Category: Points of Information

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

NASA and Boeing complete ground static fire tests of Starliner

11:20 pm

According to a press announcement tonight from NASA, the agency and Boeing have now completed the static fire tests using a Starliner ground capsule to duplicate the engine burns required to bring the in-space capsule back to Earth, carrying its two astronauts.

Teams completed ground hot fire testing at White Sands and are working to evaluate the test data and inspect the test engine. The ongoing ground analysis is expected to continue throughout the week. Working with a reaction control system thruster built for a future Starliner spacecraft, ground teams fired the engine through similar inflight conditions the spacecraft experienced on the way to the space station. The ground tests also included stress-case firings, and replicated conditions Starliner’s thrusters will experience from undocking to deorbit burn, where the thrusters will fire to slow Starliner’s speed to bring it out of orbit for landing in the southwestern United States.

Engineers now need to complete a review of those tests, followed by a full review leading to a decision as to when the astronauts will return on Starliner. No dates have yet been set, but expect these reviews to be completed within two weeks, and that Starliner will likely be scheduled for return in early August, prior to the scheduled launch of the next Dragon manned mission in mid-August.

All this assumes the FAA will clear SpaceX to resume launches before then. SpaceX is apparently ready to resume this week, but we have no indication the FAA will go along.

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July 18, 2024 Quick space links

3:36 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.

 

 

 

 

  • Today in 1966 John Young and Michael Collins launched on Gemini 10

    • This mission completed the first entirely successful docking, followed by a rendezvous with a second target spacecraft. Gemini 8 had docked but had to abort shortly thereafter due to out-of-control thruster, and Gemini 9 couldn’t dock because the shroud did not release properly from the target spacecraft.

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Scientists: Biden has infused DEI and racial quotas throughout the entire federal science bureaucracy

1:39 pm

Joe Biden, allied with Hamas
Joe Biden, like the KKK in love with racist quotas

A new research paper just completed by a international group of scientists details at length how the policies of critical race theory and its “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)” philosophy has been infused deeply into all levels of the entire federal science bureaucracy, influencing grant awards and hiring at the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institute of Health (NIH), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in ways that warp science and research and make good research impossible..

You can read the paper here [pdf]. From the press release:

The paper exposes how DEI has spread much further and more deeply into core scientific disciplines than most people, including many scientists, realize. This has happened, in large part, by presidential executive order (specifically, EO 13985 and EO 14091), implemented through the budget approval process.

The two executive orders listed were issued by President Biden in 2021 and 2023 respectively, with the first issued on his very first day in office. If you have the patience, it worth reading both, since they outline in great detail the goals of this administration to favor the hiring and promotion of “underserved communities,” which the first order lists as follows:
» Read more

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Columbia University donors fleeing because of its apparent willingness to tolerate bigotry and pro-Hamas mobs

1:03 pm

Columbia University's seal
The motto means “In Your Light [God],
We Shall See the Light.” Too bad no one
running Columbia now believes in this.

In the past two months Columbia University has discovered that there are real consequences for tolerating and sometimes even supporting the bigotry and anti-Semitism of its Marxist and pro-Hamas students and faculty.

First, in early June a very wealthy Columbia graduate donated $260 million to Israel’s Bar-Ilan University. Though the donor remains anonymous, these details were released by the university:

Not only did the donor make a point to tell onlookers he fought in a conflict entrenched in antisemitism, but he also reiterated how he graduated from Columbia.

It appears the donor wanted to make it very clear that Columbia had once been in the running for this donation, but its wishy-washy response to the riots committed on campus by pro-Hamas students caused him to reject it.

Nor has this been all. Another major donor to Columbia, Mortimer Zuckerman, announced earlier this week that he has cut off payments on a major $200 million donation he had initiated to Columbia in 2012, totaling millions.
» Read more

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Curiosity looks up Gediz Vallis as it starts its journey out

10:45 am

Curiosity panorama looking south on July 16, 2024Curiosity panorama looking south on July 16, 2024. Click for high resolution. Go here, here, here, and here
for original images.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Even as the Curiosity science team is beginning the rover’s journey out of the giant Martian slot canyon Gediz Vallis, they have on July 16, 2024 used its high resolution camera to gather a new mosaic of the surrounding terrain. I have used four of those images (available here, here, here, and here) to create a panorama, as shown above, focusing on the view looking south up into Gediz Vallis. Make sure you click on the image to see the full resolution version.

