Category: Points of Information

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

Did pieces of a Chinese upper stage land in middle of Mediterranean last week?

11:44 pm

According to a tweet from a Twitter account that specializes in reporting on the Chinese space program, at least one piece of the upper stage from the Long March 2F rocket that launched the present Tiangon space station crew on the Shenzhou-14 crashed into the middle of Mediterranean Sea when the stage’s orbit decayed.

Most parts burned during the reentry while small debris splashed in Mediterranean Sea around E5.2° N39.1°

According to both this Twitter site as well as the Aerospace Corporation’s re-entry site, the event occurred on June 20, 2022. The latter site however says the stage burned up over the Atlantic, though it also indicated a one hour margin of error both before or after that time. If the stage thus stayed up just a bit longer, its orbit would have brought it down exactly where the former site states.

If this is so, it indicates that the Chinese either could not or made no effort to control the de-orbit, something that should be standard for any upper stage that has mass that could hit the ground.

Hat tip from reader Jay.

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A thick and syrupy flow on Mars

1:06 pm

A thick and syrupy flow on Mars
Click for full image.

Overview map

Cool image time! The photo above, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on March 5, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label as a “viscous flow feature,” which is another way of saying the flow was thick and syrupy.

Nor is such a flow unusual in this area of Mars. It is located in a region of chaos terrain dubbed Protonilus Mensae, which is also the central mensae region in the 2,000-mile-long strip in the northern mid-latitudes of Mars I label glacier country. The overview map above of Protonilus Mensae — covering about 500 miles in width — shows how common such flows are in this place. The black rectangles mark the locations of other cool images I have featured, as follows:

The red rectangle indicates the location of today’s cool image.

The glacial aspect of everything in this region is even more emphasized by the wider view provided by MRO’s context camera below.
» Read more

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Pushback: Supreme Court rules in favor of HS football coach fired for praying

11:27 am

Joe Kennedy: An American once again free to pray
Joe Kennedy: An American once again free to pray,
when and where he wishes.

Bring a gun to a knife fight: In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court today ruled in favor of high school coach Joe Kennedy, who was fired by the Bremerton School District in Washington because he choose to kneel and pray quietly on the football field at the end of each game.

Joe Kennedy was a junior varsity head coach and varsity assistant coach with the Bremerton School District in Washington from 2008 to 2015. He began the practice of reciting a post-game prayer by himself, but eventually students started joining him. According to court documents, this evolved into motivational speeches that included religious themes. After an opposing coach brought it to the principal’s attention, the school district told Kennedy to stop. He did, temporarily, then notified the school that he would resume the practice.

The situation garnered media attention, and when Kennedy announced that he would go back to praying on the field, it raised security concerns. When he did pray after the game, a number of people stormed the field in support.

The school district then offered to let Kennedy pray in other locations before and after games, or for him to pray on the 50-yard line after everyone else had left the premises, but he refused, insisting that he would continue his regular practice. After continuing the prayers at two more games, the school district placed Kennedy on leave.

He eventually lost the job when the school district refused to renew his contract.

You can read the Supreme Court’s ruling here [pdf].

Initially Kennedy was holding locker room prayer sessions and postgame religious talks, actions by a public school teacher that are certainly inappropriate. However, when the district demanded these stop he did so.

Subsequently he began praying on the field, alone and silent, after games. This action did attract some students to join him, but since he did not require participation he was violating no one’s rights, nor was he acting as a government agent at that time.
» Read more

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New research suggests flowing water existed intermittently on Mars from 2.5 to 3.6 billion years ago.

9:26 am

Based on a study of alluvial fans on Mars, river sediment thought to have been placed at the foot of mountains, scientists have concluded that liquid water could have been flowing from as 2.5 to 3.6 billion years ago.

