Blue Man Group – Drumbone
An evening pause: Performed live 2010. Makes a nice contrast to the Bach dulcimer pause two days ago.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
Category: Behind The Black
The eroding north wall of glacial-filled Harmakhis Valles
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on February 8, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
We are looking at the 2,400-foot-high cliff, its lower walls clearly cracking horizontally as they sag downward, with other large sections higher up appearing to have been eroded away in larger pieces.
Yet, the ground below this cliff wall appears to have no debris piles, the kind you would expect below a landslide. Instead, that ground appears to be very glacial in nature, with many linear parallel lines suggesting layers.
The overview map below provides us the context, and an explanation as to where that debris has gone.
» Read more
South Korea successfully launches its Nuri rocket for the second time
The new colonial movement: South Korea today successfully launched its home-built Nuri rocket for the second time, lifting off from a coastal South Korean spaceport and carrying eight smallsats.
This was South Korea’s first launch this year. The leaders in the 2023 launch race remain the same:
34 SpaceX
19 China
7 Russia
4 Rocket Lab
The U.S. still leads China 38 to 19 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 38 to 33. SpaceX by itself now trails the entire world, including American companies, 34 to 37.
Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay for reminding me of this launch.
As parents and students continue to flee public education the consequences are both good and dire
“But Brawndo’s got what plants crave. It’s got electrolytes!”
Two recent stories have clearly illustrated that the abandonment of the public school system, from kindergarten to college, is continuing unabated. It appears that the Wuhan lockdowns and mask and jab mandates helped to open the eyes of many parents and students as to the ineffectual and often harmful teaching going on in these institutions.
We begin with the precipitous drop in children attending K through 12 public schools.
Public school enrollment declined by 1.4 million students between fall 2019 and fall 2020, dipping to 49.4 million, a loss of nearly 3 percent, and remains at the lowest point in more than a decade. The decline could be closer to 2 million, according to a survey by Education Next showing that traditional public school enrollment as a percentage of all school enrollment declined sharply between 2020 and 2022.
Enrollment in traditional public schools fell from 81 percent to 76.5 percent of total enrollment during that period, while enrollment in public charter schools, private schools, and homeschooling grew by a combined 4.5 percent.
Those numbers suggest that nearly 2 million students left traditional public schools for other educational options between 2020 and 2022. The findings are based on the May 2022 survey of a national representative panel of more than 3,600 American adults commissioned by Education Next.
The abandonment in the last three years by so many parents of the public school system can be attributed to three things. » Read more
Watch a still brightening new supernova only 20 million light years away
A new still brightening supernova has been discovered in the Pinwheel Galaxy, also known as Messier 101, only 20 million light years away, one of the closest such supernovae in years.
The discovery was made on May 19, 2023. Because the supernova is so close, it was discovered very early in its explosion and is still brightening to maximum. It is also an object that ordinary amateur astronomers can spot using their own telescopes. The Pinwheel Galaxy is located in the Big Dipper, making it a good target for amateurs in the northern hemisphere.
A live stream of the supernovae, dubbed SN 2023ixf, is also being broadcast today by the Virtual Telescope Project, and will be available here starting at 3 pm (Pacific).
No supernovae have occurred within our own galaxy, the Milky Way, since the invention of the telescope, so any such event in a nearby galaxy is an important opportunity for astronomers to learn more about these explosions.
Nova Scotia spaceport gets another launch contract
Maritime Launch Services, which is building a spaceport in Nova Scotia and hopes to offer its own rocket services to put satellites in orbit, has obtained what it claims could be a $1 billion contract with an unnamed European orbital tug company.
The only two European orbital tug companies that closely fit the description provided by Maritime officials are D-Orbit or Exolaunch. The latter had had a contract with Virgin Orbit to launch as many as 20 of its satellites. Coming less than one day after Virgin Orbit’s assets were sold off, this announcement suggests Exolaunch has replaced Virgin Orbit with this deal.
Unlike other spaceports, Maritime isn’t merely providing a launch site for rocket companies. Instead the company will also launch smallsats itself, using either Ukraine’s Cyclone-4M rocket or a British-made startup rocket dubbed Skyrora.
Relativity and Impulse are now targeting ’26 launch window for 1st private mission to Mars
According to officials from the two companies, Relativity and Impulse have now delayed the launch date of their joint private unmanned lander to Mars from the ’24 launch window to the ’26 launch window.
