Category: Points of Information

Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.

Boeing & NASA; 1st Starliner manned mission to now launch on July 21

3:34 pm

In a update posted by NASA today, agency and Boeing officials announced that they are now aiming to launch Boeing’s Starliner capsule on July 21, 2023 on its first manned mission to ISS.

The new target date provides NASA and Boeing the necessary time to complete subsystem verification testing and close out test flight certification products and aligns with the space station manifest and range launch opportunities.

The specifics behind this somewhat meaningless press release jargon can be found at this twitter thread. Apparently Boeing & NASA want to do more ground tests of the capsule’s parachute system as well as its flight software. There also appears to be some issue relating to the capsule’s batteries.

Boeing is also mulling a redesign of Starliner’s batteries for after this delayed crewed flight test. It also expects to redesign Starliner’s smart initiator system, which separates the crew from service module. NASA’s paying $24 million for that redesign amid added requirements

Though Boeing has a fixed price contract with NASA, if NASA demands redesigns or changes it has to pay for them. That Boeing and NASA are finding these issues at this late date, four years after Starliner was first supposed to launch, does not speak well of Boeing’s workmanship and quality control systems.

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The chaos between galaxies following their head-on collision

2:09 pm

The chaos between galaxies following their head-on collision
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken using the Gemini North ground-based 8-meter telescope in Hawaii. It shows two spiral galaxies about 180 million light years away following a head-on collision about 25 million years ago, in which the smaller spiral moved through the larger from the bottom to the top.

Upon exiting, the smaller spiral trailed behind it the reddish stream of material, while its outside arms on the right were bent downward. That trailing material is why astronomers have dubbed these the “Taffy Galaxies.” Imagine pulling two clumps of taffy apart. The stretched material linking the two clumps is the bridge of trailing material between these two galaxies. From the caption:

When the Taffy Galaxies’ collided, their galactic disks and gaseous components smashed right into each other. This resulted in a massive injection of energy into the gas, causing it to become highly turbulent. As the pair emerged from their collision, high-velocity gas was pulled from each galaxy, creating a massive gas bridge between them. The turbulence of the stellar material throughout the bridge is now prohibiting the collection and compression of gas that are required to form new stars.

The evolution of galaxies is incredibly slow, from the perspective of human existence. For example, this first collision 25 million years ago seems like it took a long time, but it will likely be followed by many more over the next billion years, eventually resulting in a single spherical elliptical galaxy. On the time scale of the universe, collisions every 100 million years or so means galaxies like this can mix and collide many times, and do so well within the existence of the theorized lifespan of the universe itself.

To us short-lived humans, however, this process just seems so slow it can’t possibly happen as described. But it does.

Sidebar: It appears this image was released to herald the repair of Gemini North’s primary mirror, which was damaged in two places on its edge during a recoating operation on October 20, 2022. Since then the telescope has been shut down as repair operations were undertaken. That repair is now complete, and it is expected the telescope will resume science observations in a few weeks.

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SpaceX launches another 56 Starlink satellites

1:19 pm

SpaceX today successfully launched another 56 Starlink satellites, using its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The first stage successfully completed its fourth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

Russia was also launching at almost the exact same time a classified military satellite, using its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from Plesetsk spaceport in northern Russia, but at the moment there is no word on whether that launch was a success.

For the moment then the leaders in the 2023 launch race are as follows:

21 SpaceX
11 China
5 Russia (with a planned launch today)
3 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads China 24 to 11 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 24 to 20. SpaceX now trails the rest of the world, including other American companies, 21 to 23.

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Zhurong: Small polygons on light curved dunes indicate regular atmospheric water interaction

1:12 pm

Zhurong's full journey on Mars

A paper published this week in Geophysical Research Letters by the science team for China Zhurong Martian rover has revealed the discovery of small polygon cracks on the surface of the many curved light-colored small dunes found in the region where Zhurong landed, suggesting the possibility of relatively recent water activity between the atmosphere and the dune surfaces.

Those dunes, dubbed transverse aeolian ridges (TARs) by the science team, are the many light curves visible in the labeled Mars Reconnaissance mosaic to the right. The blue arrows indicate Zhurong’s path south from its landing spot at the top and ending near the bottom of the picture after traveling about 1,400 feet.

