March 9, 2016 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Last night’s podcast is embedded below the fold. This time we spent a good amount of time discussing the smart way Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk publicity their brands.
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Category: Points of Information
Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
Russia completes investigation into Vostochny embezzlement
The investigation into the corruption during the construction of Russia’s new spaceport Vostochny has been completed, with four Russians to be charged.
It also appears a fifth is on the lam and “has been put on the international wanted list.”
XCOR wins Vulcan engine design contract
The competition heats up: ULA has awarded XCOR a design contract for building an upper stage rocket engine for the Vulcan rocket.
This is good news for XCOR, though there is one important caveat: A close reading of the press release at the link shows that the contract does not guarantee that ULA will use this engine in Vulcan. XCOR must deliver, and ULA must be satisfied with what they produce.
More details about China’s space station, planned for launch in 2020
The competition heats up: The chief designer of China’s human space program revealed more details today about their planned space station in talking with reporters at China’s on-going parliamentary sessions.
Zhou Jianping, speaking to state media on the sidelines of China’s ongoing parliamentary sessions, explained that the project will include three modules, two 30m solar panel ‘wings’, two robotic arms and a telescope dubbed ‘China’s Hubble’. Zhou, who is a member of China’s top consultative body currently in session in Beijing, said the space station will comprise of a core module and two labs forming a T-shape, each weighing about 20 tons.
The core module is scheduled to be launched in 2018, by the new heavy lift Long March 5 rocket, which will make its maiden flight in September and be capable of lifting 25 tonnes to low Earth orbit.
“China’s Hubble” will be a module flying near the station so that if it needs maintenance the station astronauts will be able to do the work.
India launches sixth GPS satellite
The competition heats up: India has successfully launched the sixth satellite in its own GPS constellation. using its PSLV rocket.
They will complete the GPS constellation with a seventh satellite launch in April. The system however is already functioning, as it only needs a minimum of four satellites to work. Unlike the U.S. 24 satellite system, which is designed to be global, India’s system is regional with its focus centered over India itself. This is why they do not need as many satellites for it to function effectively.
Another Falcon Heavy customer switches to different rocket
The competition heats up: Afraid of more delays in SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, Inmarsat has booked a Russian Proton rocket for a 2017 commercial satellite launch.
London-based Inmarsat is the second Falcon Heavy commercial customer to have sought a Plan B given the continued uncertainties in the launch schedule of Falcon Heavy, whose inaugural flight has been repeatedly delayed. Carlsbad, California-based ViaSat Inc. in February moved its ViaSat-2 consumer broadband satellite from the Falcon Heavy to Europe’s Ariane 5 rocket for an April 2017 launch, securing what may be launch-service provider Arianespace’s last 2017 slot for a heavy satellite.
ExoMars ready for launch
The European ExoMars Mars orbiter and lander mission, set for launch on March 14, is assembled on its Proton rocket and is ready for launch.
This European project was originally going to be in partnership with NASA, but the Obama administration pulled out of the deal. The Russians then offered to come in and provide a rocket for the mission.
Iran tests ballistic missiles
Does this make you feel safer? Iran today completed two more ballistic missile tests, with rockets capable of reaching Isreal that were supposedly marked in Hebrew with the phrase, “Israel must be wiped off the Earth.”
The firings took place on the second and final day of a large-scale military drill, which marked the first time Tehran has fired ballistic missiles since signing a deal with world powers on its nuclear program in July.
U.S. officials said Tuesday that the tests did not violate the nuclear agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, but were very likely in breach of a U.N. resolution calling on Iran not to undertake ballistic missile activity. U.S. officials threatened Tuesday to raise the issue at the Security Council.
Well, I am so glad these tests didn’t violate the Obama Iran deal. That makes me feel so much better.
College student faces charges for expressing conservative opinions
The coming dark age: A student senator at the University of Southern California (USC) faces removal from office merely because he is a conservative.
The complaint against him cites three charges, all absurd. The best however is this one:
The third violation Ellenhorn is accused of also concerns a Campus Reform article, but in this case, he is charged with failing to secure permission before filming the “Consent Carnival” that was held on campus in January by several student groups. The complaint specifies that university rules require approval “for any filming required as part of an event (including footage for use on YouTube, Facebook, and other online platforms).”
In other words, according to the fascist making the charges, no one is allowed to film anything on this so-called college campus without first obtaining permission first from school authorities. Such a charge demonstrates that this fascist has a complete lack of understanding of the concept of freedom, or the first amendment.
