Category: Points of Information

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

Lucy’s first asteroid fly-by coming on November 1st

9:25 am

Lucy's route through the solar system
Lucy’s route through the solar system

The asteroid probe Lucy is about to do its first asteroid fly-by on November 1, 2023, the first of a planned ten asteroids it will see close-up during its twelve year mission.

The half-mile-wide asteroid, Dinkinesh, is indicated on the graphic to the right by the white dot in the lower left of the main asteroid belt. It was a late addition to the spacecraft’s plan in order to provide a perfect testbed for doing a dress rehearsal of the many later fly-bys.

As this encounter is intended as a test of Lucy’s systems, scientific observations will be simpler than for the mission’s main targets. The spacecraft and the platform that holds the instruments will move into position two hours before the closest approach to Dinkinesh. Once in place, the spacecraft will begin collecting data with its high-resolution camera (L’LORRI) and its thermal-infrared camera (L’TES). One hour before closest approach, the spacecraft will begin tracking the asteroid with the terminal-tracking system. Only in the last eight minutes will Lucy be able to collect data with MVIC and LEISA, the color imager and infrared spectrometer that comprise the L’Ralph instrument. Lucy’s closest approach is expected to occur at 12:54 p.m. EDT, when the spacecraft will be within 270 miles (430 kilometers) of the asteroid. Lucy will perform continuous imaging and tracking of Dinkinesh for almost another hour. After that time, the spacecraft will reorient itself to resume communications with Earth but will continue to periodically image Dinkinesh with L’LORRI for the next four days.

After this close encounter the spacecraft will return to do a flyby of Earth in 2025 to slingshot it to the orbit of Jupiter, where it will do its main work exploring the Trojan asteroids there. On the way it will fly past a second main belt asteroid, dubbed Donaldjohanson.

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Varda signs deal with Australian private spaceport operator to land its capsules

9:13 am

Blocked from landing its American-built space capsules by the American government, the startup Varda has now completed negotiations and signed an agreement with Southern Launch, an Australian private spaceport operator, to land its capsules at the Koonibba Test Range northwest of Adelaide.

Varda’s business plan is to launch unmanned capsules in which pharmeceuticals and other products that can’t be made on Earth are manufactured, then return the capsule to earth where they are sold for a profit. This deal will allow Varda to land its next capsule there in 2024.

Meanwhile, Varda first capsule, presently in orbit after manufacturing pharmeceuticals for HIV, appears to be a total loss because the FAA and the Pentagon refused it permission to land in the U.S., for what appear to be purely bureaucratic reasons.

There was no single specific issue that held up the reentry, he said. “It was ultimately a coordination problem amongst three different groups that had not worked through this operation before.” He added that there were no safety concerns with Varda’s spacecraft or its ability to meet requirements for an FAA license. An additional challenge is that Varda is the first company to seek an FAA reentry license through a new set of regulations called Part 450. Those regulations are intended to streamline the process but, on the launch side, have been criticized by companies for being difficult.

The U.S. government is now the enemy of its citizens, so incompetent that it actually works to block them from achieving their goals.

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NASA issues update on repairs/fixes to Starliner

9:05 am

According to an update posted today by NASA, Boeing is moving forward on the repairs and fixes necessary to finally fly a manned mission with its capsule Starliner, now delayed several years and costing the company an additional $1.5 billion due to those repairs.

Boeing has completed P213 tape removal in the upper dome of the Starliner crew compartment and work is underway to remove or remediate the tape in the lower dome of the spacecraft. These hardware remediation efforts inside the Starliner production facility at NASA Kennedy are expected to be completed during the next several weeks. After the P213 tape remediation efforts conclude, engineers will conduct final assessments to ensure acceptable risk of any remaining tape.

A set of parachutes is on track to be delivered and installed on the CFT spacecraft by the end of this year to support the current target launch date. Separately, the team also is planning a drop test of Starliner’s updated drogue and main parachutes. The parachutes will incorporate a planned strengthening of main canopy suspension lines and the recent design of the drogue and main parachute soft-link joints, which will increase the safety factor for the system. The drop test is planned for early 2024 based on the current parachute delivery schedule.