According to the paper, the TARs were formed by the prevailing winds over many eons, coming first from the north and then from the northwest. The edges of the ridges, being smaller, are pushed ahead quicker, thus creating the curved shape. The polygons were small, never larger than 4 inches in size, with five to six sides. The scientists theorize that they were formed when atmospheric water interacted with the dune crust, causing fractures “due to temperature/moisture changes or deliquescence/dehydration cycling of salts”. This process could be slow or fast, and could actually be occurring in relatively recent times, as the scientists say it requires only a little water in the atmosphere.

More likely however we are seeing evidence of water from the past, from tens of thousands to several million years ago.

Zhurong meanwhile remains in hibernation, and might never come out of that condition. Orbital images indicate that its solar panels are dust-covered, the result of the heavy winter dust storm season. The project team however is hopeful that with time and the arrival of Martian summer the dust will be blown off and they can reactivate the rover. This hope however entirely depends on the arrival of a dust devil acoss the top of Zhurong, a random event that cannot be predicted. With both the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, such events happened regularly, allowing those missions to last years instead of only 90 days. With InSight it never happened, and the lander died after two-plus years on Mars.

Zhurong’s future fate thus remains unknown, but not promising at this moment.

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New map of the volcanoes of Venus

11:27 am

Map of Venus' volcanoes
Click for original image.

Using the archival radar data from the Magellan orbiter that circled Venus in the early 1990s, scientists have produced a new map of the volcanoes of Venus.

That map is to the right, and is publicly available for download.

Byrne and Hahn’s new study includes detailed analyses of where volcanoes are, where and how they’re clustered, and how their spatial distributions compare with geophysical properties of the planet such as crustal thickness. Taken together, this work provides the most comprehensive understanding of Venus’ volcanic properties — and perhaps of any world’s volcanism so far … because, although we know a great deal about the volcanoes on Earth that are on land, there are still likely a great many yet to be discovered under the oceans. Lacking oceans of its own, Venus’ entire surface can be viewed with Magellan radar imagery.

Although there are volcanoes across almost the entire surface of Venus, the scientists found relatively fewer volcanoes in the 20-100 km diameter range, which may be a function of magma availability and eruption rate, they surmise.

This new map catalogs about 85,000 volcanoes, but is also considered incomplete because the resolution of the Magellan data makes identifying volcanoes smaller than 1 kilometer impossible. It will require new orbiters to spot these volcanoes.

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Looking back from the foothills of Mount Sharp

10:17 am

Panorama looking back across Gale Crater, March 29, 2023
Click for original image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

The panorama above, cropped to post here, was taken today by the left navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity. It looks back at the rover’s previous travels, though only the terrain traveled in the past few months is visible, the rover having reached this point through the notch to the left of the distinctly dark mesa in the center of the picture. The lower flanks of Mount Sharp the rover traversed to get here are now blocked from view.

Instead, the image provides a spectacular example of the views north from Curiosity’s present position. The overview map to the right provides us the full context of the entire ten-plus year journey since Curiosity landed safely on Mars on August 5, 2012. The white squiggly line indicates the rover’s route. The yellow lines mark the approximate area covered by the panorama. The rim of Gale Crater is about 20-25 miles away.

As you can see, as spectacular as this view is, the journey up Mount Sharp has barely begun. Mount Sharp’s peak is about 18,000 feet high. The rover at this point has only climbed about 4,600 feet from the floor of Gale Crater.

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Hakuto-R1 snaps first picture of Moon from lunar orbit

9:18 am

Hakuto-R1's first released image from lunar orbit
Click for original image.

The science team for Ispace’s Hakuto-R1 privately-built lunar orbiter/lander earlier this week released the spacecraft’s first picture of the Moon since entering lunar orbit on March 20, 2023.

That image is to the right, cropped and reduced to post here. The photo resolution is quite good. It also demonstrates that the spacecraft’s attitude control systems for pointing the camera are working correctly.

Launched on December 11, 2022 by a Falcon 9 rocket, Hakuto-R1 will land in Atlas Crater on the northeast quadrant of the Moon’s visible hemisphere sometime in April, making it the first successful private commercial planetary lander to reach another world. If successful, it will then release the United Arab Emirates Rashid rover, that nation’s first planetary lander but its second planetary mission, following the Mars orbiter, Al-Amal, now circling Mars.

