July 6, 2022 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, well worth your time, go here.
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Category: Points of Information
Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
July 5, 2022 Zimmerman appearance on the Space Show
The podcast from my appearance last night on the Space Show is now available here.
Twas a fun show. The questions and comments from the audience were especially excellent this time.
How did sand dunes get to the top of a Martian mesa?
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on January 1, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and shows one of the peaks of a 5,000+ foot high mesa inside Juventai Chasma, one of Mars’ deep mostly-enclosed chasms north of Valles Marineris.
I grabbed this picture because its label, “Bedform Change Detection in Juventae Chasma”, suggested something had changed from past photos, probably related to the sand dunes that hug the upper slopes of this peak. Unfortunately, in comparing this image with the earliest high-res image taken by MRO back in February 2018, I could not spot any change, probably because the resolution of the pictures released is not as high as MRO’s raw images.
However, the caption written for that 2018 image tells us where that change has likely occurred:
This image reveals a unique situation where this small dune field occurs along the summit of the large 1-mile-tall [mesa] near the center of Juventae Chasma. The layered [mesa] slopes are far too steep for dunes to climb, and bedform sand is unlikely to come from purely airborne material. Instead, the mound’s summit displays several dark-toned, mantled deposits that are adjacent to the dunes and appear to be eroding into fans of sandy material.
In other words, somewhere in the full resolution image scientists have spotted a change in the bedform sands that make-up these high mountain dunes that hug the peak. Since the data so far has suggested that the source for the sand of these high elevation dunes likely comes from the mesa itself — not from any distant source — any change found will help confirm or disprove that hypothesis.
The white box indicates the area covered by the close-up higher resolution picture below. Also below is an overview map, showing both the location of this mountain in Juventai Chasma as well as Juventai’s location relative to Valles Marineris.
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Today’s blacklisted American: Google blacklists Republican Party fund-raising emails
Blacklists are back and Democrats at Google have got ’em: According to evidence presented by the Republican National Committee last week, Google is tactically blocking all fund-raising emails from the committee at the end of the month, when such emails are routinely sent.
To quote the twitter thread from Ronna McDaniel, GOP chairwoman:
Every single month – for 7 months in a row – Google has systematically attacked the RNC’s email fundraising during important donation days at the end of the month. Our emails go from strong inbox delivery (90-100%) down to 0%.
These are emails that go to our most engaged, opt-in supporters without any increase in user complaints, changes to the content, email frequency or target audiences that could account for the suppression.
Yet month after month – like clockwork – right ahead of a CRITICAL period when voters are most engaged, Google blocks our emails. They even block GOTV emails.
Google has failed to explain why this is happening. It’s unacceptable. We have filed a complaint with the FEC over this practice of censoring Republican emails and it just keeps happening.
The graphic below, including in McDaniel’s tweets, shows how the GOP’s emails are suddenly considered spam by Google at the end of every month, conveniently at the very moment the party sends out its fund-raising pleas.
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Contact with CAPSTONE re-established
Though no further details have been released, according to a NASA update, engineers at Advanced Space have successfully re-established communications with the cubesat lunar orbiter CAPSTONE.
China begins construction of commercial spaceport
The new colonial movement: China’s state-run press today announced the ground-breaking of a spaceport on the southern island of Hainan that will be dedicated to launches by that country’s pseudo-commercial companies.
The location is in Wenchang City, the same location of the country’s Wenchang spaceport used to launch government’s newest Long March rockets. While it isn’t clear from the Chinese news report, this new facility is likely at the same location.
Though China touts this as a commercial facility for private commercial launch companies, everything in China is still controlled and owned by the government. Nothing will happen at this new site that China’s military does not approve.
Rocket Lab to launch twice in 10 days for NRO
Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab announced yesterday that its next two launches, scheduled for July 12th and July 22nd, will demonstrate the ability of the company to quickly launch reconnaissance satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).
The NROL-162 and NROL-199 missions will carry national security payloads designed, built, and operated by the National Reconnaissance Office in partnership with the Australian Department of Defence as part of a broad range of cooperative satellite activities with Australia. The satellites will support the NRO to provide critical information to government agencies and decision makers monitoring international issues.
