Category: Points of Information

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

The rovers’ view of Mars

9:10 am

The view from the top of Mont Mercou
Click for higher resolution. For original images, go here and here.

Some cool images to savor from Mars! Above is a panorama from Curiosity, created by me from two images taken by the rover’s left navigation camera today, April 18, 2021. The view is southwest towards the canyon regions where Curiosity will be heading in the coming months. Note the roughness of the ground. Travel is going to be tricky from here on out.

The photo was taken from the top of Mont Mercou, the 20-foot high outcrop that the rover spent several weeks studying at the cliff’s base. The Curiosity science team is presently preparing to drill into the bedrock at the top.

Ingenuity on the floor of Jezero Crater
Click for full image.

The photo to the right, reduced to post here, was taken by Perseverance on April 13, 2021, and looks west across the floor of Jezero crater. The high mountains in the distance are the crater’s rim. The low and much closer hill is the delta that is the rover’s primary geological target.

In the center of the picture is the helicopter Ingenuity. You can also see the tracks of Perseverance’s wheels just below it.

This will be the rover’s vantage point when Ingenuity attempts its first test flight in the early morning hours of April 19, 2021. The helicopter will head to the right once it lifts off.

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Ingenuity first test flight scheduled for 3:30 am (Eastern) tonight!

8:16 am

The engineering team for the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars have decided to attempt the first test flight tonight, scheduled for 3:30 am (Eastern) in the early morning hours tomorrow.

Data from the first flight will return to Earth a few hours [later] following the autonomous flight. A livestream will begin at 6:15 a.m. EDT (3:15 a.m. PDT) as the helicopter team prepares to receive the data downlink in the Space Flight Operations Facility at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

NASA propaganda will begin on NASA TV at 3:30 am (Eastern), but the actual live stream of the flight will not air until about 6:30 am (Eastern) on April 19th.

At the first link above the engineers explain their decision to proceed immediately.
» Read more

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Russia hands over last rocket engines to ULA

9:20 am

In a ceremony in Russia yesterday, Roscosmos’s Energomash division completed and handed over ownership to ULA six RD-180 engines, to be used in ULA’s Atlas 5 rocket.

These are the last such engines required as part of the contract. They will also likely be the last Russian engines ULA will ever buy. The company is retiring its Atlas 5 rocket, which requires them, and replacing it with its Vulcan rocket, which will instead use Blue Origin’s BE-4 engine.

Furthermore, as of September 1st, 2021 such commercial space contracts with Russia will be difficult to obtain because of new sanctions imposed on Russia by the Biden administration.

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Ingenuity successfully completes rapid spin test

9:00 am

Ingenuity’s engineers announced this morning that yesterday the helicopter on Mars was able to successfully complete a rapid spin test of its rotary blades.

Today, April 16, on the 154th anniversary of Wilbur Wright’s birth, the Ingenuity flight team received information that the helicopter was able to complete a rapid spin test. The completion of the full-speed spin is an important milestone on the path to flight as the team continues to work on the command sequence issue identified on Sol 49 (April 9).

…The approach that led to today’s successful spin test entailed adding a few commands to the flight sequence. This approach was tested extensively on both Earth and Mars, and was performed without jeopardizing the safety of the helicopter.

They have still not set a date for flight, because they might still decide, after they have analyzed fully the results from this test, to revise the helicopter’s software and upload that change. If not the flight will be relatively soon. If so there will be a longer delay to test that software fully before flight.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Professor fired without due process for lamenting the poor education often received by blacks

10:58 am

Today's modern witch hunt
Burning witches in academia: It’s the IN thing.

They’re coming for you next: Sandra Sellers, a law professor at Georgetown University Law Center in Virginia was immediately fired by her dean without any investigation, based on an intentional false misreading of of her words said during what she thought was a private Zoom phone conversation.

