Category: Behind The Black

January 31, 2024 Quick space links

3:35 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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Voyager signs SpaceX’s Starship to launch its Starlab space station

3:23 pm

Voyager Space, one of three commercial space stations being built in partnership with NASA, has awarded SpaceX the launch contract for putting its Starlab space station into orbit, using that company’s Superheavy/Starship rocket.

The companies did not disclose terms of the agreement or a projected launch date, although a spokesperson for Starlab Space said the company was confident that Starlab would be launched before the decommissioning of the International Space Station, currently scheduled for 2030.

Voyager is building Starlab in a joint partnership with Airbus and Northrop Grumman. The design is relatively simple though large (one main module and a service module), which makes Starship an excellent method for getting it into orbit.

SpaceX now has deals to launch two different space stations using Starship. The second is with the private company Vast, which is building its station completely independent from NASA. Starship also has won launch contracts from two different private citizens, as well as NASA.

It appears that Musk’s instincts were right on the money when he decided to build this rocket, even though when he proposed it there did not seem to be any customers for it.

Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.

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Have these Martian dunes changed in sixteen years?

1:57 pm

Comparing two MRO images taken 16 years apart
Click here and here for the original images.

Overview map

Cool image time! The two pictures above, both rotated, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to match and to post here, were taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) sixteen years apart. The first, on the left, was taken on February 23, 2007, while the second, on the right, was taken on November 1, 2023.

What drew me to both images was the label for the second: “Dune Change in Arabia Region Crater.” To find out if this image had revealed any changes in the dunes I went back and found the earliest MRO picture of this location, and sized and enhanced the dunes in both to match.

Do you see any changes? I don’t. However, that really means nothing. These are not the highest resolution versions that MRO obtains, and a very careful comparison of those best images might detect more subtle changes than our eyes can perceive in the versions above. Also, there might be brightness changes that require careful software analysis.

The white dot on the overview map to the right marks the location, in Arabia Terra, the largest transition region on Mars between the northern lowland plains and the southern cratered highlands. The inset shows the half filled crater in which these dunes sit. The grayed area on the floor of the crater marks the entire dune field, extending eastward to the crater rim from this one spot, indicated by the black dot.

It is likely that the dust is blown into this crater and gets trapped there. Whether the dunes move or change is not clear, though if they do the changes are small, even after almost two decades. Instead, the two pictures suggest these dunes have hardened into a form of sandstone, that can be eroded over time by the wind, but only very very slowly.

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Shoddy Harvard — home of plagiarism and bigotry — loses another big donor

12:52 pm

Harvard: where you get can get a shoddy education centered on hate and bigotry
Harvard: where you can spend a lot of money
getting a shoddy education teaching hate and bigotry

One of Harvard’s biggest donors, Ken Griffin, has announced that he is pausing all further donations to the university due to its now obviously shoddy educational standards combined with its advocacy of racial quotas under its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion program.

Griffin announced his decision to stop donating to Harvard during a keynote talk at a conference hosted by the Managed Funds Association in Miami. Griffin, however, left open the possibility that the University could win back his support. “I’d like that to change and I have made that clear to members of the corporate board,” he said. “But until Harvard makes it very clear that they’re going to resume their role as educating young American men and women to be leaders, to be problem solvers, to take on difficult issues, I’m not interested in supporting the institution.”

He added that Harvard students were “whiny snowflakes” caught in a misguided ideology of oppressor and oppressed during his remarks.

Griffin also stated that his companies will hire no students who signed a group letter that expressed support for Hamas’ rape, torture, and massacre of more than 1,400 Israelis on October 7, 2023.

Griffin has donated more than half a billion to Harvard in recent years, including a $300 million donation to Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences last year.

He is also not the first billionaire to announce a boycott of Harvard. In November Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager and Harvard alumni, released a long letter condemning the university’s former president Claudine Gay for allowing anti-Semitism to fester at the school. Like Griffin, he is apparently withholding further donations while refusing to hire students. Ackman has since repeatedly harangued Harvard in public for its refusal to take any serious reform actions.

