Category: Behind The Black

Ingenuity completes 16th Mars flight

9:38 am

According to a tweet by the Ingenuity team, the Mars helicopter successfully completed its 16th flight on Mars on November 21st.

“#MarsHelicopter continues to thrive!” mission personnel wrote in a tweet posted Monday (Nov. 22). “The mighty rotorcraft completed its 16th flight on the Red Planet last weekend, traveling 116 meters northeast for 109 seconds. It captured color images during the short hop, but those will come down in a later downlink.”

No images have as yet been downloaded from the flight.

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Rocket Lab to attempt 1st stage recovery by helicopter, beginning early next year

9:30 am

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab announced today that based on the data obtained during its previous launch in November, the company will attempt a helicopter recovery in the air of its Electron rocket’s first stage, starting with its first launches in 2022.

With the success of this latest mission, Rocket Lab will now move to aerial capture attempts with a helicopter for future recovery missions in the first half of 2022. Rocket Lab’s recovery helicopter will include auxiliary fuel tanks for extended flight time during the capture attempt. While Rocket Lab’s engineers and recovery vessel will also be stationed at sea, Rocket Lab’s primary objective will be to return Electron’s booster to the mainland while attached to the helicopter. Improvements to the launch vehicle for this next recovery attempt will include a thermal protection system applied to the entire stage and its nine Rutherford engines to help it endure heat of up to 2,400 degrees Celsius during re-entry, and modifications to the parachute system including an engagement line for the recovery helicopter to capture and secure the booster.

The company has a launch scheduled for the end of November, but apparently it is not going to attempt a first stage recovery by helicopter during that mission.

If successful, Rocket Lab will have become the second company able to reuse its first stage, and thus cut the price it charges for launches significantly.

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Russia successfully launches Progress with new docking hub for ISS

9:15 am

Russia today successfully launched a new Progress freighter carrying Prichal, a new docking hub for the Russian half of ISS.

If all goes as planned, Prichal will dock to Nauka in two days.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

43 China
26 SpaceX
19 Russia
5 Europe (Arianespace)

China still leads the U.S. 43 to 41 in the national rankings. This launch was the 111th successful launch in 2021, which tied the number from 2018 that had been the highest since the 1990s.

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SpaceX successfully launches NASA asteroid mission

8:58 am

Last night SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched NASA’s DART asteroid mission.

The first stage landed successfully, completing its third flight. This was SpaceX’s 26th launch in 2021, setting a new record for the company and in fact for any private company ever.

DART’s mission is to test one method for changing an asteroid’s orbit.

After launch tonight, DART will take aim on an asteroid called Dimorphos. The spacecraft will strike Dimorphos at nearly 15,000 mph (about 6.6 kilometers per second).

The primary science goal of the mission is to measure how the high-speed collision next September, which will destroy the DART spacecraft, disrupts the orbit of Dimorphos around nearby Didymos. The data could help plan a future mission to deflect an asteroid on a course to hit Earth.

Dimorphos and its larger companion Didymos pose no near-term threat to Earth, but the asteroids will be close enough to our planet next year for astronomers to observe DART’s impact using ground-based telescopes. The asteroids orbit the sun in an elongated path that occasionally bring them into Earth’s neighborhood. That makes them potentially hazardous asteroids, although scientists say there is no near-term threat from the pair.

No space mission has ever explored Didymos and Dimorphos, but scientists who have observed them through telescopes say the asteroids are about a half-mile (780 meters) and 525 feet (160 meters) in diameter, respectively.

An Italian cubesat is also on board, and will separate from DART about ten days before impact so that it can observe the impact with two camera.

The leaders in 2021 launch race:

43 China
26 SpaceX
18 Russia
5 Europe (Arianespace)

China now leads the U.S. 43 to 41 in the national rankings. For the U.S. SpaceX’s launch last night topped the U.S. total from last year, which was this country’s highest launch total since the 1960s.

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Second camera on Hubble returned to science operations

10:35 am

Engineers working to reactivate the instruments on the Hubble Space Telescope have successfully brought a second camera out of safe mode.

NASA continues bringing the Hubble Space Telescope back to normal science operations, most recently recovering the Wide Field Camera 3 instrument Sunday, Nov. 21. This camera will be the second of Hubble’s instruments, after the Advanced Camera for Surveys, to resume science after suspending the spacecraft’s observations Oct. 25. The Wide Field Camera 3’s first science observation since the anomaly will be Nov. 23.

The team chose to restore the most heavily used Hubble instrument, the Wide Field Camera 3, which represents more than a third of the spacecraft’s observing time. Engineers also began preparing changes to the instrument parameters, while testing the changes on ground simulators. These changes would allow the instruments to handle several missed synchronization messages while continuing to operate normally if they occur in the future. These changes will first be applied to another instrument, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, to further protect its sensitive far-ultraviolet detector. It will take the team several weeks to complete the testing and upload the changes to the spacecraft.

