Category: Points of Information

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

Ingenuity snaps picture of Perseverance during 54th flight

10:13 am

Perseverance as seen by Ingenuity on August 8th
Click for original image.

During Ingenuity’s 54th flight, a short vertical hop sixteen feet up and down that lasted only 25 seconds, the helicopter’s color camera managed to get a picture of the rover Perseverance, only about 200 feet away to the north.

That picture, cropped and enhanced to post here, is to the right. It shows Perseverance just inside the picture’s upper edge. Its graininess illustrates in a sense the engineering test nature of Ingenuity. It was never expected to last this long and to take actual scouting or science imagery. It was supposed to complete a 30 day program of a handful of test flights, proving it was possible to fly in Mars’ very thin atmosphere (1/1000th that of Earth). Instead, it has lasted years, and completed 54 flights, keeping ahead of Perseverance and providing the rover team scouting images of the ground they wish to travel.

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South Korea’s KARI space agency releases new images taken by its Danuri lunar orbiter

10:02 am

To celebrate the anniversary of its launch, South Korea’s KARI space agency today released new images taken by its Danuri lunar orbiter.

Images include views of Reiner Gamma, a so-called swirl, which features a localized magnetic field and marks a bright spot within the Oceanus Procellarum region. Another shows shadows inside Amundsen Crater, close to the lunar south pole and a potential landing site for NASA’s Artemis 3 mission, which is slated to put astronauts on the moon in late 2025.

Another southern feature captured by Danuri is Drygalski Crater, showing the central peak inside the impact crater.

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ESA official confirms first Ariane-6 launch will not occur until 2024

9:45 am

The head of ESA yesterday confirmed what had been known since May, that the first test flight of its Ariane-6 rocket will not take place this year but will be delayed until 2024.

In an update on the Ariane 6 program also posted Tuesday, the ESA said that it could not complete a short hot firing test — which mimics the environment in space to provide data to operators — of Ariane’s Vulcain 2.1 engine system in a July attempt, with plans to try again on August 29.

Aschbacher said the tentative plan is to carry out a long hot fire test of the assembled core stage and engine on September 26 at the agency’s spaceport in French Guiana. If those tests are successful, it should then be possible to set a more precise timeline for getting the rocket system ready for launch next year.

It seems the inability of engineers to complete that July engine test — which ESA officials claimed was because they simply ran out of time — added at least a six-week delay to the entire program.

There delays leave Europe without any large rocket to launch payloads, and has forced its various governments to hire SpaceX to get those payloads into space.

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First stage of Chinese rocket crashes in Chinese city

9:34 am

Remains of Long March 2C, in Chinese city

Locals in the city of Shangluo, population over two million located in central China, today released video images of the remains of the first stage of a Long March 2C rocket that launched yesterday and apparently crashed in the city.

The image to the right is a screen capture. Since this two-stage rocket uses extremely toxic hypergolic fuels in both of its stages, those citizens wandering around the rocket’s remains are in great health danger.

China has in recent years has appeared taken actions to block the release of such videos by its citizens, but apparently failed in this case.

The irony is that this rocket supposedly launched what China called “a disaster reduction” satellite. That maybe so, but in the process it also dumped toxic materials on its own citizens.

Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.

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NASA engineers still struggling to understand why Orion’s heat shield ablated so much

9:10 am

NASA engineers still do not understand why the heat shield on its Orion capsule ablated as it did during its return to Earth on the first unmanned Artemis-1 mission.

The agency is still running tests. It also expressed confidence that the issue will not delay the Artemis-2 mission, the first intended to carry humans on SLS and in Orion and still scheduled for late 2024.

At the same time, agency officials hinted that the third Artemis mission, which has always been planned as putting humans on the Moon for the first time since Apollo, might not achieve that goal. It is still not clear whether the mission’s lunar spacesuits as well as SpaceX’s Starship lunar lander will be ready on time. The latter is facing serious regulatory problems imposed by the Biden administration that is generally preventing it from flight testing the spacecraft.

That second Artemis mission, the first planned to carry humans, is one that actually at present carries the most risk. It will not only use a heat shield that at present engineers do not entirely understand, it will be the first Orion capsule to have the environmental systems necessary for its human cargo. NASA is putting humans on the first test flight of those systems.

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China’s Long March 2C rocket launches “disaster reduction” satellite

7:30 pm

China today used its Long March 2C rocket to place what it called a “disaster reduction” satellite into orbit, launching from its Taiyuan spaceport in the interior of China.

No other information was released, including whether the rocket’s lower stages landed near habitable areas.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

54 SpaceX
32 China
10 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
6 India

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 62 to 32, and the entire world combined 62 to 53, while SpaceX by itself still leads the world (excluding American companies) 54 to 53.

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August 8, 2023 Quick space links

3:51 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

 

  • According to NASA the investigation into the Soyuz/Progress coolant leaks continues

    • It appears Russia still favors micrometeorite impacts as the cause, but no possibilities have been dismissed. If Russia concludes it was sabotage or some failure in the coolant system design, do not expect any public information release, though Russian officials might tell NASA officials, under an agreement that NASA will help Russia keep this info secret.

 

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NOAA lifts many restrictions on the release of commercial Earth observation images

3:09 pm

As part of a 2020 revision by Commerce to reduce regulations on satellites that monitor the Earth, NOAA has now lifted many of the restrictions it placed on the release of high resolution commercial Earth observation images.

