Category: Points of Information

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

During fly-by Juice snaps picture of Earth’s radiation belts

9:32 am

Juice image of Earth's radiation belts
Click for original graphic.

During its fly-by of Earth on August 19-20, the European Jupiter orbiter Juice used its NASA instruments, designed to study the radiation environment around the gas giant, to snap a false color image of the Earth’s radiation belts, as shown in the graphic to the right. From the caption:

On Aug. 19, JENI and its companion particle instrument Jovian Energetic Electrons (JoEE) made the most of their brief 30-minute encounter with the Moon. As Juice zoomed just 465 miles (750 kilometers) above the lunar surface, the instruments gathered data on the space environment’s interaction with our nearest celestial companion. It’s an interaction scientists expect to see magnified at Jupiter’s moons, as the gas giant’s radiation-rich magnetosphere barrels over them.

On Aug. 20, Juice hurled into Earth’s magnetosphere, passing some 37,000 miles (60,000 km) above the Pacific Ocean, where the instruments got their first taste of the harsh environment that awaits at Jupiter. Racing through the magnetotail, JoEE and JENI encountered the dense, lower-energy plasma characteristic of this region before plunging into the heart of the radiation belts. There, the instruments measured the million-degree plasma encircling Earth to investigate the secrets of plasma heating that are known to fuel dramatic phenomena in planetary magnetospheres.

The dotted line shows the trajectory of ESA’s Juice spacecraft during its lunar-Earth gravity assist, with the white rings indicating equatorial distances of 4 and 6 Earth radii. The colors indicate the strength of the energetic neutral atoms detected by the instruments, and show the million-degree hot plasma halo that circles the Earth.

The data proved that the instruments are functioning as intended, and will thus be able to achieve their main goal, studying the much more active and energetic radiation belts of Jupiter.

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FAA grounds SpaceX again

9:10 am

According to a report in Reuters, the FAA yesterday announced that it has grounded SpaceX from any further launches, two days after SpaceX had already paused launches, the action triggered when the second stage of Saturday’s Falcon 9 launch to ISS failed to fire its de-orbit burn properly, thus causing the stage to splashdown outside its target zone in the Pacific.

This action is a perfect example of the FAA’s extraneous interference. SpaceX was already on the case. It doesn’t need the FAA to kibbitz it, since no one at the FAA has any qualifications for providing any useful advice. All the FAA accomplishes here is get in the way.

The FAA’s action also likely falls outside its statutory authority. The stage landed in the ocean, causing no damage or threat to public safety, the only areas the FAA’s authority resides. And if the agency now deems returning equipment part of its licensing requirements, why did it didn’t say anything about the uncertain nature of the return of Boeing’s Starliner capsule, which targeted a landing on land and could have easily ended up crashing in the wrong spot because its own thrusters were untrustworthy?

The FAA is playing favorites here, and needs to be reined in, badly.

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September 30, 2024 Quick space links

4:39 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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Course carnage at Harvard as more than 30 queer and Marxist classes get axed

12:39 pm

Harvard: where you get can get a shoddy education centered on hate and bigotry
Harvard: where you can spend a lot of money
and still get a shoddy education

It appears the student body at Harvard is beginning to realize that classes focused on the queer agenda or racist Marxist indoctrination will not teach you much of substance and could even hurt your future career, and are thus increasingly not signing up for these courses.

This fall more than 30 such courses at Harvard have been cancelled, with the History and Literature department losing the most.

According to The Crimson, Hist-Lit Director of Studies Lauren Kaminsky said class offerings dropped from 19 to 13 classes after five lecturers either departed or chose to do something else. The canceled Hist-Lit courses include “British Soft Power from Shakespeare to Dua Lipa,” “Marx at the Mall: Consumer Culture & Its Critics,” “Global Transgender Histories,” “Indigenous Genders and Sexualities in North America,” “The Making of Race across Latin America,” and “Global Histories of Capitalism.”

The course description for “Global Transgender Histories” noted students “will become familiar with some of the global vocabulary of gender identities beyond the binary and will understand the historical impacts of phenomena such as racism, imperialism, and [the] medicalization on gender identities.” Students also would’ve “discovered” the diversity of “gender-variant people” via “religious texts, poetry, art, legal cases, travelogues, newspapers, films […] and oral histories.”