The companies have also shared few technical details about the lander, but noted they plan to leverage designs and technologies developed for NASA’s InSight Mars lander, such as its heat shield. “We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel,” Brost said. “Doing a clean-sheet design of a lander is an insane, monumental engineering feat.”
Relativity is tasked with launching the probe, using its Terran-R rocket, which is under development and has its first launch scheduled in 2026. Impulse, which is building the lander, is at this point simply trying to develop its first small rocket engine. It appears therefore that this proposed Mars lander is designed mostly to make NASA willing to consider it when it starts hiring private companies to land probes on Mars. Its chances of launching in ’26 is quite small.
SuperBIT high altitude astronomical balloon completes mission
The Antennae galaxy, one of four SuperBIT images released.
Click for original image.
After almost forty days circling Antarctica and taking high resolution images of galaxies and nebula, NASA SuperBIT high altitude astronomical balloon completed its mission today, landing in Argentina.
Having identified a safe landing area over southern Argentina, balloon operators from NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas, sent flight termination commands at 8:37 a.m. EDT, May 25. The 18.8-million-cubic-foot (532,000-cubic-meter) balloon then separated from the payload rapidly deflating, and the payload floated safely to the ground on a parachute touching down in an unpopulated area 66 nautical miles (122 kilometers) northeast of Gobernador Gregores, Argentina. NASA coordinated with Argentine officials prior to ending the balloon mission; recovery of the payload and balloon is in progress.
During its nearly 40-day journey, the balloon completed a record five full circuits about the Southern Hemisphere’s mid-latitudes, maintaining a float altitude around 108,000 feet. In the coming days, the predicted flight path would have taken the balloon more southerly with little exposure to sunlight, creating some risk in maintaining power to the balloon’s systems, which are charged via solar panels. The land-crossing created an opportunity to safely conclude the flight and recover the balloon and payload.
The picture above, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, has incredible resolution, illustrating the advantage of flying a telescope on a high altitude balloon.
May 24, 2023 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
» Read more
Naomi Priest & Saskia van Gerven – The Boxer
An evening pause: A beautiful cover of Paul Simon’s classic.
Hat tip Alton Blevins.
May 24, 2023 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
- Next-to-last Delta-4-Heavy launch scheduled for June 21, 2023
The payload is a National Reconnaissance Office surveillance satellite.
- Progress freighter today docked with ISS, a little more than four hours after launch
It will remain at ISS until November.
- China releases new designs for its proposed Long March 8 rocket
The tweet implies China has abandoned developing reusability on this rocket but none of this means much, as at this point it is merely engineering by powerpoint.
Knobs on the floor of a Martian caldera
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 14, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and shows what the scientists have dubbed as “enigmatic knobs” located on the caldera floor of a Martian shield volcano.
The knobs themselves, while puzzling, aren’t that interesting on their own. They are no more than 100 to 200 feet high, and are relatively featureless. Since most lack a pit at their peaks, they are probably not some form of small volcanic vent, though this conclusion is uncertain. The location, at about 30 degrees south latitude, suggests the faint possibility of near surface ice, which could make these mud volcanoes, or a very specific Arctic-type permafrost mound dubbed pingos, but once again the lack of any central pit at their peaks makes these origins also doubtful.
What the knobs however revealed to me was a giant Martian shield volcano I had never noticed before, even though it was hiding in plain sight.
» Read more
Spaceport startup launches small amateur rockets from ship
A company dubbed The Spaceport Company on May 22, 2023 launched two small amateur rockets from a ship in the Gulf of Mexico in order to demonstrate the logistics of such launches in advance of developing a floating launchpad.
The Spaceport Company, based in northern Virginia, launched on Monday 4-inch and 6-inch diameter rockets from a vessel about 30 miles south of Gulfport, Miss. The one-year-old company wanted to demonstrate its operations and logistics, which included getting approval from federal regulators, before developing larger floating platforms that would send satellites into orbit.
These offshore launches, as small as they were, were the first such ocean launches in U.S. history.
It appears that the company wants to offer an alternative launch option that might avoid the problems created by regulators in the UK that destroyed Virgin Orbit.
Launch of Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser now scheduled for six month window opening in August
After years of delays, Sierra Space’s first Dream Chaser reusable mini-shuttle, dubbed Tenacity, is now scheduled for launch during the six month mission to ISS of a crew scheduled for launch in August.
Dream Chaser’s first flight on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is expected while Crew-7 is aboard and two of those crew members, NASA’s Jasmin Moghbeli and JAXA’s Satoshi Furukawa, recently trained on it. JAXA and NASA formally announced Furukawa’s assignment to Crew-7 today. Furukawa, Moghbeli, ESA’s Andreas Mogensen and a Russian cosmonaut whose assignment has not been officially announced yet, are expected to launch in mid-August for a 6-month stay on the ISS.