Last month, Georgetown Law adjunct professor Sandra Sellers told a colleague privately on Zoom, “I hate to say this—I end up having this angst every semester that a lot of my lower [graded] ones are blacks.” Some black students, Sellers said, did well, but the overall pattern made her “feel bad.”

Sellers was not aware that her conversation was being recorded and uploaded to the aptly named “Panopto” software system. If someone had chosen to, he might have clipped her words and posted them to Twitter with the caption: “We need more white professors like this, who feel shame about how badly law schools are failing students of color. Thank you, Professor Sellers!” Instead, Sellers’ words were clipped and posted by Georgetown Law student Hassan Ahmad with the caption: “.@GeorgetownLaw negotiations professors Sandra Sellers and David Batson being openly racist on a recorded Zoom call. Beyond unacceptable.”

That day, without speaking with Sellers, William Treanor condemned her “reprehensible statements,” which he declared “abhorrent.” The next day, against his own university’s policies, Treanor fired Sellers without an official investigation.

Treanor also suspended without investigation David Batson, the law professor whom Sellers was speaking to.

The moral and legal violations here were not committed by Sellers by her words, since she was simply expressing a concern for her minority students and her frustration that she had not been able to figure out a way to help them do better. No, let me list the real violators to truth and justice:
» Read more

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InSight pauses science operations to conserve power

8:41 am

The science team for the InSight lander on Mars have been forced to suspend science operations because dust on the solar panels is reducing the available power.

InSight’s solar panels were producing just 27% of their energy capacity in February, when winter was arriving in Elysium Planitia. So NASA decided to start incrementally turning off different instruments on the lander. Soon the robot will go into “hibernation mode,” shutting down all functions that aren’t necessary for its survival.

By pausing its scientific operations, the lander should be able to save enough power to keep its systems warm through the frigid Martian nights, when temperatures can drop to negative-130 degrees Fahrenheit. “The amount of power available over the next few months will really be driven by the weather,” Chuck Scott, InSight’s project manager, said in a statement.

InSight is still in good condition – it’s even using its robotic arm – but the risk of a potentially fatal power failure is ever-present. If the lander’s batteries die, it might never recover.

As with the rovers Spirit and Opportunity, InSight engineers have depended on periodic strong wind events to periodically clean off the solar panels. Unfortunately, these events are somewhat random, and for the past few months none have occurred.

Note: the article at the link says that winter was arriving at InSight’s location in February, but this is incorrect. InSight sits at about 4 degrees north latitude. In February the end of winter was approaching in the northern hemisphere. More to the point, sitting at the equator you wouldn’t really expect InSight to experience much seasonal changes regardless.

It therefore seems that these issues had less to do with the seasons and much more to do with the accumulating dust on the panels.

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New OSIRIS-REx photos of Bennu sample site after sample grab

1:40 pm

Nightingale before and after sample grab
Click here and here for original images.

The OSIRIS-REx science team today released the photos the spacecraft obtained in its last fly-by of the asteroid Bennu on April 7th of the Nightngale sample site, showing how it changed after the sample grab in October 2020.

The two photos to the right compare that site, with the top image taken before the sample grab and the bottom image taken on April 7th.

Comparing the two images reveals obvious signs of surface disturbance. At the sample collection point, there appears to be a depression, with several large boulders evident at the bottom, suggesting that they were exposed by sampling. There is a noticeable increase in the amount of highly reflective material near the TAG [touch-and-go] point against the generally dark background of the surface, and many rocks were moved around.

Where thrusters fired against the surface, substantial mass movement is apparent. Multiple sub-meter boulders were mobilized by the plumes into a campfire ring–like shape — similar to rings of boulders seen around small craters pocking the surface.

Jason Dworkin, the mission’s project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, noticed that one boulder measuring 4 feet (1.25 meters) across on the edge of the sampling site seemed to appear only in the post-TAG image. “The rock probably weighs around a ton, with a mass somewhere between a cow and a car.”