The overview map to the right provides the context. The blue dot marks Curiousity’s present position. The yellow lines indicate the approximate area covered by the panorama. The white dotted line indicates Curiosity’s actual traveled route, while the red dotted line the planned route.

The peak of Mount Sharp is directly ahead in this panorama, out of sight and about 26 miles away and 16,000 feet higher up. To get a sense of how far away that remains, note that Curiosity in its dozen years of exploration on Mars has so far traveled just under 20 miles and climbed about 2,500 feet.

The plan is to back track downhill and circle around the nose of the western wall of Gediz Vallis and head south in a parallel canyon that is believed to provide easier traveling for Curiosity’s damaged wheels.

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Researchers discover an anti-aging drug that extends the lives of rats 25%

9:49 am

Researchers have discovered that by blocking the increase of a certain protein within the body, they can not only extend the lives of rats by about 25%, the rats overall health in old age was improved significantly.

You can read the original paper here and the press release from the researchers here. From that press release:

After establishing IL11’s role in aging, the team demonstrated that by applying this anti-IL11 therapy in the same preclinical model, metabolism was improved. The mice shifted from generating white fat to beneficial brown fat. Brown fat breaks down blood sugar and fat molecules to help maintain body temperature and burn calories. The researchers also observed improved muscle function and overall better health in their study, as well as an increased lifespan by up to 5 per cent in both sexes.

Unlike other drugs known to inhibit specific pathways involved in aging, such as metformin and rapamycin, anti-IL11 therapy blocks multiple major signaling mechanisms that become dysfunctional with age, offering protection against cardio-metabolic diseases, age-related loss of muscle mass and strength as well as frailty. In addition to these externally observable changes, anti-IL11 therapy also reduced the rate of telomere shortening and preserved mitochondria’s health and ability to generate energy.

According the paper, this drug is now in early-stage clinical trials for fibrotic lung disease, but its benefits — as seen in these rat experiments — could turn out to be far greater, across the board.

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Astronomers discover an exoplanet with the most eccentric orbit so far found

9:41 am

Using the TESS space telescope, astronomers have discovered a gas giant exoplanet with the most eccentric orbit so far found, circling a star about 1,100 light years away.

On Jan. 12, 2020, TESS picked up a possible transit of the star TIC 241249530. Gupta and his colleagues at Penn State determined that the transit was consistent with a Jupiter-sized planet crossing in front of the star. They then acquired measurements from other observatories of the star’s radial velocity, which estimates a star’s wobble, or the degree to which it moves back and forth, in response to other nearby objects that might gravitationally tug on the star. Those measurements confirmed that a Jupiter-sized planet was orbiting the star and that its orbit was highly eccentric, bringing the planet extremely close to the star before flinging it far out.

Prior to this detection, astronomers had known of only one other planet, HD 80606 b, that was thought to be an early hot Jupiter. That planet, discovered in 2001, held the record for having the highest eccentricity, until now.

The exoplanet’s orbit is presently 167 days long, at its closest stellar approach dipping 10 times closer to its star than Mercury is from the Sun, and at its farthest point zipping just beyond Earth’s distance.

Computer simulations suggest that in a billion years this orbit will decay into a more circular orbit close to the star, turning this gas giant into a hot Jupiter roasted by its star continually.

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Europe’s Gaia space telescope in trouble

9:34 am

Launched in 2013 and now functioning more than six years after the completion of its primary mission to measure precisely the distances to over a billion stars, the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope has experienced several major technical issues this spring related to a micrometeorite hit and a failure of the electronics of one of its CCDs.

The micrometeorite hit occurred in April.