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Israel launches spy satellite

9:04 am

Israel yesterday successfully launched a radar reconnaissance satellite using its Shavit-2 solid-fueled three-stage rocket.

This was Israel’s first launch since 2020. It took place from Israel’s coastal launchpad, and traveled west over the Mediterranean so that its stages would not fall on habitable areas. This retrograde orbit, opposite of the Earth’s rotation, is costly in terms of fuel and the size of payload put in orbit, which is why the satellite weighed only 661 pounds.

The leader board for the 2023 launch race remains the same:

20 SpaceX (with a planned launch later today)
11 China
5 Russia (with a planned launch later today)
3 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads China 23 to 11 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 23 to 20. SpaceX now trails the rest of the world, including other American companies, 20 to 23.

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Mars’ largest mountain region

1:05 pm

Mars' largest mountain region
Click for original image.

The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on September 21, 2015 by the context camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). I originally was going to post a high resolution image of some of these mountains, taken on January 1, 2023 that showed some slope streaks, but quickly realized that a wider view of this mountain region was a much more interesting story.

This picture covers an area about 50 by 50 miles. As you can see, it is endless series of random hills ridges and peaks, with only a vague hint of a northeast to southwest alignment. Ground travel through this region would be slow and twisty, immediately reminding me of my many trips to West Virginia, where the hills and valleys are almost as random and never ending.

The overview map below however suggests the scale of this region exceeds West Virginia many times over.
» Read more

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NASA goes woke!

9:39 am

NASA yesterday announced that it has named two individuals, based on their race and gender, to lead the agency’s effort to promote the Marxist and racist Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) movement.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced Monday he is taking additional steps forward to advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) at the agency. Nelson named Steve Shih to serve in a new position as the agency’s first Diversity Ambassador and selected Elaine Ho as the next associate administrator for the Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity at NASA Headquarters in Washington, effective immediately.

…As diversity ambassador, Shih will further NASA’s DEIA initiatives by building key strategic alliances with external partners, enabling NASA to continue being a model agency and leader for DEIA. In this role, Shih will engage NASA’s partners – including across the government, private sector, academia, and non-governmental organizations – to learn and promote best practices for NASA to recruit, hire, engage, and retain the most talented individuals from all backgrounds and life experiences. With his experience leading the Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity since 2017, Shih will build on his three decades of federal expertise and help NASA continue to enable everyone to contribute inclusively to NASA and to the United States.

As Shih transitions to the role of diversity ambassador, Ho will bring extensive DEIA expertise to the Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity. She most recently has served as the deputy associate administrator for NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement, leading a wide-ranging portfolio of projects benefiting students, universities, and educational institutions across the country to inspire, engage, and educate the Artemis Generation.

To further prove NASA’s commitment to favor some races over others, the agency also announced yesterday that it is committing $3 million to support “seven Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and one Predominantly Black Institution (PBI).”

Note the focus on race, not achievement. While it is nice to help the disadvantaged, these programs are not really aimed at that goal. Instead, this entire DEI movement is designed to give power to specific races, to the detriment of others. Or to put it more bluntly, it is a race-based apartheid system that encourages race hatred and resentment.

It is also probably illegal, based on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Of course, the law is now irrelevant when it comes to the new racism. Supporters of DEI are allowed to break it whenever they want, because clearly they are superior to all others and have that right.

Finally, this stuff has absolutely nothing to do with NASA’s fundamental purpose, which is to help American industry more successfully explore space. It is instead a return to the Obama administration’s policy of making NASA’s most important priority that of helping minorities. Then it was Muslims, now it is the alphabet soup of LBGQTBIPOCZXYZ (and so on).

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Webb finds Earth-sized exoplanet likely too hot to have atmosphere

9:25 am

The uncertainty of science: Using the infrared Webb Space Telescope, scientists have measured the temperature of the Earth-sized exoplanet, dubbed Trappist-1b, and found its temperature is probably too hot to have atmosphere.

The red dwarf star Trappist-1is about 40 light years from Earth, and in 2017 was found to have a solar system of seven exoplanets, all rocky terrestrial planets like the inner planets of our solar system. Trappist-1b is the innermost exoplanet. To measure its temperature, Webb observed the star while the planet was eclipsed by the star as well as when it was not, and measured the tiny difference in infrared light.

