across. If their high resolution images are soft, it will thus be hard to map out the terrain sufficiently to safely make a touch-and-go landing here.
More important, there is still no word on whether they have fixed the laser altimeter. Without it I suspect a landing will be very difficult, if not impossible.
Capitalism in space: According to anonymous sources, SpaceX is once again seeking more investment capital, this time totaling $250 million.
Last year the company raised $1.33 billion. While not as much as the personal cash that Jeff Bezos has raised for Blue Origin by selling his personal Amazon stock, it has been enough for SpaceX to accomplish far more. Not only is the company about to launch its first manned mission, it has quickly begun assembling its Starlink internet constellation in orbit, while pushing forward on Starship construction.
NASA on February 20, 2020 finally admitted that the first SLS launch cannot happen in 2020, and set a new target date no earlier than April 18, 2021.
The previous target launch date in November 2020 was always a pure fantasy. NASA just held off admitting it in order to defuse any political consequences for having a program, building SLS, that will end up taking them almost two decades to complete.
This new launch date is likely the most realistic so far, since the hardware for SLS is actually finally coming together. Nonetheless, if anything at all should go wrong along the way, especially with the full static test firing of the core booster of the first stage scheduled for no earlier than August, then expect more delays, possibly lasting years.
Insight’s engineers, having failed to get its mole pile driver to dig down as planned, now plan to use the lander’s scoop to push on the mole in the hope this will prevent it from popping up with each hammer drive.
[T]he mole is a 16-inch-long (40-centimeter-long) spike equipped with an internal hammering mechanism. While burrowing into the soil, it is designed to drag with it a ribbonlike tether that extends from the spacecraft. Temperature sensors are embedded along the tether to measure heat coming deep from within the planet’s interior.
…The team has avoided pushing on the back cap [at the top of the mole] until now to avoid any potential damage to the tether.
It appears to me that they are running out of options. This new attempt carries risks. It could damage the tether required to obtain underground temperature readings, the prime purpose of the experiment. However, if they don’t get the tether into the ground, this will also prevent the experiment from functioning. Thus, this attempt could essentially be a Hail Mary pass, gambling all on one last all-or-nothing gambit.
Capitalism in space: Airbus announced this week that it plans to cut 2,362 jobs, citing as the reason “lower performance in space” as well as postponed defense contracts.
This quote from the article is revealing:
Airbus Defence and Space is the third satellite manufacturer to announce layoffs in the past 12 months. Thales Alenia Space said in September it was cutting around 6% of its workforce, following Maxar’s February 2019 announcement that it would dismiss roughly 3% of its employees.
The article however also indicates that 2019 saw a big recovery in geosynchronous satellite orders.
Though not stated, I suspect that part of Airbus’s problem is related to Ariane 6, which it is building in a joint partnership with Safran dubbed ArianeGroup. While designed to be less expensive to build, the rocket is not reusable, and its launch price is simply not competitive. Thus, getting contract orders has been very difficult.
Note also that ArianeGroup announced in November 2018 that it going to cut 2,300 jobs by 2022. I wonder if some of these cuts overlap the newly announced cuts.
Either way, these trims might be a good thing as Airbus and ArianeGroup work to cut their costs. Or they could be a bad thing, indicating that both are having trouble making sales. Only time will tell.
An evening pause: Technology developed with slide rules and the English system of measurements, more than half a century ago, that still works today.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
Click for full image.
The image to the right, rotated, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on December 19, 2019 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled “Head of Mamers Valles”, it shows the very end of one side canyon to this very extensive canyon system made up of the fractured fissures and mesas of chaos terrain.
Mamers Valles itself sits in the transition zone between the northern lowland plains and the southern cratered highlands. This specific canyon is close to those lowlands, at a latitude of 40 degrees north, where scientists believe there are many buried inactive glaciers of ice.
The image reinforces this belief. The entire canyon appears practically filled with what looks like ice. In fact, it almost looks like we are looking down at a frozen lake with a layer of snow on top of it. In this case, the layer is not snow, but dust and dirt and debris that covers the ice to protect it and prevent it from sublimating away.