Dante Lauretta, of the University of Arizona and the mission’s principal investigator, later pointed out that this boulder is likely one of those present in the pre-TAG image, but much nearer the sampling location, and estimates it was thrown a distance of 40 feet (about 12 meters) by the sample collection event.

The sample grab arm penetrated the surface by more than a foot, and that event is marked by that dark depression at the center of the site.

OSIRIS-REX will now prepare for its May 10th engine firing that will send it on its route back to Earth to return that sample in September 24, 2023. After that the spacecraft could be sent on another mission, this time to the potentially dangerous asteroid Apophis.

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Today’s blacklisted American: A movie about the dark side of Planned Parenthood

12:09 pm

Today's modern witch hunt
Burning witches: What Hollywood now routinely tries
to do to conservatives.

Blacklists are back and Hollywood’s got ’em: When long time Hollywood filmmakers Cary Solomon and Chuck Konzelman decided to make the film Unplanned, telling the story of a woman who went from being Planned Parenthood clinic director supporting abortion to an avid advocate for the unborn, they did so under assumed names, and discovered themselves fighting an aggressive effort both in Hollywood and in social media to suppress the film once released.

Multiple cable networks, such as Lifetime, Hallmark Channel, HGTV, USA Network, Food Network, The Travel Channel, refused to carry commercials promoting the film. Multiple theater owners received death threats and harassment prior to screenings, with a few cancelling the screenings out of fear for themselves and their families.

And then there was the usual Twitter censorship.
» Read more

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Sierra Nevada to make its space operations a separate company

10:01 am

Capitalism in space: Sierra Nevada has decided to spin off its space operations involving Dream Chaser and its proposed private space station into a separate company called Sierra Space.

In a message to employees April 14, SNC [Sierra Nevada] Chairwoman and President Eren Ozmen said the company’s Space Systems division will become a standalone company, called Sierra Space, although remain a subsidiary of SNC.

…Ozmen provided few details about how the transition of SNC’s space business to Sierra Space would unfold, but she said it would take several months to complete. Even after the transition, Sierra Space will “continue deep cooperation and synergy” with SNC’s other business areas in aviation and defense.

My guess is that Ozmen does not want the risks of its space-related projects to impact its more reliable aviation and defense holdings. By separating it out, she can better isolate the success or failure of each. This does not necessarily mean that the space holdings are failing, only that they carry a greater financial risk.

Sierra Space’s future strongly hinges on the success of the first Dream Chaser cargo shuttle, Tenacity, whose inaugural flight has been delayed from ’21 to ’22. If that fails, all the other plans of this space division will likely fail as well. If it succeeds however the company’s financial future will be quite promising.

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Phantom Space raises $5 million in investment capital

9:52 am

Rising from the ashes: Phantom Space, the new startup smallsat rocket company created by Jim Cantrell, the former CEO of the smallsat rocket company Vector, has now successfully raised $5 million in seed money to begin development of its rocket, dubbed Daytona.

The expendable Daytona will be powered by eight Hadley engines — seven on the first stage and one on the upper stage. The engines are an example of Phantom Space’s strategy of leveraging externally developed tech; Hadleys are built by Denver-based company Ursa Major Technologies.

According to my sources, the reason Vector never flew and Cantrell and the company parted ways was that the engines they were building for the rocket ended up under-powered. It seems Cantrell has taken a different approach with his new startup by buying engines from an outside source instead of building them in house.

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Branson sells off more of his Virgin Galactic stock

9:40 am

He’s getting out while the getting is good: In the past three days Richard Branson sold another $150 million worth of his Virgin Galactic stock.

The stock price for these sales was about $27, more than twice the value when the company went public in November 2019.

Including his stock sales in May ’20, Branson has now sold about 30% of his share in the company, leaving him holding only about a 20% share. Essentially, Virgin Galactic is no longer his company.

Meanwhile, Virgin Galactic now says it will not begin tourist flights until ’22. Whether it can survive that long is another question. It certainly hasn’t delivered on any of Branson’s endless grandiose promises, beginning almost two decades ago in 2005.