» Read more

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Perseverance looks uphill

9:51 am

Perseverance looks uphill
Click for full resolution. The original images can be found here and here.

Cool image time! The panorama above was created by me from two pictures taken today by the left navigation camera on the Mars rover Perseverance (found here and here). The haziness in the air is the left over from a local dust storm in Jezero Crater during the past month.

On the overview map below, the blue dot marks Perseverance’s present position, with the red dotted line indicating the approximate planned route of the rover uphill. The yellow lines are my guess as to the area covered by the panorama above. That guess could be wrong, as not all the features in the picture match the overview map. The view could be much closer, with the hill and ridgeline nothing more than the small outcrops close to the rover.

Nonetheless, these navigation pictures show us the kind of terrain the rover will be climbing as it works its way up the rim of Jezero Crater. The ground is relative smooth, though steep. My guess is that this is about a 25% grade, which on Earth would be a problem but on Mars it is a grade that NASA’s other rover, Curiosity, has routinely traversed. Perseverance has not yet traveled this kind of steepness, but there is no reason to expect it to have any difficulties doing so.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

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Curiosity spots a corroded weathered rock

9:15 am

a weathered and corroded rock
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on September 29, 2024 by the close-up camera mounted at the end of the robot arm of the rover Curiosity on Mars.

This is a small rock, less than three inches across. It is embedded in the sand and soil of Mars, its surface clearly weathered and smoothed by some process. The holes and gaps in the rock could have occurred prior to that smoothing, getting exposed by it. Or possibly the holes developed during the smoothing, with sections breaking off because the material was like sandstone, easily friable.

What caused the smoothing? The data from Curiosity as it climbs Mount Sharp suggests some water process, either flowing water or glacial ice. The scientists at present tend to prefer the liquid explanation, but that requires the Martian atmosphere to have once been much thicker and warmer, conditions that no model has yet demonstrated convincingly was ever possible.

The rock is also likely another example of sulfur, part of the sulfate-bearing unit of geology that Curiosity is presently traversing.

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Proposed commercial spaceport in Azores launches two suborbital demonstration rockets

8:38 am

Santa Maria spaceport

A spaceport startup, the Atlantic Spaceport Consortium (ASC), has successfully launched two small suborbital demonstration rockets from the island of Santa Maria in the Azores of Portugal, where it hopes to eventually establish a spaceport.

The first of the two flights was launched from a mobile platform at 13:04 UTC on 27 September. The rocket reached an altitude of 5,596 metres. The second was launched at 11:49 UTC on 28 September 2024. According to the company, the second launch ‘was not perfect,’ but it did not provide any further details on what occurred during the flight.

The rocket was developed and built by ASC, and was intended to demonstrate its own rocket capabilities as well as provide information to the Portuguese government for establishing its own regulatory guidelines, as per an agreement signed in August.

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China unveils proposed spacesuit for its planned manned lunar landings

11:24 am

China's proposed moonsuit
Click for original image.

China’s Manned Space Agency (CMSA) yesterday unveiled its proposed spacesuit for the planned manned lunar landings it hopes to achieve by 2030.

As shown on the left, the suit draws its design from the Russian Orlan suit. The large backpack-like unit is also a hatch. The astronaut opens it, drops into the suit, and then a partner closes the unit, locking it shut. The rest of the suit is a single piece, with the central body unit rigid and the arms and legs flexible.

The Russian’s Orlan suit has been upgraded a number of times over the years, but the basic design has proved to be practical, efficient, and reliable, generally the oppose of the unwieldy and complex American suits NASA has been using since the start of the shuttle era.

The announcement was made to initiate a contest for the public to pick a name for the suit. Like all such contests, the real goal is to provide bread-and-circuses to the public so that they can think they have some say in what is happening. In the end the government will pick the name, and find someone who made the same suggestion to “award” for the idea.

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SpaceX pauses launches after de-orbit of Falcon 9’s second stage misfires

10:37 am

SpaceX today announced that, after its Falcon 9 rocket had successfully placed two astronauts in orbit in its Freedom capsule, the engine burn designed to de-orbit the rocket’s upper stage in a safe zone in the ocean misfired, and for this reason the company was scrubbing a planned launch today until the root cause was found.

After today’s successful launch of Crew-9, Falcon 9’s second stage was disposed in the ocean as planned, but experienced an off-nominal deorbit burn. As a result, the second stage safely landed in the ocean, but outside of the targeted area.