The overview map below shows the location of this canyon, by the red cross, within Mamers Valles.
Mamers Valles is actually a very large collection of miscellaneous canyons, flowing into the lowlands. In some areas it looks like very old chaos terrain, with the canyons so eroded that all we see are scattered mesas. In other places the canyons more resemble meandering river canyons sometimes interspersed with crater impacts.
Scientists have analyzed the canyons in Mamers Valles, and from this concluded that they were likely formed from “subsurface hydrologic activity”. which in plain English means that flowing water below ground washed out large underground passages, which eventually grew large enough for their ceilings to collapse and form the canyons we see today.
Yesterday I posted an image of a string of pits that could very well be evidence of this same process in its early stages of canyon formation. In Mamers Valles the process is far more advanced, and the canyons have existed for a long time, long enough for the planet’s inclination to go through several cycles of change, from a low of 25 degrees tilt (what it is now) to has high as 60 degrees. At that high inclination the mid-latitudes were colder than the poles, so that ice would sublimate from the poles to fall as snow in the mid-latitudes, forming active glaciers within canyons such as this.
Now that the planet’s inclination is similar to Earth’s, 25 degrees, the poles are slightly colder than the mid-latitudes, and the glaciers in this canyon are either inactive (if buried) or slowly sublimating away so that the water can return to the poles.
Here however the surface debris appears to be protecting the glaciers, leaving the canyon filled mostly with ice. For future settlers this ice would likely be relatively accessible, and at a latitude where the environment is also relatively mild, for Mars.
Yutu-2 has found a cluster of small rocks that appear relatively young, with little erosion.
The rocks also also appear as if they came from another place on the Moon.
Closer inspection of the rocks by the rover team revealed little erosion, which on the moon is caused by micrometeorites and the huge changes in temperature across long lunar days and nights. That anomaly suggests that the fragments are relatively young. Over time, rocks tend to erode into soils.
The relative brightness of the rocks also indicated they may have originated in an area very different to the one Yutu-2 is exploring.
Youth in this case is very relative. The rocks might be young when compared to the surface on which they sit, but they still could be more than a billion years olf.
As predicted by astronomers, Betelguese’s dimming has ceased and has even begun to brighten slightly in the past week.
The graph here and at the link shows the uptick clearly. As this was exactly what was expected if the star followed its past cyclical patterns, this strongly suggests that we will not see any supernovae from the star anytime in the near future.
An evening pause: Stay with it. It will soon remind you of modern DC politics.
Hat tip Phill Oltmann.
Click for full image.
Cool image time! As my regular readers well know, I am a caver, and am thus always interested when the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) takes a close-up of a pit that might also be an entrance to a cave.
The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was part of the most recent image release from MRO, but was boringly labeled “Arabia Terra” after the region where it is located, one of the largest transition zones on Mars between the northern lowland plains and the southern cratered highlands. When I took a close look, what I found was an intriguing string of pits whose arrangement is strikingly reminiscent of a river tributary system.
The white box indicates one section that I have zoomed into, as shown below.
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In testimony during a Senate hearing on February 12, the head of NOAA’s space weather division admitted that the agency’s ability to monitor the Sun is threatened by its aging fleet of solar satellites, combined with the agency’s slow progress on a large single replacement satellite, presently scheduled for launch in 2024.
NOAA currently uses the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) and NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft to collect solar wind data, and uses the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft to observe the solar corona, using those data to forecast solar storms that can affect satellites and terrestrial infrastructure such as power grids.
However, SOHO, launched in December 1995, is well past its design life. In addition, DSCOVR has been offline since June 2019 because of technical problems, forcing NOAA to depend solely on ACE, which launched in 1997. [emphasis mine]
NOAA has been trying, and failing, to build a replacement for ACE for more than a decade. Worse, the agency’s inability to deal with these issues was further revealed by this quote:
Congress has pushed to speed up work on that [replacement] mission, despite NOAA’s assurances about the availability of data from other spacecraft. NOAA sought about $25 million for the mission in its fiscal year 2020 budget request, but Congress appropriated $64 million. NOAA has yet to release its fiscal year 2021 budget request, more than a week after the White House published the overall federal government budget proposal.