The impact created a little gap that allowed stray sunlight – around one billionth of the intensity of direct sunlight felt on Earth – to occasionally disrupt Gaia’s very sensitive sensors. Gaia’s engineers were in the middle of dealing with this issue when they were faced with another problem.

The spacecraft’s ‘billion-pixel camera’ relies on a series of 106 charge coupled devices (CCDs) – sensors that convert light into electrical signals. In May, the electronics controlling one of these CCDs failed – Gaia’s first CCD issue in more than 10 years in space. Each sensor has a different role, and the affected sensor was vital for Gaia’s ability to confirm the detection of stars. Without this sensor to validate its observations, Gaia began to register thousands of false detections.

The cause of the electronics failure remains unsolved, though it is believed related to the major solar storm that swept by at about the same time.

As a result of these issues, the telescope’s data stream will be significantly reduced. How long it will remain in operation remains unclear. At some point the cost will outweigh the amount of data obtained.

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Update on Cape Canaveral work by multiple launch companies

9:24 am

Link here. The article provides a nice summary of the construction work by Blue Origin, Stoke Space, and SpaceX at the cape, all leading to future launches and greater capabilities.

Blue Origin is still pushing for a September 29, 2024 first launch of its New Glenn orbital rocket. SpaceX is continuing work on its new Starship/Superheavy facilities as well as installing upgrades to its Falcon launchpads. The most interesting tidbit however is was about Stoke Space and its proposed Nova rocket:

The first two flights of Nova are planned for 2025, while 10 flights are planned for both 2026 and 2027. Initial flights of Nova will be expendable, with full reusability of the first and second stages coming later.

Stoke’s primary goal has been to make this rocket entirely reusable. It apparently plans to begin launching and do recovery tests as it goes until it achieves that reusability later.

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CEO of Firefly removed

9:18 am

The board of directors of the rocket startup Firefly announced yesterday that the company’s CEO, Bill Weber, “will no longer serve” in that position and has been replaced by an interim CEO.

This change is likely related to a news story the day prior about allegations that Weber had had an “inappropriate relationship” with a female employee.

Firefly has an interesting history when it comes to its CEOs. The company’s first CEO, Tom Markusic, was first sued by Virgin Galactic (his former employer) for stealing proprietary information, and then by his first Firefly investors when he got the company out of bankruptcy by making a deal with a Ukrainian billionaire. That billionaire was later forced to divest from the company by the State Department. The new investors that Markusic found then forced him out in 2022.

Who will take over now remains unknown.

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NASA cancels its VIPER payload on Astrobotic’s Griffin lunar lander

9:06 am

VIPER's planned route on the Moon
VIPER’s now canceled planned route at the Moon’s south pole

Late yesterday NASA announced it was canceling the VIPER rover that was the primary payload on Astrobotic’s Griffin lunar lander, scheduled for launch in the fall of 2025.

NASA stated cost increases, delays to the launch date, and the risks of future cost growth as the reasons to stand down on the mission. The rover was originally planned to launch in late 2023, but in 2022, NASA requested a launch delay to late 2024 to provide more time for preflight testing of the Astrobotic lander. Since that time, additional schedule and supply chain delays pushed VIPER’s readiness date to September 2025, and independently its CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) launch aboard Astrobotic’s Griffin lander also has been delayed to a similar time. Continuation of VIPER would result in an increased cost that threatens cancellation or disruption to other CLPS missions. NASA has notified Congress of the agency’s intent.

Knowing a bit of history is important to understand this decision. In the first half of the 2010s VIPER was called Resource Prospector, and was intended as an entirely NASA-built lunar lander and rover mission with a budget of about billion dollars. In 2018 however the Trump administration cancelled it as part of its decision to shift from missions designed, built, and owned by NASA to making NASA simply a customer buying products from private sector. Rather than spend a billion on one lunar lander/rover mission, NASA would use that money to buy multiple lunar landers from private companies, and put its instruments on those.

