Mannheim Steamroller – Silent Night
An evening pause: Performed live 2012.
Hat tip Alton Blevins.
Category: Behind The Black
December 11, 2023 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
- Images of the Chinese pseudo-company Landspace’s launchpad where it plans a rocket hop test soon
The rumors say the test flight will occur next week.
- Space Force head admits government intentionally works slower than private enterprise
He said this to explain what he saw as a positive aspect of government, but I think he instead underlined why it should be the last place we should ever go to get anything done.
- Today’s Falcon Heavy launch is still set for 8:14 pm (Eastern)
You can watch it at this live stream, beginning around 7:30 pm (Eastern).
- Ghana in Africa warns its citizens not to use Starlink illegally
Heavy fines are threatened. Ghana is the fourth African country to issue such a warning, after South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Senegal. Apparently the citizens of those countries are tired of bad phone and internet service, and have been bypassing their incompetent government to get it on the black market from private enterprise. In other words, they are exercising independence, and we can’t have that!
- ISRO confirms its manned mission to ISS in 2024 in partnership with NASA
The tweet adds that the mission will fly on a Falcon 9 using a Dragon capsule.
Craters in a row
Click for original image.
Cool image time from Mars! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on October 13, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It highlights a string of craters, all lined up in an almost straight line.
Were these craters caused by the impact of an asteroid that broke up as it burned its way through the thin Martian atmosphere? The lack of any raised rims argues instead that these are sinks produced not from impact but from a collapse into a void below, possibly a fault line.
Yet, almost all of the craters in this image, even those not part of this crater string, show no raised rims. If sinks, the voids below don’t seem to follow any pattern, which once again argues in favor of random impacts, with the string produced by a bolide breaking up just prior to hitting the ground.
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Galaxies in a row
Click for original image.
Cool image time from Hubble! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a survey of nearby “pecular” galaxies. What makes it unusual is the line of distant galaxies below the largest on the left.
The wonderful quality of this image also reveals several further galaxies, not associated with this system but fortuitously positioned in such a way that they appear to be forming a line that approaches the leftmost (in this image) component of Arp-Madore 2105-332, which is known individually as 2MASX J21080752-3314337. The rightmost galaxy, meanwhile, is known as 2MASX J21080362-3313196. These hefty names do not lend themselves to easy memorisation, but they do actually contain valuable information: they are coordinates in the right ascension and declination system used widely by astronomers to locate astronomical objects.
Both larger galaxies are thought to be about 200 million light years away, with the smaller ones far more distant. If you look at the full resolution image, you will see that there are at least six galaxies in that line, one that appears to be an elliptical galaxy with all the rest a variety of different types of spiral galaxies. The detail provided by Hubble is truly astonishing.
Though they are not linked to the larger galaxies, it is not clear if they are linked to each other.
Webb takes infrared false-color image of supernova remnant Cassiopeia A
Click for original image.
Using the Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have obtained the first wide full infrared view of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, the remains of a supernova that occurred about 11,000 years ago. That image is to the right, reduced to post here.
The most noticeable colors in Webb’s newest image are clumps represented in bright orange and light pink that make up the inner shell of the supernova remnant. Webb’s razor-sharp view can detect the tiniest knots of gas, comprised of sulfur, oxygen, argon, and neon from the star itself. Embedded in this gas is a mixture of dust and molecules, which will eventually become components of new stars and planetary systems. Some filaments of debris are too tiny to be resolved by even Webb, meaning they are comparable to or less than 10 billion miles across (around 100 astronomical units). In comparison, the entirety of Cas A spans 10 light-years across, or 60 trillion miles.
…When comparing Webb’s new near-infrared view of Cas A with the mid-infrared view, its inner cavity and outermost shell are curiously devoid of color. The outskirts of the main inner shell, which appeared as a deep orange and red in the MIRI image, now look like smoke from a campfire. This marks where the supernova blast wave is ramming into surrounding circumstellar material. The dust in the circumstellar material is too cool to be detected directly at near-infrared wavelengths, but lights up in the mid-infrared.
The four rectangles mark specific features of particular interest, with #4, dubbed by the scientists Baby Cas, the most intriguing.
This is a light echo, where light from the star’s long-ago explosion has reached and is warming distant dust, which is glowing as it cools down. The intricacy of the dust pattern, and Baby Cas A’s apparent proximity to Cas A itself, are particularly intriguing to researchers. In actuality, Baby Cas A is located about 170 light-years behind the supernova remnant.
By comparing this infrared view with Hubble’s optical and Chandra’s X-ray views, astronomers will be able to better decipher Cas A’s make-up and geometry.
