Category: Points of Information

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

Food fight! China denies NASA chief’s charge that it wants to dominate space

9:16 am

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.
» Read more

11 comments

Sunspot update: For the first time in 2022, sunspot activity eases

3:58 pm

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.

» Read more

1 comment

The new damage on Curiosity’s wheels

9:30 am

Comparing a Curiosity wheel from January to June 2022
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.

1 comment

Rocket Lab’s Photon completes course corrections, deploys CAPSTONE to Moon

8:45 am

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.

6 comments

One of Perseverance’s two wind sensors damaged by wind-blown material

5:09 pm

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.

1 comment

Lucy solar panel almost completely open

11:19 am

Engineers have now been able to get the one solar panel that did not deploy completely after launch on the Lucy asteroid probe almost completely open.

From May 6 to June 16, NASA’s Lucy mission team carried out a multi-stage effort intended to further deploy the spacecraft’s unlatched solar array. The team commanded the spacecraft to operate the array’s deployment motor for limited periods of time, allowing them to closely monitor the response of the spacecraft. As a result of this effort, the mission succeeded in further deploying the array and now estimates that the solar array is between 353 degrees and 357 degrees open (out of 360 total degrees for a fully deployed array). Additionally, the array is under substantially more tension, giving it significantly more stabilization. The mission team is increasingly confident the solar array will successfully meet the mission’s needs in its current tensioned and stabilized state.

The spacecraft’s orbit is now moving into a position where communications will be limited until October, so further attempts to completely open the array will have to wait until then.

1 comment

Virgin Orbit puts seven Space Force smallsats in orbit

10:05 am

Capitalism in space: Virgin Orbit last night successfully launched seven smallsats for the Space Force, using its Cosmic Girl 747 carrier plane and its LauncherOne rocket.

This was the company’s first night time launch, and its second in 2022. The leader board for the 2022 launch race remains the same:

27 SpaceX
21 China
8 Russia
4 Rocket Lab
4 ULA

The U.S. now leads China 39 to 21 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 39 to 35.

5 comments

Strange pitted and isolated ridges on Mars

2:30 pm

Context camera image of isolated ridges
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on February 17, 2012 by the wide-view context camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a section of the northern lowland plains of Mars, latitude 31 degrees north, where several very inexplicable and isolated ridges can be seen.

One ridge meanders mostly in a north-south direction, while a second instead meanders east-west. The shape of both says that neither has anything to do with any past impact crater. In fact, their random snakelike shape doesn’t really fit any obvious explanation. For example, they do not fit the look of the many fossil rivers found on Mars, where the hardened and dry riverbed channel resists erosion and becomes a ridge when the surrounding terrain erodes away.

What geological process caused them? In the decade since this photo was taken the scientists who use MRO have only been able to snap a handful of high resolution images of these ridges. The image below is the most recent, covering the area in the white rectangle above.
» Read more

2 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: University of Arizona gives free tuition to American Indians; All other races must pay

12:01 pm

Academia: dedicated to segregation!
University of Arizona: dedicated to the new segregation!

“Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” The University of Arizona has begun a new racist policy whereby anyone who is a member of one of 22 American Indian tribes that exist in the state will be excused from paying any tuition or fees while studying on campus.

Beginning in the fall, new and continuing full-time, degree-seeking, in-state undergraduates will be eligible for the Arizona Native Scholars Grant, the first program of its kind in Arizona. The program will be administered by UArizona Enrollment Management.

“Serving Arizona’s Native American tribes and tribal students is a crucial part of the University of Arizona’s land-grant mission, and the Arizona Native Scholars Grant program is another important step among many to do that,” said University of Arizona President Robert C. Robbins. “I am so proud that that this university has found a way to help hundreds of students more easily access and complete a college education, and I look forward to finding ways to take these efforts even further.”

To be eligible, students must complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, and provide tribal identification. Native American tribes’ federal legal status allows universities to administer scholarships and grants to tribal members.

More than 400 students enrolled at UArizona last year meet the criteria for the new program.

Let me translate what UA president Robert C. Robbins is really saying:
» Read more

13 comments

Kepler signs up D-Orbit’s orbital tug for its next two satellites

9:56 am

Capitalism in space: The Canadian company Kepler — which already has nineteen satellites in orbit providing data communications — will use the orbital tug developed by the start-up D-Orbit and dubbed ION on its next two satellites.

After separating from the launch vehicle, D-Orbit intends to use ION to drop Kepler’s satellites off at a sun-synchronous orbit (SSO) between 500 and 600 kilometers. Each satellite is the size of six cubesats, a standard smallsat form factor measuring 10 centimeters on each side.

Kepler previously had a deal to use Momentus’s Vigoride tug, but delays and further in-orbit technical problems with that tug has apparently forced it to switch to D-Orbit.

0 comments
1 … 607 608 609 610 611 … 2,412