Category: Points of Information

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

New data from Webb shows the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole flares multiple times per day

9:47 am

The magnetic field lines surrounding Sagittarius A*
The magnetic field lines surrounding Sagittarius A*,
published in March 2024. Click for original image.

Though past research had shown that the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, dubbed Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star) is generally quiet and inactive, new data from the Webb Space Telescope gathered over a year’s time now shows that it flares multiple times per day.

Throughout the year, the team saw how the black hole’s accretion disk emitted 5 to 6 large flares per day, of varying lengths and brightnesses, plus smaller flares in between. “[Sagittarius A*] is always bubbling with activity and never seems to reach a steady state,” Yusef-Zadeh says. “We observed the black hole multiple times throughout 2023 and 2024, and we noticed changes in every observation. We saw something different each time, which is really remarkable. Nothing ever stayed the same.”

In their paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the team outlines two possible ideas for the processes driving these flares. The faint flickers may be caused by turbulent fluctuations in the accretion disk, which could compress plasma and trigger a burst of radiation. “It’s similar to how the sun’s magnetic field gathers together, compresses and then erupts a solar flare,” Yusef-Zadeh says. “Of course, the processes are more dramatic because the environment around a black hole is much more energetic and much more extreme.”

The larger and brighter flares, on the other hand, may be caused by two fast-moving magnetic fields colliding and releasing accelerated particles. These magnetic reconnection events also have a solar parallel.

You can read their paper here [pdf]. Though this research shows unexpected activity, that activity is still relatively mild compared to other central supermassive black holes in many other galaxies. Why this difference exists remains an unanswered question.

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SaveRGV drops lawsuit against SpaceX’s Boca Chica operations

9:29 am

SaveRGV, one of several fringe activist groups that has been using lawfare to try to shut down SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy operations in Boca Chica, suddenly announced yesterday that it has dropped a lawsuit against the company that claimed the potable water released in the launchpad deluge system during launches polluted the wetlands there.

Save RGV board member Jim Chapman said they dropped the lawsuit because the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality [TCEQ], the state’s environmental agency, granted SpaceX a permit that “moots” their lawsuit. “We think we’re right,” Chapman said in a phone interview. “We just didn’t feel like [the lawsuit] was going to move in a positive direction for us.”

According to the article at the first link above, SaveRGV and its partner fringe groups have filed a different lawsuit against TCEQ, challenging its decision to issue SpaceX that permit.

When TCEQ issued the permit last week, I wondered if the lawfare of these groups would begin to fade away because their funding is now drying up because of the Trump’s DOGE team effort to shut down the laundering of money illegally to such groups by many agencies in the executive branch. SaveRGV’s decision yesterday, only days after TCEQ’s decision, makes me think my theory might have some merit. It could be it no longer has funds to pay its lawyers for multiple lawsuits, and has decided to focus on one for the time being. Only time will tell.

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ULA & Northrop Grumman complete static fire test of Vulcan strap-on booster

9:13 am

As part of its investigation into the loss of a strap-on booster nozzle during the second launch of ULA’s Vulcan rocket in October 2024, ULA and Northrop Grumman on February 13, 2025 successfully completed a static fire test of another strap-on booster.

The test was also apparently done in order to convince the Space Force to certify Vulcan for military launches. The Pentagon originally required Vulcan to complete two launches before certification, something that second launch achieved despite the loss of the nozzle. It has held off that certification however, insisting on more information into the nozzle loss.

The investigation has scrambled ULA’s planned launch schedule. The company had hoped after the second certification launch to fly two Space Force commercial launches before the end of 2024. Both launches were pushed back into 2025, so much so that ULA has been forced to de-stack a Vulcan rocket so it can instead do an Atlas-5 launch first, carrying the first set of Amazon’s Kuiper satellites.

Whether the results of this static fire test will satisfy the military is at present unknown. No details about the test were revealed, other than the companies were studying the results.

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SpaceX launches 23 Starlink satellites; landing first stage on drone ship in the Bahamas

4:35 pm

SpaceX today successfully placed 23 Starlink satellites in orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The rocket’s two fairings completed their 14th and 22nd flight respectively. The first stage completed its 16th flight, landing on a drone ship off the coast of the Bahamas, near Exumas. That landing was the first ever to land in territory of another country. SpaceX negotiated rights to do so from the Bahamas to give it more orbital options launching from Florida.

The 2025 launch race:

21 SpaceX
7 China
1 Blue Origin
1 India
1 Japan
1 Russia
1 Rocket Lab

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February 18, 2025 Quick space links

3:25 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.

  • By today NASA’s workforce will shrink by 10%
    The layoffs are as per Trump’s order to lay off all new provisional employees, plus the 750 or so who accepted the buy offer. The article is another example of the media wailing over a staffing reduction that private companies do all the time, usually to the benefit of the company.
  • South Africa rejects Starlink
    Actually, Starlink had already rejected South Africa, partly because of its racist policies confiscating land from whites, and partly because the government there was demanding an exorbitant share of Starlink’s profits.
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Blue Ghost lowers its lunar orbit while shooting a movie of the Moon

3:12 pm

The company Firefly announced that its lunar lander Blue Ghost successfully completed 3:18 minute engine burn that tightened its orbit around the Moon.