Then in December billionaire Leonard Blavatnik stopped his own donations, also because he was appalled by the uinversity’s willingness to allow anti-Semitism to run rampant on campus.

These three men combined had previously donated almost a billion dollars total to the university. One would think their boycott would carry profound weight, and force some immediate changes at Harvard.

Don’t bet on it. » Read more

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Scientists: No obvious ice in the permanently-shadowed interior of Shackleton Crater

10:59 am

Shadowcam-LRO mosaic
Click for original image.

Using the low-light image produced by the American Shadowcam instrument on South Korea’s lunar orbiter Danuri, scientists now belief that there are no thick obvious deposits of water ice in in the permanently-shadowed interior of Shackleton Crater at the Moon’s south pole.

The image to the right combines pictures taken by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) of the region around Shackleton with pictures produced by Shadowcam of its permanently-shadowed interior. From their paper’s conclusion:

The trailing (right) side of Shackleton’s interior is warmer owing to the secondary illumination asymmetry and floor topography. Illumination at the floor of Shackleton is patchy and possibly indicates a similar patchy (50 m scale) temperature distribution, which could mean a spatially irregular concentration of cold-trapped volatiles at the subsurface or mixed with regolith.

According to our Shackleton crater interior mapping from ShadowCam images, there is no observed evidence of thick ice deposits or surface ice that could be easily recognized by any relative brightness features observed in multiple illumination geometries. However, this analysis did not include the estimation of reflectance, nor did it involve reviewing all of the images of Shackleton in this preliminary study. Our hypothesis, in the context of water frost detections in Shackleton, is that if ice or frost is present in Shackleton’s interior, then the concentrations are either below the threshold that results in an observable signature in ShadowCam images, or might be mixed with the regolith at the detected areas. At other places where surface temperatures are below 110K, water frost could be hidden in subsurface layers.

The paper’s main purpose was to identify the dim lighting sources within the crater, all of which come from light bouncing off other surfaces. In the process the scientists obtained a better understanding of the surface itself.

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Pentagon in discussions with SpaceX about buying a Starship outright for military missions

9:49 am

The Pentagon is negotiating with SpaceX the idea that in certain cases where it deems it legally necessary it will buy outright full ownership of a SpaceX Starship/Superheavy launch rocket in order to fly some military missions.

The idea is similar to how the Air Force moves cargo. At times, the service contracts with private carriers to deliver cargo, but for certain critical missions it uses service “gray tail” aircraft. In this hypothetical case, the military could take a Starship off the line for a specific mission and return it to SpaceX after it is complete.

I suspect such situations involve very risky wartime missions that carry liabilities that a private company cannot accept. The military takes over ownership, relieving the company of risk, and then returns ownership afterward. Such a plan requires the company to agree to it, and the military to pay extra for these temporary rights. According to the article at the link, SpaceX is presently exploring its options.

That the Pentagon is discussing this with SpaceX at all tells us that it sees Starship/Superheavy as having a lot of value. It wants to buy its services, one way or the other.

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Tank explosion in Shanghai injured three

9:38 am

The supposed test-to-tank failure of a rocket tank being tested by the Chinese pseudo-company Landspace on January 29, 2024 apparently injured three workers, though officials also claimed everything worked as planned.

Three workers were injured and nearby residents reported that “a huge boom” shook their windows during testing of a LandSpace rocket fuel tank in Shanghai on Monday evening. The Chinese start-up – which last year beat its rivals, including US-based SpaceX, to launch Zhuque-2, the world’s first methane-fuelled rocket, into orbit – said there were no abnormalities during the test.

A LandSpace representative told local media on Tuesday that the test “left some glass damaged and three production personnel with minor scratches”. The company and the district government said no explosion occurred.

This explosion was reported on X by nearby residents earlier this week (see the quick links here and here), with no confirmation from the pseudo-company. Even now it is being very coy about what it is telling us. An anonymous source at the link says the test filled the tank with nitrogen, and was intended “to establish the tank’s limits.”

No one however should have gotten injured during such a test, if everything took place as planned.

