Category: Points of Information

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

China launches classified satellite

8:59 am

China today successfully launched a classified reconnaissance satellite, its Long March 2D rocket lifting off from its Xichang spaceport in the south of China.

No word on where the first stage, which uses toxic hypogolic fuel, crashed in the interior of China.

The leaders in 2023 launch race:

76 SpaceX
47 China
13 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 88 to 47, and the entire world combined 88 to 75. SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world combined (excluding American companies) 76 to 75.

2 comments

October 23, 2023 Quick space links

5:47 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

  • NASA convenes team to reassess design of Mars sample return mission

    • Common sense would cause them to consider a major restructuring that even might include Starship. The track record of Washington suggests instead they will only make some superficial changes, claiming it saves money and addresses the problems outlined by the recent very critical independent review. And most important, they will ask for more money!

Leave a comment

A low mid-latitude crater on Mars apparently filled to overflowing with ice

12:04 pm

ice filling a Martian crater to overflowing
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 18, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a steep 1,000-foot-high cliff with what appears to be extensive glacial material at its base.

The many layers all suggest past climate cycles, where snow was deposited and the glacier grew, followed by a period when no snow fell and the glacier either shrank or remained unchanged. The terraced nature of the layers near the base of the cliff suggest that with each active cycle less snow was deposited and the glacier grew less.

The latitude is 33 degrees south, which puts it just outside the dry equatorial regions of Mars and inside the mid-latitude region where many such glacial features are found. Its closeness to the tropics however is significant, because by this point we should be seeing a diminishment of such features. Instead, the wider view shows us that the near surface ice in this region is extensive and in fact appears to cover everything.
» Read more

Leave a comment

Ingenuity completes 63rd flight on Mars

10:07 am

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

On October 19, 2023 the Mars helicopter Ingenuity successfully completed its 63rd flight on Mars, traveling 1,901 feet (its third longest flight) for 142.6 seconds.

On the overview map above the two dots and the green line mark the flight path, to the southwest and landing about 2,000 feet to the west of where the rover Perseverance presently sits (indicated by the blue dot).

Both the flight time and distance were slightly longer than the flight plan, likely caused by the helicopter making sure it had a safe landing spot before lowering itself to the ground.

Ingenuity is no longer simply an engineering test of whether flight is possible on Mars. It is now serving wholly as a scout for Perseverance, either moving ahead of its planned route (the red dotted line) in order to provide pictures of the ground so that the rover’s science team can better plan their future travels, or going into territory that the rover is not intended to travel in order to gather data that would previously been unavailable.

3 comments

Near collision of Australian satellite with Chinese military satellite

9:31 am

According to one Australian military official, a Chinese military satellite earlier this month came within a kilometer of a Australian satellite.

Analysis conducted after the event by the company LeoLabs shows both satellites were predicted to have an “miss” distance of just 100 metres 24 hours before the anticipated “conjunction”.

According to the data, the Yaogan 37 satellite manoeuvred 16 hours prior to the conjunction, increasing the miss distance to 978 metres at the closest approach.

The official’s presentation emphasized the increasing threat of collisions from the high number of satellites being launched, but this incident instead suggests to me that the problem is actually under some control by satellite operators. It continues the pattern seen repeatedly, whereby satellite operators detect a potential collision before it happens, and take preventive measures to avoid it.

The real problem has to do with defunct equipment in orbit that no one is in contact with or can control. Such objects pose are a bigger threat, because they cannot be maneuvered.

2 comments

Space Perspective unveils restroom for its high altitude tourist balloon

9:14 am

Neptune's restroom
Click for original image.

The Florida company Space Perspective yesterday unveiled the restroom for its high altitude tourist balloon, Neptune, that intends to take passengers on six to eight hour flights to nineteen miles elevation.