These twin missions will be a demonstration of responsive launch under NRO’s Rapid Acquisition of a Small Rocket (RASR) contract for launching small satellite through a streamlined, commercial approach, and are the third and fourth missions contracted to Rocket Lab by the NRO under the contract.
Several federal military agencies have been testing this capability with almost all the new rocket companies, from the large, such as SpaceX, to the small, such as Rocket Lab and Astra.
Engineers propose flying gliders on Mars
Proposed sailplane flights in Valles Marineris. Click for full image.
Engineers at the University of Arizona are developing a prototype sailplane that they think could fly for long distances on Mars at higher altitudes than a helicopter and not be reliant on solar batteries.
Using dynamic soaring, the sailplane utilises increases in horizontal wind speed with gaining altitude to continue flying long distances. It’s the same process albatrosses use to fly long distances without flapping their wings and expending crucial energy.
After lifting themselves up into fast, high-altitude air, albatrosses then turn their bodies to descend rapidly into regions of slower, low-altitude air. With the force of gravity providing downward acceleration, the albatross uses this momentum to slingshot itself back to higher altitudes. Continuously repeating this process enables albatross and other seabird species to cover thousands of kilometres of ocean, flap-free.
It’s the inspiration for the sailplane’s own propulsion system, enabling it to cover the canyons and volcanoes dotted across the red planet currently inaccessible to Mars rovers.
The graphic above, figure 1 from the engineers’ research paper, shows one possible sailplane mission, deploying two gliders, one to observe the canyon wall and a second to survey the canyon floor. Both would become a weather station upon landing. While the paper doesn’t state a Mars location for this concept, the graphic strikes a strong resemblance to the section of Valles Marineris where scientists have recently taken “Mars Helicopter” high resolution images using Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). This paper and those images might be related, or they could be illustrating the general interest by many scientists for this Mars’ location.
Regardless, the engineers are now planning test flights at 15,000 feet elevation, an elevation that will most closely simulate the atmosphere of Mars, on Earth.
On the radio
I forgot to post this earlier, but I am doing the Space Show tonight, beginning at 7 pm (Pacific). The info is in the right column or on the bottom of the page, depending on the device you use to read this.
Engineers lose contact with CAPSTONE on its way to Moon
Shortly after the spacecraft was successfully deployed from its Proton upper stage on yesterday, engineers lost contact with the spacecraft as it headed towards the Moon.
“The spacecraft team currently is working to understand the cause and re-establish contact. The team has good trajectory data for the spacecraft based on the first full and second partial ground station pass with the Deep Space Network,” NASA spokesperson Sarah Frazier wrote in an emailed statement today (July 5).
“If needed, the mission has enough fuel to delay the initial post-separation trajectory correction maneuver for several days,” Frazier added. “Additional updates will be provided as soon as possible.”
The spacecraft will not arrive in lunar orbit until November, but along the way it needs to do a number of course corrections. Thus, there is some time pressure to reestablishing communications. That task now falls with the private company Advanced Space, which won a contract to operate the spacecraft for NASA.
UPDATE: More details are provided by the operators of the spacecraft, Advanced Space press, here. Though they canceled a course correction burn today, they apparently have plenty of time to do it, since the probe is already on a course to reach lunar orbit. The burn was simply intended to increase the accuracy of the trajectory.
Today’s blacklisted American: Democrat politicians threaten local Aspen newspaper for its news coverage
The goal of Democrats everywhere
Blacklists are back and the Democrats have got ’em: Because a bunch of local Aspen, Colorado, politicians dislike how the Aspen Times has been covering one story, they wrote a letter to that newspaper demanding it change its coverage and hire their preferred journalists or they would use their power to silence it.
From their letter, written to Robert Nutting, CEO of Ogden Newspapers which owns the Aspen Times:
Our faith in Ogden Newspapers is shattered and we are individually considering separate reactions as a result, including: directing our individual organizations to pull advertisements and notices from the paper; encouraging local businesses to do the same; refusing interviews with reporters at the Aspen Times; or calling for a community boycott of the paper.
