Category: Behind The Black

UAE engineers shift Al-Amal’s orbit to do fly-bys of Mars moon Deimos

9:53 am

Engineers from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) yesterday revealed that they are in the process of changing the orbit of their Al-Amal Mars orbiter so that it will be able to do several close fly-bys of the Martian moon Deimos.

Two of the three required manoeuvres have already been made, allowing it to reach a new orbit between 20,000km and 43,000km with a 25-degree incline towards the planet. “Previously, we didn’t have any reason to move the orbit,” Ms Al Matroushi said. “But now we’re exploring a new adventure and science mission.”

Engineers are using the probe’s three main science instruments to capture images and data of the moon. These include an exploration imager ― a high-resolution camera ― to photograph the moon, and the infrared and ultraviolet spectrometers to measure its temperature and observe its thermophysical properties, including its regolith, or dust.

The first Deimos fly-by took place in late January, and as the probe moves to its closest approach to the moon, it will take high-resolution images.

Eventually Al-Amal will dip as close as 60 miles of Deimos.

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FCC approves the first 3,000+ satellites in Amazon’s Kuiper constellation

9:46 am

FCC has now given Amazon its license to launch the first 3,236 satellites in its Kuiper internet constellation, including with that license new de-orbiting requirements that exceed the FCC’s actual statutory authority.

The Federal Communications Commission approved Amazon’s plan Feb. 8 to deploy and operate 3,236 broadband satellites, subject to conditions that include measures for avoiding collisions in low Earth orbit (LEO).

Amazon got initial FCC clearance for its Ka-band Project Kuiper constellation in 2020 on the condition that it secured regulatory approval for an updated orbital debris mitigation plan. The FCC said its conditional approval of this mitigation plan allows “Kuiper to begin deployment of its constellation in order to bring high-speed broadband connectivity to customers around the world.” The conditions include semi-annual reports that Kuiper must give the FCC to detail the collision avoidance maneuvers its satellites have made, whether any have lost the ability to steer away from objects, and other debris risk indicators.

In the order, the FCC also requires Kuiper to ensure plans to de-orbit satellites after their seven-year mission keep inhabitable space stations in addition to the International Space Station in mind.

According to the license, Amazon must launch 1,600 of these satellites by 2026.

The de-orbit requirements are part of the FCC’s recent regulatory power grab, and has no legal basis. The FCC’s statutory authority involves regulating the frequency of signals satellites use, as well as acting as a traffic cop to make sure the orbits of different satellites do not interfere with other satellites. Nowhere has Congress given it the right to determine the lifespan of satellites, or the method in which they are de-orbited.

Right now however we no longer live in a republic run by elected officials. In Washington it is the bureaucracy that is in charge, Congress being too weak, divided, and corrupt to defend its legal power. Thus, the FCC can easily grab new powers that it has no right to have.

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ESA successfully unfurls solar sail from cubesat

9:32 am

The European Space Agency (ESA) has successfully unfurled a solar sail from a cubesat in order to test using that sail to help de-orbit that cubesat more quickly.

The sail was deployed from a package measuring 3.93 by 3.93 by 3.93 inches (10 by 10 by 10 centimeters). The unfurling process was captured by an integrated camera onboard the Ion satellite carrier, which is operated by the Italian company D-Orbit.

The satellite will eventually burn up in the atmosphere, providing a quicker, residue-free method of disposal, according to ESA.

A short video of that unfurling can be viewed here.

This flight was intended as a proof of concept. Thus, ESA like many similar NASA test projects will now close the project down, which is dubbed ADEO, having no specific plans to do anything with what was learned. Private cubesat companies, however, might adopt this solar sail deployment technology, but I suspect less for de-orbit purposes but instead as a method of maneuvering their satellite in orbit.

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Astronomers find ring around distant dwarf planet Quaoar

9:22 am

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers have confirmed the existence of an uneven ring encircling the dwarf planet Quaoar, orbiting far enough from the planet that, according to present theories, the ring should have quickly coalesced into a small Moon.

At 1,110 km (690 miles) in diameter Quaoar is one of the largest objects known in the outer solar system. Its single moon, named Weywot, spans about 160 km and was discovered in Hubble images in 2007. But the first signs of material around Quaoar didn’t come until 2018; even then, evidence was insufficient to call it a ring, says Morgado. He began studying Quaoar in 2020 with the European Space Agency’s CHEOPS space telescope, originally designed to find and characterize exoplanets. Rather than looking for exoplanet transits, Morgado used CHEOPS to observe stellar occultations, when Quaoar passed in front of distant stars and momentarily blocked their light.