The goal was to provide an environment closer to a spa than to a typical aircraft setting, said Dan Window, who oversees all aspects of design at Space Perspective alongside Isabella Trani. “Overall, we embraced softness and optimistic color tones in the Space Spa, which play nicely with the contrasting colors you will see through its two windows,” Window said in the same statement. “We’re also using light washes, for example, to create ambience and allow for customization of the environment as well as discourage reflections in the windows. Soothing soundscapes will be unique to what you experience in the Space Lounge, and we brought in plants as a callback to the experience that Space Perspective’s founders had in Biosphere 2.

Based on the artist’s renderning to the right, the restroom is still a very small space, smaller than the smallest bathroom in most homes.

Space Perspective says it has received deposits for more than 1,600 flight tickets at 125K each, representing $200 million in potential income. It hopes to complete its first test flight next year.

7 comments

Scientists: The activity at the few known fast radio bursts suggests they resemble earthquakes

8:57 am

By analyzing 7,000 fast radio bursts (FRBs) detected from the three known FRBs, two scientists have found that the behavior appears to resemble the main quake and aftershocks seen in earthquakes.

The duo found that the arrival times of bursts from FRB20121102A showed a high degree of correlation, with many more bursts arriving within a second of each other than would be expected if the generation of bursts were completely random. This correlation faded away at longer timescales, with bursts separated by over a second arriving completely at random.

They drew similarities with this behaviour to how earthquakes produce secondary aftershocks in the hours or days following a tremor, but then become completely unpredictable once an episode of aftershocks passes. Moreover, they found that the rate of these FRB “aftershocks” follows the same Omori-Utsu law that characterises the occurrence of earthquake aftershocks on Earth. The law states that shortly after a large earthquake, the rate of aftershocks remains constant over a brief period of minutes to hours, after which the aftershock rate drops, decaying as roughly the inverse of the time since the main shock.

As always there is uncertainty about this conclusion. The magnitudes of the main quake and the pre- and after-shocks do not follow the curve pattern of earthquakes. Instead pre- and after-shocks can be as powerful.

The present theory is that FRBs are quakes in the crust of neutron stars, though this remains unconfirmed.

2 comments

SpaceX successfully completes two Starlink satellite launches today

8:29 pm

SpaceX today successfully completed two Starlink satellite launches, first putting 21 satellites in orbit from Vandenberg in the early morning hours and then launching another 23 satellites from Cape Canaveral in the evening.

Both first stages successfully landed on their drone ships, respectively in the Pacific and Atlantic. The first completed its sixteenth flight, the second its fourth flight.

The leaders in 2023 launch race:

76 SpaceX
46 China
13 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise now leads China in successfully launches 88 to 46, and the entire world combined 88 to 74. SpaceX by itself now leads the entire world combined (excluding American companies) 76 to 74.

12 comments

First Bennu asteroid samples recovered from OSIRIS-REx return capsule

10:26 am

Scientists have successfully removed the asteroid samples from the OSIRIS-REx return capsule that the spacecraft obtained from the asteroid Bennu in 2020.

What is more exciting is that though they now have slightly more material than the mission hoped to bring back, they haven’t even opened the capsule’s sample compartment.

The curation team processing NASA’s asteroid Bennu sample has removed and collected 2.48 ounces (70.3 grams) of rocks and dust from the sampler hardware – surpassing the agency’s goal of bringing at least 60 grams to Earth.

And the good news is, there’s still more of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security–Regolith Explorer) sample to collect.

The sample processed so far includes the rocks and dust found on the outside of the sampler head, as well as a portion of the bulk sample from inside the head, which was accessed through the head’s mylar flap. Additional material remaining inside the sampler head, called the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism, or TAGSAM, is set for removal later, adding to the mass total.

The large amount of material means there will be plenty to distribute to many scientists for study.

The reason the recovery process is going so slowly is to ensure the samples do not get contaminated by the Earth’s atmosphere. The capsule is inside a glovebox filled with nitrogen. The only way any work can be done is by inserting hands inside gloves that extend into the box. This keeps the samples protected but prevents any direct contact, which makes work slow and difficult.

