Category: Points of Information

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

Rocket Lab will try to recover 1st stage on next launch

3:04 pm

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab announced today that it will attempt to recover the 1st stage of its Electron rocket on its next launch, using parachutes to slow its descent into the ocean and then fishing from the sea.

On its next mission set for liftoff later this month, Rocket Lab will try to recover the first stage of its Electron small satellite launcher after parachuting into the Pacific Ocean downrange from the company’s privately-run spaceport in New Zealand, officials announced Thursday.

The attempt to retrieve the Electron rocket’s first stage moves Rocket Lab closer to eventually capturing falling boosters in mid-air with a helicopter, then reusing the hardware. The reuse initiative is aimed at increasing Rocket Lab’s flight rate, and could result in cost savings, according to Peter Beck, the company’s founder and CEO.

The flight is presently scheduled for November 15 from New Zealand. It appears the goal with this recovery is not to reuse the 1st stage, but to recover it so they can determine how it fared during re-entry. For re-use they will capture the first stage using a helicopter, before splashdown and is exposed to saltwater.

When they attempt the helicopter capture on an actual launch remains unclear.

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Terraced mesa inside Martian depression

1:14 pm

Terraced mesa inside depression
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on July 1, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a very puzzling terraced mesa inside an enclosed depression or sinkhole (the western half of which can be seen in the full image).

What caused that mesa? A first scan of the image and the data suggests we are looking at sinkage related to the melting of an underground ice table. The latitude here is 34 degrees south, just far enough away from the equator for glacial activity to be possible. Moreover, the small circular depression in the upper right of the image strongly suggests an impact crater into slushy material. The implication is that this depression is the result of the melting or sublimation of underground ice, leaving behind a mesa that is made of solider stuff.

Another possibility is that the terraced mesa is actually the remains of glacial material. In the full image features inside other nearby depressions are terraced also, but are also much more reminiscent of glacial features found in many craters in the mid-latitudes. The depression is also close to the headwaters of Reull Valles, a meandering canyon where many images have shown glacial features (see for example here, here, and here).

These features however could also have nothing to do with water ice.
» Read more

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Starship hop tentatively set for Nov 9-11

8:59 am

Capitalism in space: Based on SpaceX’s road closure requests, it now appears that the 50,000 foot hop by the eighth Starship prototype will occur sometime between November 9th and November 11th.

This schedule remains very uncertain, as the company needs to do other tests before the hop. Depending on when these tests happen and what they learn after each, the overall schedule might change.

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Bezos sells another $3 billion of Amazon shares

8:54 am

Jeff Bezos continues to accelerate his sale of his Amazon stock, selling another $3 billion this week.

In August, Bezos offloaded more than $3.1 billion of Amazon shares, after selling more than $4.1 billion worth of shares in February. The sales this week bring his total cash out in 2020 to more than $10.2 billion so far, which is a notable jump from 2019, when Bezos sold $2.8 billion worth of shares.

While Bezos had originally said these sales were for financing his space company, Blue Origin, it now appears that the bulk of this new money is aimed at funding environmental political organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Wildlife Fund.

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Overview of China’s lunar sample return mission

8:29 am

Chang'e-5 landing site on Moon

Link here. The Chinese mission, the first to bring back lunar samples since the 1970s, is now set for launch on November 24, 2020.

Chang’e-5 includes a lander, ascender, orbiter and returner. After the spacecraft enters the Moon’s orbit, the lander-and-ascender pair will split off and descend close to Mons Rümker, a 1,300-metre-high volcanic complex in the northern region of Oceanus Procellarum — the vast, dark lava plains visible from Earth. Once the craft has touched down, it will drill up to 2 metres into the ground and extend a robotic arm to scoop up about 2 kilograms of surface material. The material will be stored in the ascender for lift-off.

The descent and ascent will take place over one lunar day, which is equivalent to around 14 Earth days, to avoid the extreme overnight temperatures that could damage electronics, says Clive Neal, a geoscientist at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

…Once the ascender is back in lunar orbit, the samples will be transferred to the returner. This in-flight rendezvous will be complex and “a good rehearsal for future human exploration”, says James Carpenter, a research coordinator for human and robotic exploration at the European Space Agency in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. China plans to send people to the Moon from around 2030.

The Chang’e-5 spacecraft will then journey back to Earth, with the lander parachuting toward Siziwang Banner in Inner Mongolia, northern China, probably sometime in early December.

