Category: Behind The Black

Voyager-1 now returning science data from all working instruments

8:59 am

Engineers have now resumed full science operations on Voyager-1, presently more 15 billion miles from Earth, after computer issues shut the spacecraft down in November 2023.

The team partially resolved the issue in April when they prompted the spacecraft to begin returning engineering data, which includes information about the health and status of the spacecraft. On May 19, the mission team executed the second step of that repair process and beamed a command to the spacecraft to begin returning science data. Two of the four science instruments returned to their normal operating modes immediately. Two other instruments required some additional work, but now, all four are returning usable science data.

The four instruments study plasma waves, magnetic fields, and particles. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are the only spacecraft to directly sample interstellar space, which is the region outside the heliosphere — the protective bubble of magnetic fields and solar wind created by the Sun.

Voyager-2 is 12 billion miles from Earth. Both spacecraft are using what are the longest continously running computers ever built, having been turned on 47 years ago. Both spacecraft however do not have much longer to live, despite the recent fixes. The nuclear power source for both no longer provides enough power to run all their instruments, and will run down completely sometime in 2026, as expected, when operations will finally cease.

The spacecraft however will continue to fly out into interstellar space. In 40,000 years or so Voyager-1 will get within 1.6 light years of the star Gliese 445 in the constellation Camelopardalis, while at the same time Voyager 2 will pass 1.7 light-years from the star Ross 248 in the constellation Andromeda.

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Starliner’s return delayed again

8:44 am

NASA today announced that the return of Starliner from ISS, carrying two astronauts, has been delayed again, from June 18th to June 22nd.

It appears engineers want to perform more tests of the the spacecraft’s attitude thrusters before undocking. The failure of some thrusters during docking on June 6th has raised some concerns.

NASA and Boeing teams also prepared plans for Starliner to fire seven of its eight aft-facing thrusters while docked to the station to evaluate thruster performance for the remainder of the mission. Known as a “hot fire test,” the process will see two bursts of the thrusters, totaling about a second, as part of a pathfinder process to evaluate how the spacecraft will perform during future operational missions after being docked to the space station for six months. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted words are kind of a lie. While there is no doubt this test will tell engineers a lot about future operations, such a test, while attached to ISS, would never have been approved had the thrusters all worked as planned during docking. The real reason for this static fire test is to make sure the thrusters will work once undocked.

If they don’t work, there could be a safety issue putting the astronauts in Starliner for return to Earth.

NASA plans a press briefing on June 18th at noon (Eastern) to outline in better detail the situation.

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June 13, 2024 Quick space links

3:51 pm

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • Soviet cosmonaut Vyacheslav Zudov dies at 82

    • He commanded Soyuz 23 in 1976, which because of a failed antenna was unable to dock with Salyut-5 and returned to Earth after only two days in space, crashing through the ice on Lake Tengiz and thus becoming the USSR’s first and only manned splashdown.

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Study: Dust removal at Jezero 9x greater than InSight landing area

11:41 am

Figure 2 from the paper
Figure 2 from the paper. Click for original.

Using data from the Mars rover Perseverance, scientists have concluded that dust removal rate in Jezero crater is almost ten times greater than where InSight landed in western Elysium Planitia.

The graph, figure 2 from their paper, illustrates that differents starkly. From their abstract:

Dust removal is almost 10 times larger than at InSight’s location: projections indicate that surfaces at Jezero will be periodically partially cleaned. The estimations of the effect of the accumulated dust as a function of time are encouraging for solar-powered missions to regions with similar amounts of dust lifting, which might be determined from orbital data on where dust storms originate, dust devils or their tracks are found, or seasonal albedo changes are noted.

In other words, it might be practical to send solar powered rovers to different places on Mars, if first research was done to see if the conditions there would regularly clear dust from those panels.

This research confirms what had been implied by the different experiences of landers/rovers in different places on Mars. InSight landed near the equator in a region south of the giant shield volcano Elysium Mons. It only survived four years, with steadily lower energy levels, because no wind or dust devil ever cleared the accumulating dust on its solar panels. Spirit meanwhile landed about 1,500 miles southwest of InSight, yet its power levels were still healthy after more than five years of operations, when those operations ended because the rover could no longer move. The rover Opportunity meanwhile on the other side of the planet lasted more than fourteen years. Both rovers relied on solar power, like InSight, but their solar panels kept getting cleared of dust by wind and dust devils.