5 comments

The reshuffling of Blue Origin’s management continues

10:20 am

With the announcement yesterday that another high level executive was leaving the company — the third in less than a month — Blue Origin does appear to be making major changes in its management as well as its entire organizational structure.

Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith told employees in an email on Friday that Mike Eilola, the company’s senior vice president of operations since 2021, “is leaving the company for personal reasons” on Nov. 3 and will have his unit split into two new organizations.

Eilola’s departure follows plans announced last month by Bezos to replace Smith, who has been Blue Origin’s CEO since 2017, with longtime Amazon executive Dave Limp by the end of the year. And Brent Sherwood, the head of what had been the company’s research and development unit, will depart next month, Reuters has reported.

This is not the only management restructuring. It has also shifted its lunar lander project into its own division, as well as created a new separate division for developing in-space robotic servicing and orbital tug products.

It finally appears that Jeff Bezos is taking action to get his company working again, after more than a half decade of non-achievement since Bob Smith took over in 2017. Hopefully these changes finally will produce results.

7 comments

Gaganyaan abort test flight flies successfully after short delay

10:13 am

When I went to bed last night India’s Gaganyaan abort test flight had been cancelled due to a launch abort at T-0, with the live stream ending and an expectation that engineers would need at least another day to fly.

When I woke up it turned out that ISRO behaved more like SpaceX than a government agency. It quickly figured out what was wrong, recycled the countdown, and two hours later successfully flew the test of its launch abort rescue system for its manned Gaganyaan capsule.

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) successfully executed the Test Flight Abort Mission, for the Gaganyaan mission on Saturday after the first test flight was aborted at 8:45 am due to a problem in the engine ignition. ISRO Chief S Somanth said the planned lift off the TV-D1 rocket could not happen following an anomaly that will be analysed. He said that the engine ignition of the TV-D1 rocket did not happen over time.

The space agency then said that the errors have been identified and corrected and the second launch was scheduled for 10:00 Hrs today.

And at 10 am, ISRO successfully launched the test vehicle from Sriharikota today. Chairman Somanath expressed happiness and said, “I am very happy to announce the successful accomplishment of Gaganyaan TV-D1 mission”.

The test rocket launched, the abort system separated from the rocket as planned, the capsule was released from the abort system, its parachutes then opened, and the capsule then safely splashed down in the Bay of Bengal about ten miles off the coast, where it was recovered successfully.

ISRO plans a second launch abort test prior to flying the actual manned mission, but at this moment it appears very close to being ready for a manned mission in 2024, its present goal.

2 comments

India’s Gaganyaan launch abort test aborts at T-0

8:21 pm

India’s attempt today to test the launch abort system to be used to safely propel its manned Gaganyaan capsule away from a failing rocket aborted at T-0.

They need to take the spacecraft back to the assembly building in order to figure out what went wrong, so the next attempt will likely be delayed at mininum several weeks. UPDATE: That’s what the head of ISRO said at the end of this live stream, but that is not what happened. See new post above.

2 comments

October 20, 2023 Quick space links

3:12 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

Leave a comment

The fractured floor of the south Utopia Basin

1:05 pm

The fracture floor of South Utopia Basin

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on August 5, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The central darker strip however comes from a September 27, 2008 image by MRO’s lower resolution context camera, inserted to fill in the blank section where one component on the high resolution camera has failed.

The picture focuses on what the scientists call a “pit interacting with a mound.” The 100-foot-deep pit is one of a very long meandering string of such pits, all of which suggest the existence of an buried river canyon into which debris is sinking. Altogether this particular string runs from several dozen miles, and its interaction with the triangular 300-foot-high mound suggests at first glance that the river that created the canyon did a turn to the left to avoid a large underground mountain, now mostly buried but revealed by its still exposed peak.

As is usual in planetary research, the first glance is often wrong. The overview map below provides a different answer, which says the formation of the aligned pits is related to the formation of the mound itself.
» Read more

5 comments

Astronomers detect what they think is the most distant known fast radio burst yet

9:50 am

The uncertainty of science: Using ground-based radio and optical telescopes, astronomers think they have detected the most distant known fast radio burst yet, coming from a galaxy thought to be eight billion light years away.