The location, as shown in the image above, is in the northern mid-latitudes of the Moon’s nearside, and is a place where some relatively recent volcanic activity might have occurred, though still in the far past.

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Why Martian mountains are different than on Earth

3:08 pm

A mountain peak on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on August 12, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what to any Earthling’s eye appears to be a somewhat ordinary flat-topped mountain peak with two major flanking ridgelines descending downward to the north and the south, and two minor ridgelines descending to the northwest and southwest.

This peak and its landscape would surely be quite a spectacularly place to visit, should humans ever settle Mars and begin doing sightseeing hikes across its more interesting terrain. I can definitely imagine hiking trails coming up the two minor ridges, with a crest trail traversing the main north-south ridge across the peak.

This is not however a mountain on Earth. It is on Mars, which makes its formation and evolution over time fundamentally different than anything we find on Earth, despite its familiar look.

First, what formed it? Unlike most of Earth’s major mountain chains, the mountains of Mars were not formed by the collision of tectonic plates, squeezing the crust upward. Mars does not have plate tectonics. Most of its mountains formed either from the rise of volcanoes at single hot spots, or from the wearing away of the surrounding terrain to leave behind a peak or mesa.
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New owners for Vector to revive company

8:30 am

Capitalism in space: The new owners for bankrupt smallsat rocket company Vector have announced that they plan to revive the company.

In their announcement they confirmed that the key problem that killed the original company were engineering issues with its chosen engine design.

One thing they did wrong was the technology the used for their engines. “They had some Achilles’ heels associated with their technical approach. They were trying to use a propellant combination that was untested in the industry,” said Chris Barker, who serves as Vector’s chief rocket scientist. “They were struggling with trying to get performance that they knew they needed for a small launcher to be successful, and ultimately their test program was unsuccessful.”

Vector had been developing engines that used propylene and liquid oxygen propellants. The new Vector plans to instead use engines powered by a more conventional combination of liquid oxygen and refined kerosene, or RP-1, propellants. Barker has been developing such engines since the 1990s for companies such as Space America and Earth to Sky.

The new owners also stated that initially they plan to target the suborbital business field. Their main focus right now is redesigning the Vector-R rocket in conjunction with their engines.

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Russians aim for Dec for fixing ISS leak permanently

8:23 am

The Russians announced yesterday that they plan the full and permanent repair of the small inch-long crack leaking air on ISS to occur in December, after required material is shipped to the station.

According to the official, the crack was the width of a hair and located in a hard-to-reach spot of Zvezda’s shell.

Solovyov did not specify the spacecraft that will deliver the sealing materials to the ISS, but the only one scheduled to fly in December is Cargo Dragon, a reusable freight spaceship of US private company SpaceX. The soonest flight of a Russian cargo spacecraft — Progress MS-16 — has been postponed until December 2021.

They also plan a spacewalk in the next two weeks to inspect the exterior of the Zvezda module where the crack is located.

I have yet to see an image of the crack itself. Why none has been made easily available is somewhat puzzling.

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In Europe, the use of masks leads to more COVID-19 cases

9:28 am

It appears that the three European countries with the strictest mask mandates and the highest percentage of usage are also the three European countries experiencing the highest surge of COVID-19 cases, signaling once again that masks not only do not protect anyone from the virus, they could actually be contributing to its spread.

The Biden campaign and the Democrats are cynically cashing in on these pandemic fears. “We’re in a circumstance where the president thus far and still has no plan, no comprehensive plan,” Biden ranted at the debate. “What I would do is make sure we have everyone encouraged to wear a mask all the time.”

France, Italy, and Spain tried that. It didn’t work.

The European countries most obsessed with masks are doing the worst. Nearly universal mask wearing in those countries has done little to prevent a surge. Democrats have a weakness for wanting to be like the Europeans. But the only thing the Biden mask mandate would do is turn us into France. The French wore masks through the summer heat only to have three times the cases per capita and per day as the Americans who never adopted a mask mandate.

The author outlines the numbers. In France 78% of the population wear masks. In Italy the number is 81%. And in Spain it is as high as 86%. Yet all three have had the biggest recent surges in new cases since the mask mandates were imposed. Meanwhile countries where fewer than a third or less of the population where masks — Sweden, Norway, and the UK — the number of cases is far less, and for Sweden there has been no surge in cases at all..

While the author outlines the failure of these mask mandates to stop the virus’ spread, he does not note one component that might be contributing to the surges in these mask-obsessed countries. Masks if misused and worn when they are not sanitary, as is common when large numbers of people are required to wear them all the time, become pathogen bombs. Instead of blocking the virus (an ability that remains quite unproven), they likely become carriers of the virus, at the very place people breath.