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SpaceX raises another $1.16 billion in private capital

9:25 am

Capitalism in space: In a regulatory filing yesterday SpaceX revealed that it raised another $1.16 billion in private investment capital in just the past two months.

This follows two other recent financing rounds since August of last year in which SpaceX raised almost $3 billion. That makes $4 billion raised in eight months. All told, I think this brings the total private investment capital SpaceX has raised in the past two years to approximately $6 billion, all for building both the Starlink satellite constellation and the Starship/Superheavy rocket.

Not only does this give SpaceX ample cash to build both, it signals the growing faith big money investors have in the company’s plans. They have bought into Elon Musk’s dreams because he has proven that his dreams deliver, not only in exciting space ventures but in profits.

This fund-raising success also tells us that even if Starship does not reach orbit before SLS, it will very soon eclipse it entirely. It has the money now to get built, and the way SpaceX builds things, it will get built fast.

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Russia to build own space station; admits Zvezda is failing

9:10 am

Zvezda module of ISS
The Zvezda module, with aft section indicated
where the cracks have been found.

The new colonial movement: On April 12th, the 60th anniversary of the flight of Yuri Gagarin, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia is going to build its own independent space station, dubbed the Russian Orbital Space Station (ROSS), to replace its half of ISS.

More important however was this carefully worded admission:

In recent years, the ISS has begun to fall apart, with astronauts now frequently discovering cracks. Last week, it was revealed that Russian cosmonauts were still working on plugging a leak first noticed in 2019. The ongoing problems with the international station have prompted Moscow to begin creating a replacement.

What this state-run news article failed to mention is that the cracks and leaks have only been found in Russia’s twenty-year-old Zvezda module, not the rest of ISS. What ISS faces is the failure of the core section of Russia’s half of the station.

This public statement however is the first from Russia that clearly admits that the cracks in Zvezda are likely systemic stress fractures, and the patches to seal them are mere bandaids on a much more fundamental problem that is certain to get worse over time.

The decision to build its own new station is however not really surprising. The American goals in space have been shifting from promoting the government’s program to stimulating the American commercial aerospace industry. International cooperation is no longer the primary goal. The American foreign aid to Russia’s space program from the early days of ISS’s construction has long ago dried up, and Russia is also no longer getting any cash from the U.S. to fly American astronauts to ISS. The incentive to remain a partner has vanished.

If successful this will make three national stations in orbit, ISS, China’s, and Russia’s. In addition, we should start seeing the launch of several private commercial stations sometime this decade.

The competition is going to be glorious, with the results fast-paced and exciting. The moribund days of boring international cooperation where everything was squeezed into a single project, the International Space Station, appear over.

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Evidence of glaciers in the Martian equatorial regions?

1:45 pm

Equatorial crater with glacial features?

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on February 2, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and was labeled as “Exhumed Craters Exhibiting Concentric Fill”.

The term “Concentric Fill” is used by planetary scientists to mark glacial-type features frequently found inside craters at latitudes greater than 30 degrees latitude. This crater however is at 22 degrees north latitude, too close normally to the equator to expect a buried glacier inside it. Any ice at such a latitude is expected to be underground and well protected. A debris covered glacier would likely sublimate away, which I think is why the scientists labeled this “exhumed.” Though there are the concentric features near its inside rim as well as covered by the sand dunes on the crater’s floor, they are assuming this is only evidence of past ice, no longer there. This assumption is strengthened by the splattered but eroded nature of the surrounding terrain. Such splats are typical of high latitude impacts in regions with ample buried ice. The eroded nature of this splat however suggests it is very old and has likely lost its ice.

Then again, this is an assumption.
» Read more

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Blue Origin completes another unmanned suborbital test flight of New Shepard

12:38 pm

Capitalism in space: Blue Origin today successfully completed another unmanned suborbital test flight of New Shepard, and in doing so also rehearsed the boarding and disembarking procedures they will use when they finally fly this craft with people on board.