On 10 June 2022, CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope on Wajarri Yamaji Country was used to detect a fast radio burst, created in a cosmic event that released, in milliseconds, the equivalent of our Sun’s total emission over 30 years.

“Using ASKAP’s array of dishes, we were able to determine precisely where [in the sky] the burst came from,” says Dr Ryder, the first author on the paper. “Then we used the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile to search for the source galaxy, finding it to be older and further away than any other FRB source found to date, and likely within a small group of merging galaxies.”

Note that the scientists have not actually measured the distance of this burst. They assume it sits at the same distance of the group of merging galaxies that surround it. Only about fifty fast radio bursts have so far been detected. As yet there is no accepted explanation as to what causes them, though knowing their assumed distance helps narrow the possibilities significantly.

The scientists also think they can use the energy from this burst to measure the intervening matter between it and Earth, and thus get a better estimate of the mass of the universe.

Leave a comment

Webb detects high altitude jet stream above Jupiter’s equatorial band

9:40 am

Jupiter's newly discovered jet stream
Click for original false-color infrared image.

Using the Webb Space Telescope’s infrared capability, scientists have now detected a high altitude jet stream that flows above the equatorial band of Jupiter at speeds estimated to 320 miles per hour.

The false-color infrared image to the right shows evidence of this jetstream in three places by the brightest features seen there. From the caption:

In this image, brightness indicates high altitude. The numerous bright white ‘spots’ and ‘streaks’ are likely very high-altitude cloud tops of condensed convective storms. Auroras, appearing in red in this image, extend to higher altitudes above both the northern and southern poles of the planet. By contrast, dark ribbons north of the equatorial region have little cloud cover. In Webb’s images of Jupiter from July 2022, researchers recently discovered a narrow jet stream traveling 320 miles per hour (515 kilometers per hour) sitting over Jupiter’s equator above the main cloud decks.

These features sit about 25 miles higher than the planet’s previously detected cloudtops.

This discovery only proves what has always been evident, that Jupiter’s atmosphere is very complex with many features earlier optical observations could not see. It also only gives us a hint of that complexity. It will take numerous Jupiter orbiters observing in all wavebands, not just Webb in the infrared millions of miles away, to begin to untangle that complexity. And that untangling will take decades as well, since global weather unfolds over time. You can’t understand it simply by one snapshot. You have to watch the changes from season to season and from year to year. As Jupiter’s year is 12 Earth-years long, this research will take many lifetimes.

One comment

Blocked by its own American government, Varda now looks to Australia

9:18 am

Because the U.S. military as well as the FAA refused to issue Varda a license to land its recoverable capsule from orbit — carrying actual HIV pharmaceuticals that can only be manufactured in space — the company is now negotiating with a private range in Australia for landing rights.

The agreement between Varda and Southern Launch, a company based in Adelaide, Australia, would allow Varda’s second mission, scheduled to launch in mid-2024, to reenter and land at the remote Koonibba Test Range. “We plan, with the Koonibba Test Range, to conduct a reentry operation as soon as our second orbital mission, which the launch and reentry would be in mid-2024,” [Delian Asparouhov, the company’s chairman, president, and co-founder,] told Ars.[emphasis mine]

In other words, Varda’s first launched capsule, in space now but unable to land, has become a total loss, simply because the U.S. government blocked its return. The HIV drugs it produced while in orbit will never become available for sale. Nor will Varda be able to use it to demonstrate the returnable capability of its orbiting capsule.

Such a loss could easily destroy a startup like Varda, which is certainly not yet in the black as it develops its technology.

What is most disgusting about this blocking is that at the same time the military and the FAA refused Varda permission to land, those agencies had no problem letting NASA drop its OSIRIS-REx sample capsule in the same landing range in Utah.

Right now our federal government has become the enemy of the American people, doing whatever it can to stymie them, whether by intention or by incompetence.