We will resume launching after we better understand root cause

The company provided no further details on exactly what happened. We know the engine fired, and the stage was successfully de-orbited safely over the ocean, but we do not know how far outside its target zone. Nor do we know the extent of the “off-nominal deorbit burn.”

At present today’s scrubbed launch, placing three satellites of Starlink’s competitor OneWeb into orbit, is scheduled for tomorrow, but that is likely a contigency scheduling. SpaceX’s launch teams have gotten very good at rescheduling launches day-to-day, so that as soon as it gets the go-ahead it can go ahead.

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SpaceX launches two astronauts to ISS, setting new annual launch record for the U.S.

11:17 am

SpaceX this morning launched two astronauts to ISS in the fourth flight of the Freedom Dragon capsule, the Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage completed its second flight, landing back at Cape Canaveral. Freedom will dock with ISS tomorrow.

While most news stories will focus on the rescue aspect of this mission, its crew reduced by two so that the two astronauts launched in June on Boeing’s Starliner capsule can come home on it in February, the real news story is that with this launch the United States set a new record for the number of launches in a single year. With this launch the U.S. has completed 111 successful launches in 2024, exceeding the record set last year’s of 110 launches. And this record was achieved in less than three quarters of the year. At this rate is it very likely the U.S. will double the record of 70 set in 1966 that lasted until 2022.

China meanwhile completed its own launch late yesterday, its Long March 2D rocket placing what China’s state-run press described as “its first reusable and returnable test satellite,” designed to do orbital operations and experiments, return to Earth with those materials, and then later relaunch again. This is very similar to the commercial capsules that the startup Varda is flying and using to produce pharmaceuticals for sale.

The rocket lifted off from China’s Jiquan spaceport in northwest China. No word where its lower stages, using toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed inside China.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

95 SpaceX
44 China
11 Russia
11 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 111 to 67, while SpaceX by itself now leads the entire world, including American companies, 95 to 83.

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September 27, 2024 Quick space links

3:58 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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Crazy swirling Martian landscape

1:48 pm

Crazy swirling Martian landscape
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, sharpened, and annotated to post here, was taken on July 1, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this “Contacts between Likely Sulfates and Chaos Blocks.” That contact I have indicated with the dotted line. To the west the lighter terrain is likely the sulfate-bearing unit, similar to the sulfate-bearing unit that Curiosity has been traversing on Mount Sharp for the past year or so.

To the east are the chaos blocks, but I think that description is wholly inadequate. In truth, I haven’t the faintest idea how this terrain got to be the way it is. It is evident that a lot of dust and sand has gotten trapped in the hollows, leaving behind ripple dunes in some places, but why the higher ridges swirl and curve about as they do is utterly baffling.
» Read more

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Scientists locate lunar impact crater produced by LCROSS in 2009

11:07 am

Figure 2 of research paper
Taken from figure 2 of the paper. Click for
original image.

Using orbital radar and opitcal images scientists finally believe they have identified the small crater on the Moon produced when — as part of the 2009 LCROSS mission — an abandoned rocket stage crashed in a permanently shadowed section of Cabeus crater near the lunar south pole.

LCROSS was designed to study the ejecta thrown up by that impact, and found “a significant amount of water, estimated at 5.6 ± 2.9% by mass, as well as minor amounts of other volatile species.” Because the impact was in that permanently shadowed region, however, locating the new crater required new instrumentation.

Using a radar instrument on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) as well as the Shadowcam instrument on South Korea’s Danuri orbiter — designed to take optical images in very low light — the scientists pinpointed that impact crater, as shown in the image to the right, overlaying both the radar and optical images. The crater is estimated to be about 22 meters across, about 25% smaller than predicted. From this the scientists conclude that the water in the ejecta plume came from close to the surface, and thus could only have been placed there in the past billion years. Before that, the location was not in shadow, and volatiles like water could not have survived if they were near the surface.

From this data the scientists believe the water was likely placed there by the “recent delivery by comets or the solar wind, rather than as a paleo-reservoir from an early volcanic atmosphere.” If so, the amount of material can be reasonably predicted, and is likely less than hoped for because it only exists in the top two meters.

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Rocket Lab completes new capsule for Varda

9:10 am

Varda's space capsule, on the ground in Utah
Varda’s first capsule on the ground in Utah.