It is unclear if this wind research has been done for Europe’s Franklin rover, presently scheduled to land in Oxia Planum in 2028. Franklin will rely on solar panels, and though its nominal mission on the surface is only supposed to last seven months, it is always assumed it will continue until the rover fails.

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June 13, 2024 Zimmerman/Pratt on Texas podcast

10:24 am

Robert Pratt has now posted a new 30-minute interview with me as part of his Pratt on Texas podcast, discussing a whole range of recent blacklist stories, and their larger context within our sadly presently debased culture.

This is part one of a two part interview, the second half of which Pratt plans to post next week.

That podcast is embedded below. It can also be listened to here.
» Read more

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A new lawsuit filed against Elon Musk by former SpaceX employees

10:12 am

Elon Musk, a target for destruction by the left
Elon Musk, a target for destruction

The lawfare won’t stop until morale improves! A new lawsuit has been filed against Elon Musk by eight former SpaceX employees, who now accuse him of sexually harassing them by his sometimes pointed tweets on X, calling those tweets “juvenile, grotesque sexual banter.”

The suit also says Musk’s tweets “had the wholly foreseeable and intentional result of encouraging other employees to engage in similar conduct.”

At SpaceX’s Hawthorne offices, the suit claims, company meetings and employees mimicked Musk’s humor. At meetings, the lawsuit alleges, senior engineers called mechanical parts “chodes” and “schlongs.” A camera that was placed on the bottom of a second-stage Falcon rocket was referred to as the “Upskirt Camera,” and a structure used by astronauts to transfer from SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station was called the “Fun Tunnel,” a euphemism for anal sex.

Read the whole article. The complaints are quite hilarious. These employees need to get a life. This is all silly stuff, hardly worth even two nanoseconds of concern.

Unfortunately, these anti-Musk employees do have a life, and it is a very sad one, consumed wholly with destroying Musk, not accomplishing anything worthwhile on their own. These eight former employees are the same ones who were fired after they published an internal letter in SpaceX calling for others in the company to denounce Musk for his tweets. Following their firing they also instigated a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) suit against Musk, which is presently suspended because SpaceX is claiming the NLRB’s very existence is unconstitutional, and no further action on the complaint will occur until the courts decide on that claim.

This new lawsuit is simply another example of new harassment of Musk by these former employees.

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Astronauts cancel ISS spacewalk due to “spacesuit discomfort issue”

9:55 am

UPDATE: A later update by NASA provided no new information on why the spacewalk was canceled, but did announce a new date for the EVA, June 24th, while adding “The crew members on the station are healthy, and spacesuits are functioning as expected..”

My guess is that one of the astronauts had a personal but minor health issue, that out of privacy concerns NASA cannot reveal.

Original post:
——————
A spacewalk planned for today was postponed when the two astronauts involved stopped putting on their spacesuits and instead put them aside “due to spacesuit discomfort issue.”

That is all we know at this point. Was the issue a technical problem with the suits? Or was it something related to the astronauts themselves, such as one experienced stomach problems for instance?

No more details are as yet available. The NASA-designed American spacesuits used on spacewalks on ISS are very complicated and prone to technical problems. If that was the cause it could result in a serious delay before the next spacewalk takes place.

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FAA announces schedule for new EIS public meetings on SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy operations at Cape Canaveral

9:48 am

FAA has now announced the schedule of public meetings in connection with the new environmental impact statement (EIS) it is doing for SpaceX’s proposed Starship/Superheavy operations at Cape Canaveral.

On June 12 and 13, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will host a series of public scoping meetings to inform the public and answer questions about SpaceX’s proposal to launch Starship from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A). There will also be a virtual meeting on June 17 for those unable to attend in person.

…Among those attending the public hearings will be representative of the Department of the Air Force, the U.S. Space Force, the U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, Canaveral National Seashore and SpaceX.

FAA officials claim this new EIS is required, after doing one only five years ago, because of major changes in SpaceX’s design of Superheavy. For example, it originally planned to land the rocket on a drone ship. Now it wants to catch it with the arms on the launch tower.

The FAA’s argument for this new EIS might sound plausible at first glance, but these regulations were never intended to require new environmental statements every time a project underwent changes. The goal was to make sure the environment would not be impacted by the work, and the first 2019 EIS achieved that. None of the changes SpaceX is proposing change significantly its impact on the local environment.