9 comments

Russia announces revised schedule for its lunar unmanned projects

9:04 am

NPO Lavochkin, the Roscosmos division that builds Russia’s lunar landers, has now announced a revised schedule for all of that country’s proposed lunar unmanned projects, following the failure of its Luna-25 lander in August.

The program calls for at least six missions, including orbiters, landers, and a rover, launching from 2027 through the 2030s. However, this quote from the article is the reality:

As often before, the latest strategy relied on the development time frames that had never been demonstrated by NPO Lavochkin in comparable projects in the past three decades.

What is worse is the 100% failure record of Lavochkin’s planetary probes once launched. It takes forever to build anything, and then what it builds and launches doesn’t work.

Not that this absimal record will cost Lavochkin anything. The Russian government and the bureaucracy that controls it does not allow any competition. Instead, like prohibition-era mobsters, divisions like Lavochkin carve up territories that they control, and allow no one else in. For example, Lavochkin owns planetary research while Energia, another division in Roscosmos, controls manned space flight as well as its launch industry. No one else is allowed it enter these markets, which means Lavochkin can fail repeatedly for the next century and nothing will change.

3 comments

Japan awards Ispace $80 million to develop larger lunar lander

8:49 am

The Japanese government, not its space agency JAXA, today announced it has awarded the commercial company Ispace an $80 million grant to develop a larger lunar lander, following its failed attempt earlier this year to land its first Hakuto-R1 lander on the Moon.

Japan will provide a subsidy of up to 12 billion yen ($80 million) to moon exploration startup ispace (9348.T) as part of a grant programme for innovative ventures, industry minister Yasutoshi Nishimura said on Friday.

The new lander is targeting a 2027 launch, and according to the company’s own statement [pdf] will replace the Hakuto-R lander being used on its first two lunar missions, as well as the Apex lander the American division of Ispace is now building for NASA. It also appears that the contract is fixed price, and will only be paid out when the company achieves actual milestones of development.

In other words, the Japanese government is doing what NASA is now doing, moving away from a government model, where its space agency JAXA builds and controls everything, to a capitalism model, where it buys what it needs from the private sector. That JAXA did not issue this award demonstrates this transition, in that until now all such space contracts were through that agency solely.

2 comments

October 19, 2023 Quick space links

2:31 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

  • Suborbital Dutch rocket to be launched in 2024 from German ocean platform

    • The link is in German, requiring a translation tool. From Jay a translation of the lede: “In April 2024, a rocket from the Dutch company T-Minus will be launched for the first time as part of a demonstration mission from a mobile launch platform of the “German-Offshore Spaceport Alliance” (GOSA) in the North Sea.”

 

  • Europe posts revised Ariane-6 test schedule

    • The schedule as now planned:
    October: Combined test, launch rehearsal with ignition of the main stage, Kourou, French Guiana
    November: Combined test, long-duration firing of the main stage with Vulcain 2.1 engine, Kourou, French Guiana
    December: Upper stage firing test, Lampoldshausen, Germany
    They then hope to be ready for a 2024 launch.

 

 

 

 

3 comments

Posting shall be light today…

12:09 pm

Because of a scheduled surgery in the family early this morning, I am wiped out. All is well with everyone, but I had too little sleep last night, leaving me with little energy to think today.

I might post if I get the hankering, but I doubt I’ll have the mental capacity to write any essays.

6 comments

At Senate hearings numerous launch companies complain of regulatory bottleneck

8:18 am

At a hearing in the Senate yesterday officials from SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic all expressed strong concerns about how the regulatory bottleneck at the FAA is damaging the entire launch business.

Gerstenmaier emphasized that the FAA’s commercial space office “needs at least twice the resources that they have today” for licensing rocket launches. While he acknowledged the FAA is “critical to enabling safe space transportation,” Gerstenmaier added that the industry is “at a breaking point.”

“The FAA has neither the resources nor the flexibility to implement its regulatory obligations,” Gerstenmaier said.