Rocket Lab today announced it has completed testing and intergration of a new recoverable capsule for the in-space manufacturing company Varda, to be used in orbit to produce pharmaceuticals that can only be created in weightlessness.

No launch date was announced. This was the second of four capsules Rocket Lab is building for Varda, with the first having already completed its flight, where it returned to Earth after successfully crystallizng the HIV drug Ritonavir.

The most important tidbit in the press release however was this:

Varda received permission from the FAA under a Part 450 license earlier this month, making them the only company to ever secure a second reentry license.

With the first capsule, the capsule’s return was delayed almost six months because the FAA and the military couldn’t get their paperwork together to approve the return license. Varda now has that return license in hand before launch, meaning it will get the capsule back when it wants.

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Starlink now has four million subscribers

9:00 am

According to SpaceX’s CEO, Gwynne Shotwell, during testimony in a hearing before the Texas state legislative committee and confirmed by a SpaceX tweet on X, Starlink now has a total of four million subscribers.

The milestone would mean that SpaceX has gained a million new customers since the end of May alone. This outpaces the company’s already impressive rate of growth: Starlink started providing beta service of its product in October 2020; it hit 1 million subscribers in December 2022, 2 million subscribers in September 2023, and 3 million in May. The constellation now comprises nearly 6,000 satellites, with service available in nearly 100 countries to individual users as well as large enterprise customers like major airlines and cruise lines.

The service is on track to generate $6.6 billion in revenue this year — an increase from roughly $1.4 billion just two years prior, according to industry research and consulting firm Quilty Space. [emphasis mine]

With $6.6 billion in yearly revenue, in two years SpaceX will get as much from its customers as it has raised in investment capital. It essentially does not need to look for more funding, as it is now earning enough to pay for both Starlink as well as the development of Starship/Superheavy. Furthermore, at this point the company no longer needs NASA’s government funds to do anything it wants to do.

Nor are these numbers the end. Yesterday it was also reported that Air France had signed up Starlink for its airplane fleet, coming after both United and Hawaiian airlines announced they were switching to Starlink as well.

No wonder the left as well as the federal bureaucracy — dominated by top-down authoritarians who love governemnt rule — are hostile to SpaceX. It no longer needs them, and that independence threatens their power.

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Orbital tug startup D-Orbit raises another 150 million euros

8:44 am

The orbital tug company D-Orbit announced today that it was able to extend its more recent round of fund-raising by 50 million euros, and raise a total of 150 million in private investment capital instead.

Japan’s Marubeni Corp. led the Series C round. Marubeni has exclusive rights to distribute D-Orbit’s services in Japan in Southeast Asia, according to the news release.

New and existing investors participating in the round include: Avantgarde, CDP Venture Capital, Iberis Capital, Indaco Venture Partners, the European Innovation Council, Neva, Phaistos Investment Fund, Primo Ventures and Seraphim Space Investment Trust. Also joining the round was a consortium led by United Ventures that included the European Investment Bank and the European Investment Fund.

I call the company a “startup” in the headline, but that probably is now incorrect. It already has flown fourteen orbital tug missions, with seven more scheduled in 2025. At this point it is well established, and could extend this most recent funding round.

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September 26, 2024 Quick space links

3:48 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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Musk and Shotwell once again blast red tape against the company

12:54 pm

The EPA to SpaceX
The EPA to SpaceX “Nice company you got here.
Sure would be a shame if something happened to it.”

In a follow-up to SpaceX’s blunt critical response to the attacks against it by the head of the FAA, Mike Whitaker during House testimony on September 24, 2024, Elon Musk in a tweet yesterday called for Whitaker to resign.

That blast however was only the start. During a different hearing on September 24th before the Texas state house appropriations committee, Gywnne Shotwell, the CEO of SpaceX, called the actions of the EPA to regulate the launch deluge system for Starship/Superheavy “nonsense.”

“We work very closely with organizations such as the (Texas Commission on Environmental Quality),” she said. “You may have read a little bit of nonsense in the papers recently about that, but we’re working quite well with them.”

…On Tuesday, Shotwell maintained that the the system — which she said resembles “an upside down shower head” — was “licensed and permitted by TCEQ [Texas Commission on Environmental Quality] … EPA came in afterwards and didn’t like the license or the permit that we had for that and wanted to turn it into a federal permit, which we are working on right now.”