Moreover, the FAA has three-quarters of a century of empirical data at Cape Canaveral proving that spaceports help the local environment, not hurt it. We know without doubt that none of SpaceX’s launch plans will do harm. The FAA should get out of the way.

Instead, it is sticking its nose into everything. This new EIS is merely mission creep, government bureaucrats both covering their backsides while creating new work that increases their power and justifies bigger budgets for their existence.

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Review of 4th Superheavy/Starship flight; FAA clears SpaceX for next flight

9:32 am

Link here. The article provides a detailed step-by-step review of everything that happened on the fourth Superheavy/Starship orbital test flight on June 6, 2024, as well as describing the changes being applied to Starship and Superheavy due to that flight.

However, the article also included this announcement from the FAA, stating that it will not do its own mishap investigation on that flight.

The FAA assessed the operations of the SpaceX Starship Flight 4 mission. All flight events for both Starship and Super Heavy appear to have occurred within the scope of planned and authorized activities.

While this decision means SpaceX can go ahead with the fifth test launch as soon as it is ready — no longer delayed while it waits for the FAA to retype SpaceX’s investigation and then approve it — it is unclear whether this FAA decision will allow SpaceX to attempt a tower landing of Superheavy, with the tower’s arms catching the rocket.

If the FAA has not yet approved a tower landing, I suspect SpaceX will forgo that attempt on the next launch in order to get it off the ground as soon as possible, even as it pushes the FAA for such an approval for a subsequent launch.

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NASA accidently airs simulated medical emergency on ISS, panicking the public

9:18 am

NASA yesterday accidently aired an on-going drill where ground astronauts were simulating a serious medical emergency, causing public alarm because it appeared the emergency was on ISS itself.

The regular scheduled livestream was interrupted at 6:28 p.m. ET by an unidentified speaker — apparently a flight surgeon — liaising with the crew on the ISS on how to deal with a commander suffering from serious compression sickness.

The speaker advises the crew to “check his pulse one more time,” before placing the stricken astronaut inside a suit pumped full of pure oxygen. She says any action would be “best effort treatment” and better than doing nothing. “Unfortunately, the prognosis for Commander is relatively tenuous,” she says.

She says she is “concerned that there are some severe DCS [decompression sickness] hits” and tells the crew to get him in a suit as soon as possible. She mentions that there is a hospital in San Fernando, Spain, with hyperbaric treatment facilities, in an apparent suggestion of ordering an emergency evacuation from the space station.

But after fueling alarm among the space enthusiasts listening, NASA revealed that the scenario wasn’t real — the ISS crew were all safely asleep at the time.

It appears this was a training exercise on the ground. For reasons that have not been explained, the audio somehow got rerouted onto NASA’s public live stream channel, forcing the agency to quickly issue an explanation.

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Armenia signs Artemis Accords

5:13 pm

Armenia, formerly part of the Soviet Union, has now joined the American space alliance by signing the Artemis Accords, becoming the 43rd nation to do so.

This announcement came on the same day Armenia’s prime minister announced that the country was also leaving the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), created after the break-up of the Soviet Union and created from former U.S.S.R. provinces that are now separate nations.

Armenia’s ties with Russia, its long-time sponsor and ally, have grown increasingly strained after Azerbaijan waged a lightning military campaign in September to take the Karabakh region, ending three decades of ethnic Armenian separatist rule there.

Armenian authorities accused Russian peacekeepers who were deployed to Nagorno-Karabakh after a previous round of hostilities in 2020 of failing to stop Azerbaijan’s onslaught. Moscow, which has a military base in Armenia, rejected the accusations, arguing that its troops didn’t have a mandate to intervene.

It could also be that Armenian sees Russia as a hostile power, considering its invasion of the Ukraine. Russia’s failure to win quickly in the Ukraine and the bogged down nature of the war also make this a very good moment to break free from Russia. Putin doesn’t have the resources to invade another neighbor.

The Artemis Accords now includes these nations: Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Peru, Poland, Romania, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, the United States and Uruguay.

Whether it will do much depends wholly on what the U.S. does. Right now, the American government’s space effort is confused and incoherent. There is a lot of money being spread around, but not much getting accomplished.

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June 12, 2024 Quick space links

4:58 pm

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.

 

  • Scientist discovers another type of aurora

    • This phenomenon is similar to another new aurora type that scientists claim to have discovered in 2017 and stupidly dubbed “Steve,” a name so asinine I have found it impossible to take the whole thing seriously.