The team analyzed data from five separate secondary eclipse observations. “We compared the results to computer models showing what the temperature should be in different scenarios,” explained Ducrot. “The results are almost perfectly consistent with a blackbody made of bare rock and no atmosphere to circulate the heat. We also didn’t see any signs of light being absorbed by carbon dioxide, which would be apparent in these measurements.”

As this was the innermost of the star’s solar system, it is also the one most likely to lack an atmosphere. Webb’s observations of the system continue, so there is a chance that data about the other exoplanets will eventually tell us more about them.

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Virgin Orbit extends pause in operations, having failed to get new financing

9:11 am

Virgin Orbit has extended its worker furlough and pause in operations now that a $200 million deal with a Texas investor has fallen through.

Reuters reported last week that Texas-based Matthew Brown had been in talks to invest $200 million in the company. Those talks have collapsed, said two people familiar with the discussions who asked not to be identified. Brown declined to comment on Monday.

Virgin Orbit, teetering on bankruptcy after a January rocket failure and struggles to raise funds, furloughed nearly all its 750 employees on March 15 while it sought a financial lifeline that would allow it to focus on upgrading its launch business.

This is very bad news for the company, because it indicates that there might not be a financial savior for it.

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Leaking Soyuz capsule returns unmanned to Earth

9:06 am

The Soyuz capsule with a leaking coolant system successfully landed in Kazakhstan today, returning to Earth unmanned because of that leak.

Russian engineers will now analyze whether a crew would have been able to come home safely in that spacecraft, despite its damaged coolant system, which will provide information for future such problems. They will not be able to study the leak itself, however, as it was part of the capsule’s service module, which separates upon return and burns up in the atmosphere.

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German rocket startup raises $168 million in private investment capital

9:02 am

The German rocket startup Isar Aerospace has raised $168 million in new private investment capital, bringing the total it has raised to $310 million.

At present the company is targeting the second half of this year for the first launch of its Spectrum rocket, lifting off from a new spaceport in Norway.

Isar is one of three German rocket startups, with the other two Rocket Factory Augsburg and HyImpulse Technologies. Both Isar and Rocket Factory are getting close to launch.

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Scientists detect water inside lunar samples returned to Earth by Chang’e-5

7:53 pm

Chinese scientists have found water molecules trapped within glass beads found within the lunar samples returned to Earth by the lunar lander Chang’e-5.

The team polished and analysed 117 glass beads which were scooped up by China’s Chang’e-5 spacecraft in December 2020 and brought back to Earth. The beads are formed by tiny meteorites that bombard the surface of the Moon, which lacks the protection of an atmosphere. The heat of the impact melts the surface material, which cools into round glass beads around the width of a strand of hair.

…The glass beads may make up around three to five percent of lunar soil, according to the study. A “back of the envelope” calculation suggested that there could be around a third of a trillion tonnes of water inside all the Moon’s glass beads, he added. And it only takes mild heat of around 100 degrees Celsius (210 Fahrenheit) to liberate the water from the beads, Anand said.

According to the paper, the water’s origin might be tied to the solar wind, and might have been implanted in the beads after their impact formation.

If this analysis is correct, it might explain the hydrogen signature found in large parts of the lunar surface, where it is believed water simply couldn’t exist. It also might explain why the first images inside permanently shadowed lunar craters show no obvious ice, only what appear to be ponds of dark dust. The dust might contain these beads, and thus explain the hydrogen signature detected there as well.

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A Martian crater with a surface pattern that resembles hanging draperies

2:45 pm

A Martian crater with a surface pattern like hanging draperies

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on January 27, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows what the scientists label a “streak-spoke pattern” inside the crater. To my eye, the pattern more resembles hanging draperies, neatly tied near the top and then pulled apart as they descend to the ground.

This photo was a follow-up to a previous picture by MRO on February 4, 2008, more than seven Martian years ago, to see if there had been any identifiable changes in that time. Both images were taken in springtime, and despite the passage of time, the 2023 image shows no obvious changes from the 2008 photo.

What caused this distinct pattern? The first guess would be the wind, except if so shouldn’t there have been some change over seven Martian years?
» Read more

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A multitude of strange galaxies

11:57 am

A multitude of strange galaxies
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released today. From the caption:

Z 229-15 is one of those interesting celestial objects that, should you choose to research it, you will find defined as several different things: sometimes as an active galactic nucleus (an AGN); sometimes as a quasar; and sometimes as a Seyfert galaxy. Which of these is Z 229-15 really? The answer is that it is all of these things all at once, because these three definitions have significant overlap.

