Category: Behind The Black

ArianeGroup chosen by Europe to develop reusable rockets

9:47 am

The new colonial movement: The European Commission, which makes the major decisions for the European Space Agency, has chosen the European commercial company ArianeGroup to run two programs designed to produce that continent’s first reusable rocket.

From the press release [pdf]:

The SALTO project will facilitate the first flight tests of the Themis reusable stage demonstrator in Kiruna, Sweden. The ENLIGHTEN project will speed up the development and introduction of reusable engine technologies.

The main goal of SALTO will be to develop the kind of vertical landing technology that SpaceX now does routinely. ENLIGHTEN in turn will develop rocket engines using either methane or hydrogen as the fuel. The total budget allocated for both is just under 50 million euros, which seems quite small. The press release also made no mention of a schedule for accomplishing these tasks.

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Scientists: Comet 67P/C-G’s make-up matches the rest of the solar system

9:33 am

A detailed review of the archived data from the Rosetta mission that studied Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko closely in 2014-2016 now strongly suggests that the comet’s overall make-up closely matches the rest of the solar system.

“It turned out that, on average, [the comet’s] complex organics budget is identical to the soluble part of meteoritic organic matter”, explains [Nora Hänni of the University of Bern] and adds: “Moreover, apart from the relative amount of hydrogen atoms, the molecular budget of [comet 67P/C-G] also strongly resembles the organic material raining down on Saturn from its innermost ring, as detected by the INMS mass spectrometer onboard NASA’s Cassini spacecraft”.

“We do not only find similarities of the organic reservoirs in the Solar System, but many of [comet 67P/C-G]’s organic molecules are also present in molecular clouds, the birthplaces of new stars”, complements Prof. Dr. Susanne Wampfler, astrophysicist at the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH) at the University of Bern and co-author of the publication. “Our findings are consistent with and support the scenario of a shared presolar origin of the different reservoirs of Solar System organics, confirming that comets indeed carry material from the times long before our Solar System emerged.”

These results are not unexpected, but having those expectations confirmed was one of the main scientific goals of the Rosetta mission. Now, almost a decade later, the results are in.

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South Korea ships its first lunar orbiter to U.S. for August launch

9:22 am

The new colonial movement: South Korea today packed and shipped its first lunar orbiter, dubbed Danuri, to the United States for an August 3, 2022 launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

According to the Ministry of Science and ICT, Danuri was sent from the Korea Aerospace Research Institute in Daejeon, 160 kilometers south of Seoul, to Incheon International Airport, west of Seoul, in a specially designed container. The orbiter will be flown to Orlando International Airport and arrive at the Floridian space center Thursday. It will later undergo maintenance, assembly and other pre-launch preparations for about a month before launch.

If all goes right, Danuri will orbit the Moon for a year, both testing its own technology as well as observing the lunar surface.

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Food fight! China denies NASA chief’s charge that it wants to dominate space

9:16 am

On July 2, 2022, in an interview for a German news outlet, NASA administrator described in somewhat overbroad terms the long range goals of the Chinese space program.

“We must be very concerned that China is landing on the moon and saying: ‘It’s ours now and you stay out,’” Mr. Nelson said in an interview published Saturday in the German newspaper Bild.

….China’s space program, at its heart, is a military space program, Mr. Nelson said. “China is good. But China is also good because they steal ideas and technology from others,” he said, according to Bild.

A China spokesman for its Foreign Ministry, Zhao Lijian, immediately slammed Nelson’s comments, adding some of his own overbroad accusations against the U.S.
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Victory Boyd – The Star Spangled Banner

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Victory Boyd was supposed to perform the national anthem at the opening game of the NFL’s 2021 season. They canceled her because she has refused to get vaccinated for religious reasons. She responded with this performance made available to all. The NFL should burn in hell.

Her passion in singing the last two lines of the anthem are important. The words, “The land of the free, the home of the brave,” are meant to remind us that you can’t have the former without the latter. Right now, every time I see someone mindlessly wearing a mask I wonder if the latter still exists.

Sing it! Believe it! Make ’22 the year that freedom and courage return to America.

Hat tip Mike Nelson.

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Sunspot update: For the first time in 2022, sunspot activity eases

3:58 pm

With the year half over, the Sun in June did something it had not done since the start of the year: The number of sunspots seen daily on the Sun’s visible hemisphere actually declined from the month before.

I know this because, as I do every month, I have posted below NOAA’s monthly update of its graph tracking the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere, with some addition details added to provide a larger context.

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The new damage on Curiosity’s wheels

9:30 am

Comparing a Curiosity wheel from January to June 2022
To see the original images, go here and here.

On June 23, 2022 the Curiosity team provided a major update on the rover’s status on Mars, noting that because of new damage discovered on one of wheels, they were increasing the frequency of their wheel checks from once every 1000 meters of travel to once every 500 meters.

The team discovered that the left middle wheel had damaged one of its grousers, the zig-zagging treads along Curiosity’s wheels. This particular wheel already had four broken grousers, so now five of its 19 grousers are broken.

The previously damaged grousers attracted attention online recently because some of the metal “skin” between them appears to have fallen out of the wheel in the past few months, leaving a gap.

The photo comparison to the right might be showing that specific wheel, or not. The top image was taken January 11, 2022, and when compared then with an image taken six months earlier showed little change. Thus, in January 2022 it seemed the wheels were holding up well as Curiosity traveled into the mountains.

The new image at the bottom, taken June 3, 2022, shows new damage (as indicated by the plus sign) which had occurred sometime in the past six months. During that time the rover had attempted to cross the incredibly rough ground of the Greenheugh Pediment, and had been forced to retreat because the ground was too rough.