 

 

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A new Chicken Little report: The mega satellite constellations are going to destroy the ozone layer!

1:50 pm

The American Geophysical Union, where science is no longer practiced
The American Geophysical Union, where
science is no longer practiced

We’re all gonna die! According to a new paper touted today by the PR department of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), a new study has concluded — based on computer modeling — that the many giant satellite constellations totaling tens of thousands of satellites pose a risk to the ozone layer because the aluminium used in their structures that gets vaporized upon re-entry will interact with the ozone layer and destroy it.

You can read the paper here. From the abstract:

This paper investigates the oxidation process of the satellite’s aluminum content during atmospheric reentry utilizing atomic-scale molecular dynamics simulations. We find that the population of reentering satellites in 2022 caused a 29.5% increase of aluminum in the atmosphere above the natural level, resulting in around 17 metric tons of aluminum oxides injected into the mesosphere. The byproducts generated by the reentry of satellites in a future scenario where mega-constellations come to fruition can reach over 360 metric tons per year. As aluminum oxide nanoparticles may remain in the atmosphere for decades, they can cause significant ozone depletion.

The uncertainties and biases here are hard to count. First, it is a computer model (“Garbage in, garbage out”). Second, the simulations make many assumptions, most of which cannot be confirmed, or are simply absurd. For example, the model is based on a single “typcial, small satellite” coming from a specific orbit and elevation when we know these satellites will have many variations in size, make-up, and orbits. Third, the scientists admit they use “a worst-case scenario” for determining what would happen when the satellite re-enters the atmosphere.

Finally, and most damning, the whole premise of this threat is based on a somewhat implausive chain of chemical actions.
» Read more

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Perseverance looks up at the rim of Jezero Crater

1:01 pm

Panorama on June 10, 2024 by Perseverance
Click for full resolution. For original images, go here, here, here, and here.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time. The panorama above was created from four pictures taken on June 10, 2024 by the left navigation camera on the Mars rover Perseverance (captions found here, here, here, and here). It looks north at the nearest hill that forms the north part of the rim of Jezero Crater.

The overview map to the right provides context. The blue dot marks Perseverance’s present location, when it took these pictures. The yellow lines indicate the approximate area covered by the panorama. The red dotted line marks the rover’s planned route, while the white dotted line the route it has actually taken.

Because the rover is now at the base of this hill, it can no longer see the top of the crater’s rim. What it sees instead is the barren foothills of that rim, covered with dust, dunes, and many broken rocks.

As I have noted numerous times, the utter lack of life marks this as a truly alien landscape, compared to Earth. Nowhere on our home planet would you see terrain this empty of life. While NASA likes to claim that Perseverance’s main mission is the search for life on Mars, that claim is always a lie. It is very unlikely any life is going to be found here by Perseverance, and if that was its true scientific purpose it would never have been built nor launched.

What the scientists are doing is studying the alien geology of Mars, to try to understand how this utterly alien planet got to be the way it is now. Such knowledge is critical for the future explorers of space, as it will make it easier for them to understand the alien landscapes they will find elsewhere, within the solar system and eventually in other solar systems far beyond.

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Curiosity sees evidence of solar storm hitting Mars

12:11 pm

Charged particles from solar storm
Click to see original three-frame movie.

Cool image time! The picture to the right is a screen capture from a three-frame movie created from photos taken by one of the navigation cameras on the Mars rover Curiosity. The white streak and other smaller streaks were created by charged particles hitting the camera’s CCD detector on May 20, 2024, from a solar storm caused by the strong solar flares presently being pumped out by the Sun.

The mission regularly captures videos to try and catch dust devils, or dust-bearing whirlwinds. While none were spotted in this particular sequence of images, engineers did see streaks and specks – visual artifacts created when charged particles from the Sun hit the camera’s image detector. The particles do not damage the detector.

The images in this sequence appear grainy because navigation-camera images are processed to highlight changes in the landscape from frame to frame. When there isn’t much change — in this case, the rover was parked — more noise appears in the image.

Curiosity’s Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) measured a sharp increase in radiation at this time – the biggest radiation surge the mission has seen since landing in 2012.

The view of this picture is to the south, looking towards the top of Mount Sharp, though that peak, more than 25 miles away, is not visible because the mountain’s lower flanks are in the way. A second movie showing similar charged particle streaks was taken looking south, with the rim of Gale Crater barely visible 20-30 miles away.