NASA then decided to repurpose the rover portion of Resource Prospector, turning it into VIPER to launch on Astrobotic’s Griffin lander. However, that project still carried with it all the problems that curse all government-designed, government-built, and government-owned projects. It had no fixed price contract but instead had the typical government unlimited checking account, and thus its costs kept rising with repeated delays in construction.

When then-NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine revealed the project at the 2019 International Astronautical Congress, the estimated cost was $250 million. By the time NASA was ready to make a cost commitment to Congress, that grew to $433.5 million with landing in 2023. That landing date slipped to 2024 with a cost of $505.4 million. Now it has slipped again to 2025 and with a cost of $609.6 million, more than 30 percent above the commitment. That triggered an automatic cancellation review, Kearns said, which took place last month.

Some of the cause of the 2023 delay was because Astrobotic’s Griffin lander wasn’t ready either. Now however it appears VIPER still won’t be ready for the 2025 launch, even though the lander will be ready.

NASA has therefore decided to stop throwing good money after bad, and kill the rover. It however has not killed its funding for Astrobotic’s Griffin, and the mission will go forward, with the company offering its now open payload space to others. It also may use this space to fly a demonstration mission of its own proposed LunarGrid solar power system.

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July 17, 2024 Quick space links

4:15 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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A pit on the Moon reveals some really bad journalism

3:54 pm

Mare Tranquilitatis Pit

At the start of this week three different major news organizations posted articles about a so-called “discovery” of a cave on the Moon that could sustain a human colony.

What all three articles [now updated with a fourth] demonstrated however was how little research was done by the journalists who wrote the articles, as well as the lack of any editorial supervision to make sure the news organization publishing the stories didn’t look stupid.

Here are the articles in question:

The original paper that these stories are based on can be read here. It didn’t take me more than five seconds to immediately recognize that the pit in question, dubbed the Mare Tranquillitatis pit, has been known about for years. I in fact wrote about it as long ago as 2011, when researchers used Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to take oblique images of it. One such image is to the right, cropped and enhanced to post here.

The new research has simply used the radar instrument on LRO to take oblique radar data to see if there are any cave passages at its base, and found that there could be voids leading off from the pit as much as “tens of meters” long, or about 100 feet or so.

This is good research, but the finding is hardly significant. Numerous other studies have suggested the same results, all tantalizing but entirely unconfirmed until we can send some probe (manned or manned) into these pits. In addition, hundreds of similar lunar pits have been documented for more than a decade.

Yet the first two articles above treated this cave as God’s gift to humanity, as if it was the first such pit found on the Moon that could hold a human base, while the third provided so little information about the background of this work that the article was essentially worthless.

I write this as a warning to my readers. Mainstream news sources no longer do the proper due diligence that should be expected from writers and editors. If you want good information, you need to go to sources that specialize in the subject (such this website), and you must go to more than one in order to understand the subject entirely.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Marvel bans all Jewish or Israelis characters

2:20 pm

Hamas vs Israel
Apparently Marvel is okay with these facts.
Courtesy of Doug Ross.

They’re coming for you next: In a sign that the corporate world is still kow-towing to pro-Hamas anti-Semites, Marvel Studios had decided to erase a long-standing Israeli character from its next Captain America movie, changing her from a former Israeli Mossad agent to a former Soviet spy with no links to any Jewish heritage.

While in the original Marvel comics continuity, Ruth Bat-Seraph serves as the Mossad agent mutant superhero Sabra, in a recent summary for the February 2025 film Bat-Seraph is described as a former member of the Soviet Russian Black Widow super spy program – the same program that trained Scarlett Johansson’s Avengers of the same name.

The summary made no mention of Bat-Seraph’s codename, Sabra, which comes from the slang term for native-born Israeli, though other characters are referred to by their alter-egos.

Anti-Israel activists have taken issue with the inclusion of Sabra in the film since the unorthodox star’s casting was announced by Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige at the 2022 D23 Expo event in Anaheim, California.

American Muslims for Palestine launched a letter campaign against Disney and Marvel Studios soon after the “distasteful” announcement, complaining that the character served “a state that is recognized by the entire human rights community as an apartheid regime, guilty of ongoing war crimes and crimes against humanity against the Palestinian people.”