Blue Origin personnel rehearsed how customers will board the six-seat crew capsule before Wednesday’s launch. Four employees stood in as astronauts and rode to the launch pad inside a Ford SUV with two support crew members.

After arriving at the pad, the astronaut stand-ins climbed stairs up the launch pad tower and walked across an access gantry leading to the spacecraft sitting atop the already-fueled New Shepard booster. Two employees — Gary Lai, Blue Origin’s New Shepard designer, and Audrey Powers, the company’s vice president of legal and compliance — entered the capsule through the hatch and strapped into seats. … After a few minutes, Lai and Powers exited the spacecraft and the crew evacuated the launch pad before liftoff.

…Blue Origin crews at the West Texas test site also practiced how they will help passengers out of the capsule after landing. Recovery teams quickly converged on the spacecraft after touchdown in the desert, and approached the capsule with mobile stairs and other equipment.

While rehearsing these procedures seems a good idea, there appears to be a bit of blarney in this whole show. Considering that this was their 15th New Shepard flight and the second for this spacecraft, it seems to me that these procedures could have rehearsed during one of those earlier flights, or even during any one of many dress rehearsal countdowns that they should have done previously, not on a flight itself.

Blue Origin has not announced when the first manned suborbital flight will be. In their last prediction in January they had said the first manned flight would happen in April, something that has now clearly not happened.

That flight is now more than five years behind schedule, based on the company’s promises back in 2016. when they flew New Shepard almost every other month and predicted the first manned flights in 2017. Then, Jeff Bezos hired Bob Smith to be Blue Origin’s CEO, and the company’s progress on New Shepard crawled to a stop.

It is now questionable whether this company will even get its first suborbital tourist flight launched before SpaceX completes its first orbital tourist flight in September. At that point why should anyone who can afford to pay for a space flight choose New Shepard and its mere five minutes of weightlessness when they go to orbit with SpaceX and spend days there? It might cost less, but it will still cost a lot, and the cost-benefit analysis sure doesn’t favor Blue Origin’s business model any more.

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Today’s blacklisted American: A black conservative professor, because he is black

12:12 pm

The Declaration of Independence, cancelled
The Declaration of Independence, banned at Grace Church high school

The intolerant and insane blacklist culture that has taken over our government, our academic community, the entertainment field, and corporate America has reached a new low with today’s story.

When Paul Rossi, a teacher at the private Grace Church high school in Manhattan, decided to assign his students readings by Glenn Loury, a moderate black conservative professor, the school’s head, George Davison, told him to remove those books and instead assign books by “mainstream white conservatives.”

Rossi wrote that since “the BLM [Black Lives Matter] protests often came up in our discussions, I thought of assigning Glenn Loury, a Brown University professor and public intellectual whose writings express a nuanced, center-right position on racial issues in America. Unfortunately, my administration put the kibosh on my proposal.”

“The head of school responded to me that ‘people like Loury’s lived experience—and therefore his derived social philosophy’ made him an exception to the rule that black thinkers acknowledge structural racism as the paramount impediment in society,” Rossi wrote. “He added that ‘the moment we are in, institutionally and culturally, does not lend itself to dispassionate discussion and debate,’ and discussing Loury’s ideas would ‘only confuse and/or enflame students, both those in the class and others that hear about it outside of the class.’”

In other words, racism against a black man is perfectly okay if that black man happens to also disagree with the Marxist and clearly bigoted philosophies of Black Lives Matter.

If you read Rossi’s full column describing this event and the situation at Grace Church high school, you will discover that the school’s bigoted culture is even worse than that.
» Read more

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More delays to Boeing’s Starliner manned capsule schedule

9:52 am

Capitalism in space: Though no new launch date has been announced, both NASA and Boeing are now likely aiming for a summer launch of the second unmanned Starliner demo mission to ISS.

