January 10, 2025 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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Category: Points of Information
Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
January 10, 2025 Quick space links
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.
- Intuitive Machines’ first lunar lander apparently entered lunar orbit last year with a low point only 1.3 kilometers above the surface, far lower than expected
The engineers immediately scheduled an orbital burn to raise this low point to a reasonable number, as there was an actual risk the spacecraft might hit a mountain peak if not corrected.
- ESA’s director touts a joint ESA/China solar probe to study solar wind and magnetosphere
This tweet has very old information, apparently from before 2021. The probe is now scheduled for launch in 2025 on a Vega-C rocket
- Chinese grasshopper test stage spotted during transport
It appears the plan is to next test fly it up and down from a sea platform off the coast of Haiyang
- On this day in 1968 the Surveyor-7 spacecraft touched down softly on the Moon
It landed near the crater Tycho.
SpaceX completes two launches, reusing first stage a record number of times
Since early this morning SpaceX successfully completed two launches from opposite coasts.
First, in the early morning the company placed a National Reconnaissance Office payload into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California. The first stage completed its 22nd flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific. The fairings completed their 9th and 16th flights respectively. It is believed but not confirmed that the payload was another batch of “Starshield” satellites, SpaceX’s military version of Starlink.
Next, SpaceX sent another 23 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The first stage I think set a new reuse record, completing its 25th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The 2024 launch race:
5 SpaceX
1 China
The reuse record is significant, as SpaceX’s fleet of first stages is beginning to record flight numbers comparable to NASA’s fleet of space shuttles, but it is doing so in far less time. For example, this 25th flight matches the entire number of flights by the shuttle Endeavour during its lifespan of almost two decades. This booster however accomplished the same number of reflights in only three and a half years.
In the next few years we should expect SpaceX’s Falcon 9 first stage fleet to eclipse the numbers set by the shuttles, and do so in a very spectacular manner.
Hubble captures a nice example of intergalactic microlensing
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released this week. I have specifically cropped it to focus on this ringlike feature, as it one of the nicest examples of micro-lensing I have seen. From the caption:
This curious configuration is the result of gravitational lensing, in which the light from a distant object is warped and magnified by the gravity of a massive foreground object, like a galaxy or a cluster of galaxies. Einstein predicted the curving of spacetime by matter in his general theory of relativity, and galaxies seemingly stretched into rings like the one in this image are called Einstein rings.
The lensed galaxy, whose image we see as the ring, lies incredibly far away from Earth: we are seeing it as it was when the Universe was just 2.5 billion years old. The galaxy acting as the gravitational lens itself is likely much closer. A nearly perfect alignment of the two galaxies is necessary to give us this rare kind of glimpse into galactic life in the early days of the Universe.
I am generally a very big skeptic of most astronomical studies that rely on micro-lensing. I don’t deny it happens and has been detected, as in this case. The uncertainties — such as the unknown distance to intervening galaxy that is causing the lensing — always require too many assumptions that make any reliable conclusions difficult.
Nonetheless, this object illustrates the phenomenon perfectly. The light from the distant galaxy is bent around the intervening nearer galaxy so that we that distant galaxy as a ring.
Cruz reveals another area where red tape is blocking SpaceX at Boca Chica: roads
In a interview with a local news outlet in Texas, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) revealed that the state’s bureaucracy is stymieing SpaceX at Boca Chica in another unexpected way, getting the road to the facility repaired and upgraded.
“SpaceX has offered to invest their own money to improve the highway, and the problem is they’re running into permitting obstacles, environmental permitting obstacles that is slowing it down,” Senator Cruz said.
Cruz is the new Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. There are steps he says he can take to fix these roads, even if it is not something that will directly address the issue. “As chairman of the Commerce Committee, I am very focused on permitting, on reducing the barriers of permitting, on speeding up the ability to do things like improve and expand State Highway Four,” Cruz said.
In a statement, Texas Department of Transportation spokesman Ray Pedraza said, “TxDOT is currently providing upgrades and pavement improvements for the existing SH 4 between Brownsville and Starbase Texas (SpaceX). TxDOT is also working with SpaceX on further planning and environmental efforts to achieve additional widening on SH 4 in the future.”
I think Cruz did this interview to apply some public pressure on the Texas Transportation Department. Hopefully it will get the tortoise moving.
ISRO moving ahead with Spadex docking
India’s space agency ISRO has announced that it now moving ahead with the autonomous docking of its two Spadex spacecraft presently in orbit, but it will wait until after the docking to post when it had occurred.
With the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (Isro) SpaDeX space docking experiment missing two publicly announced schedules on January 7 and January 9, the space agency has decided to complete docking before making a public announcement.
Isro had earlier announced that the docking would be a public event but after two consecutive postponements, a senior Isro official said that the docking “is on track” but the space agency will now “dock and inform” the public about the exercise.
I suspect they realized the uncertainty of the real docking schedule made making the schedule public too difficult. This remains a test, and so many things can occur along the way to slow things down.
January 9, 2025 Quick space links
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.
- Blue Origin now targeting January 12, 2025 1 am (Eastern) for first launch of New Glenn
Just stay up late Saturday night to watch. I will try to post the live stream here. [Note: Link fixed! My error. Sorry.]
- Astra touts testing of its Rocket-4 upper stage tank
Very puzzling, as the company had said it was delaying construction of Rocket-4 for several years as rebuilds the company from its almost bankruptcy. Maybe now that it is in private hands again things are moving. Or not. We shall see. [Note: Link fixed. My error. Sorry.]