The exact launch date within that mission has not yet been determined. It will largely depend scheduling, fitting it in with other launches to the station, assuming Tenacity’s construction is finished in time. That construction began in 2015, and has taken three to four years longer than first announced.
Bankrupt Virgin Orbit is dead, its assets purchased by a variety of different companies
After failing to find a single buyer for the whole company, Virgin Orbit is now officially dead as a company, its assets broken up during bankruptcy proceedings and purchased by several different companies.
Rocket Lab paid $16.1 million for Virgin Orbit’s main manufacturing facility in California, which it intends to use for developing its larger Neutron rocket. Stratolaunch paid $17 million for the company’s 747 airplane and related equipment. Launcher, a former rocket startup that is now owned by the space station startup Vast, paid $2.7 for the company’s test site in Mojave, California, which it plans to use for static fire engine tests of a rocket engine it is developing for sale to others. A liquidation company purchased other assets, while the various LauncherOne rockets under construction remain unsold.
It is essential the reasons for this failure are made very clear. The destruction of this company occurred because regulators in the United Kingdom prevented it from launching from within the UK for almost half a year, during which it could not perform other launches elsewhere and therefore earn revenue. It then ran very low on cash, and when the UK launch failed in January, the company no longer had the resources to weather to time necessary to complete the investigation, fix the problem that caused the failure, and resume launches.
For other rocket startups, it is very important to consider this story before committing to launching in the UK. where you will face major bureaucratic obstacles from its government. Until there is evidence that something has changed, it might be better to consider other launch sites.
Russia launches Progress with cargo to ISS
Russia today used its Soyuz-2 rocket to launch a new Progress freighter to ISS, with its docking to the station to occur shortly.
The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
34 SpaceX
19 China
7 Russia
4 Rocket Lab
The U.S. still leads China 38 to 19 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 38 to 32. SpaceX by itself now trails the entire world, including American companies, 34 to 36.
Ekaterina Yukhnova – Sarabanda
An evening pause: By J.S. Bach.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
Webb and Chandra take composite X-ray/infrared images of four famous objects
Click for original image.
Astronomers have now used the Chandra X-ray Observatory and Webb Space Telescope (working in the infrared) to produce spectacular composite false-color X-ray/infrared images of four famous heavenly objects.
To the right is the composite taken of the Eagle Nebula, also known as Messier 16. It was also dubbed the Pillars of Creation when it was one of the first Hubble images taken after the telescope’s mirror focus was fixed in 1993. From the caption:
The Webb image shows the dark columns of gas and dust shrouding the few remaining fledgling stars just being formed. The Chandra sources, which look like dots, are young stars that give off copious amounts of X-rays. (X-ray: red, blue; infrared: red, green, blue)
The other images include star cluster NGC 346 in a nearby galaxy, the spiral galaxy NGC 1672, and the face-on spiral galaxy Messier 74.
May 23, 2023 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s string Jay.
- Virgin Orbit’s chief operating office gets lump-sum cash severance payment in bankruptcy auction
Other sources tell me that the company’s assets are going to sold off piecemeal, as no single buyer was found to buy it whole. Expect more news by tomorrow.
- Virgin Orbit’s 747 meanwhile completed another flight
This flight was probably done to satisfy the potential buyer, thought to be Stratolaunch.
- ESA looking for commercial companies to provide cargo services to ISS, followed by commercial space stations
It seems the European Space Agency (ESA) has finally decided to stop trying to build things and become customers of European companies. This is excellent news. It will be great to get some space competition from Europe.
- China wants its own pseudo-companies to provide a cargo ferrying service for China’s space station
It seems everyone is getting into the act, encouraging competition. China however will be hindered by the reality that the government there really controls everything. Its pseudo-private companies are only make-believe independent. In the end the government dictates everything.
Frozen waves of Martian lava?
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on March 17, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The science team labeled this a terrain sample image, which implies it was taken not as part of any specific request, but to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule in order to maintain its proper temperature.
What are we looking at? This stippled terrain with curved ridges actually extends quite a distance beyond this image. A MRO context camera picture taken on July 22, 2020 shows its full extent, about 10 miles wide but extending to the north and south about 30 miles total, butting up against a north-south mountain chain to its east that is about seventy miles long with its highest peak about 8,000 feet above this plain.
» Read more