This is largely due to traffic at the International Space Station rather than the readiness of Starliner itself. Two NASA sources said the vehicle is “close” to being ready, with only a few small tests to certify the spacecraft for flight remaining. Starliner is therefore expected to be ready to fly by early summer.

The primary issue is the availability of space station docking ports fitted with an “international docking adapter,” which are used by SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, Cargo Dragon 2, and Starliner vehicles. There are presently two such ports on the station, and for NASA, the priority for access to these ports are crew rotations followed by supply missions. So the question becomes when the Starliner test flight can find an open slot on station.

It appears that they are now targeting the window of availability for either of those ports in the late July into August time period.

While this might be the main reason for this new delay, it also appears that there might be technical issues as well. In early March Boeing and NASA had announced that they were delaying this demo mission for the same scheduling reasons, but then they said they were targeting a May launch date, during a period after one manned Dragon mission had left in late April and before the next Dragon cargo mission arrived in June.

It now appears they cannot meet that window any longer, and are therefore aiming for the next, in July.

Meanwhile, the first manned Starliner demo mission appears to have also pushed back, from late this year to early next year.

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SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy wins launch contract for VIPER lunar rover

9:39 am

Capitalism in space: Astrobotic, the company building the lander to place NASA’s VIPER lunar rover on the Moon, has picked SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy as the rocket to launch the package.

This mission is part of a fleet of landers being sent to the Moon in the next two years, as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program to hire private companies to do this rather than NASA.

Intuitive Machines, which won CLPS task orders for two lander missions, will launch each on Falcon 9 vehicles late this year and in 2022. Masten Space Systems selected SpaceX to provide launch services for its XL-1 lander mission, which won a CLPS award for a late 2022 mission.

Astrobotic will launch its first CLPS mission, a smaller lunar lander called Peregrine, on the inaugural launch of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur currently scheduled for late this year. Firefly Aerospace, which won the most recent CLPS award in January, has not selected a launch provider yet for its Blue Ghost lander, but noted the lander is too large to launch on the company’s own Alpha rocket.

That’s five American lunar missions, all built and owned by private companies. Nor will these be the only unmanned lunar missions, when you include the UAE rover targeted for a ’22 launch, along with additional planned Indian, Chinese, and Russian missions. Almost all are aimed at the Moon’s south polar regions.

It is going to get both crowded and busy on the Moon in the next few years.

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UAE hires Japanese company as partner for its ’22 lunar rover mission

9:34 am

Capitalism in space: The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has chosen the private Japanese company Ispace to provide the lander bringing its Rashid rover to the Moon in 2022.

ispace’s 240 kg lander is 2.3 meters tall and 2.6 meters wide. It will be launched by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, on a Falcon 9 rocket. Once the iSpace lander is placed in the Earth’s orbit, it will travel to the moon on its own, land and unload the rover.

The lander will use solar panels for power, which will also allow the rover to communicate with Earth. It will also carry a solid-state battery made by NGK Spark Plug, which intends to examine its battery’s lunar performance.

This UAE project is similar but a step up from its Al-Amal Mars orbiter. In that case UAE used its money to have the orbiter mostly built by U.S. universities as they taught UAE’s students how to do it. In this case, UAE engineers appear to be building the rover itself, with the purchased help of others to provide the lander..

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A lonely dry lava spring on Mars

2:19 pm

A lonely dry lava spring on Mars
Click for full image.

Today’s cool image from Mars takes us to the southern flank of the giant volcano Pavonis Mons. The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, shows what appears to be a volcanic vent from more than a billion years ago when it is believed Pavonis was actively erupting. The picture was taken on March 2, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The grade is mostly downhill to the east and south east.