Now Morgado has extended his work, working with others to observe Quaoar’s stellar occultations using other telescopes. The team first predicted a few occultations and recorded them. Then, after those observations hinted at a ring, the researchers went back through previous occultation records. “We saw the ring in nine different regions, from observations taken between 2018 and 2021,” Morgado explains.

In Nature, the team reports the presence of a ring 4,100 kilometers from the center of Quaoar, far beyond its classical Roche limit of 1,780 km. Morgado says the ring is dense and irregular. “It has a very thin region about 5 km wide and also a large region about 300 km wide, depending on which part of the ring was probed,” he notes. If the material could all be collected into a single moon, it would be about 10 km in diameter, less than a tenth of Weywot’s size.

According to astronomers, they would expect such a ring at that distance to coalesce in just a matter of decades. Either their theories of the Roche limit are incorrect, or the creation of this ring is very very recent, caused by the collusion of two objects that were orbiting Quaoar.

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Progress freighter launched to ISS

9:10 am

Russia today completed its second launch of 2023, successfully using its Soyuz-2 rocket to send a Progess freighter on its way to ISS.

The capsule will dock with the leaking Zvezda module on ISS on February 11th.

The 2023 launch race:

9 SpaceX
5 China
2 Russia
1 Rocket Lab
1 Japan

American private enterprise still leads China 10 to 5 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 10 to 8.

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Update on CAPSTONE in lunar orbit

8:58 pm

Link here. The key takeaway is that this commercial privately built and operated lunar smallsat is doing what it was designed to do, even as its operators continue to overcome periodic technical problems.

For example, beginning January 26th the spacecraft stopped receiving commands from ground controllers. The problem solved itself when on February 6th “an automatic command-loss timer rebooted” the spacecraft. Meanwhile,

CAPSTONE has completed more than 12 orbits in its near-rectilinear halo orbit – the same orbit [that will be used by Lunar] Gateway – surpassing one of the mission’s objectives to achieve at least six orbits. The mission team has performed two orbit maintenance maneuvers in this time. These maneuvers were originally scheduled to happen once per orbit, but the mission team was able to reduce the frequency while maintaining the correct orbit. This reduces risk and complexity for the mission and informs plans for future spacecraft flying in this orbit, like Gateway.

Essentially, mission controllers are figuring out the best and most efficient methods for eventually maintaining Lunar Gateway’s orbit around the Moon, when it gets there.

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Engineers struggle to salvage Lunar Flashlight cubesat

8:52 pm

Because of thruster failures shortly after its December 11, 2022, NASA’s technology test lunar orbiter cubesat Lunar Flashlight has been unable to reach its planned orbit around the Moon.

Instead, first engineers have attempted an improvisation with the one thruster that had not initially failed, and when that did not work are now hoping to instead use the Earth’s gravity to shift its present path so that it will periodically fly over the Moon’s south pole, when it could possible still use its lasers reflectometer to gather data in the permanently shadowed craters there.

[Other than the thrusters, t]he rest of the CubeSat’s onboard systems are fully functional, and the mission recently successfully tested its four-laser reflectometer. This mini-instrument is the first of its kind and is designed and calibrated to seek out surface ice inside the permanently shadowed craters at the Moon’s South Pole.

As a engineering test satellite, everything that has happened has been to the good, as it has allowed these engineers to push this cutting edge cubesat technology to the limit.

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Midori- Variations on “The Last Rose of Summer” by Ernst

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Performed live 1990, four days before her 19th birthday. As every single commenter at the youtube page correctly notes, this is an incredibly difficult piece. “Many great violinists won’t play this in public, or even record it.” Just watch and see. If you admire great guitar players, you will be astounded by some of the moves she performs.

Hat tip Judd Clark.

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February 8, 2023 Quick space links

4:47 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

 

 

 

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Dormant volcanic vent on Mars

12:36 pm

Dormant volcanic vent on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on November 19, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the science team labels “Intersecting Fissures.”

These fissures stand out distinctly on this terrain. If you look at an MRO context camera image, showing a wider view, you can see that the surrounding plain is relatively featureless, with few craters. Except for some strange and inexplicable dark streaks close by to the east, some mottled but flat terrain to the north, and a long but very faint similar east-west fissure to the south, this runelike fissure is the only major topological feature for miles around.

That context camera image also shows that this fissure sits on top of a very faint bulge, with hints that material had flowed downhill from the fissure’s western and southern outlets. Located very close to the equator, it is unlikely that any of those flow features are glacial, and in fact they do not have that appearance in the context camera picture. Instead, they have the look of Martian lava, fast-moving and far less viscous than Earth-lava, and thus able to cover large areas much more quickly.