…The other four panelists’ testimonies largely echoed SpaceX’s viewpoint on the need to bolster the FAA’s ranks and speed up the process of approving rocket launches. Phil Joyce, Blue Origin senior vice president of New Shepard, said the FAA “is struggling to keep pace” with the industry “and needs more funding to deal with the increase in launches.”

Likewise, industry expert Caryn Schenewerk, a former leader at SpaceX and Relativity Space, said that the FAA’s recent changes have yet to “streamline licensing reviews” and instead have “proven more cumbersome and costly.”

Wayne Monteith — a retired Air Force brigadier general who also led the FAA’s space office — said that Congress should consider consolidating space regulations. “I believe a more efficient one stop shop approach to authorizing and licensing space activities is necessary,” Monteith said.

As always, the focus is on giving the government agency “more resources”. No one ever suggests that maybe its inability to meet the demand is because of mission creep, in which the government continually grabs more regulatory power than it is supposed to have, which then requires it to have additional resources, which then allows it to grab even more power, which then requires more resources, and on and on the merry-go-round goes.

To really solve this problem we need to trim the regulatory framework. The FAA’s responsibilities must be cut, not enhanced. It must be told it “will issue” launch licenses, rather than take the position it “might issue” them. It also must be told to cut back on the checklists it is demanding from companies. All that should concern it is scheduling and arranging air traffic and the launch range to prevent conflicts. Beyond that any regulation is simply overreach, and is something that was never under its control in the past.

7 comments

SpaceX to push for more than 140 launches in 2024

8:04 am

At a Senate hearing yesterday, a SpaceX official revealed the company is aiming to achieve 144 launches in 2024, an almost 50% increase from the record-setting pace it is maintaining this year.

“This year, we’re going to attempt to fly 100 flights,” Bill Gerstenmaier, the vice president of build and flight reliability at SpaceX, said on Wednesday (Oct. 18) during a hearing of the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Space and Science. “As we look to next year, we want to increase that flight rate to about 12 flights per month, or 144 flights,” he added during the hearing.

Getting to 12 launches per month will be a challenge, but not an unreasonable one. So far this year the company has routinely launched more than six times per month, but it has been pushing that rate since the summer, with it many times trying to do launches almost daily for a stretch. Often its biggest problem isn’t the company or rocket, but the weather and scheduling at Cape Canaveral, as there are others that wish to launch there.

10 comments

Erosion revealing ridges on Mars?

12:16 pm

Erosion revealing lava dikes on Mars?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 30, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The science team calls the features here “narrow ridges”, but what makes these criss-crossing ridges interesting is their location within the picture.

They appear only inside the hollows and depressions, as if erosion had stripped out a top layer of softer material to reveal these ridges, made of a harder material. The almost random but straight orientations of the ridges also suggest they formed along faults or cracks, which also suggests we are seeing dikes where lava was pushed up from below.

Whether the eroded softer material is lava or volcanic ash is unclear, though it certainly resembles the ash layers seen in the giant Medusa Fossae Formation ash field on the opposite side of Mars.

As always, a wider look helps clarify things.
» Read more

Leave a comment

Israel negotiating with SpaceX to use Starlink

10:23 am

Israel is now in negotiations with SpaceX to get use of its Starlink constellation for communications, especially in the region around Gaza where the present conflict is ongoing.

Starlink currently isn’t available in Israel, so this would be the first time the service is introduced in any capacity. As it seeks to bolster its own communications during wartime, it is also looking into halting cell and internet communications in Gaza, that same official said.

“The activity of coordinating the Israeli company Starlink is taking place, enabling the operation of communication terminals by the company SpaceX, which will allow a wide broadband internet connection in Israel,” Israel Minister of Communications Shlomo Karhi said on X. “Additionally, under the guidance of the minister, the ministry promotes the purchase of these satellite devices for the benefit of regional councils and community leaders in conflict zone settlements.”

By having Starlink available, Israel could use it as it shut down the cell and internet capabilities being used by Hamas.

Whether a deal will be made remains unclear, as Musk has shown ambivalence about Starlink’s contribution in the Ukraine war.