The company is targeting having Starliner ready for launch in March ahead of its scheduled April 2024 launch.

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China launches classified satellite

8:59 am

China today successfully launched a classified reconnaissance satellite, its Long March 2D rocket lifting off from its Xichang spaceport in the south of China.

No word on where the first stage, which uses toxic hypogolic fuel, crashed in the interior of China.

The leaders in 2023 launch race:

76 SpaceX
47 China
13 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 88 to 47, and the entire world combined 88 to 75. SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world combined (excluding American companies) 76 to 75.

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October 23, 2023 Quick space links

5:47 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

  • NASA convenes team to reassess design of Mars sample return mission

    • Common sense would cause them to consider a major restructuring that even might include Starship. The track record of Washington suggests instead they will only make some superficial changes, claiming it saves money and addresses the problems outlined by the recent very critical independent review. And most important, they will ask for more money!

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A low mid-latitude crater on Mars apparently filled to overflowing with ice

12:04 pm

ice filling a Martian crater to overflowing
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 18, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a steep 1,000-foot-high cliff with what appears to be extensive glacial material at its base.

The many layers all suggest past climate cycles, where snow was deposited and the glacier grew, followed by a period when no snow fell and the glacier either shrank or remained unchanged. The terraced nature of the layers near the base of the cliff suggest that with each active cycle less snow was deposited and the glacier grew less.

The latitude is 33 degrees south, which puts it just outside the dry equatorial regions of Mars and inside the mid-latitude region where many such glacial features are found. Its closeness to the tropics however is significant, because by this point we should be seeing a diminishment of such features. Instead, the wider view shows us that the near surface ice in this region is extensive and in fact appears to cover everything.
» Read more

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Ingenuity completes 63rd flight on Mars

10:07 am

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

On October 19, 2023 the Mars helicopter Ingenuity successfully completed its 63rd flight on Mars, traveling 1,901 feet (its third longest flight) for 142.6 seconds.

On the overview map above the two dots and the green line mark the flight path, to the southwest and landing about 2,000 feet to the west of where the rover Perseverance presently sits (indicated by the blue dot).

Both the flight time and distance were slightly longer than the flight plan, likely caused by the helicopter making sure it had a safe landing spot before lowering itself to the ground.

Ingenuity is no longer simply an engineering test of whether flight is possible on Mars. It is now serving wholly as a scout for Perseverance, either moving ahead of its planned route (the red dotted line) in order to provide pictures of the ground so that the rover’s science team can better plan their future travels, or going into territory that the rover is not intended to travel in order to gather data that would previously been unavailable.

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Near collision of Australian satellite with Chinese military satellite

9:31 am

According to one Australian military official, a Chinese military satellite earlier this month came within a kilometer of a Australian satellite.

Analysis conducted after the event by the company LeoLabs shows both satellites were predicted to have an “miss” distance of just 100 metres 24 hours before the anticipated “conjunction”.

According to the data, the Yaogan 37 satellite manoeuvred 16 hours prior to the conjunction, increasing the miss distance to 978 metres at the closest approach.

The official’s presentation emphasized the increasing threat of collisions from the high number of satellites being launched, but this incident instead suggests to me that the problem is actually under some control by satellite operators. It continues the pattern seen repeatedly, whereby satellite operators detect a potential collision before it happens, and take preventive measures to avoid it.

The real problem has to do with defunct equipment in orbit that no one is in contact with or can control. Such objects pose are a bigger threat, because they cannot be maneuvered.

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Space Perspective unveils restroom for its high altitude tourist balloon

9:14 am

Neptune's restroom
Click for original image.

The Florida company Space Perspective yesterday unveiled the restroom for its high altitude tourist balloon, Neptune, that intends to take passengers on six to eight hour flights to nineteen miles elevation.