ULA likely to delay first Vulcan launch to January launch window
According to a tweet yesterday by ULA’s CEO, Tory Bruno, the final dress rehearsal countdown of its new Vulcan rocket had some “routine” issues that will require a redo and thus prevent the planned launch on December 24, 2023.
WDR [wet dress rehearsal] update: Vehicle performed well. Ground system had a couple of (routine) issues, (being corrected). Ran the timeline long so we didn’t quite finish. I’d like a FULL WDR before our first flight, so XMAS eve is likely out. Next Peregrine window is 8 Jan.
Peregrine is Astrobotic’s lunar lander, which must launch within certain time frames to get to the Moon as planned.
As many news sites are noting (almost certainly because they read my launch race reports), ULA will likely complete 2023 with only three launches, its lowest total since it was formed in 2007 from a merger of the launch divisions of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Prior to 2017 the company had averaged about one launch per month. In 2017 however SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket finally reached full operations, hitting 18 launches and steadily since then increasing that total. Its success (and lower prices) shifted the business from ULA, causing its annual launch totals to drop significantly, as shown in my 2022 global report.
Once Vulcan begins launching finally ULA should recover, especially because of its large contract with Amazon to launch the Kuiper constellation totalling almost fifty launches. A large percentage of those launches must be completed before 2026 for Amazon to meet the requirements of its FCC license.
China’s Long March 2D rocket launches classified remote sensing satellite
Early on December 10, 2023 (Chinese time) China successfully launched a classified remote sensing satellite, its Long March 2D rocket lifting off from its Xichang spaceport in the south of China.
The state-run Chinese press released almost no information. Nor did it say where within China the lower stages of the rocket, using toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed.
As expected, China’s launch pace in December has picked up, as it has routinely in recent years. The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
91 SpaceX
58 China
16 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India
American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches, 103 to 58, and the entire world combined 103 to 92. SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding other American companies), 91 to 92, though it plans two launches on December 10th.
Momentus fails to deploy three satellites on SpaceX’s multi-smallsat launch
The orbital tug company Momentus failed to deploy the satellites of three of its customers following November’s SpaceX multi-smallsat Transporter launch.
Momentus announced Dec. 5 that three of the five satellites that it flew on the Transporter-9 launch Nov. 11 did not appear to deploy from the Falcon 9’s upper stage. The company used a third-party deployer, rather than its own Vigoride tug, on that mission, and said that it was able to confirm that the Hello Test 1 and 2 satellites from Turkish company Hello Space were released.
The Momentus deployer remained attached to SpaceX’s upper stage, which as planned fired a de-orbit burn after completing the deployment schedule of its 90 satellites. All the satellites that used SpaceX’s deployment system apparently deployed properly.
In 2022 Momentus’s own orbital tug, Vigoride, had problems deploying some satellites on its first test launch, though its second flight in July 2023 was completely successful.
The failure here will not only pose problems for that third-party deployment company as well as Momentus, it will do serious harm to the startups that launched the three lost satellites. One was American, while the other two were South Korean and Polish. The American company, Lunasonde, has been trying to develop a constellation of satellites designed to look for underground resources.
China launches three satellites using methane-fueled rocket
China’s spaceports
The Chinese pseudo-company Landspace yesterday successfully used its methane-fueled Zhuque-2 rocket for the third time, placing three satellites into orbit from China’s Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.
As China’s state-run press is now consistently doing, its report fails to mention this pseudo-company at all, recognizing the reality that it is actually controlled and owned by the Chinese government, though structured to function like a private company to enhance competition within China.
No word on where the rocket’s lower stages crashed inside China.
The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
91 SpaceX
57 China
16 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India
American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches, 103 to 57, and the entire world combined 103 to 91. SpaceX by itself is now tied with the rest of the world (excluding other American companies), 91 to 91, though it plans two launches tomorrow.
December 8, 2023 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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J.S. Bach – Christmas Oratorio, excerpt
An evening pause: Performed live 2012.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
December 8, 2023 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
- The flight plan for Ingenuity’s 68th flight
It is presently scheduled for tomorrow.
- India’s Aditya-L1 solar observatory takes its first full-disk images of the Sun
All images were in an ultraviolet wavelength range never previously used to image the Sun.
- Astronauts on ISS wish Happy Hanukkah to all Jews on Earth
I can’t help wonder if they did this because of the rise of anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli hatred worldwide. Since Apollo 8, NASA has generally frowned on giving pubicity to any religious holiday.