6 comments

Location of mud volcanoes in Martian chaos terrain suggest past existence of mud lake

10:18 am

Mud volcanoes in the inland sea

Scientists mapping the location of mud volcanoes in chaos terrain in the dry equatorial regions of Mars have found numerous mud volcanoes, adding weight to the theory that an intermittent shallow lake once existed there.

The inset on the overview map to the right indicates the location of those mud volcanoes (of two types) in white and orange dots. What is significant is that none of the volcanoes are found on the mesas within this chaos terrain, only in the low flats below. From the caption:

Both feature types result from sedimentary volcanism – instead of magma upwells and eruptions, wet sediments, and salts reach and breach the surface, forming mounds and flows. Interestingly, these mounds only occur over the chaotic terrain floor materials and not on the mesas (red-shaded areas) they embay. This suggests a material composition link rather than a genesis by regional extensional forces generated by magmatic rises.

The blue areas are where this same science team think an intermittent inland sea once existed. This new data reinforces that hypothesis.

Features that look like mud volcanoes are common in the icy northern lowland plains. Finding them in the dry equatorial regions strengthens the theory that water was once common there. For this reason the scientists are proposing a mission to this location, especially because the possibility of water might increase the chances of discovering past life.

Leave a comment

Review of orbital images confirms source of largest Mars quake was not an impact

9:35 am

Location of May quake
The white patches mark the locations on Mars of the largest quakes
detected by InSight. The green dotted patch marks this particular 4.7 quake.

Scientists reviewing images from several different orbiters have confirmed that the source of the largest Mars quake detected by InSight, 4.7 magnitude, was not caused by a meteorite impact and thus proves that movement in the interior of Mars is still occurring.

The quake, which had a magnitude of 4.7 and caused vibrations to reverberate through the planet for at least six hours, was recorded by NASA’s InSight lander on Wednesday 4 May 2022. Because its seismic signal was similar to previous quakes known to be caused by meteoroid impacts, the team believed that this event (dubbed ‘S1222a’) might have been caused by an impact as well, and launched an international search for a fresh crater.

…During its time on Mars, InSight (which was co-designed by the University of Oxford) recorded at least 8 marsquake events caused by meteoroid impacts. The largest two of these formed craters around 150m in diameter. If the S1222a event was formed by an impact, the crater would be expected to be at least 300m in diameter. Each group examined data from their satellites orbiting Mars to look for a new crater, or any other tell-tale signature of an impact (e.g. a dust cloud appearing in the hours after the quake).

After several months of searching, the team announced today that no fresh crater was found.

You can read their paper here. To do the survey, the team used data from the American orbiters Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey, and also enlisted help from scientists controlling the data from Europe’s Mars Express, China’s Tianwen-1, India’s Mangalyaan, and the United Arab Emirates’ Al-Mal.

The results suggest the quake occurred at “a dip-slip fault in the mid-crust, consistent with an origin between 18 and 28 km depth,” as stated in the conclusion of their paper. More analysis is necessary, but this result proves that the Martian interior still active enough to produce relatively large quakes..

Leave a comment

Russian geosynchronous spy satellite making close-up inspections of other commercial satellites

9:13 am

A second Russian “inspector” spy satellite in geosynchronous orbit is being directed to move relatively close to other commercial satellites, close enough to obtain high resolution images.

According to data gathered by California startup Slingshot Aerospace, the satellite known as Luch-5X or Olymp-K-2 [Norad ID 5584] began moving east to west shortly after its launch on March 12 — in what company officials told Breaking Defense on Oct. 6 shows a “pattern of life” that includes making stops nearby non-Russian satellites.

So far it the closest it has gotten to another satellite is about 10 miles, just far enough away so as to avoid triggering any collision concerns but close enough that good cameras will see fine details. It is believed the satellite so far under surveillance is a communications satellite from Eutelsat that covers Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and central Asia, suggesting a link to the wars in the Ukraine and Gaza.

6 comments
1 … 87 88 89 90 91 … 898