The goal was to provide an environment closer to a spa than to a typical aircraft setting, said Dan Window, who oversees all aspects of design at Space Perspective alongside Isabella Trani. “Overall, we embraced softness and optimistic color tones in the Space Spa, which play nicely with the contrasting colors you will see through its two windows,” Window said in the same statement. “We’re also using light washes, for example, to create ambience and allow for customization of the environment as well as discourage reflections in the windows. Soothing soundscapes will be unique to what you experience in the Space Lounge, and we brought in plants as a callback to the experience that Space Perspective’s founders had in Biosphere 2.

Based on the artist’s renderning to the right, the restroom is still a very small space, smaller than the smallest bathroom in most homes.

Space Perspective says it has received deposits for more than 1,600 flight tickets at 125K each, representing $200 million in potential income. It hopes to complete its first test flight next year.

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Scientists: The activity at the few known fast radio bursts suggests they resemble earthquakes

8:57 am

By analyzing 7,000 fast radio bursts (FRBs) detected from the three known FRBs, two scientists have found that the behavior appears to resemble the main quake and aftershocks seen in earthquakes.

The duo found that the arrival times of bursts from FRB20121102A showed a high degree of correlation, with many more bursts arriving within a second of each other than would be expected if the generation of bursts were completely random. This correlation faded away at longer timescales, with bursts separated by over a second arriving completely at random.

They drew similarities with this behaviour to how earthquakes produce secondary aftershocks in the hours or days following a tremor, but then become completely unpredictable once an episode of aftershocks passes. Moreover, they found that the rate of these FRB “aftershocks” follows the same Omori-Utsu law that characterises the occurrence of earthquake aftershocks on Earth. The law states that shortly after a large earthquake, the rate of aftershocks remains constant over a brief period of minutes to hours, after which the aftershock rate drops, decaying as roughly the inverse of the time since the main shock.

As always there is uncertainty about this conclusion. The magnitudes of the main quake and the pre- and after-shocks do not follow the curve pattern of earthquakes. Instead pre- and after-shocks can be as powerful.

The present theory is that FRBs are quakes in the crust of neutron stars, though this remains unconfirmed.

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SpaceX successfully completes two Starlink satellite launches today

8:29 pm

SpaceX today successfully completed two Starlink satellite launches, first putting 21 satellites in orbit from Vandenberg in the early morning hours and then launching another 23 satellites from Cape Canaveral in the evening.

Both first stages successfully landed on their drone ships, respectively in the Pacific and Atlantic. The first completed its sixteenth flight, the second its fourth flight.

The leaders in 2023 launch race:

76 SpaceX
46 China
13 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise now leads China in successfully launches 88 to 46, and the entire world combined 88 to 74. SpaceX by itself now leads the entire world combined (excluding American companies) 76 to 74.

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First Bennu asteroid samples recovered from OSIRIS-REx return capsule

10:26 am

Scientists have successfully removed the asteroid samples from the OSIRIS-REx return capsule that the spacecraft obtained from the asteroid Bennu in 2020.

What is more exciting is that though they now have slightly more material than the mission hoped to bring back, they haven’t even opened the capsule’s sample compartment.

The curation team processing NASA’s asteroid Bennu sample has removed and collected 2.48 ounces (70.3 grams) of rocks and dust from the sampler hardware – surpassing the agency’s goal of bringing at least 60 grams to Earth.

And the good news is, there’s still more of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security–Regolith Explorer) sample to collect.

The sample processed so far includes the rocks and dust found on the outside of the sampler head, as well as a portion of the bulk sample from inside the head, which was accessed through the head’s mylar flap. Additional material remaining inside the sampler head, called the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism, or TAGSAM, is set for removal later, adding to the mass total.

The large amount of material means there will be plenty to distribute to many scientists for study.

The reason the recovery process is going so slowly is to ensure the samples do not get contaminated by the Earth’s atmosphere. The capsule is inside a glovebox filled with nitrogen. The only way any work can be done is by inserting hands inside gloves that extend into the box. This keeps the samples protected but prevents any direct contact, which makes work slow and difficult.

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