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SpaceX retrieves its Dragon debris that fell in Canada in February

11:08 am

SpaceX yesterday sent a crew and a U-Haul truck to five different farms in Saskatchewan, Canada, to retrieve eight pieces of debris that came from the service module trunk of a Dragon cargo capsule when the trunk was de-orbited to burn up in the atmosphere in February.

I am certain SpaceX engineers want to find out why this debris survived its fall through the atmosphere, so as to better predict what will happen on future de-orbits. If they determine that more of Dragon’s service module survives re-entry than previously predicted, it will require a rethinking on where such de-orbits are planned, making sure they always occur over the ocean.

It also appears that an academic who doesn’t know much about space engineering showed up during this retrieval to talk to the press and attack SpaceX.

Samantha Lawler, a University of Regina astronomy professor, was at the farm when SpaceX employees arrived on Tuesday. She said SpaceX needs to be transparent about how its operations are affecting the atmosphere, and how incidents like this are dealt with.

Lawler was quoted more fully (and more embarrassingly) in this other news report:

“SpaceX has over 6,000 Starlink satellites in orbit that they claim will burn up completely when they re-enter. That comes to 23 re-entries per-day when they are at full capacity. If those re-entries are all making it to the ground, dropping hundred pound pieces of garbage, that will kill lots of people,” Lawler explained.

To claim that any Starlink satellites are threat to hit the ground proves Lawler knowns nothing about space engineering and is acting merely as a anti-SpaceX “Karen” who wants to harass the company. Starlink satellites are too small to pose a threat. Moreover, SpaceX from day one has acted responsibly to de-orbit them under a controlled manner.

Nonetheless, this incident in Canada suggests that more material from larger orbiting objects can reach the ground, and requires a rethinking as to where to de-orbit them.

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The gullies on Mars are caused by a variety of factors, linked to both water and carbon dioxide

10:46 am

The global distribution of gullies on Mars
Click for original image.

In doing a detailed global analysis of all the known gullies on Mars, scientists now believe the gullies are formed by a variety of factors, linked to both water and carbon dioxide as well as the planet’s radically changing rotational tilt — varying from 11 to 60 degrees — over time.

Noblet’s paper articulates a “hierarchy of factors” that describes where gullies occur, with well-supported explanations as to why they form in one place and not another. None of the explanations in this paper are new. What’s new is how Noblet and coworkers reconcile apparent contradictions and inconsistencies among other researchers’ explanations of gully formation, explaining why an explanation that works for one spot on Mars doesn’t work in another.

The map above, from their paper, shows the global distribution of the gullies, which appear to favor the same mid-latitudes where the planet’s glaciers are mostly found. The data from many different studies suggests that when the planet’s rotational tilt was high, these mid-latitudes regions were warmer, and the near-surface ice there would sublimate away to get redeposited at the poles. When this happened the sublimation would cause the pole-facing gullies to form.

The paper also suggests that any gullies changing today are likely the result of the sublimation of carbon dioxide, not water.

There is a lot more at the article at the link, which is an excellent summation of this research.

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Pentagon wants to buy from SpaceX its own 100-satellite Starshield constellation

10:21 am

The Pentagon is so impressed with its experience using SpaceX’s Starlink system as well as its military-hardened version dubbed Starshield that it is negotiating the purchase from SpaceX of its own 100-satellite Starshield constellation.

Col. Eric Felt, director of space architecture at the office of the assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, said the plan is to acquire a constellation of Starshield satellites by 2029, contingent upon receiving the necessary funding appropriations from Congress.

Speaking at SAE Media Group’s Milsatcom USA conference on June 10, Felt noted that the military has been an avid consumer of SpaceX’s commercial Starlink services, but also wants to take advantage of the company’s dedicated Starshield product line and procure a government-owned constellation. In a briefing slide presented at the conference, titled “Satcom 2029,” Felt showed the DoD’s notional future satcom architecture including more than 100 Starshield satellites.

If approved for funding from Congress, this Starshield constellation would be used in conjunction with other military communciations satellites, which could also include satellites provided by other satellite companies such as Amazon and its as-yet unlaunched Kuiper constellation. The main advantage for such a system is redundancy. It is very difficult for an enemy to take the system down, since it uses so many small satellites. It is also cheaper to maintain and upgrade.