All three classifications involve galaxies with nuclei that are brighter, more energetic, and more massive than the rest of the galaxy. Z229-15 itself is estimated to be 390 million light years away.

Normally I would have cropped the image to center on Z229-15. However, I was struck by the number of other strange galaxies in the distance and on the periphery of the picture. Near the top is a trio of three, none of which appear spiral- or elliptical-shaped. On the right is a galaxy that could be a standard spiral seen edge-on, but its red nucleus is very unusual. And scattered across the bottom half of the image are a number of weirdly shaped galaxies of all types, none of which appear typical.

Be sure to look at the high resolution original. There are more weird galaxies visible there.

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Curiosity heads to the west of the Hill of Pillows

10:18 am

Panorama on March 27, 2023 (Sol 3781)
Click for full resolution panorama. The original images can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

In my previous post on March 11, 2023 showing Curiosity’s spectacular view at that time in the foothills of Mount Sharp, the main question was: Which route will the rover take in the next few weeks? Based on the panorama above, created from five pictures taken by Curiosity’s right navigation camera today, it now appears that the science team has made its decision and will have the rover traverse to the west of what I label the Hill of Pillows.

The overview map to the right gives the context. The blue dot marks Curiosity’s position three days ago, with the yellow lines indicating the approximate area covered by the panorama. The red dotted line shows the planned route going past the Hill of Pillows to the east.

The science team took a careful look at the terrain in both directions, and decided the route to the west was both more gradual and less rough. This set of images by the navigation camera was now taken to better plan the route up in this hollow among its rock-strewn ground.

Make sure you look at the full resolution version of the panorama. You can see on the horizon the high mesas in the south just beginning to appear.

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Are launch prices up, or is the demand continuing to be high?

8:58 am

According to a Space News yesterday, high demand and inflation have resulted in an overall increase in launch prices in recent months.

At the recent Satellite 2023 conference, industry officials said they saw evidence of growing prices in the last year. Growing demand along with a constrained near-term supply that some have dubbed a “global shortage” is a factor, they say, along with inflation that has remained historically high for more than a year.

The only evidence of this increase that the article presents however is a 10% increase in SpaceX’s launch price, which the company claims is almost entirely due to inflation, not demand. Furthermore, this increase still leaves SpaceX’s launch prices well below the lowest prices that other launch companies can yet offer, which means the competition can’t really raise its prices significantly.

The important take-away from the article is not that the cost of rockets has gone up, but that the demand remains very high, which bodes well for the new startups trying to enter the market. For example, the article notes that the next SpaceX smallsat launch opportunity is 2025. There thus remains plenty of business for the many new rocket companies trying to enter the market in the next two years.

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Momentus reports successful use of its new water-based thrusters on its orbiting Vigoride-5 tug

8:55 pm

The orbital tug startup Momentus on March 23, 2023 reported the successful use of its new water-based thrusters on its orbiting Vigoride-5 prototype tug, proving the design works.

The Reaction Control System operates using the same propellant and tank with water as the Vigoride spacecraft’s primary MET propulsion system. The MET is designed to use water as a propellant and produce thrust by expelling extremely hot gases through a rocket nozzle. Unlike a conventional chemical rocket engine, which creates thrust through a chemical reaction, the MET is designed to create a plasma and thrust using microwave energy. When operational, the MET will be used to raise the orbital altitude and inclination of Vigoride-5.

Essentially this is a variation of an ion engine. The thrust will be low, but very efficient. The thrusters can therefore fire for a very long time, building up accelerations infeasible for chemical engines, and thus allowing the tug to significantly change the orbits of satellites in ways that was previously impossible.

This release came out the day before NASDAQ announced that Momentus has six months to raise the price of its stock above one dollar or be delisted from the stock exchange. Since its release, the stock price rose from $0.54 to $0.63, still below a dollar but going in the right direction, despite the NASDAQ announcement.

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NASDAQ gives two more space companies delisting warning

10:25 pm

NASDAQ yesterday told the space companies Momentus and Spire they have six months to get their stock price over $1 or the stock exchange will delist each.