To reinstate our trust in the Aspen Times, we would like to see clear action from Ogden Newspapers such as the following: reinstatement of Andrew Travers as the Editor in Chief; re-publication of Marolt’s June 10 column; a joint statement from Travers, Allison Pattillo, the publisher of the Times, and yourself, detailing the editorial freedom and standards of transparency that will be carried forward; and, public clarity about the settlement that was reached by Doronin’s lawsuit.
Europe’s new long term space strategy calls for its own independent and competing manned program
The new colonial movement: The European Space Agency (ESA) yesterday unveiled a new roadmap for its future space effort, aimed primarily in developing an independent space program capable of launching its own astronauts and taking them to both the Moon and Mars.
The program is dubbed Terrae Novae (“New Worlds”) and aims to put European astronauts on other worlds using its own rockets and landers by the 2030s. The graphic to the right, figure 6 from the policy paper, illustrates this long term goal.
ArianeGroup chosen by Europe to develop reusable rockets
The new colonial movement: The European Commission, which makes the major decisions for the European Space Agency, has chosen the European commercial company ArianeGroup to run two programs designed to produce that continent’s first reusable rocket.
From the press release [pdf]:
The SALTO project will facilitate the first flight tests of the Themis reusable stage demonstrator in Kiruna, Sweden. The ENLIGHTEN project will speed up the development and introduction of reusable engine technologies.
The main goal of SALTO will be to develop the kind of vertical landing technology that SpaceX now does routinely. ENLIGHTEN in turn will develop rocket engines using either methane or hydrogen as the fuel. The total budget allocated for both is just under 50 million euros, which seems quite small. The press release also made no mention of a schedule for accomplishing these tasks.
Scientists: Comet 67P/C-G’s make-up matches the rest of the solar system
A detailed review of the archived data from the Rosetta mission that studied Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko closely in 2014-2016 now strongly suggests that the comet’s overall make-up closely matches the rest of the solar system.
“It turned out that, on average, [the comet’s] complex organics budget is identical to the soluble part of meteoritic organic matter”, explains [Nora Hänni of the University of Bern] and adds: “Moreover, apart from the relative amount of hydrogen atoms, the molecular budget of [comet 67P/C-G] also strongly resembles the organic material raining down on Saturn from its innermost ring, as detected by the INMS mass spectrometer onboard NASA’s Cassini spacecraft”.
“We do not only find similarities of the organic reservoirs in the Solar System, but many of [comet 67P/C-G]’s organic molecules are also present in molecular clouds, the birthplaces of new stars”, complements Prof. Dr. Susanne Wampfler, astrophysicist at the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH) at the University of Bern and co-author of the publication. “Our findings are consistent with and support the scenario of a shared presolar origin of the different reservoirs of Solar System organics, confirming that comets indeed carry material from the times long before our Solar System emerged.”
These results are not unexpected, but having those expectations confirmed was one of the main scientific goals of the Rosetta mission. Now, almost a decade later, the results are in.
South Korea ships its first lunar orbiter to U.S. for August launch
The new colonial movement: South Korea today packed and shipped its first lunar orbiter, dubbed Danuri, to the United States for an August 3, 2022 launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
According to the Ministry of Science and ICT, Danuri was sent from the Korea Aerospace Research Institute in Daejeon, 160 kilometers south of Seoul, to Incheon International Airport, west of Seoul, in a specially designed container. The orbiter will be flown to Orlando International Airport and arrive at the Floridian space center Thursday. It will later undergo maintenance, assembly and other pre-launch preparations for about a month before launch.
If all goes right, Danuri will orbit the Moon for a year, both testing its own technology as well as observing the lunar surface.
Food fight! China denies NASA chief’s charge that it wants to dominate space
On July 2, 2022, in an interview for a German news outlet, NASA administrator described in somewhat overbroad terms the long range goals of the Chinese space program.
“We must be very concerned that China is landing on the moon and saying: ‘It’s ours now and you stay out,’” Mr. Nelson said in an interview published Saturday in the German newspaper Bild.
….China’s space program, at its heart, is a military space program, Mr. Nelson said. “China is good. But China is also good because they steal ideas and technology from others,” he said, according to Bild.
A China spokesman for its Foreign Ministry, Zhao Lijian, immediately slammed Nelson’s comments, adding some of his own overbroad accusations against the U.S.