“We’ve known for decades that Mars had rivers and lakes around 3.5 billion years ago, but in the past few years there has been a growing body of evidence that substantial amounts of liquid water continued to erode the Martian surface for hundreds of millions of years,” said Morgan, lead author on “The global distribution and morphologic characteristics of fan-shaped sedimentary landforms on Mars” that appears in Icarus. “Water-formed landforms, such as river deltas and alluvial fans, are the most unambiguous markers of past climate. So we conducted a global survey for these features and explored patterns in their distribution and morphologic properties.”

Morgan and co-authors including PSI Senior Scientist Alan Howard found that alluvial fans are found at lower elevations than the more ancient valley networks, suggesting that stable liquid water became restricted to lower, warmer regions as Mars cooled and dried.

…What is particularly interesting about the Martian fans is that many formed much later than the valley networks, which have long been considered the strongest evidence for surface water on early Mars. Valley networks largely date to around 3.6 billion years ago, but alluvial fans date to 2.5 to 3 billion years ago.

This research merely increases the fundamental geological mystery of Mars. While the surface evidence strongly tells us that liquid water once flowed on the surface, no climate model exists that satisfactorily makes that possible. The atmosphere appears to have always been too cold and thin for liquid water.

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NASA completes suborbital launch from commercial spaceport in Australia

8:59 am

Early this morning NASA successfully completed its first rocket launch from Australia since 1995, launching a suborbital payload from a new commercial spaceport on the northern coast of Australia.

The rocket is Nasa’s first of three to blast off from the newly constructed Arnhem Space Centre on the edge of the Northern Territory. Scientists hope it will help them study the impact of a star’s light on the habitability of nearby planets.

Onlookers who travelled to the remote site glimpsed the rocket for only about 10 seconds before it shot out of view.

After a short fifteen minute flight the sounding rocket and payload were recovered. The next suborbital launch is scheduled for July 4th.

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Iran claims it has completed a second suborbital test of new rocket

8:48 am

According to Iran’s state-run press, it yesterday successfully completed the second suborbital test of its new Zuljanah rocket.

The announcement said nothing about where or when the launch took place. According to this Iranian report, the rocket “has two solid propulsion phases and a single liquid propulsion phase.”

The rocket had completed a suborbital test in January 2021. In March 2022 satellite imagery suggested a second test had exploded on the launchpad sometime in late February.

Since the video of the launch provides no specific information about where or when, it is quite possible it is simply footage from the January 2021 launch. It will require orbital imagery to confirm this claim.

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German smallsat rocket startup signs orbital tug startup as launch customer

9:54 am

Capitalism in space: Isar, one of three German smallsat rocket companies hoping to launch their own rockets, has won a launch contract from D-Orbit, one of three companies building orbital space tugs designed to provide in-orbit transportation to cubesats.

Isar Aerospace announced today that it has entered into a firm launch services agreement with space infrastructure pioneer D-Orbit. The company’s launch vehicle Spectrum, which is developed for small and medium satellites and satellite constellations, will launch D-Orbit’s ION Satellite Carrier as a primary customer to a Sun-synchronous orbit from its launch site in Andøya, Norway with a launch term starting in 2023.

This is Isar’s third launch contract. The company has also raised almost $200 million in investment capital in the past year and a half.

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Cygnus freighter fires engine, adjusts ISS orbit for first time

9:47 am

For the first time the engines on a Cygnus capsule were used successfully yesterday to adjust the orbit of the International Space Station (ISS).

On Saturday, June 25, Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus completed its first limited reboost of the International Space Station. Cygnus’ gimbaled delta velocity engine was used to adjust the space station’s orbit through a reboost of the altitude of the space station. The maneuver lasted 5 minutes, 1 second and raised the station’s altitude 1/10 of a mile at apogee and 5/10 of a mile at perigee. This Cygnus mission is the first to feature this enhanced capability as a standard service for NASA, following a test of the maneuver which was performed in 2018 during Cygnus’s ninth resupply mission.

NASA’s goal is to have this capability without relying on Russia’s Progress capsules, which up until now have been used to adjust the station’s orbit. It appears from yesterday’s test this this goal has now been met.