…The state agency has said the company received a stormwater permit — a type that’s usually quickly approved — but did not have the permit required for discharge of industrial wastewater produced by launches. That type of permit requires significant technical review and usually takes almost a year to approve. [emphasis mine]

The problem with this demand by both EPA and TCEQ is that SpaceX is not dumping “industrial wastewater produced by launches.” The deluge system uses potable water, essentially equivalent to rain water, and thus does zero harm to the environment. In fact, a single rainstorm would dump far more water on the tidal islands of Boca Chica that any of SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy launches.

Thus, this demand by the EPA clearly proves the political nature of this regulatory harassment. The unelected apparatchiks in the federal bureaucracy are hunting for ways to stymie and shut down SpaceX, and they will use any regulation they can find to do so — even if that use makes no sense. And they are doing this because they support the Democratic Party wholesale, and thus are abusing their power to hurt someone (Elon Musk) who now opposes that party.

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NASA inspector general: Air leak in Zvezda module on ISS increased significantly in 2024

12:14 pm

Figure 3 from IG report
Figure 3 from IG report, annotated by me to show Zvezda location.

According to a new report [pdf] from NASA’s inspector general, the air leaks in the Russian Zvezda module on ISS increased significantly in 2024, reaching “the highest level of risk in its risk management system,” and more than six times the normal planned leak rate for the station (see the box in the lower corner of the figure above).

[I]n February 2024 NASA identified an increase in the leak rate, and the Agency and Roscosmos continue to assess the risk that the increase poses to the module’s structure. In May and June 2024, ISS Program and Roscosmos officials met to discuss heightened concerns with the increased leak rate. The ISS Program subsequently elevated the Service Module [Zvezda] Transfer Tunnel leak risk to the highest level of risk in its risk management system. According to NASA, Roscosmos is confident they will be able to monitor and close the hatch to the Service Module prior to the leak rate reaching an untenable level. However, NASA and Roscosmos have not reached an agreement on the point at which the leak rate is untenable.

To mitigate potential impacts from the air leaks, NASA and Roscosmos continuously monitor leak rates and close the hatch to the Service Module when access is not required, sealing the module to minimize air loss while isolating the leak. While it is possible for the ISS to function if the hatch is closed permanently, it could impact cargo delivery because there would be one less cargo delivery port. Closing the hatch permanently would also necessitate additional propellent to maintain the Station’s altitude and attitude. Although the root cause of the leak remains unknown, both agencies have narrowed their focus to internal and external welds. As of June 2024, there was no indication of other leaks on the Station.

The transfer tunnel is the section of Zvezda that connects it to ISS. Though the report is very careful not to say anything specific about the cause of the leak, the evidence strongly suggests it is caused by stress fractures in the module’s hull, fractures that indicate a serious and dangerous long term issue. The tunnel however cannot be replaced without replacing Zvezda, and Zvezda cannot be replaced without detaching the entire Russian section from ISS, something that is likely very difficult and maybe impossible to do. And even if it could be replaced, Russia does not have the capability or the money right now to build a replacement.

The report also noted that keeping the station operating through 2030 faces other challenges, including the lack of redundancy for getting cargo and crew to ISS, the increasing difficulty of obtaining spare parts for the station, the long term damage from micrometeoroids and orbital debris, and finally, the unknown commitment of Russia, which at this point has not yet decided whether it will remain a partner after 2028.

All these issues underline the need for the four American private commercial space stations to reach orbit and get operational before 2028.

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The jet 3,000 light years long that causes nearby stars to explode

10:48 am

The jet from M87
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the left, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the giant eliptical galaxy M87, known for more than a century by astronomers for the jet of gas that points outward from its center. Astronomers now know that this jet is produced by a supermassive black hole in the center of M87, weighing 6.5 billion times the mass of our Sun.

The blowtorch-like jet seems to cause stars to erupt along its trajectory. These novae are not caught inside the jet, but are apparently in a dangerous neighbourhood nearby. During a recent 9-month survey, astronomers using Hubble found twice as many of these novae going off near the jet as elsewhere in the galaxy. The galaxy is the home of several trillion stars and thousands of star-like globular star clusters.

M87 is considered an old galaxy, but its entire formation process remains uncertain.