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Sunspot update: For the first time in 2022, sunspot activity eases
With the year half over, the Sun in June did something it had not done since the start of the year: The number of sunspots seen daily on the Sun’s visible hemisphere actually declined from the month before.
I know this because, as I do every month, I have posted below NOAA’s monthly update of its graph tracking the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere, with some addition details added to provide a larger context.
The new damage on Curiosity’s wheels
To see the original images, go here and here.
On June 23, 2022 the Curiosity team provided a major update on the rover’s status on Mars, noting that because of new damage discovered on one of wheels, they were increasing the frequency of their wheel checks from once every 1000 meters of travel to once every 500 meters.
The team discovered that the left middle wheel had damaged one of its grousers, the zig-zagging treads along Curiosity’s wheels. This particular wheel already had four broken grousers, so now five of its 19 grousers are broken.
The previously damaged grousers attracted attention online recently because some of the metal “skin” between them appears to have fallen out of the wheel in the past few months, leaving a gap.
The photo comparison to the right might be showing that specific wheel, or not. The top image was taken January 11, 2022, and when compared then with an image taken six months earlier showed little change. Thus, in January 2022 it seemed the wheels were holding up well as Curiosity traveled into the mountains.
The new image at the bottom, taken June 3, 2022, shows new damage (as indicated by the plus sign) which had occurred sometime in the past six months. During that time the rover had attempted to cross the incredibly rough ground of the Greenheugh Pediment, and had been forced to retreat because the ground was too rough.
This most recent wheel survey in June thus confirms that the decision to retreat was a wise one. It appears that while the rover’s wheels can take the general roughness of the terrain in the foothills of Mount Sharp, the Greenheugh Pediment was beyond the wheels’ capabilities.
Rocket Lab’s Photon completes course corrections, deploys CAPSTONE to Moon
Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab’s Photon upper stage successfully completed its seventh engine burn, putting NASA’s cubesat test lunar orbital on a path toward the Moon.
Following its launch on June 28, CAPSTONE orbited Earth attached to Rocket Lab’s Photon upper stage, which maneuvered CAPSTONE into position for its journey to the Moon. Over the past six days, Photon’s engines fired seven times at key moments to raise the orbit’s highest point to around 810,000 miles from Earth before releasing the CAPSTONE CubeSat on its ballistic lunar transfer trajectory to the Moon. The spacecraft is now being flown by the teams at Advanced Space and Terran Orbital. [emphasis mine]
From here on out CAPSTONE will use its own tiny thrusters to do any course corrections as it heads for an arrival in lunar orbit on November 13, 2022.
The highlighted words in the quote above are significant in and of themselves. The spacecraft is not being operated by NASA. In fact, other than paying for it, NASA has little to do with CAPSTONE. It was designed and built by Terran Orbital. It was launched by Rocket Lab. And it is now being controlled by Advanced Space, a private commercial company focused on providing in-space operations for others.
One of Perseverance’s two wind sensors damaged by wind-blown material
According to the principal investigator for Perseverance’s two wind sensors, one was recently damaged by a wind-blown tiny pebble.
Pebbles carried aloft by strong Red Planet gusts recently damaged one of the wind sensors, but MEDA can still keep track of wind at its landing area in Jezero Crater, albeit with decreased sensitivity, José Antonio Rodriguez Manfredi, principal investigator of MEDA, told Space.com. “Right now, the sensor is diminished in its capabilities, but it still provides speed and direction magnitudes,” Rodriguez Manfredi, a scientist at the Spanish Astrobiology Center in Madrid, wrote in an e-mail. “The whole team is now re-tuning the retrieval procedure to get more accuracy from the undamaged detector readings.”
…Like all instruments on Perseverance, the wind sensor was designed with redundancy and protection in mind, Rodriguez Manfredi noted. “But of course, there is a limit to everything.” And for an instrument like MEDA, the limit is more challenging, since the sensors must be exposed to environmental conditions in order to record wind parameters. But when stronger-than-anticipated winds lifted larger pebbles than expected, the combination resulted in damage to some of the detector elements.
The term “pebble” implies a larger-sized particle than what probably hit the sensor. I suspect the “pebble” was no more than one or two millimeters in diameter, at the most.