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Private company in India aims to build its own manned capsule and astronaut training facility

9:27 am

A private company in India, Astroborne Aerospace, is now developing its own commercial manned capsule as well as a commercial astronaut training facility, targeting as customers Earth-based tourists as well as those hoping to fly in space.

The capsule, dubbed Airawat, will seat six, and will be designed for suborbital flights, similar to Blue Origin’s New Shepard capsule. The training facility will be on a four-acre site the company is presently negotiating either a lease or purchase from the local government.

The company says it has obtained investment capital, but also says that money will arrive next month.

Whether this deal is real or not is actually irrelevant. Its existence illustrates the underlying enthusiasm in India for private commercial space, now that the Modi government has ended the monopoly on all space activities by its space agency ISRO.

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China’s Chang’e-7 lunar mission will target the rim of Shackleton Crater

9:15 am

The Moon's south pole, with landers

China’s Chang’e-7 lunar mission, which will include an orbiter, lander, rover, and “mini-flying” probe, will land in 2026 on the rim of Shackleton Crater, one of the same candidate landing zones for NASA’s manned Artemis program.

The map to the right shows the lander’s approximate landing site, on the illuminated rim of thirteen-mile-wide Shackleton Crater at the Moon’s south pole. The candidate landing zone for NASA is also on this rim, but the location might not be precisely the same. From the abstract of the published paper [pdf] outlining the project’s science goals:

The lander will land on Shackleton crater’s illuminated rim near the lunar south pole, along with the rover and mini-flying probe. The relay satellite (named Queqiao-2) will be launched in February 2024 as an independent mission to support relay communication for ongoing scientific exploration of Chang’E-4 (CE-4), the upcoming Chang’E-6 (CE-6) in 2024, and subsequent lunar missions.

Though the abstract states the target is Shackleton’s rim, the paper is less specific, showing a map with a much wider “candidate landing region”. It is unclear if China as yet has the ability to land with the pinpoint accuracy necessary to hit the rim as stated. The paper is also devoid of any technical details about the lander, rover, or its mini-flyer. It lists the science instruments and their science goals, but describes nothing more specific. For example, will the flyer bounce or use small rockets to lift off? Or will it simply be released prior to landing with no capability of taking off again?

The big story here is the race to get to Shackleton first. NASA presently hopes its first Artemis manned mission to land on the Moon, Artemis-3, will arrive in September 2026, with its stated goal landing at or near the south pole. That schedule is certainly tentative, based on NASA’s recent track record. China is now targeting that same year, but its recent track record for its lunar program has been far more reliable.

The Outer Space Treaty forbids both countries from claiming any territory, but possession is always nine-tenths of reality. Expect China to touch down first, and hold what it touches.

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Rocket Lab launches four commercial satellites

12:15 am

Electron 1st stage floating in the water

Rocket Lab today successuflly launched four satellites as part of a commercial constellation designed to track all objects in orbit, its Electron rocket lifting off from one of its two New Zealand launchpads.

The company also successfully recovered the first stage using a parachute system to slow it down for a soft splashdown in the Pacific where a ship picked it up. The image to the right is a screen capture shortly after the recovery ship reached the stage, which can be seen floating in the water on the left. As of posting the ship was in the process of pulling the stage from the water. Once completed, the stage will be returned to Rocket Lab’s rocket factory for refurbishment and tests to see if it can fly again.

The 2024 launch race:

10 SpaceX
6 China
2 Iran
1 India
1 ULA
1 Japan
1 Rocket Lab

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January 30, 2024 Quick space links

3:27 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: U.S. Court rules against coach fired for simply stating a fact in a casual conversation

2:51 pm

Vermont: Where you are only allowed to say things that support the queer agenda
Vermont: Where the only speech allowed must
support the queer agenda

If you are depending on the federal courts to defend your fundamental rights, as outlined very bluntly in the Bill of Rights, you are being very naive. On December 28, 2024 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled against David Bloch, who had been fired in February 2023 without due process as the snowboarding coach at Woodstock Union High School in Vermont — a team that he had founded in 2011 — because he had simply mentioned in a casual and very civil conversation with two of his students that men and women are genetically different.