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Lockheed Martin drops out of commercial manned lunar rover consortium

9:29 am

Lunar Outpost, one of the three companies/partnerships that have won NASA contracts to develop manned lunar rovers for the Artemis program, has replaced Lockheed Martin as one of its partners.

This fact was only made evident now, three months after Lockheed parted ways, with a statement that a new much smaller company, Leidos, has joined the consortium.

That statement listed the other members of the Lunar Dawn team: General Motors, Goodyear and MDA Space. Notably absent was Lockheed Martin, which Lunar Outpost had described as its “principal partner” on the rover when it won the NASA contract in April. The website for Lunar Dawn also did not list Lockheed Martin as a partner.

In a Sept. 25 interview, Justin Cyrus, chief executive of Lunar Outpost, confirmed that Lockheed Martin was no longer involved in the rover project. “We just weren’t able to reach an agreement as we were negotiating the terms and conditions of the statement of work for this contract,” he said.

Both Lunar Outpost and Lockheed Martin provided no specific reasons for the break-up, other than typical PR statements such as “it wasn’t a good fit for us or them.”

The rover being built is dubbed Lunar Dawn. The present NASA contract only covers the design phase. Once completed NASA will choose one consortium to build the rover itself, picking from either the Lunar Outpost design or the designs submitted by Intuitive Machines and Venturi Astrolab.

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September 25, 2024 Quick space links

3:48 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.

  • Radian Aerospace begins tests of spaceplane prototype

    • To avoid State Department ITAR restrictions, these runway tests are using a prototype that uses jet engines and no space-specific technology, because the flights are taking place in an unnamed airport the United Arab Emirates.

 

 

 

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Monitoring gullies on Mars for changes

12:25 pm

Overview map

Monitoring gullies on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on June 29, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The scientists label the picture simply as “gully monitoring,” with an apparent goal of looking to see if this gully has changed since MRO took the first high resolution image two years previously. In the interim this terrain went from Martian spring, through summer and winter, and has now returned to spring.

As far as I can tell, no changes are visible, but then I am not using the highest resolution data available. Small changes might be detectable in the highest resolution using good detection software. Overall, the gully drops about 3,000 feet.

The white dot in the overview map above marks the location, on the southwest interior rim of an unnamed 30-mile wide crater. This region in the Martian cratered highlands was featured in a four part cool image series I did back 2023 (here, here, here, and here), with this as my conclusion:

Overall, our short survey of the southern cratered highlands suggests that the glacial material and ice found in the southern mid-latitudes affects the Martian surface differently than in the northern lowland plains. In the north the craters and the surrounding terrain often appear blobby, as if the ice is close to the surface and also a dominant component of the ground. Impacts therefore cause significant soft melt features, with craters often heavily distorted. Similarly, there is evidence of the existence of past mud volcanoes that once spewed water and mud from below ground.

In the south however the surface is at a higher elevation, and it appears the ice layer is deeper underground. Thus, it appears the ground is more firm, and the only obvious evidence of an underground layer of ice is revealed when sublimation and the subsequent erosion produce these large pits inside craters.

In the case of this crater, a small impact on its interior southwest slope apparently caused that underground layer of ice to melt temporarily and flow downhill, leaving behind the gully and flow features we see today. Based on the two MRO pictures taken a full Martian year apart, it appears the feature is generally stable and thus likely old, left over from that impact. If things are changing seasonally they are doing so in small amounts and slowly.

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Researchers identify the oldest cheese so far found, from 3,600 years ago

10:01 am

One of the ancient cheese samples
Click for full image, figure 1 from the paper.

Researchers have confirmed that three clumps of organic matter taken from a gravesite in northwestern China are the oldest samples of cheese yet identified — more than 3,600 years old — and are in fact a specific kind of cheese, called kefir cheese.

And it’s not just any cheese: Cow and goat DNA, as well as the bacterium Lactobacillus kefiranofaciens, has indicated that these clumps were in fact kefir cheese, providing insight into the history and evolution of probiotics and human health. L. kefiranofaciens is still a key microorganism in kefir soft cheeses. The researchers also identified the microscopic fungal species Pichia kudriavzevii, which is a type of yeast found in kefir grains today.

These kefir grains contain a host of probiotic bacteria and yeast, which is key in fermenting milk to produce kefir products that have been studied for their health impacts, particularly in the areas of the immune and gastrointestinal systems, as well as metabolic regulation.