Small satellite builder and data specialist Spire Global received a notice from the New York Stock Exchange, while spacecraft delivery company Momentus received a notice from the Nasdaq. Under the respective exchanges’ compliance rules, the companies have 180 days, or about six months, to get their stock prices back above $1 a share.

Spire’s stock closed at 69 cents a share on Friday, having first slipped below $1 a share on Mar. 7. Momentus’ stock closed at 63 cents a share, slipping below $1 a share on Feb. 7.

Both companies now join Astra under the same threat. Both also have indicated they will consider a reverse-stock split, combining stocks to reduce the total number in order to bring the price above one dollar.

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India launches 36 OneWeb satellites

9:09 pm

India’s space agency ISRO tonight successfully launched 36 OneWeb satellites using its LVM-M3 rocket, the largest version of its GSLV family of rockets.

This launch completes OneWeb’s constellation, with 618 satellites now in orbit, allowing them to now offer internet access worldwide in competition with Starlink. After Russia broke its contract and confiscated 36 OneWeb satellites, the company contracted SpaceX and ISRO to launch the satellites necessary to complete the constellation, with SpaceX doing three launches and ISRO two.

This was India’s second launch in 2023. The leaders in the 2023 launch race remain the same:

20 SpaceX
11 China
5 Russia
3 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads China 23 to 11 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 23 to 19. SpaceX by itself now trails the entire world, including other American companies, 20 to 22.

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Ancient Martian landslides

5:45 pm

Ancient Martian landslides
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on December 23, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The image was labeled “Landslides in Orson Welles Crater” because the full photo shows at least two large and obvious slides, with the biggest shown to the right.

These avalanches are likely ancient because both have craters on them suggesting the material has not moved for a very long time. Yet when both flowed they did so almost like mud, the material moving downhill almost in a single blobby mass. Both have this look, as do many Martian landslides, which I think is why the scientists usually label them mass wasting events.
» Read more

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The invulnerability of today’s academic blacklist culture

2:22 pm

Tirien Steinbach: in favor of censorship and mob rule
Stanford’s Tirien Steinbach:
in favor of censorship and mob rule

They’re coming for you next: In order to best understand how difficult it will be to regain the free and open society that was once the United States, we need only look at recent events at the Stanford Law School.

On March 9, 2023 a mob of students and faculty, led by Tirien Steinbach, the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion dean, shouted down U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan when he tried to give a lecture about the law for the school’s chapter of the Federalist Society.

You can watch a video of this mob action at the link, where Steinbach actually took the podium away from Duncan to order to give a speech defending the mob and agreeing with their effort to silence him.

The story has gotten ample coverage in the press, including the general reaction from outside the school. For example, in Texas and in California action has been proposed to bar the students involved from getting law licenses.

The law school itself initially responded very weakly, simply sending a letter of apology to Duncan.
» Read more

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Blue Origin releases results of investigation into New Shepard flight failure

11:04 am

Blue Origin today released by email its results of its investigation into the New Shepard flight failure that occurred in September 2022, when the launch abort system activated soon after launch and released the capsule early so that it could return safely to Earth.

[T]he MIT [investigation team] determined the direct cause of the mishap to be a structural fatigue failure of the BE-3PM engine nozzle during powered flight. The structural fatigue was caused by operational temperatures that exceeded the expected and analyzed values of the nozzle material. Testing of the BE-3PM engine began immediately following the mishap and established that the flight configuration of the nozzle operated at hotter temperatures than previous design configurations. Forensic evaluation of the recovered nozzle fragments also showed clear evidence of thermal damage and hot streaks resulting from increased operating temperatures. The fatigue location on the flight nozzle is aligned with a persistent hot streak identified during the investigation.

The MIT determined that design changes made to the engine’s boundary layer cooling system accounted for an increase in nozzle heating and explained the hot streaks present. Blue Origin is implementing corrective actions, including design changes to the combustion chamber and operating parameters, which have reduced engine nozzle bulk and hot-streak temperatures. Additional design changes to the nozzle have improved structural performance under thermal and dynamic loads.

In other words, the company had made some design changes to the engine prior to launch, and these caused the hot spots that destroyed the nozzle.

The company’s email says it is fixing this issue and plans to launch “soon”, but issued no date.

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Hubble spots long term seasonal changes on Uranus

10:20 am

Uranus as seen by Hubble in 2014 and 2022
Click for original image.