Something has been wrong in the management at NOAA now for at least a decade. They can’t seem to get new satellites built, and when they try they can’t seem to do it on schedule and for a reasonable cost. Their weather satellite program has been rife with problems, including cost overruns, schedule delays, and failing satellites.
But why should we be surprised? This kind of mismanagement at the federal government has been par for the course for the past half century.
Charles Lieber, the chairman of Harvard’s department of chemistry and chemical biology, has been arrested by the federal government for lying about the work he has been doing for China.
An affidavit accompanying the criminal complaint in Boston further accuses Lieber of making false statements to the National Institutes of Health—a major funder of his research into nanoscale biological interfaces, such as transistors that can interact with intracellular biological machinery—as well as to Harvard itself, about his connections to [China’s] Thousand Talents program and the Wuhan University of Technology.
The arrest occurred very shortly after a Chinese medical student from Harvard was arrested for trying to smuggle cancer research material from a Harvard-affiliated medical center.
More information here. It appears that Lieber did not tell the truth about how much China was paying him for this work, which by the way was a lot of money, $50K per month plus $150K stipend for living in Wuhan while he helped build them a medical lab.
Hat tip Phill Oltmann.
The new colonial movement: Japan revealed yesterday that it plans to send unmanned probe to Mars’ moon Phobos, using the basic designs developed for the asteroid mission Hayabusa-2.
Like Hayabusa-2, they will attempt to grab a sample from Phobos, and will launch in September 2024, returning its sample in 2029.
The new colonial movement: China is now targeting mid-April for the maiden launch of its Long March 5B rocket, which will place in orbit China’s new manned capsule on its first unmanned demo flight.
The article at the link, from China’s normally reticent state-run press, actually provides a great deal of information. First, it outlines the launch schedule for their space station, using the Long March 5B rocket:
China aims to complete construction of the space station around 2022. According to the CMSA, more than 10 missions are planned in the next three years to complete the construction and master technologies for in-orbit assembly and construction of large complex spacecraft, long-term manned spaceflight in near-Earth space and large-scale space science experiments.
…The space station will be a T shape with the Tianhe core module at the center and a lab capsule on each side. The core module — at 16.6 meters long and 4.2 meters in diameter, with a takeoff weight of 22.5 tonnes — will be the management and control center.
Second, the article confirms that the Long March 5B rocket will be used to launch all of China’s manned missions. This means they are dependent on their biggest and possibly most expensive rocket to make things happen, suggesting that either they will have to go slow or they have made a very big commitment to space. The quote above suggests the latter.
Third, the article reveals that their new manned capsule, which will weigh almost as much as a single station module on either their station or ISS, will be capable of carrying six astronauts, and that the descent module is designed to be reusable.
Finally, they confirm once again that they will also be launching “a large optical telescope” that will fly in formation with their space station. An earlier news article indicated that this telescope would have a mirror 12 meters in diameter, which would be five times bigger than the mirror on the Hubble Space Telescope. That same article however also noted major design issues.
Overall, it appears China is about to step out as a major space power, with capabilities that in many ways will exceed anything from either the U.S. or Russia.
Click for full image.
Astronomers using two radio telescopes have created multi-wavelength radio images of 300 protoplanetary disks, or proplyds, found in the star forming region in the constellation Orion. The image to the right shows only a small sampling of the proplyds imaged.
“This survey revealed the average mass and size of these very young protoplanetary disks,” said John Tobin of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Charlottesville, Virginia, and leader of the survey team. “We can now compare them to older disks that have been studied intensively with [the radio telescope] ALMA as well.”
What Tobin and his team found, is that very young disks can be similar in size, but are on average much more massive than older disks. “When a star grows, it eats away more and more material from the disk. This means that younger disks have a lot more raw material from which planets could form. Possibly bigger planets already start to form around very young stars.”
Of the disks photographed, four appear to be extremely young, probably less than ten thousand years, because of their very blobby and irregular shape.