NOAA said it lifted 39 restrictions on an unspecified number of licenses. Those restrictions include a reduction of global imaging restrictions for certain imaging modes and removal of restrictions on non-Earth imaging and rapid revisit. It also removed all temporary conditions on X-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery.

One of the companies that benefits from the removal of the conditions is SAR imaging company Umbra. The company announced Aug. 7 that, with the removal of the conditions, it can now offer SAR images to customers at a resolution of 16 centimeters, compared to no better than 25 centimeters under the old license conditions. “This means that we are finally able to offer customers the highest resolution images that our satellites are capable of capturing, setting the stage for even further expansion of products to customers,” said Gabe Dominocielo, Umbra’s co-founder and president, in a company statement.

The revision to the regulations, put in place in 2020, had been instigated by the Trump administration, and has apparently been left untouched by the Biden administration, at least up until now.

For the satellite companies it means they are much freer to produce that best imagery, and thus compete more successfully. For customers, it means that they will now have access the best imagery, in open competition. For news outlets attempting to report on things like the Ukraine War, for example, this ability will make it possible to improve the accuracy of the coverage.

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Real pushback: Judge slams Southwest Airlines for violating settlement terms of free-speech court case

1:38 pm

Southwest: Enemy to free speech

Bring a gun to a knife fight: We now come to another chapter in the continuing saga of flight attendant Charlene Carter, who was fired in 2017 by Southwest Airlines because she had expressed opinions that were not liked by both the company and union officials. In 2022 a jury awarded her $5.1 million against the airline and the union.

In December 2022 the federal judge in the case, Brantley Starr, reduced the settlement award to $810,000 in order “to comply with federal limits on punitive damages.” However, he also approved the rest of the jury award, which required Southwest to rehire Carter as well as change its policies that violated the first amendment, and announce these facts publicly to its employees.

Only a month later Carter went back to court, demanding that the judge sanction Southwest for violating settlement terms of her court victory. Not only did the company not admit error to its employees, as required by the settlement, one company-wide memo slandered Carter again, calling her previous communications for which she was fired as “inappropriate, harassing, and offensive.”

Judge Starr yesterday responded to Carter’s demand for relief, slamming Southwest in no uncertain terms.
» Read more

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Land of Martian springs?

11:30 am

Land of Martian springs?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on December 22, 2014 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). I came across this image when researching another photo taken recently of the interior of this same 56-mile-wide crater, dubbed Firsoff, and decided this decade old picture was far more interesting.

Firsoff, which had been considered a candidate landing site for Perseverance, is known for the many layers shown in this picture. It is also known for having mounds, here ranging in height from 90 to 150 feet, that some scientists believe could have once been springs of water. The layers as always are of great interest, as they provide data on past geological events. In the case of Firsoff, the layers are especially easy to see because of their alternating dark and light colors. The dark layers are thought to be basalt, suggesting these layers were laid down during a volcanic event.
» Read more

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Scientists repeat fusion power experiment that produced more energy than spent

10:03 am

For the second time ever, scientists have successfully produced more energy from a fusion power experiment than they spent running the experiment.

Physicists have since the 1950s sought to harness the fusion reaction that powers the sun, but until December no group had been able to produce more energy from the reaction than it consumes — a condition also known as ignition.

Researchers at the federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, who achieved ignition for the first time last year, repeated the breakthrough in an experiment on July 30 that produced a higher energy output than in December, according to three people with knowledge of the preliminary results.

Before you start buying stock in fusion power or believe the glowing praises coming from politicians and government bureaucrats, be warned: This experiment, which cost billions, was only able to produce enough power to run a household iron for about an hour. It will likely take many more billions and decades more of research to scale it up to a viable power system that has any hope of being practical.

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Ingenuity completes 54th flight, a short hop after previous flight ended prematurely

9:45 am

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

According to the Ingenuity engineering team, Ingenuity has successfully completed its 54th flight on Mars, a short 25 second hop up and down that was done to try to figure out why the previous flight previous flight, #53, had ended prematurely.

Flight 53 was planned as a 136-second scouting flight dedicated to collecting imagery of the planet’s surface for the Perseverance Mars rover science team. The complicated flight profile included flying north 666 feet (203 meters) at an altitude of 16 feet (5 meters) and a speed of 5.6 mph (2.5 meters per second), then descending vertically to 8 feet (2.5 meters), where it would hover and obtain imagery of a rocky outcrop. Ingenuity would then climb straight up to 33 feet (10 meters) to allow its hazard divert system to initiate before descending vertically to touch down.

Instead, the helicopter executed the first half of its autonomous journey, flying north at an altitude of 16 feet (5 meters) for 466 feet (142 meters). Then a flight-contingency program was triggered, and Ingenuity automatically landed. The total flight time was 74 seconds.

This explains why, after the 53rd flight, the engineering team had not immediately added that flight to the helicopter’s flight log. That log is now updated to include both the 53rd and 54th flights, but the data from the 53rd flight was held back until after the 54th flight was completed.

The green dot in the overview map above shows Ingenuity’s present position, only a few feet to the west from its previous position shown here. The blue dot indicates Perseverance’s present position. The red dotted line indicates the planned route of the rover.

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