Using images of Uranus taken eight years apart by the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have detected significant seasonal changes in the atmosphere of the gas giant, caused by its unusual sideways rotation.

The two pictures to the left, realigned and reduced to post here, show the changes. If you look closely you can see the planet’s ring system and its shift to almost face on at present.

[top] — This is a Hubble view of Uranus taken in 2014, seven years after northern spring equinox when the Sun was shining directly over the planet’s equator, and shows one of the first images from the OPAL program. Multiple storms with methane ice-crystal clouds appear at mid-northern latitudes above the planet’s cyan-tinted lower atmosphere. Hubble photographed the ring system edge-on in 2007, but the rings are seen starting to open up seven years later in this view. At this time, the planet had multiple small storms and even some faint cloud bands.

[bottom] — As seen in 2022, Uranus’ north pole shows a thickened photochemical haze that looks similar to the smog over cities. Several little storms can be seen near the edge of the polar haze boundary. Hubble has been tracking the size and brightness of the north polar cap and it continues to get brighter year after year. Astronomers are disentangling multiple effects – from atmospheric circulation, particle properties, and chemical processes – that control how the atmospheric polar cap changes with the seasons. At the Uranian equinox in 2007, neither pole was particularly bright.

To really understand the long term climate of Uranus will likely take centuries, since its year lasts 84 Earth years. Since the beginning of space exploration, we have only had now about forty years of good imagery of the planet, and even that has been sporadic and very incomplete.

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Sierra Space pops another inflatable test space station module

9:56 am

Proposed Orbital Reef space station
Proposed Orbital Reef space station

Sierra Space announced yesterday that it had successfully completed its fourth test to failure of a one-third scale prototype inflatable space station module, dubbed LIFE, with work on the full scale module expected to begin next year and leading to the launch of its private commercial space station sometime later this decade.

In February, Sierra Space performed a month-long Accelerated Systematic Creep (ASC) test on LIFE – the first milestone in its 2023 testing campaign. Engineers loaded a one-third-scale version of the inflatable habitat with a sustained amount of pressure over an extended period until it failed. Per NASA’s recommended guidelines for inflatable softgoods certification, the test reached its goal of generating an additional data point – pressure and time to burst – which can be used to estimate the life of the primary pressure shell structure.

“Our testing campaign has demonstrated that our LIFE habitat pressure shell design has a predicted life of far greater than 60 years – or 525,600 hours – based on Sierra Space’s 15-year on-orbit life requirement and the applied 4x safety factor,” said Sierra Space Chief Engineer for LIFE, Shawn Buckley. “We are obviously simulating pressures well in excess of the norm.”

You can view video of the test here. The failure was so intense that it also blew up the test shack.

Sierra Space is part of a partnership with Blue Origin and others to build the Orbital Reef space station, one of four such stations with contracts with NASA. Sierra Space is building the station’s modules, while Boeing is providing the Starliner capsule for transportation. Blue Origin is supposed be providing larger modules and the New Glenn rocket for transportation, but the development of both continues to lag.

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Starliner’s first manned mission to ISS delayed again

9:36 am

According to a tweet by a NASA official, the first manned mission to ISS of Boeing’s Starliner capsule, carrying two NASA astronauts, has been delayed again, from the planned late April launch to sometime during the summer.

No reasons for the delay were given, as yet. The second link notes however that a schedule conflict at ULA, which is launching Starliner on its Atlas-5 rocket, might be part of the reason.

A launch in late April [of Starliner on the Atlas-5] would have put it in conflict with the inaugural launch of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket, currently scheduled for as soon as May 4. Vulcan and Atlas use the same launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, and ULA has been conducting tests of the Vulcan rocket on that pad. It has not shared updates on the status of the Atlas 5 used for Starliner.

This conflict might also explain why Starliner itself has not yet been fueled, since Boeing officials have said they want to do this within 60 days of launch to avoid the same kind of valve leaks that delayed the second unmanned demo mission for almost a year.

Starliner itself is years behind schedule, a long delay that has cost Boeing an enormous amount of income. First, the problems during the first unmanned demo flight in December 2019 forced the company to do a second unmanned demo flight, on its own dime costing about $400 million. That second flight was then delayed because of those valve issues. All the delays next cost Boeing income from NASA, as the agency was forced to purchase many manned flights from SpaceX that it had intended to buy from Boeing.

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