» Read more

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Layered Martian mesa inside crater

1:43 pm

Layered mesa on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on May 14, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label as a “layered butte inside small crater.”

The crater is only about 1.8 miles across, and is only a couple of hundred feet deep, at the most. Because this crater sits on a large slope rising to the southwest, the mesa’s peak is actually about thirty feet higher than the crater’s northern rim, but is still below the southern rim by about 70 feet.

A close look at the mesa’s slopes suggests about a dozen obvious layers, though based on data from the rovers Curiosity and Perseverance, those obvious layers are probably divided into many hundreds of thinner layers in between.

What caused these layers? And how did such a small crater get such a relatively large mesa in its center? As always, the overview map provides some clues, but as always it does not provide a definitive answer.
» Read more

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SpaceX to FAA: Allow launches to resume before completion of July 11th launch failure investigation

10:59 am

SpaceX on July 15, 2024 submitted a request to the FAA to quickly determine that the July 11th Falcon-9 launch failure posed no threat to public safety, and thus allow the company to resume Falcon 9 launches before the investigation of that failure is completed.

The FAA has two means of allowing a rocket to return to flight operations following a mishap. The first is that it approves a launch operator-led mishap investigation final report, which would include “the identification of any corrective actions.” Those actions need to be put in place and all related licensing requirement need to be met.

The other option is for a public safety determination to be issued. This would be an option if “the mishap did not involve safety-critical systems or otherwise jeopardize public safety,” according to the FAA.

“The FAA will review the request, and if in agreement, authorize a return to flight operations while the mishap investigation remains open and provided the operator meets all relevant licensing requirements,” the FAA wrote on its website.

SpaceX is apparently expecting the FAA to quickly approve this request, as it has now scheduled its next Falcon 9 launch for July 19, 2024, at the end of this week.

The lower level workers at the FAA probably want to get out of the way, but they have to obey orders from above, and it is my suspicion that the White House is applying pressure to make life hard for SpaceX. As I have noted, the FAA has not required the same level of due diligence from either NASA and its SLS rocket, or Boeing’s Starliner capsule.

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Europe targets 2031 for the first mission of its own lunar lander

10:48 am

The European Space Agency (ESA) has approved a target date of 2031 for the first mission of its own unmanned lunar lander, dubbed Argonaut, and launched on the most powerful version of the Ariane-6.

On 16 July, the agency published a call for Argonaut Mission 1 Phase A/B1 development aimed at demonstrating the technical and programmatic feasibility of the Argonaut mission concept. The call included a proposed launch date of 2031 for the first Argonaut mission to the Moon.

The Argonaut lunar lander will be launched aboard an Ariane 64 rocket. Once operational, ESA envisions it being used for a wide variety of applications, from cargo logistics to acting as an in-situ resource utilization plant. The agency has already completed pre-phase A studies for what it calls the European Charging Station for the Moon. This system would be launched aboard an Argonaut lunar lander and would essentially act as a gas station on the Moon that would be used to support crewed missions on the surface of the Moon.

As I’ve noted previously, ESA routinely sets a glacial pace on all its government-run projects. Do not expect this government lander to fly on this schedule. More likely by 2031 there will be many cheaper and available options from the private sector, and European companies wanting to put payloads down on the Moon will turn to those, especially because Argonaut is apparently being forced to use the expensive expendable Ariane-6 rocket. The cost for going on Argonaut is simply going to be too high.

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July 16, 2024 Quick space links

3:28 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, who has now returned from a business trip to the People’s Republic of California. 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: SpaceX is moving its headquarters from California to Texas

2:33 pm

Because of the bill signed into law this week by California governor Gavin Newsom that allows schools to groom little kids sexually and hide that fact from their parents, Elon Musk announced today that SpaceX is moving its headquarters from California to Texas. From Musk’s tweet:

This is the final straw.

Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas.

Musk also noted that X will also relocate from California to Texas.