It is very possible that this is the resurgence of a lava tube, the point where the underground flow either emerged to the surface or got so close to the surface that the ceiling was thin enough to later collapse, creating this depression. No pits or skylights are visible in this high resolution picture, however, so whether there is an underground lava tube here is not known, an unknown that is amplified by the wider MRO context camera image below.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: A congresswoman because she speaks her mind

1:16 pm

The cancelled Bill of Rights

They’re coming for you next: Since her election in November 2020 Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) has repeatedly irritated many people for her strong and very outright conservative opinions on everything from election fraud to religion to Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

As a result she has become the target by many on the left, resulting in her Twitter account being suspended more than once. In one case it was because she had said posted a tweet celebrating Easter and glorifying the resurrection of Jesus. In another case it as because she called for the supporters of Trump to rally against election fraud and the possibility that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. In both cases her account was reinstated by Twitter within twelve hours, with the social media platform claiming the first suspension was a mistake while the second was not (having violated Twitter’s partisan rules that forbid anyone from suggesting that there might have been election tampering that led to Biden’s victory).

These Twitter attacks are ugly and illustrate that platform’s anti-Republican and leftist agenda, but it is still a private company. More important have been the efforts to muzzle Greene in Congress, led by the Democrats.
» Read more

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New calls for reworking or replacing Outer Space Treaty

10:53 am

Yesterday there were two different public statements calling for the international community to either amend or replace the Outer Space Treaty, one an op-ed in the U.S. and the other a statement by the head of Russia’s space agency.

At first glance these announcements seemed hopeful, especially because the op-ed, written by one of the authors of a just released new study [pdf] by a defense-oriented Washington think tank, made part of its focus the need to encourage commercial activities in space.
» Read more

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Commerce increases sanctions on Russia impacting space commerce and trade

9:47 am

The Commerce Department last month announced that is increasing the level of sanctions against trade with Russia because it had determined that country had violated international law by using chemical weapons against specific dissidents both in and out of Russia.

On March 4, 2018, the Russia Government deployed a Novichok nerve agent in an attack against former Russian military officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia Skripal in the United Kingdom. In response, the U.S. Government imposed two sets of sanctions against Russia pursuant to the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991 (CBW Act) in August 2018 and August 2019.

On August 20, 2020, the Russian Government again deployed a Novichok nerve agent, this time against Russian opposition figure Aleksey Navalny, warranting a new determination by the Secretary of State and additional sanctions under the CBW Act.

While this ruling will have a negative impact on any space-related U.S./Russian activities, the full ruling specifically included these waivers:
» Read more

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Ingenuity requires software update before flying

9:10 pm

JPL engineers have determined that they need to upload a software update on Ingenuity in order to solve the issue that caused the first high-speed spin test of its rotary blades to end prematurely.

In an update released late Monday by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, mission managers said engineers identified a software fix for the “command sequence issue” that ended the high-speed spin-up test Friday.

Officials at JPL, which manages the Ingenuity helicopter project, did not announce a new target date for the rotorcraft’s first test flight. Ground teams hope to determine a new target date next week for the helicopter’s first flight.

According to the original plans, Ingenuity was to get about a 30 day test period, after which Perseverance would move on to its primary Mars science mission. It is not clear at this moment whether that test period will be extended because of these issues. I suspect they will extend it to get as many flight tests as possible, since Perseverance is functioning like a dream and can wait a few extra weeks before beginning what will be years of Martian roving. How often does one get to flight test a helicopter on another world?

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Northrop Grumman’s MEV-2 successfully completes docking to commercial satellite

4:28 pm

MEV-2 about 50 feet away from satellite

Capitalism in space: Northrop Grumman today announced that its second Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV-2) has successfully docked with an Intelsat geosynchronous communications satellite.

Northrop Grumman is the only provider of flight-proven life extension services for satellites, and this is the second time the company has docked two commercial spacecraft in orbit. The company’s MEV-1 made history when it successfully docked to the Intelsat 901 (IS-901) satellite in February 2020. Unlike MEV-1, which docked above the GEO orbit before moving IS-901 back into service, MEV-2 docked with IS-10-02 directly in its operational GEO orbital location.