He was fired the next day, even though no investigation into the incident had been done, and no one involved in the conversation had complained. School officials made it clear that Bloch was being fired for daring to have an opinion they did not like.

The notice accused Bloch of violating Windsor Central Supervisory Union Board’s Harassment, Hazing, and Bullying policy and the Vermont Principals’ Association related policy for “ma[king] reference to [a] student in a manner that questioned the legitimacy and appropriateness of the student competing on the girls’ team to members of the WUHS snowboard team”—all outside the student’s presence.

» Read more

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A plateau of friable rock on Mars

2:11 pm

A plateau of friable rock on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on September 13, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this “Friable Outcrops in Aeolis Dorsa.” What we are looking at is the northeasternmost tip of a 30-mile long plateau that marks the northern edge of Mars southern cratered highlands. For most of its length the top of that plateau is relatively smooth, broken by some vague surface features and a few scattered craters (suggesting it is relatively young). However, as you approach the plateau’s edges and especially that northeastern tip the surface begins to break up into the rough terrain shown to the right. It appears that the prevailing winds from the north are scouring the soft topsoil here and causing it to wear away, leaving behind those innumerable small ridges, almost all of which are oriented from north-to-south.

But why is the topsoil here soft and so easily scoured?
» Read more

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Spain awards rocket startup PLD $43.8 million grant

12:53 pm

Capitalism in space: The Spanish rocket startup PLD has won a $43.8 million grant from the Spanish government to develop its Miura-5 orbital launch rocket.

The company won the funding after completing the preliminary design review (PDR) its Miura 5 small launch vehicle, a review that was then examined by an independent committee. The award is technically a loan, which will be paid off over 10 years once Miura 5 begins commercial operations, currently scheduled for 2026.

The rocket will compete directly with Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket, with a bigger payload capacity. PLD also plans to recover and reuse its first stages after splashdown in the ocean, as Rocket Lab is now attempting to do with Electron.

The significance of this deal is multifold. It shows us that Spain is now a player in space, with its own rocket company, though still only a startup. It also provides further evidence that the nations of Europe are beginning to go their own way in space, rather than rely on their partnership in the European Space Agency and its rocket division, Arianespace. Arianespace has failed to do the job, so Spain like Germany is now looking to the private sector to get its satellite payloads in orbit.

Finally and most important, this deal illustrates the shift in Europe from being the designer and owner of rockets to being a mere customer. Rather than depend on a governnment-built and owned Arianespace rocket, Spain is buying the service from a private company, PLD. That company owns it entirely and can sell its services to others as well.

This trend away from government-owned rockets bodes well for the future of space exploration in Europe. It will produce a vibrant competitive industry with many different companies coming up with different ideas that will increase innovation while reducing cost.

It also signals the coming death of Arianespace, ESA’s commercial division which despite dominating the commercial launch market for almost two decades, was never able to make a profit ever. Instead, it produced rockets that were too expensive and required subsidies on a yearly basis. The nations of Europe are no longer willing to tolerate that bad performance, and have basically told Arianespace it either must compete with these new private companies, or die. I expect it to die. If it does survive, it will only do so if it changes radically.

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SpaceX launches Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus capsule to ISS

10:22 am

SpaceX today for the first time launched a Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo freighter to ISS, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage completed its 10th flight, landing back at Cape Canaveral. Cygnus will rendezvous with ISS in two days, where it will be berthed to the station using a robot arm. It will then stay docked for six months as astronauts unload about 8,200 pounds of cargo.

SpaceX was used as a launch provider because Northrop Grumman’s own rocket Antares is presently unavailable because the engines for the first stage as well as the stage itself were previously built by Russia and the Ukraine respectively, both of which the company cannot no longer buy due to the Ukraine War. SpaceX has a contract for three flights, with today’s launch the first. Firefly has a contract from Northrop Grumman to built a new first stage for Antares, with a first launch targeting mid-2025.

The launch was SpaceX’s 10th in January. With a goal of 150 launches in 2024, this puts the company slightly behind the pace required to meet that goal.