Thus, all the evidence says that this feature is a dormant volcanic vent, sitting on a flood lava plain. And the overview map below cements this conclusion.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Previously blacklisted Oregon professor sues university for being further blacklisted because he tweeted “all men are created equal.”

11:42 am

Bruce Gilley
Bruce Gilley of Portland State University

They’re coming for you next: Professor Bruce Gilley of Portland State University in Oregon, who previously had a peer-reviewed paper on colonialism withdrawn from publication because of death threats, has now sued the university because the former communication manager for its Division of Equity and Inclusion blocked him from an internal college Twitter discussion group because he had the nerve to tweet “all men are created equal.”

You can read his lawsuit complaint here [pdf]. Gilley not only sued the university’s Division of Equity and Inclusion, he also sued directly Tova Stabin, the communications manager who blocked him.

What makes the case interesting is that the day after he filed his lawsuit, the university unblocked him and its lawyer sent him an apologetic letter. Here is part of that letter, as quoted in the lawsuit complaint:
» Read more

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The landing sites for two upcoming lunar landers

9:51 am

Map of Moon's south pole
Click for interactive map.

The approximate landing sites for two different lunar landers have now been revealed.

The map to the right, with the south pole indicated by the white cross, shows both, plus the planned landing site for Russia’s Luna-25 lander, presently targeting a summer ’23 launch. The green dot marks Luna-25’s landing site, inside Boguslawsky Crater.

The red dot marks the landing site in for India’s Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander/rover, now tentatively scheduled for launch by the end of ’23. This mission will put a small rover on the surface, and is essentially a redo of the failed Chandrayaan-2 mission from 2019.

The yellow dot in Malapert-A crater is now the likely landing site for Intuitive Machines Nova-C lander. This site is a change from the spacecraft’s original landing site in Oceanus Procellarum (where Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander is now going). In making this change, the launch of Nova-C also slipped to late June 2023, from the previously announced launch date of early 2023.

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ULA stacks Vulcan-Centaur rocket for ground tests prior to first launch

9:14 am

ULA’s new Vulcan-Centaur rocket has finally been stacked in the company’s assembly facility at Cape Canaveral, ready to be rolled out for its first launchpad fueling tests prior to its first launch, tentatively scheduled for the end of March.

The odds of that launch date being met is quite uncertain. Right now neither the rocket’s payloads nor its solid rocket strap-on boosters have been added, and before that will happen the company plans to first roll the rocket out to the launchpad, do fueling and countdown tests. It will then roll it back to the assembly building to stack those components, and then roll it back to the launchpad for launch.

To meet that launch target everything must go perfectly during these preliminary operations, something that is generally unexpected for a rocket’s first launch. ULA however has an advantage, in that it has already done much of this testing using a dummy Vulcan, and it also has decades of experience launching rockets.

Much rides on this first launch. The payloads include Astrobotic’s first lunar lander, Peregrine, as well as Amazon’s first two test satellites for its Kuiper internet constellation. Also, ULA needs to complete two successful launches in order to get certified to begin its commercial launches for the military.

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Virgin Orbit narrows cause of launch failure to $100 component

9:04 am

Though its investigation is not completed, Virgin Orbit has narrowed the cause of its January 9th launch failure from Cornwall to a $100 component in the second stage engine of its LaunchOne rocket.

Speaking on a panel at the SmallSat Symposium in Mountain View, California, Dan Hart said it was still premature to formally declare the root cause of the failed Jan. 9 flight of the company’s LauncherOne rocket on the “Start Me Up” mission from Spaceport Cornwall in England. However, he said while that investigation continues, evidence was pointing to a component in the rocket’s second stage engine.

“Everything points to, right now, a filter that was clearly there when we assembled the rocket but was not there as the second stage engine started, meaning it was dislodged and caused mischief downstream,” he said. He didn’t go into details about that component, other than to say that it was not an expensive item. “This is like a $100 part that took us out.”

Hart said the company would no longer use that filter and was “looking broadly” at other potential fixes.

No timeline as to when the company will complete the investigation or resume launches has been released. Since both the FAA and the UK’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch are involved, we should expect it to take longer than necessary.

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Relativity’s Terran-1 rocket on launchpad for final tests prior to first launch

8:59 am

Relativity has once again stacked its Terran-1 rocket on its launchpad at Cape Canaveral for its final ground tests prior to first launch, hopefully later this month.