This most recent wheel survey in June thus confirms that the decision to retreat was a wise one. It appears that while the rover’s wheels can take the general roughness of the terrain in the foothills of Mount Sharp, the Greenheugh Pediment was beyond the wheels’ capabilities.

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Rocket Lab’s Photon completes course corrections, deploys CAPSTONE to Moon

8:45 am

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab’s Photon upper stage successfully completed its seventh engine burn, putting NASA’s cubesat test lunar orbital on a path toward the Moon.

Following its launch on June 28, CAPSTONE orbited Earth attached to Rocket Lab’s Photon upper stage, which maneuvered CAPSTONE into position for its journey to the Moon. Over the past six days, Photon’s engines fired seven times at key moments to raise the orbit’s highest point to around 810,000 miles from Earth before releasing the CAPSTONE CubeSat on its ballistic lunar transfer trajectory to the Moon. The spacecraft is now being flown by the teams at Advanced Space and Terran Orbital. [emphasis mine]

From here on out CAPSTONE will use its own tiny thrusters to do any course corrections as it heads for an arrival in lunar orbit on November 13, 2022.

The highlighted words in the quote above are significant in and of themselves. The spacecraft is not being operated by NASA. In fact, other than paying for it, NASA has little to do with CAPSTONE. It was designed and built by Terran Orbital. It was launched by Rocket Lab. And it is now being controlled by Advanced Space, a private commercial company focused on providing in-space operations for others.

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Why we really celebrate the Fourth of July

6:00 am

The Declaration of Independence

If you really want to know why the Fourth of July has been the quintessential American holiday since the founding our this country, you need only return to the words of the document that became public to the world on that day.

Below the fold is the full text of the Declaration. Read it. It isn’t hard to understand, even if the style comes from the late 1700s. Its point however is clear. Governments that abuse the rights of the citizenry don’t deserve to be in power. The most important quote of course is right near the beginning:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed — that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. [emphasis mine]

What a radical concept — a nation founded on the principle of allowing its citizens to pursue happiness.

Right now, however, we have a federal government in America that more fits the description of King George III’s Great Britain in 1776 in the Declaration. The corrupt elitist uni-Party of federal elected officials and the federal bureaucracy in Washington has for too long run roughshod over the general population. If you take the time to read the full text of the Declaration, you will be astonished at the remarkable conceptual similarity between the abuses that Jefferson describes coming from Great Britain and the many abuses of power that are now legion and common by the uni-Party in Washington.

When November comes the American public will likely have its last chance to overthrow the political wing of the uni-Party, led by the Democratic Party. The Republicans are no saints, but at least that party contains within it many decent politicians who honor the Constitution, the rule of law, and the Bill of Rights. Many are right now campaigning on those ideals. Based on the past six years, we now know that no one in the Democratic Party honors those values. What they honor is blacklisting, racism, segregation, anti-American hate, and above all power. If they are not removed from office, they will ramp up that power, in league with quislings like Romney and Cornyn in the Republican Party, to further corrupt our Constitutional government.

These people do not like losing power. The longer they hold it, the more they will work to undermine the election system to make sure they do not lose. The corruption and election fraud in 2020 election was merely a dress rehearsal of what these goons will do if they have the chance next year.

In fact, November 2022 might very well be the last election that has any chance of producing legitimate results. Americans had better not waste this last chance.
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One of Perseverance’s two wind sensors damaged by wind-blown material

5:09 pm

According to the principal investigator for Perseverance’s two wind sensors, one was recently damaged by a wind-blown tiny pebble.

Pebbles carried aloft by strong Red Planet gusts recently damaged one of the wind sensors, but MEDA can still keep track of wind at its landing area in Jezero Crater, albeit with decreased sensitivity, José Antonio Rodriguez Manfredi, principal investigator of MEDA, told Space.com. “Right now, the sensor is diminished in its capabilities, but it still provides speed and direction magnitudes,” Rodriguez Manfredi, a scientist at the Spanish Astrobiology Center in Madrid, wrote in an e-mail. “The whole team is now re-tuning the retrieval procedure to get more accuracy from the undamaged detector readings.”

…Like all instruments on Perseverance, the wind sensor was designed with redundancy and protection in mind, Rodriguez Manfredi noted. “But of course, there is a limit to everything.” And for an instrument like MEDA, the limit is more challenging, since the sensors must be exposed to environmental conditions in order to record wind parameters. But when stronger-than-anticipated winds lifted larger pebbles than expected, the combination resulted in damage to some of the detector elements.

The term “pebble” implies a larger-sized particle than what probably hit the sensor. I suspect the “pebble” was no more than one or two millimeters in diameter, at the most.

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Lucy solar panel almost completely open

11:19 am

Engineers have now been able to get the one solar panel that did not deploy completely after launch on the Lucy asteroid probe almost completely open.

From May 6 to June 16, NASA’s Lucy mission team carried out a multi-stage effort intended to further deploy the spacecraft’s unlatched solar array. The team commanded the spacecraft to operate the array’s deployment motor for limited periods of time, allowing them to closely monitor the response of the spacecraft. As a result of this effort, the mission succeeded in further deploying the array and now estimates that the solar array is between 353 degrees and 357 degrees open (out of 360 total degrees for a fully deployed array). Additionally, the array is under substantially more tension, giving it significantly more stabilization. The mission team is increasingly confident the solar array will successfully meet the mission’s needs in its current tensioned and stabilized state.

The spacecraft’s orbit is now moving into a position where communications will be limited until October, so further attempts to completely open the array will have to wait until then.

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