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Research suggests a Mars mission will permanently damage a person’s kidneys

10:12 am

New research now suggests strongly that the exposure to cosmic rays during a three-year-long mission to Mars would cause permanent damage to a person’s kidneys.

The results indicated that both human and animal kidneys are ‘remodelled’ by the conditions in space, with specific kidney tubules responsible for fine tuning calcium and salt balance showing signs of shrinkage after less than a month in space. Researchers say the likely cause of this is microgravity rather than GCR [galactic cosmic rays], though further research is required to determine if the interaction of microgravity and GCR can accelerate or worsen these structural changes.

The primary reason that kidney stones develop during space missions had previously been assumed to be solely due to microgravity-induced bone loss that leads to a build-up of calcium in the urine. Rather, the UCL team’s findings indicated that the way the kidneys process salts is fundamentally altered by space flight and likely a primary contributor to kidney stone formation.

Perhaps the most alarming finding, at least for any astronaut considering a three-year round trip to Mars, is that the kidneys of mice exposed to radiation simulating GCR for 2.5 years experienced permanent damage and loss of function. [emphasis mine]

The study used samples “from over 40 Low Earth orbit space missions involving humans and mice, most of which were to the International Space Station, as well as 11 space simulations involving mice and rats.”

If these results are confirmed, it means that any interplanetary spaceship is going to require significant shielding. Having a safe haven they can go to during high energy solar events will not work, as cosmic rays arrive randomly at all times. This research thus tells us that we can’t simply add engines to the space station designs presently being built to send them to Mars. Instead, we need a heavy-lifte capability (such as Starship) to get the much heavier, well-shielded habitable modules into orbit.

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Stoke Space test fires its first stage engine for the first time

10:02 am

The rocket startup Stoke Space has successfully completed the first static fire test of the methane-fueled rocket engine that will be used on the first stage of its entirely reusable Nova rocket.

The engine, designed to produce up to 100,000 pounds-force of thrust, went up to 50% of its rated thrust in the two-second test. The goal of the test was to see how the engine started up and shut down, Andy Lapsa, chief executive of Stoke, said in an interview. “All of the complexity and a lot of the risk is in that startup transient and shutdown transient,” he said. “The duration of the test was short because the goal was to demonstrate the transient and then back out.”

The engine uses a design called full-flow staged combustion, where both the engine’s fuel and oxidizer — liquified natural gas and liquid oxygen, respectively — go through separate preburners before going into the main combustion chamber. That approach offers greater efficiency and a longer engine life, but is more complex to develop. It is currently used only on SpaceX’s Raptor engines that power its Starship vehicle.

The rocket’s upper stage uses hydrogen as its fuel, as well as a radical nozzle design. Instead of a single large nozzle, the thrust is released from a ring of tiny outlets at the permeter of the stage. It is hoped this design will better protect the system during re-entry from orbit, while allowing for more precise control upon landing, and thus make it possible to reuse the upper stage.

The first test launch is presently scheduled for 2025. This new engine test makes that date more realistic.

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Ed Stone, who ran the Voyager missions for a half century, passes away at 88

9:54 am

Ed Stone, who was the project scientist for both Voyager missions to the outer solar system and beyond for a half century, passed away at 88 on June 9, 2024.

From 1972 until his retirement in 2022, Stone served as the project scientist from NASA’s longest-running mission, Voyager. The two Voyager probes took advantage of a celestial alignment that occurs just once every 176 years to visit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. During their journeys, the spacecraft revealed the first active volcanoes beyond Earth on Jupiter’s moon Io, and an atmosphere rich with organic molecules on Saturn’s moon Titan. Voyager 2 remains the only spacecraft to fly by Uranus and Neptune, revealing Uranus’ unusual tipped magnetic poles, and the icy geysers erupting from Neptune’s moon Triton.

Stone was also head of JPL from 1991 to 2001, during the time it built and flew the Mars Pathfinder mission, which sent the first rover to Red Planet. That mission revitalized the entire American Mars exploration program for the next three decades.

Stone was one of the giants of American space exploration during its formative years. He leaves behind a legacy that will be difficult to match, highlighted most of all by both Voyager spacecraft, which outlived him.

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Starliner at ISS: One thruster shut down, another helium leak found, and a new valve issue

9:45 am

According to an update from NASA yesterday, engineers are evaluating three different on-going technical issues with Boeing’s Starliner capsule, presently docked at ISS.