Computer beats human in Go
In the first game of a best of five for a $1 million prize, the computer has beaten professional Go player Lee Sodel.
Want to discover gravitational waves? You can!
The citizen science project, Einstein@home, will begin providing its participants data from the upgraded LIGO gravitational wave detector beginning March 9.
Rather than looking for dramatic sources of gravitational waves, such as the black-hole merger that LIGO detected on 14 September, Einstein@home looks for quieter, slow-burn signals that might be emitted by fast-spinning objects such as some neutron stars. These remnants of supernova explosions are some of the least well understood objects in astrophysics: such searches could help to reveal their nature.
Because they produce a weaker signal than mergers, rotating sources require more computational power to detect. This makes them well-suited to a distributed search. “Einstein@home is used for the deepest searches, the ones that are computationally most demanding,” Papa says. The hope is to extract the weak signals from the background noise by observing for long stretches of time. “The beauty of a continuous signal is that the signal is always there,” she says.
To participate all you have to do is let their software become your screensaver, doing its work whenever you walk away from your computer.
Jeff Bezos gives a tour of Blue Origin
The competition heats up: Jeff Bezos gave his first tour of Blue Origin’s facilities for eleven journalists on Tuesday.
The article is chock full of interesting details about the company’s plans. To me these details about their New Shepard test program are the most interesting:
“We’re going to fly it until we lose it,” he said. The plan is to test the spaceship many, many times without humans aboard. At some point, Blue Origin will run a test in which the crew capsule will have to blast itself clear from the propulsion module at maximum dynamic pressure – a scenario during which the propulsion module will almost certainly be destroyed.
Not to worry, though: More crew capsules and propulsion modules are already under construction at the factory. “By the time anybody gets on, I think you should be willing to bring your mom,” Bezos said.
They also hope that this test program will proceed to launching humans by 2017.
Second solo Ariane 5 launch in 2016
The competition heats up: In successfully placing a commercial communications satellite in orbit last night, Arianespace also did its second consecutive single satellite launch.
The Ariane 5 rocket is designed to carry two satellites, and normally does so in order to maximize its profit per launch. That they have done two straight commercial launches without a second satellite suggests to me that the competition from SpaceX is taking customers from them. The scheduling of the secondary payload usually suffers because priority is given to the primary satellite. Those customers thus might be switching to SpaceX in the hope they can gain better control over their own launch schedule, while also paying far less for their launch.
Then again, considering how unreliable SpaceX’s own launch schedule has been, it is unlikely these customers will have yet gained any scheduling advantages.
NASA reschedules rather than cancels InSight
Forced to delay its launch because its primary instrument, built by the French, would not be ready for its 2016 launch, NASA has decided to go on with the InSight Mars mission, rescheduling it for a May 2018 launch, rather than cancelling it outright.
The seismometer, built by the French space agency CNES, will be repaired in time to make the 2018 launch window, said Jim Green, the head of NASA’s planetary sciences division in Washington DC. “That’s terrific news,” he told a planetary sciences advisory panel on 9 March. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, will assume responsibility for building a new vacuum enclosure for the seismometer.
The last sentence above suggests that NASA has decided to take certain responsibilities from the French to make sure they get done right. It also means that the cost will be born by the NASA’s planetary program, cutting into other possible future missions.
Ceres’s big mountain
The Dawn science team has released an oblique angle image of Ceres’s big mountain, Ahuna Mons. I have cropped and reduced it above to show it here.
Despite looking almost toylike in this image, the mountain is quite monstrous, especially considering Ceres’s relatively small size.
This mountain is about 3 miles (5 kilometers) high on its steepest side. Its average overall height is 2.5 miles (4 kilometers). These figures are slightly lower than what scientists estimated from Dawn’s higher orbits because researchers now have a better sense of Ceres’ topography.
Consider: Mount Everest is not quite six miles high, on a planet with a diameter about 7926 miles across. Ceres however is only about 600 miles across at its widest, which means a 3 mile high mountain is 0.5% of Ceres’s entire width! Such a thing could only occur on such a small body, whose gravity is not quite great enough to force things into a completely spherical shape. It is for this reason it could be argued that Ceres doesn’t qualify as a dwarf planet, but would be better labeled a giant asteroid.
On the road
Sorry for the lack of posting today, or tomorrow. I am on a research trip in California and won’t be back home until late on Tuesday. Normally I would post along the way but cannot as I am doing all the driving, and when I am in the National Archives research room in California there is no time.