If you establish a government that oppresses and encourages insane behavior, you will discover that people will flee your tyranny enthusiastically. The Democrats who run California have achieved this goal quite skillfully. May they enjoy their enduring bankruptcy.

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Martian taffy terrain

11:08 am

Martian taffy terrain
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on April 11, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a typical area of what scientists have labeled “taffy terrain,” a landscape made up of strangely twisted bands that look like someone was pulling the ground repeatedly, just like taffy.

Based on the lower crater count found here, taffy terrain is thought to be relative young, formed around three billion years ago. While the exact formation process is not yet understood, scientists theorize that it was caused by some type of “viscous fluid” that settled into localized depressions.

The location is 40 degrees south latitude, so it is entirely possible we are seeing some form of glacial material, ice in these low spots that has no place to go but is warped over time by the same kind of tidal and rotational planetary effects that cause waves and tides in the oceans on Earth.
» Read more

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ESA announces asteroid mission to Apophis

9:06 am

Apophis' path past the Earth in 2029
A cartoon showing Apophis’s path in 2029

The European Space Agency (ESA) today announced that is beginning work on an asteroid mission, dubbed Ramses, to the potentially dangerous asteroid Apophis when it makes its next close-fly of the Earth in 2029.

Ramses needs to launch in April 2028 to allow for an arrival at Apophis in February 2029, two months before the close approach. In order to meet this deadline, ESA requested permission to begin preparatory work on the mission as soon as possible using existing resources. This permission has been granted by the Space Safety programme board. The decision whether to commit to the mission in full will take place at ESA’s Ministerial Council Meeting in November 2025.

Using a suite of scientific instruments, the spacecraft will conduct a thorough before-and-after survey of the asteroid’s shape, surface, orbit, rotation and orientation. By analysing how Apophis changes during the flyby, scientists will learn a lot about the response of an asteroid to external forces as well as asteroid composition, interior structure, cohesion, mass, density, and porosity.

Based on the track record of European space projects, which appear to always proceed at a glacial pace with late problems that cause the missions to miss their launch window (with the launch of the Franklin Mars rover as the poster child), the project is getting started far too late to meet its launch date of April 2028. We shall see if Europe surprises us this time and gets the project off the ground as planned.

Right now the only confirmed mission to Apophis is OSIRIS-APEX, which was redirected to the asteroid after it delivered its samples from Bennu to Earth. Many others have been proposed, including a commercial mission, but none appear to be confirmed or under construction.

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A blob in space

9:47 am

A blob in space
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the dwarf galaxy NGC 5238.

Its unexciting, blob-like appearance, resembling more an oversized star cluster than a galaxy, belies a complicated structure which has been the subject of much research by astronomers. Here, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is able to pick out the galaxy’s countless stars, as well as its associated globular clusters — the glowing spots both inside and around the galaxy that are swarmed by yet more stars.

NGC 5238 is theorised to have recently — here meaning no more than a billion years ago! — had a close encounter with another galaxy. The evidence for this is the tidal distortions of NGC 5238’s shape, the kind produced by two galaxies pulling on each other as they interact. There’s no nearby galaxy which could have caused this disturbance, so the hypothesis is that the culprit is a smaller satellite galaxy that was devoured by NGC 5238.

Astronomers are hoping to use this image to detect the two different populations of stars within this blob that come from those once interacting galaxies.

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Webb infrared spectroscopy detects differences between morning and evening on tidally-locked exoplanet

9:36 am

Webb spectroscopic data
Click for original image.

Astronomers using Webb Space Telescope’s infrared spectroscopy have now detected distinct differences in the morning and evening atmosphere of a tidally-locked gas giant exoplanet.

The graph, cropped, reduced, sharpened, annotated to post here, shows the differences. From the caption:

Researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have finally confirmed what models have previously predicted: An exoplanet has differences between its eternal morning and eternal evening atmosphere. WASP-39 b, a giant planet with a diameter 1.3 times greater than Jupiter, but similar mass to Saturn that orbits a star about 700 light-years away from Earth, is tidally locked to its parent star. This means it has a constant dayside and a constant nightside—one side of the planet is always exposed to its star, while the other is always shrouded in darkness.