The telescope’s other instruments remain in safe mode as the engineers continue to investigate the problem that caused the shut down on October 25th.

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China launches another Earth observation satellite

10:21 am

China’s high pace of launches in 2021 continued yesterday with another launch, this time placing an Earth observation satellite into orbit using its Long March 4C rocket.

This was China’s 43rd successful launch in ’21, three more than it had predicted it would achieve at the start of the year and the most any single nation has accomplished since the Russians completed 49 in 1994.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

43 China
25 SpaceX
18 Russia
5 Europe (Arianespace)

China now leads the U.S. 43 to 40 in the national rankings.

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Webb launch delayed four days because of “incident” during stacking

2:18 pm

NASA management has decided to delay the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope for four days while engineers investigate whether an “incident” that occurred during the telescope’s stacking on top of an Ariane 5 rocket could have long term consequences.

Technicians were preparing to attach Webb to the launch vehicle adapter, which is used to integrate the observatory with the upper stage of the Ariane 5 rocket. A sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band – which secures Webb to the launch vehicle adapter – caused a vibration throughout the observatory.

A NASA-led anomaly review board was immediately convened to investigate and instituted additional testing to determine with certainty the incident did not damage any components. NASA and its mission partners will provide an update when the testing is completed at the end of this week.

The launch had been scheduled for December 18th. They have now pushed it back to December 22nd.

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Posting will be light…

11:29 am

Our regal guard cat, Emma
Our regal guard cat, Emma.

The past weekend was probably the worst in my life. First I was blacklisted by my entire caving community, many of whom I had considered close friends, because I have for the last twenty months refused to quarantine and hide in my home. While they have hunkered down in fear, I have been running monthly cave trips, with no ill effects at all.

My success demonstrated that the lockdowns and mask mandates accomplished little. So of course, rather than rethink their fear-driven policies, the caving community decided I must become a non-person.

This won’t change anything, as I will still run monthly cave trips with people who see COVID for what it is, nothing more than a variation of the flu that cannot hurt you if you are young and healthy.

The weekend then ended with Diane and I being forced to put one of our two cats to sleep due to the sudden and unexpected total failure of her kidneys. Emma was only nine. It was heart-breaking to say good-bye to her.

And finally, I am fighting a cold, which leaves me with little energy. My doctor (and I) are pretty confident it is not COVID, but even if it was, it is merely exhausting and will take a few more days for me to fight it off.

Until then, my posting might be a bit lighter than normal.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Army cadet with natural immunity forced from West Point

11:17 am

No longer defended at West Point
The Constitution: No longer defended at West Point.

Despite having had COVID so that she has natural immunity and is better protected from getting it again as well as passing on to others, West Point cadet Hannah MacDonald was forced out of the Army because of its oppressive discriminatory policies against those who refuse to get COVID shots.

The litany of wrongs MacDonald was forced to undergo violated numerous laws, all of which our modern McCarthyites care little about.

  • The Army revealed her medical history to all, in violation of HPPA requirements, with one officer nonchalantly stating “HIPAA isn’t the be-all, end-all.”
  • The mandates forcing the COVID shots on her violated the Nuremberg Code, a signed treaty of the U.S. and the law of the land. When she noted this, she “was told this small legal distinction didn’t matter.”
  • The Army treated her and others who would not get the shots as second class citizens, discriminating against them in numerous ways while re-establishing the worst forms of segregation against them, all in violation of numerous civil rights legislation.

This quote from MacDonald’s story at the link best illustrates the Army’s insane policy:
» Read more

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History Unplugged – The Age of Discovery 2.0: Episode 6

8:48 am

Episode six of the six part series, The Age of Discovery 2.0, from the podcast, History Unplugged, is now available here.

On this episode Scott Rank interviews Ram Jakhu, an associate professor at McGill University and a researcher on international space law. From the show summary:

The British East India Company is perhaps the most powerful corporation in history. It was larger than several nations and acted as emperor of the Indian subcontinent, commanding a private army of 260,000 soldiers (twice the size of the British Army at the time). The East India Company controlled trade between Britain and India, China, and Persia, reaping enormous profits, flooding Europe with tea, cotton, and spices. Investors earned returns of 30 percent or more.

With SpaceX building reusable rockets and drawing up plans to colonize Mars, could we be seeing a new British East India Company for the 21st century? The idea isn’t that far-fetched. In the terms of service for its Starlink satellite internet, one clause reads the following: “For Services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other colonization spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities. Accordingly, Disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.”

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