The 2024 launch race:

10 SpaceX
6 China
2 Iran
1 India
1 ULA
1 Japan

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India and France sign deal to partner selling flights on their rockets

9:21 am

India and France have apparently signed a deal to not compete in selling flights on their biggest rockets, but instead work together to keep prices under their control.

Under the terms of the MoU [memorandum of understanding], NSIL’s [the commercial space division of India’s government] heavy-lift launch vehicle, LVM-3, and Arianespace’s Ariane-6 will be at the forefront of this joint endeavor.

The article at the link provides no information at all about the specifics of this deal. I am simply guessing that is it designed to control prices, especially because France by itself does not own the Ariane-6 and thus can not award launch contracts for it. All it can do is convince India to not charge less for its comparable LVM rocket (a variation of its GSLV rocket). If so, it is a bad deal for India, which can easily undercut any price that Arianespace can charge for the expensive Ariane-6. It will drive business from India, since other companies (such as SpaceX, ULA, and hopefully Blue Origin in the near future) will be under no obligation to match Ariane-6’s high cost.

It is also possible that the deal is simply an empty political gesture, timed during the visit to India by France’s President Emmanuel Macron. Its vague language suggests this. It gives Macron a photo op, but as an MOU it leaves India under no long term obligation.

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The Pentagon picks Northrop Grumman’s orbital refueling port as its standard

9:05 am

Having reviewed the designs of several orbital refueling ports, the Space Force has chosen Northrop Grumman’s port as the standard it wishes future military satellites to use.

In a move that could shape the in-orbit satellite servicing market, the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command designated Northrop Grumman’s Passive Refueling Module (PRM) as a favored interface to enable future in-space refueling of military satellites. The PRM has a docking mechanism to allow a refueling vehicle in orbit to transfer propellant to another satellite to extend its useful life.

Northrop Grumman said the Space Systems Command, which oversees in-space logistics and services programs, also will support the company’s development of an orbital fuel tanker for geosynchronous orbit missions that would carry up to 1,000 kilograms of hydrazine fuel and deliver it to client satellites on demand.

Lauren Smith, program manager for in-space refueling at Northrop Grumman, said the selection of the PRM was based on the maturity and technical viability of the design, as well as the company’s experience servicing satellites in orbit. Northrop Grumman’s SpaceLogistics subsidiary remains the only commercial firm to have successfully serviced satellites in geostationary orbit, having docked twice with client Intelsat satellites some 22,000 miles above Earth to extend spacecraft life.

Note that even though Northrop Grumman’s MEV spacecraft has twice docked with defunct Intelsat satellites to return them to service, the spacecraft did no refueling. Instead, it brought its own fuel and engine, and used that to control the satellite.

Other companies developing refueling services with ports they had hoped would become the standard include Astroscale and Orbit Fab. Both have launched demo missions, but neither has yet completed a refueling mission as well. Though this Space Force decision is not exclusive, and leaves open the possibility of further awards to these other commercial refueling port designs, it will likely force everyone to move towards the Northrop Grumman design.

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The dark matter in the Milky Way is not behaving as its supposed to

8:56 am

The uncertainty of science: Scientists using precise data of the motions of the outer stars of the Milky Way from the Gaia orbiting telescope have found they do not rotate the galaxy’s center as fast as expected, based on the theory of the existence of dark matter.

Dark matter was proposed to explain why in other galaxies the speed of rotation of outer stars does not appear to decline with distance (as seen for example with the planets in our solar system) but remains the same, no matter how far out you go. That extra speed suggests there must be unseen matter pulling on the stars.

[N]ew results that combine Gaia measurements with those from APOGEE (Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment), performed on a ground-based telescope in New Mexico, USA, and which measures the physical properties of stars to better judge their distance, have indeed measured the Milky Way’s rotation curve for stars out farther than ever before, to about 100,000 light years. “What we were really surprised to see was that this curve remained flat, flat, flat out to a certain distance, and then it started tanking,” says Lina Necib, who is an assistant professor of physics at MIT, said in a statement. “This means the outer stars are rotating a little slower than expected, which is a very surprising result.”