Using Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph), astronomers confirmed a temperature difference between the eternal morning and eternal evening on WASP-39 b, with the evening appearing hotter by roughly 300 Fahrenheit degrees (about 200 Celsius degrees). They also found evidence for different cloud cover, with the forever morning portion of the planet being likely cloudier than the evening.

The actual temperatures of each terminator are quite hot, approximately 1,150 and 1450 degrees Fahrenheit respectively. Computer modeling suggests “the prevailing winds are likely moving from the night side across the morning terminator, around the dayside, across the evening terminator and then around the nightside,” with wind speeds thousands of miles per hour.

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More delays for first test hops of Europe’s Themis reusable first stage

9:17 am

Par for the course: The first test hops of Europe’s Themis demonstrator reusable first stage, first proposed in 2018, have now been delayed until 2025.

In a May 2024 presentation given at the International Civil Aviation Organization offices in Paris, the Swedish Space Corporation (SSC) announced that initial Themis hop tests would only begin next year. SSC is in charge of the operation of Esrange Space Centre in Sweden, where these initial tests of an integrated Themis demonstrator will begin. Once ArianeGroup moves onto higher altitude flights, the testing will be moved to the Guiana Space Centre.

The demonstrator itself is being built by a partnership of the private company ArianeGroup (Airbus and Safran) and the French space agency CNES, and was originallly supposed to begin test hops in 2022. These delays are typical of European government-run space operations. Note too that this is not a usable first stage, merely a demonstrator. For it to become operational it will have to be rebuilt.

None of this should be a surprise, since the man who runs Arianespace and is likely a key player in all this work, Stephan Israel, said in 2023 this stage would not become operational until the 2030s. Israel has been hostile to reusability from day one, and apparently is having some influence in slowing or blocking this development.

By the time this reusable first stage flies, it will be entirely obsolete and an utter waste of money, at least from a business and profit point of view. It will however have served these bankrupt companies and space agencies well as an empty jobs program, accomplishing little but make-work.

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Radar detects tiny moon of asteroid

9:06 am

Binary asteroid
Click for original image.

Using the Goldstone radar dish, part of NASA’s Deep Space Network normally used to communicate with planetary missions, scientists have taken radar imageray of an asteroid that flew past the Earth at a distance of about 4.1 million miles on June 27, 2024, and discovered that it has its own tiny moon.

The series of radar images are above, reduced and cropped to post here.

Passing Earth on June 27, 2024, the asteroid was discovered in 2011 by the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey, in Tucson, Arizona. This marked the first time it came close enough to Earth to be imaged by radar. While the nearly mile-wide object is classified as being potentially hazardous, calculations of its future orbits show that it won’t pose a threat to our planet for the foreseeable future.

In addition to determining the asteroid is roughly spherical, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory discovered that it’s a binary system: A smaller asteroid, or moonlet, orbits it from a distance of about 1.9 miles.

It is intriguing that as their ability to make high resolution images of asteroids improves, scientists are discovering that such binary asteroid systems appear to be less and less rare, and might even be quite normal. If so, these facts will reshape all theories on the initial formation processes of the solar system.

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FAA to “investigate” SpaceX launch failure

9:12 am

In what appears to be a perfect example of bureaucratic hubris, the FAA announced right after the Falcon 9 upper stage failure on July 11, 2024 that it “is requiring an investigation” and that it “will be involved in every step of the investigation process and must approve SpaceX’s final report, including any corrective actions.” The agency added:

A return to flight is based on the FAA determining that any system, process, or procedure related to the mishap does not affect public safety. In addition, SpaceX may need to request and receive approval from the FAA to modify its license that incorporates any corrective actions and meet all other licensing requirements.

It is difficult to count all the ways this announcement is arrogant and political.