“Our observation suggests kefir culture has been maintained in Northwestern China’s Xinjiang region since the Bronze Age,” Fu said.

You can read the published paper here. The researchers suggest the cheese indicates not only the evolutionary history by which humans began creating such diary products, it also suggests the historical routes this process followed across the European and Asian continents.

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Amateur gets new image of China’s X-37B copy in orbit

9:42 am

An amateur astronomer, Felix Schöfbänker, has released a new picture he took of China’s X-37B-type reusuable mini-shuttle while it was in orbit and prior to its landing on September 6, 2024.

The picture is low resolution and not very pretty, but it does appear to show that the mini-shuttle has a delta wing design.

While the recent space plane flight was underway, space watcher veteran Felix Schöfbänker in Upper Austria took imagery of the craft. In a recent posting, Schöfbänker reported he has imagery taken Aug. 10 of the Chinese space plane which shows a delta-wing design, captured when the craft turned 180 degrees since an earlier observation he made on July 30.

Schöfbänker also theorizes that the dark area between the wings could be the mini-shuttle’s cargo bay.

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A puzzling striped rock on Mars

9:32 am

A striped rock on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on September 13, 2024 by one of the high resolution cameras on the Mars rover Perseverance. The rock’s striped nature makes it unique, unlike any feature spotted by any rover previously. From an update today:

The science team thinks that this rock has a texture unlike any seen in Jezero Crater before, and perhaps all of Mars. Our knowledge of its chemical composition is limited, but early interpretations are that igneous and/or metamorphic processes could have created its stripes. Since Freya Castle [the name the science team gave the rock] is a loose stone that is clearly different from the underlying bedrock, it has likely arrived here from someplace else, perhaps having rolled downhill from a source higher up. This possibility has us excited, and we hope that as we continue to drive uphill, Perseverance will encounter an outcrop of this new rock type so that more detailed measurements can be acquired.

Without doubt the rock’s rounded surface suggests it was ground smooth by either water or ice. That surface certainly resembles glacial cobble seen across the northeast of the U.S. where ice glaciers once covered the entire landscape. The rock also resembles river cobble, smoothed by flowing water.

The stripes however suggest that prior to its being smoothed, this rock underwent a much more complex geological process, whereby two different materials were intermixed and squeezed together.

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New Zealand’s new government abandons promise to streamline red tape

9:17 am

With the release of a new space strategy document [pdf] today, it appears that New Zealand’s new government has abandoned a promise it had made during the election campaign to streamline its space licensing requirements.

It appears that the new leading party in the government had promised to eliminate the present complex licensing rules that require an entirely new license every time a rocket or satellite company makes any change in its plans. The new space strategy however makes no mention of this change, and in fact seems more focused on expanding the government’s reach into space operations, including building and launching its own satellite by 2030. The article at the link suggests this change is possibly because the leading party is in a coalition government that must satisfy its coalition partners.

Three years ago I would have said this policy change would have guaranteed that Rocket Lab would shift more operations to the U.S., but the increased red tape imposed by the FAA’s new “streamlined” Part 450 regulations doesn’t make such a shift helpful any longer. Since the UK government also appears to be favoring heavy regulations that have stalled spaceports there, these government actions might help explain why there has been a sudden burst of new rocket companies and spaceports in Europe and in India in the past two years. Private concerns in both sense an opportunity.

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China launches five satellites

9:02 am

China today successfully launched five satellites, its Kinetica-1 rocket (Lijian-1 in Chinese) lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.

China’s state-run press generally attempts to describe this rocket as commercial and built by one of its pseudo-companies, but in this case that is even more dishonest. CAS Space was created from a government space division as a separate subsidiary, and thus is wholly controlled, funded, and owned by that agency. Unlike China’s other pseudo-companies, it didn’t even bother to go through the dance of raising investment capital or winning contracts.

Nonetheless, company officials now boast — after this fourth launch of this rocket — they are about to begin launching monthly. No word on where the rocket’s lower stages crashed inside China.

Meanwhile, China also today publicly announced a successful ICBM test launch into the Pacific, the first time it has made such an test or public announcement in four decades. It released almost no details, however, including where the missile was launched or where it splashed down.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

94 SpaceX
43 China
11 Russia
11 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 110 to 65, while SpaceX by itself now leads the entire world, including American companies, 94 to 81.

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