…The decline in orbital velocity at these distances implies that there is less dark matter in the center of our galaxy than expected. The research team describe the galaxy’s halo of dark matter as having been “cored,” somewhat like an apple. The crew also says there’s not enough gravity from what dark matter there seems to exist there, to reach all the way out to 100,000 light years and keep stars moving at the same velocity.

The rotation data of other galaxies, while somewhat robust, also includes a number of assumptions might be fooling us into thinking that the speeds are higher than expected. The more precise data gathered nearby, in the Milky Way, is now suggesting those assumptions and that distant data must be questioned.

Or to put it more bluntly, dark matter remains an ad hoc solution to a mystery that astronomers really don’t understand, or have sufficient data to explain. It might very well be a wild goose chase that has made them miss the real answer, whatever that might be.

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January 29, 2024 Quick space links

5:18 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.

 

6 comments

The FBI must be wiped clean, or wiped out, on Day One of the next Repubican administration

1:05 pm

Christopher Wray, the world's most powerful mobster

Should Donald Trump become president in 2024 and the acts to make major changes within the federal executive bureaucracy, cleaning house from top to bottom with major firings and layoffs (something he should have done in his first administration and failed to do), without question the first agency he must attack mercilessly is the FBI.

There are numerous documented examples in the past decade where the FBI has been weaponized against conservatives and Republicans, investigating, harassing, and even arresting people because they held beliefs that opposed the agenda of the Democratic Party. In some cases the individuals attacked were simply religious Christians who opposed abortion. In other cases the victims were ordinary Americans who simply made public their support of Trump.

Nor were just everyday Americans attacked. The FBI has arrested Republican candidates for office. Its officials have altered evidence to justify illegal seach warrants against Republicans. Its management also targeted and framed Trump officials it did not like. Officials there also abused the FISA court, submitting error-filled applications that were used to get warrants to spy on Americans. It redacted information to hide its misbehavior, claiming dishonestly that the redactions were for national security reasons.

This list is only a very small selection of the many such stories reported in the past decade. Any one of these corrupt actions would justify firing everyone at the FBI and zeroing out its budget as quickly as possible. Last week however the Ninth U.S. Court of Appeals provided us another reason: It ruled that FBI agents literally committed theft in rummaging through hundreds of security deposit boxes at a bank in wealthy Beverly Hills, confiscating millions of dollars it had no right to grab, simply because the cash was there and the agents and the agency wanted that money for their own pockets.
» Read more

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The internal structure of 19 galaxies, as seen in the infrared by Webb

9:48 am

The internal structure of 19 galaxies, as seen by Webb
Click for original image.

Scientists using the Webb Space Telescope today released false color infrared images of nineteen different spiral galaxies, each showing the complex internal structure that traces of spiral arms, but not always.

A compliation of those infrared images is to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here.

[Webb]’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) captured millions of stars in these images, which sparkle in blue tones. Some stars are spread throughout the spiral arms, but others are clumped tightly together in star clusters.

The telescope’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) data highlights glowing dust, showing us where it exists behind, around, and between stars. It also spotlights stars that have not yet fully formed – they are still encased in the gas and dust that feed their growth, like bright red seeds at the tips of dusty peaks. “These are where we can find the newest, most massive stars in the galaxies,” said Erik Rosolowsky, a professor of physics at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

The data suggests, not unexpectedly, that the central parts of each galaxy are older, formed first, with starbirth occurring later in the outer regions. A lot of further analysis however will be required to understand all the patterns exhibited in these images and their larger significance in connection with galaxy formation.

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Communications with SLIM lunar lander re-established

9:29 am

According to Japan’s space agency JAXA, engineers last night successfully re-established communications with its SLIM lunar lander sitting up-side down on the Moon, the Sun finally shifting to the western sky so that its westward-facing solar panel could get light and provide power.

Communication with SLIM was successfully established last night, and operations resumed! Science observations were immediately started with the MBC, and we obtained first light for the 10-band observation.

One image was immediately downloaded. Engineers will attempt to initiate as many operations as possible in the next few days, before the Sun sets at the end of the month and the spacecraft shuts down again, likely forever.