Dawn’s chief engineer reviews the mission
In a long and very detailed post, the chief engineer and mission director of Dawn gives us a very detailed update on the successful state of the spacecraft’s mission.
Not only does he describe what has been gathered at Ceres since the spacecraft arrived a year ago, he gives us this crucial information about the state of this paradigm-shattering ion engine spacecraft, the first to travel to two different objects in the solar system:
Dawn has faced many challenges in its unique voyage in the forbidding depths of space, but it has surmounted all of them. It has even overcome the dire threat posed by the loss of two reaction wheels (the second failure occurring in orbit around Vesta 3.5 years and 1.3 billion miles, or 2.0 billion kilometers, ago). With only two operable reaction wheels (and those no longer trustworthy), the ship’s remaining lifetime is very limited.
A year ago, the team couldn’t count on Dawn even having enough hydrazine to last beyond next month. But the creative methods of conserving that precious resource have proved to be quite efficacious, and the reliable explorer still has enough hydrazine to continue to return bonus data for a while longer. Now it seems highly likely that the spacecraft will keep functioning through the scheduled end of its primary mission on June 30, 2016.
NASA may choose to continue the mission even after that. Such decisions are difficult, as there is literally an entire universe full of interesting subjects to study, but resources are more limited. In any case, even if NASA extended the mission, and even if the two wheels operated without faltering, and even if the intensive campaign of investigating Ceres executed flawlessly, losing not an ounce (or even a gram) of hydrazine to the kinds of glitches that can occur in such a complex undertaking, the hydrazine would be exhausted early in 2017. Clearly an earlier termination remains quite possible.
Dawn has proven the value of ion engines. I would expect to see them used many more times in the future, especially missions heading to low gravity environments.
A Ted Cruz surge tonight
As predicted a few days ago, Ted Cruz surged against Donald Trump in tonight’s four closed primaries.
Though each won two primaries, the numbers gave Cruz the win over Trump in delegates, 69 to 44 (the numbers now adjusted after all the votes have been tallied). Moreover, as noted at the link, Trump’s voting totals remain flat or have declined, while Cruz’s have been rising steadily. It appears that among Republicans either the love affair with Trump is fading, or there never was one and that his support in the previous open primaries came from cross-over Democrats..
In addition, the numbers for both Kasich and Rubio are going nowhere, which means voting for them in future primaries will essentially give Trump an undeserved win. Thus, expect the movement from them to Cruz to increase.
More here, confirming my analysis above.
Clouds on Pluto?
A report from New Scientist today claims that the New Horizons science team has possibly seen individual clouds in some images.
Grundy had spotted features in the haze on the edge – or “limb” – of Pluto that seemed to stand out from the distinct layers. But more intriguingly, he had also seen a bright feature crossing different parts of the landscape, suggesting it was hovering above. The email kicked off a discussion as to whether the clouds were real, because it was difficult to see whether they cast shadows on the ground. The team also deliberated over the exact distinction between clouds and hazes. “One way to think of it is that clouds are discrete features, hazes widespread,” wrote Alan Stern, who heads up the New Horizons mission.
There has been no public mention of the clouds, suggesting that the team isn’t sure about the detection.
Roscosmos approves space tourism project
The competition heats up? Russia’s giant aerospace monopoly Roscosmos has given formal permission for the development of a suborbital space tourism project, proposed by the formally independent company, KosmoKurs.
Russia’s State Space Corporation Roscosmos has admitted the private space company KosmoKurs to working out a project for the development of a reusable system for space tourism flights, KosmoKurs Director General Pavel Pushkin said on Friday. “Our technical design specification was approved by Roscosmos two days ago. The system’s preliminary design will be created with this document,” Pushkin said at the InSpace forum.
According to him, the technical design specification has also been approved by the Central Research Institute of Machine Building (TsNIIMash) and the Keldysh Research Center. In addition, Pushkin said, Roscosmos chief Igor Komarov has already approved the project. “Igor Anatolyevich has taken the project with enthusiasm and gave orders to promote this project”, Pushkin said.
So, if I understand this right, this private company had to get approvals from Roscosmos’s bureaucracy, two other competitive groups within Roscosmos, plus the head of Roscosmos itself, before it would be allowed to proceed with building its independent suborbital operation. I wonder how many bribes KosmosKurs had to pay along the way. I also wonder what kind of quid pro quo deals that had to make in order get those other institutes to give their okay.
With Russia’s aerospace industry function under this kind of set-up, I doubt they are going to get much done in the coming decades.