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Blue Origin abandons plans to land New Glenn first stages on purchased cargo ship

9:31 am

Capitalism in space: This week it was revealed that Blue Origin has abandoned its plan to use a purchased and refurbished cargo ship as an ocean landing platform for the first stages of its New Glenn rocket.

The company had bought the ship in 2018, when it thought New Glenn would be flying by 2020, and planned to reconfigure it by covering it with a giant landing pad. It appears the company abandoned that plan because of cost. What it plans to do instead to provide New Glenn first stages a place to land remains unclear.

Some historical details that provide some context and might explain the change in plans. In 2016 Blue Origin was launching test flights of its New Shepard suborbital craft on almost a monthly basis. It appears to have an aggressive attitude towards development, with New Glenn aiming for a 2020 launch.

In 2017 Jeff Bezos hired Bob Smith to take over as Blue Origin’s CEO. At that point development slowed to a crawl. For the next four years New Shepard test flights dropped to about one per year. Also at that time development of the BE-4 rocket engine needed for both New Glenn and ULA’s Vulcan rocket also slowed to a crawl, apparently because the company’s management would not commit funds to buy extra engines for testing.

In 2018 Blue Origin signed a deal with the Air Force, thus delaying New Glenn’s first launch by a year. The deal appeared to stem from a desire of Blue Origin management to get government contracts and money first rather than committing any company money to development, the approach used by older big space companies for decades. While it reduces risk, this approach also makes the government a partner in development, which has historically slowed all development while significantly raising costs.

That same year it bought this ship as the rocket’s landing pad, though relatively little work is done on it for years.

In 2021 Jeff Bezos stepped down as Amazon CEO to focus more time on Blue Origin. Suddenly, New Shepard ups its launch rate, and finally starts flying passengers. At the same time, the testing of the BE-4 engine appears to accelerate.

Now Blue Origin is abandoning this ship that was purchased after Bob Smith took over.

Does one get the feeling that Bezos might have finally realized that the management under Smith was not very effective? Smith is still Blue Origin’s CEO, but one wonders how long this will last.

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Psyche will not launch as scheduled

9:06 am

NASA officials yesterday confirmed that because of software issues its asteroid mission Psyche will not launch as scheduled this year.

Due to the late delivery of the spacecraft’s flight software and testing equipment, NASA does not have sufficient time to complete the testing needed ahead of its remaining launch period this year, which ends on Oct. 11. The mission team needs more time to ensure that the software will function properly in flight.

…As the mission team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California began testing the system, a compatibility issue was discovered with the software’s testbed simulators. In May, NASA shifted the mission’s targeted launch date from Aug. 1 to no earlier than Sept. 20 to accommodate the work needed. The issue with the testbeds has been identified and corrected; however, there is not enough time to complete a full checkout of the software for a launch this year.

NASA management will conduct a review to understand what caused the problem.

As for when Psyche can next launch and reach the asteroid Psyche, the next launch windows in ’23 and ’24 will not arrive at the asteroid until ’29 or ’30 respectively, a flight time that is about two years longer than what the ’22 launch would have been.

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Today’s blacklisted Americans: Lawyers who won NY gun rights case in Supreme Court blackballed by their law firm

1:06 pm

A witch hunt against conservative lawyers
The witch hunt against conservative lawyers accelerates.

Blacklists are back and the Democrats have got ’em: The two lawyers who recently won a major gun rights victory in the Supreme Court this week, invalidating the “may-issue” gun control laws in leftist states that prevented anyone from obtaining a gun license, have been blackballed by their law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, and forced to resign.

Former Solicitor General Paul Clement and Erin Murphy, a regular Supreme Court litigator, resigned from Kirkland & Ellis and announced they were opening their own shop in Washington, D.C. Clement has been a high-profile litigator of conservative causes since he left the administration of President George W. Bush. In 2011, he argued the Defense of Marriage Act on behalf of Republican lawmakers before the Supreme Court.

That case also caused Clement to resign from the firm King & Spalding following pressure from clients to drop the gay marriage case.

As reported at Politico:
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