The launch date has not been announced, nor has a specific schedule for those tests, which will likely include several dress rehearsal countdowns where the rocket will be fueled as if for launch.

Terran-1 is a smallsat rocket, most of which has been 3D printed. If successful, Relativity plans to follow it in 2024 with the 3D printed Terran-R, which would be comparable in size and power to SpaceX’s Falcon 9. The company also claims that rocket will be entirely reusable.

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February 7, 2023 Quick space links

4:40 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

 

 

 

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Today’s blacklisted American: Leftist professor fired by university for questioning its racist agenda

12:20 pm

Ryan Hall
Ryan Hall

They’re coming for you next: English instructor Ryan Hall, a self-described leftist “who has never voted for a conservative in my life,” was fired by Western Kentucky University when he questioned its leftist and racist Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) agenda that was also leaving students fearful to speak their minds out of fear of being punished.

From the second link:

“While I may not categorize myself as a conservative, the assaults on free speech, self-reliance, meritocracy, the family, science, and truth should alarm everyone,” Hall said in an email interview this month with The College Fix. “Many have pointed out that our institutions of higher education increasingly look like the temples for a state religion attempting to create hierarchies based on byzantine and bogus ideas; such systems have never worked out well historically, no matter how many newly minted sinecures suggest otherwise,” he said.

Hall told The Fix he had canceled all of his classes, five of them, for a week while he confronted his university about its bias in February 2022. “They fired me that same month after a few days of discussion. … They fired me because I would not return until we reached an agreeable solution, not because of the classes I had canceled, according to the email I received,” Hall said.

The first link above goes to an op-ed Hall wrote for an organization called the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism, which appears to be a loose coalition of Substack writers opposed to the bigoted policies of most universities. In that op-ed Hall added these facts as to why he challenged his superiors at Western Kentucky:
» Read more

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Perseverance and Ingenuity begin the journey up onto Jezero Crater’s delta

11:17 am

Perseverance's view ahead, February 7, 2023
To see the original images, go here and here.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

After two years of detailed exploration on the floor of Jezero crater, the rover Perseverance and its Mars helicopter scout Ingenuity have finally begun the climb up onto the delta that in eons past flowed into Jezero Crater.

The panorama above was created from two Perseverance images taken by its right navigation camera on February 7, 2023 (Sol 699) (here and here), looking forward and uphill. On the overview map to the right the blue dot marks Perseverance’s location, with the yellow lines indicating the approximate area covered by this mosaic. The red dotted line in both images indicate approximately the rover’s eventually path.

Ingenuity’s present position is marked by the green dot. This is where the helicopter landed after completing its 42nd flight on February 4, 2023. Planned to fly 823 feet for 137 seconds, Ingenuity actually flew a slightly shorter distance, 814 feet, in that length of time. The difference is probably the result of Ingenuity’s need to find a good landing spot, and the one it found was slightly closer to its take-off point.

The flight however took the helicopter uphill, scouting the terrain that Perseverance plans to drive. While there is no terrain here that is much of a challenge for the rover, having the helicopter’s ground images in advance allows its operators to plan longer drives, as those images will help tell them what obstacles to avoid and route to choose.

The green oval indicates the area that Perseverance has left its first ten core samples for later pickup and return to Earth.

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Space Force to do major cleanup of diesel fuel spill on Hawaiian mountaintop

9:36 am

Space Force officials yesterday announced that it will to do major cleanup of the diesel fuel spill that occurred on the top of the mountain Haleakala on the Hawaiian island of Maui last week.

The plan is to remove about 200 cubic yards of fuel-tainted soil, test the base of the dig, and then determine if more soil has to be removed.

The official making this announcement apologized repeatedly for the spill, so much so it was almost as if he was on his face on the ground, kow-towing. It of course made no difference. The leftist race-baiters in Hawaii made it clear where they stood on the matter.

On Friday, the Hawaiian rights group Kākoʻo Haleakalā called for the removal of all telescopes from the peak of Haleakala. The military “showcased their incompetence and lack of human decency when they allowed more than 700 gallons of diesel fuel to be spilled atop Haleakalā,” the group said in a statement.

“This is just the most recent example of how U.S. imperialism and military hegemony is protected in the Pacific while Hawaiians are ignored and our ʻāina is violated,” the statement said, using the Hawaiian term for land.

Let me translate: “We hate whites and America, and we want you out of Hawaii, now. And if you don’t go, we want you to cede all control to us, so that we treat you as the inferior beings we consider you to be.”

Note too that this group’s agenda is identical to the agenda of the race-baiters on the Big Island who are blocking construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope and are forcing the removal of telescopes there.

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