…Under the terms of Intelsat’s satellite life-extension servicing contract, MEV-2 will provide five years of service to IS-10-02 before undocking and moving on to provide services for a new mission.

The image, provided by Northrop Grumman, was taken by MEV-2’s infrared wide field of view camera when it was still about 50 feet away from the Intelsat satellite. You can see the Earth in the background. As I understand it, MEV-2 uses the satellite’s own engine nozzle as a docking port, which is the smallest circular feature in the center of the satellite. If you look close you can see the nozzle’s shadow on the right.

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NASA/Boeing begin prepping SLS core stage for transfer to Florida

3:53 pm

NASA & Boeing have now agreed that the static fire test program of the core stage of their SLS rocket has ended successfully, and have begun preparing the stage for its shipment to Florida where it and the entire rocket will be assembled for launch.

While refurbishment activities continue, the team at Stennis has also started disconnecting the stage from the test stand to prepare for departure from Stennis. Weather will be a key factor in when the stage can be put on board the agency’s Pegasus barge to start the waterway tow trip from Stennis to Kennedy, but a late-April arrival at KSC is still possible — with KSC schedules currently forecasting attachment of the Core Stage to the SLS Boosters in the Vehicle Assembly Building in mid-May to prepare for launch of Artemis 1.

Though NASA still has a target of November for launch, NASA engineers estimate that it will take ten months to get the core stage in place and ready for launch. This places launch more likely in the February-March ’22 time frame. This schedule of course does not include any possible additional problems along the way, which may delay the launch further.

Even if all goes now as NASA plans, consider the length of this schedule. Though NASA will not require future SLS launches to do a static fire test, just transporting the stage and getting the rocket assembled will likely always take about this long, give or take a few months. Even if NASA streamlines this operation over time, I can’t see it getting shortened to less than five months. That means it will likely be impossible to launch more than one or maybe two SLS rockets per year, a pace that is not very effective if you really want to achieve anything in space. Moreover, that very very optimistic pace would cost about $3 to $5 billion per year, money that has not been appropriated, though considering Congress’s nonchalant attitude towards printing money these days that might not be a problem.

In the end, this rocket as designed is simply not practical or sustainable. It is a financial house of cards, and as soon as a more effective competitor like Starship (or even New Glenn) arrives that house will fall.

In fact, I still consider the odds of Starship/Super Heavy completing an orbital launch before SLS to be better than 50-50. With a likely spring ’22 SLS launch date and SpaceX aiming for a Starship orbital flight in ’21, the odds of SpaceX winning this race I think has just improved.

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The start of avalanche season at Mars’ north pole

12:36 pm

A narrow ridge with avalanches
Click for full image.

Every spring for the last seven Martian years scientists have eagerly aimed the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) at the steep 1,500 to 3,000 foot high scarp at the edge of northern polar ice cap in order to capture images of what is Mars’s most spectacular annual event, the occurrence of tens of thousands springtime avalanches along that scarp.

Well, spring has returned to the northern hemisphere on Mars, and the scientists have begun another monitoring campaign. The photo to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on March 7, 2021 by MRO. It shows a particularly dramatic part of that scarp, a place where the scarp separates two curved alcoves and is thus narrowed down to a ridge about 1,000 feet high.

The nose of the ridge is sloping downward to the northwest, so the horizontal bands on its crest are actually evidence of older and older layers exposed as the elevation drops. The blue and black markings on the left slope are likely evidence of this season’s first avalanches, or might even be avalanches occurring as the picture was snapped! As explained to me by Shane Byrne of the Lunar and Planetary Lab University of Arizona during the last Martian avalanche season,

On Mars half of the images we take in the right season contain an avalanche. There’s one image that has four avalanches going off simultaneously at different parts of the scarp. There must be hundreds to thousands of these events each day.”

The overview map below shows the location of this picture, as well as all the other places the scientists have routinely monitored in the fourteen-plus Earth years since MRO reached Mars orbit.
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