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SpaceX completes two launches on Sunday

9:20 am

SpaceX yesterday successfully completed two Starlink satellite launches, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from opposite coasts.

First the company launched 23 Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral in Florida, using a first stage flying its eighteenth time. That first stage landed successfully on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

Next less than five hours later the company launched another 22 Starlink satellites from Vandenberg in California, using a first first stage flying its ninth time. That first stage landed successfully on a drone ship in the Pacific.

The 2024 launch race:

9 SpaceX
6 China
2 Iran
1 India
1 ULA
1 Japan

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Bi-partisan bill proposed giving space traffic management to Commerce, not FCC

3:07 pm

On January 25, 2024 a bill sponsored by a bi-partisan group of senators was introduced assigning the job of managing orbital traffic and the removal of defunct satellites to the Commerce Department, essentially telling both the FCC and NOAA that the attempt by those agencies to grab this power, outside of their statutory authority, will be opposed by elected officials.

The bill puts the responsibility of managing satellite and spacecraft traffic and the regulations regarding de-orbiting satellites to Office of Space Commerce (OSC) within Commerce. It is also supported by the comercial industry, which has not been happy especially with the FCC’s regulatory power grab. Unlike the regulations the FCC is creating, this bill relies heavily on industry advice and consensus, the very people who not only know best what needs to be done, but are the only ones qualified to do it.

Of course, the bill must pass both the Senate, House, and be signed by the President before it becomes law. Whether that can happen remains uncertain, especially since there appear to be a lot of factions inside DC who want to give federal agencies like the FCC legal carte blanche to regulate however they see fit, superseding Congress, the Constitution, and the law. And it seems that Congress now is so weak, those factions might just get what they want.

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Another Chinese pseudo-company vertically lands a prototype 1st stage

11:52 am

According to China’s state-run press, the Chinese pseudo-company Expace yesterday successfully completed a short hop, with a methane-fueled prototype first stage of its next generation Kuaizhou rocket taking off and landing vertically.

The flight time lasted 22 seconds, and the rocket hovered in the air for nine seconds, with a height accuracy of 0.15 meter. The landing posture of the test rocket was stable, the landing position accurate and the rocket body in good condition, signifying the success of the experiment, according to the company.

Several things. First, this “company” is directly affliated with one of China’s government space agency. Its presently operating Kuaizhou rocket uses solid-fueled stages, adapted directly from missile technology that could only be obtained with full permission of that government. Second, there appears to be a plethora of these Chinese rocket “startups” now flying and testing methane-fueled engines. Want to bet the Chinese government told them all to share design information?

Third, there is also a plethora of Chinese pseudo-companies testing vertical take-off and landing for their first stages. Want to bet the Chinese government also told them to share design information?

Without question China’s space industry is moving fast, and will definitely be a competitive threat in the coming years — assuming outside events, such as war or economic collapse, don’t overwhelm things. However, it is a big mistake to see its industry as made up of independent, privately owned, and competing companies. They raise investment capital, compete for contracts from the government and other Chinese commercial entities, but in the end, everything they do is coordinated from above, by the Chinese communists.

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The future of astronomy, as seen by PBS News in 1991

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Today is the 75th anniversary of the moment astonomers took the lens cap off the Hale Telescope at Palomar, what astronomers call “first light.” In honor of this anniversary, tonight’s evening pause is a somewhat well-done news piece produced by PBS in 1991, describing the state of ground-based astronomy at that time, which was actually another key moment in the history of astronomy. After decades of no advancement following the Hale telescope, the field was about to burst out with a whole new set of telescopes exceeding it significantly, based on new technologies. We today have become accustomed to those new telescopes, but in 1991 they were still incomplete or on the drawing board.

This was also after the launch of Hubble but before it was fixed, so this moment was also a somewhat dark time for astronomy in general. Watching this news piece gives you a sense of history, as seen by those living at that time. It also lets you see some good examples of the standard tropes of reporters as well as some astronomers. They always say this new telescope (whatever and whenever it is) is going to allow us to discover the entire history of the universe, even though it never can, and never will.

Hat tip Mike Nelson.

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