First, of the 28 attitude thrusters on the capsule’s service module, one remains what NASA calls “deselected”, which means it is presently shut down and not in the loop during operations.

Ground teams plan to fire all 28 RCS thrusters after undocking to collect additional data signatures on the service module thrusters before the hardware is expended.

Since the service module is ejected and burns up in the atmosphere, they want to test each thruster beforehand, probably one-by-one to gather as much data as possible. They have to do this after undocking because testing the thrusters while attached to ISS is too risky.

Second, it appears engineers have detected a fifth small helium leak.
» Read more

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Moonlight Sonata

6:01 pm

An evening pause: I cannot confirm who the singer is, as he posts his name only in Japanese picture words. I also am not sure where the lyrics come from. Interesting though to hear someone sing this Beethoven music.

Hat tip Alton Blevins.

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June 11, 2024 Quick space links

3:23 pm

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.

 

 

 

 

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Today’s blacklisted American: Federal court rules conservative kids have no free speech rights

1:26 pm

The shirt that offended teachers at Nichols Middle School
Liam Morrison, wearing the evil shirt that he wore the
second time teachers at Nichols Middle School sent
him home.

They’re coming for you next: In a ruling that completely contradicts long standing court rulings that had insisted the first amendment allowed students to wear T-shirts and armbands with whatever political statements they wished, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit on June 9, 2024 ruled that a Massachusetts middle school had the right to censor and ban a 12-year-old boy wearing a shirt that said “There are only two genders.”

This story is a follow-up of a blacklist story from May 2023. At that time 12-year-old Liam Morrison was forced to leave Nichols Middle School when he refused to remove his T-shirt that said “There are only two genders.” He later came to class with the T-shirt shown in the picture to the right, with the words “only two” covered with the word “censored.” He was once again sent home, and subsequently his parents sued.

According to the court’s ruling this week (which you can read here), a student’s political clothing doesn’t have to cause any disturbances at all. All that matters is if school officials think it might (or they simply dislike the ideas expressed).
» Read more

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Evidence of giant asteroid collision in debris disk surrounding the star Beta Pictoris

9:48 am

Data difference between Spitzer and Webb
Click for original figure.

Scientists comparing infrared data collected twenty years apart — first by the Spitzer Space Telescope and then by the Webb Space Telescope — think they have detected evidence of a gigantic asteroid collision in the debris disk that surrounds the very young star Beta Pictoris, located 63 light years away.

The graph to the right shows the change found between the observations. From the caption:

Scientists theorize that the massive amount of dust seen in the 2004–05 image from the Spitzer Space Telescope indicates a collision of asteroids that had largely cleared by the time the James Webb Space Telescope captured its images in 2023.

…When Spitzer collected the earlier data, scientists assumed something like small bodies grinding down would stir and replenish the dust steadily over time. But Webb’s new observations show the dust disappeared and was not replaced. The amount of dust kicked up is about 100,000 times the size of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, Chen said.

It is believed by scientists that the debris disk that surrounds Beta Pictoris is comparable to the early solar system when the planets first started to form. This collision could be similar to the kind of collision that is thought to have formed the Moon, when a large Mars-sized object smashed into the early Earth.

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Scientists: Water frost detected in calderas of four Martian volcanos

9:33 am

Frost found on four Martian volcanoes

Scientists using data from two European Mars orbiters think they have detected patches of transient water frost in the calderas of four Martian volcanos, all located in the dry equatorial regions of Mars where previously no near-surface ice has been seen.

According to the study, the frost is present for only a few hours after sunrise before it evaporates in sunlight. The frost is also incredibly thin — likely only one-hundredth of a millimeter thick or about the width of a human hair. Still, it’s quite vast. The researchers calculate the frost constitutes at least 150,000 tons of water that swaps between the surface and atmosphere each day during the cold seasons. That’s the equivalent of roughly 60 Olympic-size swimming pools.

You can read the research paper here. The volcanoes with frost were Olympus Mons, Arsia Mons, Ascraeus Mons, and Ceraunius Tholus, as shown by the blue dots on the overview map to the right. All are in the dry tropics of Mars.

The researchers believe the frost comes from the atmosphere, like dew forming in the morning on Earth. For it to take place at these high elevations on Mars however is astonishing. At these high elevations the atmosphere is extremely thin. Furthermore, the dry tropics have so far been found to contain no near-surface water or ice to fuel these processes.

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