But don’t worry. Though you might be increasing the chances of getting sick, you will “feel-good” about yourself when you put on that mask. It is a talisman that proves your wonderful virtue to everyone else, especially those evil people who have looked at the data and have decided to forego this pathogen spreader.

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NASA officially expresses concerns about proposed private communications constellation

8:55 am

For what appears to be an unprecedented action, NASA has officially expressed opposition to a proposed private satellite constellation by the company AST & Science.

NASA’s position was released in a comment to the FCC, where the company has requested a communications license to operate its satellites.

At issue are plans put forth by AST & Science, which intends to build a constellation of more than 240 large satellites, essentially deploying “cell towers” in space to provide 4G and possibly 5G broadband connection directly to cell phones on Earth. The company, based in Midland, Texas, calls its constellation “SpaceMobile” and has raised an estimated $120 million.

The space agency felt compelled to comment on AST’s proposal for several reasons. Most notably, the proposed altitude for the SpaceMobile constellation lies near the “A-Train,” a group of 10 Earth-science monitoring satellites operated by NASA and the US Geological Survey, as well as partners in France and Japan. “Historical experience with the A-Train constellation has shown that this particular region of space tends to produce a large number of conjunctions between space objects,” the NASA letter states.

The satellites are also very large. In order to provide service, AST plans to build spacecraft with large phased array antennae—900 square meters. According to NASA, in planning for potential conjunctions with other satellites and debris in this orbit, this would require proscribing a “hard-body radius” of 30 meters, or as much as 10 times larger than other satellites.

Maneuvering around the proposed SpaceMobile constellation would be extraordinarily taxing, NASA said. “For the completed constellation of 243 satellites, one can expect 1,500 mitigation actions per year and perhaps 15,000 planning activities,” the space agency stated. “This would equate to four maneuvers and 40 active planning activities on any given day.”

The company has said it is willing to work with NASA to ease its concerns. For NASA to take this particular step however is most strange, especially considering the size of this constellation, 240 satellites. This number is tiny compared to the multi-thousands being proposed by SpaceX, Amazon, and OneWeb. Their large size footprint certainly could be a factor, but it does seem puzzling for the space agency to pick out this particular constellation for opposition, and none of the others.

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Signal to Voyager-2 confirms upgrade of NASA’s Deep Space Network

8:42 am

After months of downtime in order to install a major and very badly needed upgrade to NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) (the worldwide array of radio dishes used to communicate with planetary probes throughout the solar system) a test command to Voyager-2 beyond the orbit of Pluto was sent, received, and executed successfully this week, proving the upgrade is working.

The call to Voyager 2 was a test of new hardware recently installed on Deep Space Station 43, the only dish in the world that can send commands to Voyager 2. Located in Canberra, Australia, it is part of NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), a collection of radio antennas around the world used primarily to communicate with spacecraft operating beyond the Moon. Since the dish went offline, mission operators have been able to receive health updates and science data from Voyager 2, but they haven’t been able to send commands to the far-flung probe, which has traveled billions of miles from Earth since its 1977 launch.

Among the upgrades to DSS43, as the dish is known, are two new radio transmitters. One of them, which is used to talk with Voyager 2, hasn’t been replaced in over 47 years. Engineers have also upgraded heating and cooling equipment, power supply equipment, and other electronics needed to run the new transmitters.

The successful call to Voyager 2 is just one indication that the dish will be back online in February 2021.

The upgrade has been overdue for years, and is essential to provide sufficient communications capability for the future interplanetary mission presently planned.

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Layered mesa on Mars

2:41 pm

Layered mesa on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on June 24, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a distinctive mesa in a mountainous region in the cratered highlands of Mars, just north of Hellas Basin, the deepest basin on the red planet.

The mesa’s most distinctive feature are its terraced layers, a feature that MRO has found in numerous other places surrounding and inside Hellas Basin (see for example the cool images here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

On Earth the assumption would be that these terraced layers imply different sedimentary layers that erode at different rates, as best illustrated by the Grand Canyon in Arizona. On Mars that assumption is not unreasonable, but unlike Earth, those layers could not have been formed in connection with large ocean bodies creating seafloor layers from the deposit of sealife over centuries. Some other geological process over time formed them, with volcanism, either from volcanoes or impact, being the most likely.
» Read more

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