This maneuver moved the lander from a high elliptical orbit to a much lower elliptical orbit around the Moon. Shortly after the burn, Blue Ghost captured incredible footage of the Moon’s far side, about 120 km above the surface.

I have embedded the movie below. Quite spectacular indeed. The spacecraft is still on target for a March 2, 2025 landing attempt.
» Read more

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Another “What the heck?” image on Mars, this time a mystery on both small and large scales

12:16 pm

What the heck?
Click for the original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on October 21, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled simply as a “terrain sample,” it was likely taken not as part of any specific research project but to fill a gap in the schedule in order to maintain the camera’s proper temperature.

In this case however the camera team picked this spot probably to satisfy their own curiosity. This same location was photographed by MRO back in July 2022, and they were likely wondering if the streaks coming off these dark spots had changed at all in the subsequent years.

As far as I can tell, there has been no significant change, though the highest resolution versions of these images might show more.

The geology in the picture itself is very puzzling. At first glance the dark streaks appear to have been caused by wind blowing the dust from the dark spots. At second glance this doesn’t work, as large dark areas do not appear to be linked to those dark spots.

What is going on here?
» Read more

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ISRO’s head touts private construction of PSLV rocket

9:35 am

In comments published in the Times of India today, the head of India’s space agency ISRO, V Narayanan, enthusiastically touted the fact that a private consortium is presently manufacturing its first PSLV rocket under a five-rocket contract.

Isro chairman V Narayanan revealed this in an exclusive interview to TOI and said the launch, scheduled for the third quarter of this year, will mark a milestone as the first PSLV manufactured by the private sector under a contract for five rockets. The vehicle is in “advanced stages of realisation” with Isro providing technical guidance to the industrial partners.

Sounds good, eh? Actually, this instead appears to be an attempt by ISRO to thwart the Modi government’s desire to transfer ownership of ISRO’s rockets, starting with the long established PSLV rocket, from ISRO to the private sector. This five-rocket deal, first signed in 2022, doesn’t transfer anything. All it does is have private companies build the rocket, something that ISRO has had private companies do for decades. The one difference is that ISRO is no longer listed as the prime contractor, and appears to be somewhat less involved in management.

Well, it is at least a start. Getting government bureaucracies to give up power can sometimes be a struggle that lasts years, unless you are Donald Trump arriving for a second term disgusted with that same struggle during his first term.

The launch, targeting the third quarter of this year, will place a collection of tecnology test payloads into orbit.

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SpaceX engineers given task to review FAA air traffic operations

9:14 am

On February 16, 2025 the new head of the Department of Transportation revealed that he had invited SpaceX to review its air traffic control operations in Virginia and make recommendations.

Tomorrow, members of @elonmusk’s SpaceX team will be visiting the Air Traffic Control System Command Center in VA to get a firsthand look at the current system, learn what air traffic controllers like and dislike about their current tools, and envision how we can make a new, better, modern and safer system.

Because I know the media (and Hillary Clinton) will claim Elon’s team is getting special access, let me make clear that the @FAANews regularly gives tours of the command center to both media and companies.

Many propaganda news reports immediately did exactly what Duffy predicted, quickly finding people to attack both Musk and Duffy for this action and giving them a bull horn for those attacks:

That prompted criticism from some aviation professionals. “SpaceX put people in danger yesterday and their for-profit corporation should reimburse every other for-profit corporation that had to divert, change course or delay because of their operations in the national airspace system,” wrote Steve Jangelis, aviation safety chair for the Air Line Pilots Association, in a social media post after the incident.

Like many in the propaganda press, this article made a big deal about the debris that fell in the Caribbean during the January Starship/Superheavy test flight when Starship broke up soon after stage separation. It however buried this fact to the very end of the article:

In the case if January’s launch, Diez said SpaceX coordinated “debris response areas” with ATO [the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization] beforehand, as it had done on past flights, but this was the first time the areas were activated. “It was only a matter of minutes from when it was activated to when airspace began to be cleared,” she said, sufficient given the time it would take for debris to fall into the airspace. The airspace was cleared in about 15 minutes, she added.

Those debris response areas are developed in coordination with the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, or AST, said Katie Cranor, acting deputy director of AST’s office of operational safety, on the same panel. After the mishap, she said “only certain sections of the debris response areas were activated to allow traffic to still move freely.”

To put it more bluntly, SpaceX did the proper due diligence before launch — anticipating the possibility of such a failure — and worked well with the FAA to prepare for it. These facts have been conveniently left out of all the reports on that January launch, and we should at least give kudos to this article for finally mentioning it, albeit reluctantly.

Nonetheless, the insane hostile reaction to this invitation for help by the Transportation Department illustrates once again the stupidity of the left. In every case they attack blindly and without any thought at all, hoping such attacks will win them support and hurt their opponents. Instead, it simply makes them look petty and stupid, and is likely convincing their moderate supporters to rethink that support.

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February 17, 2025 Quick space links

5:26 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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