- Rocket Lab touts its progress as prime contractor to build eighteen satellites for the military
My how things have changed. In the old days, it would take almost a decade for the Pentagon to build and launch one satellite, and it would cost billions. Buying the product from the private sector now means they get it fast many times over, and for far less.
- The orbital debris that fell in Kenya possibly identified as coming from an Ariane-5 launch in 2008
Nothing is confirmed as yet.
- Vast installs hatch on the “primary qualification unit” for its Haven-1 space station
It remains unclear whether this unit will become the station module itself, or act merely as a testing unit. If the latter, I wonder if it will be possible for Haven-1 to be launched before the end of 2025, as the company promises.
The mysteries buried in the Martian south pole ice cap
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and color-enhanced to post here, was taken on November 3, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
The picture is labeled as a “terrain sample,” which means it was likely taken not as part of any specific research project, but to fill a gap in the camera schedule in order to maintain the camera’s proper temperature. In this case the camera team tries to choose interesting features, though sometimes they can’t due to timing.
In this case they were able to target a nice piece of geology, a layered 2,000 foot cliff on the outer edge of the south pole ice cap. The color strip illustrates the possibilities within those layers. I have significantly enhanced the colors to bring out the differences. The orange suggests dust, the aqua-blue water ice, though these colors could also indicate interesting mineralogies.
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ESA releases three images taken by BepiColombo during its Mercury fly-by yesterday
Click for original image. For the annotated version
click here.
The European Space Agency (ESA) today released what it called the three best images taken by the ESA/JAXA joint mission BepiColombo to Mercury in its closest fly-by of the planet yesterday.
The image to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, shows the north polar regions of Mercury. The probe’s solar array is visible to the right.
Flying over the ‘terminator’ – the boundary between day and night – the spacecraft got a unique opportunity to peer directly down into the forever-shadowed craters at planet’s north pole.
The rims of craters Prokofiev, Kandinsky, Tolkien and Gordimer [the four craters in a line at the terminator] cast permanent shadows on their floors. This makes these unlit craters some of the coldest places in the Solar System, despite Mercury being the closest planet to the Sun!
Excitingly, there is existing evidence that these dark craters contain frozen water. Whether there is really water on Mercury is one of the key Mercury mysteries that BepiColombo will investigate once it is in orbit around the planet.
This was BepiColombo’s last slingshot maneuver. It is now set to enter Mercury orbit in late 2026, where it will split into two separate orbiters, one build by ESA and the other by Japan’s space agency JAXA.
Correction: SpaceX DOES NOT launch 21 more Starlink satellites
CORRECTION: Reader BobT in the comments below noted that this launch is actually nothing more than a duplicate posting of the launch I counted yesterday. Thus, it doesn’t exist, and I have deleted it from my annual count.
As I note below in thanking BobT for noting the error, “This does illustrate something profound. Their launches are now so routine and frequent that it is possible to not realize you are rewatching one you viewed a day earlier. They all sound the same!”
The 2024 launch race thus remains unchanged:
3 SpaceX
1 China
SpaceX is now targeting January 13, 2025 for 7th Starship/Superheavy test launch
In a tweet yesterday, SpaceX announced that it now intends to fly the seventh test orbital launch of Starship/Superheavy no earlier than January 13, 2025, with a launch window opening at 4 pm (Central).
The launch will test numerous new systems. Superheavy will test the reuse of one of the engines used on the fifth flight, brought back successfully when the booster was successfully caught by the tower chopsticks. It will also test improvements to the launch tower as another chopstick catch will be attempted. As for this Starship prototype, which the company calls Version 2, the upgrades and tests are extensive:
- New avionics
- Redesigns in the propulsion system
- The flaps have been shrunk and shifted in position to prevent heat damage
- The tiled heat shield system has been further upgraded
- Deployment test of 10 dummy Starlink satellites
- An in-orbit Raptor-2 engine relight
The last test is critical for future orbital test flights. On this test Starship will follow the same orbital flight path as the previous flights, low enough that the atmosphere will force it down without action over the Indian Ocean. SpaceX needs to prove that Starship’s Raptor-2 engines can reliably be restarted before it can go to full orbits that will require such a relight to accurately bring the spacecraft down at the right place.
JPL shuts down due to threat from California fires
In a tweet posted yesterday, the head of JPL announced that all operations have been shut down because of the growing threat from the wildfires that are devastating the Los Angeles region.
JPL is closed except for emergency personnel. No fire damage so far (some wind damage) but it is very close to the lab. Hundreds of JPLers have been evacuated from their homes & many have lost homes.
If these fires should reach the center and do significant damage, a number of on-going space missions will be severely impacted, since those missions, such as the two Mars rovers, are operated from this location.
And this possibility exists, in this new dark age. The Democratic Party governments of Los Angeles and California have done everything they can in the past two decades to block fire prevention, from not managing the brush in the mountains to cutting funding to their fire departments to refusing to supply sufficient water to their fire hydrant system. This last action, which also included destroying dams, eliminating reservoirs, and refusing to replace them, is the most despicable. It appears firefighters throughout Los Angeles have been helpless because the hydrants have been dry. Thus, the fires burn out of control.
If the nearby fire reaches JPL we shall face the possibility that several major on-going space missions could suddenly end.