First, why has the FAA made no such similar demands upon Boeing and its Starliner capsule, during any of its three flights, all of which have had serious issues? On the present manned flight, the failure of its thrusters during docking posed a safety issue to the crew then, and poses a clear safety issue to the public when it comes time for the capsule to return to Earth. If those thrusters don’t fire as planned Starliner could crash anywhere.

Yet the FAA has been entirely uninterested. Could it be because Boeing is not owned by Elon Musk, and the Biden administration isn’t demanding the FAA come down hard on it?

Second, does the FAA really think SpaceX wouldn’t do an investigation of the upper stage failure without an order from the FAA? If anything, left to its own devices it is more likely the FAA would do nothing — as it has done with Boeing with both Starliner and the issues that have occurred with both SLS and Orion. SpaceX however will do an investigation without question, because the company takes such incidents very seriously, and always fixes the problem so that it does not pop up again.

Third, there is absolutely no one at the FAA qualified to do this investigation, or to determine if SpaceX’s “corrective actions” are the right choice. These are bureaucrats, not cutting edge engineers. All they are going to do is watch SpaceX’s people do the work, kibitz a bit here and there, and then rubberstamp the conclusions of the company’s engineers, after making SpaceX wait while it retypes SpaceX’s report.

To claim the FAA has the ability to “approve” any engineering actions here is absurd.

Fourth, to threaten to deny SpaceX’s launch license for future Falcon 9 rockets — the most reliable and dependable rocket ever built — illustrates again the partisan nature of this action. The specificity of the agency’s demands here runs very counter to its demands after other past launch anomalies, involving both SpaceX and others. It is as if the agency has gotten orders to do whatever it can to micromanage everything SpaceX does in order to hinder its operation.

I still expect SpaceX to finish its investigation within weeks, and be ready to fly by the end of July, when the Jared Isaacman manned mission is scheduled. I also now expect the FAA to block that schedule and cause an additional several week delay as it slowly retypes SpaceX’s conclusions.

17 comments

Musk: European Union attempted to blackmail X into censoring tweets

2:33 pm

The EU to Elon Musk:
The EU to Elon Musk: “Nice company you got here.
Shame if something happened to it..”

Almost immediately after the European Union announced today that it considered X in violation of its Digital Services Act (DSA), claiming that the social media company owned by Elon Musk was breaking the act “in areas linked to dark patterns, advertising transparency and data access for researchers,” Elon Musk responded most bluntly in a tweet:

The European Commission offered 𝕏 an illegal secret deal: if we quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine us.

The other platforms accepted that deal.

𝕏 did not.

In other words, the EU tried to blackmail X and Musk into censoring some users of X, based on criteria that EU chose. When X refused to play that game, the EU followed through with today’s announcement, threatening the following if Musk does not kow-tow:
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FAA is apparently starting a new environmental impact assessment for Boca Chica

12:55 pm

Damaged but working flap on Starship
Damaged but working flap during June 6, 2024
Starship/Superheavy test flight

Today I received the following email from the FAA:

Dear Interested Party:

The FAA is holding public meetings on the Draft Tiered Environmental Assessment (Draft EA) for SpaceX’s proposal to increase the number of launches and landings of its Starship/Super Heavy vehicle at the Boca Chica Launch Site in Cameron County, Texas. The Draft EA will analyze SpaceX’s proposal to increase its launch and landing cadence as follows:

  • Up to 25 annual Starship/Super Heavy orbital launches
  • Up to 25 annual landings of Starship
  • Up to 25 annual landings of Super Heavy

The Draft EA will also address vehicle upgrades.

There will be three public meetings, one on August 13, 2024 on South Padre Island, one on August 15, 2024 in Port Isabel, and the third a virtual zoom meeting on August 20, 2024. Anyone can register for the zoom meeting. For all the meetings, “The public will have an opportunity to submit written and oral comments during the meetings.” Expect the leftist anti-Musk, anti-SpaceX activists to come out in droves.

What is really significant about this is that SpaceX has applied to expand its operations at Boca Chica beyond the limitations set by the environmental reassessment issued in 2022. The FAA had said in that reassessment it would re-open it if and when SpaceX requested any changes. It has now done so.
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