Category: Points of Information

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

Lucy gets first images of its first target asteroid, Dinkinesh

10:32 am

The asteroid Dinkinesh as seen by Lucy

The asteroid probe Lucy has obtained its first images of Dinkinesh, the first of the ten asteroids the spacecraft is hoping to visit during its twelve year voyage to the Trojan asteroids.

The image to the left shows the motion of that asteroid over a two day period when Lucy was getting the pictures.

Lucy took these images while it was 14 million miles (23 million km) away from the asteroid, which is only about a half-mile wide (1 km). Over the next two months, Lucy will continue toward Dinkinesh until its closest approach of 265 miles (425 km) on Nov. 1, 2023. The Lucy team will use this encounter as an opportunity to test out spacecraft systems and procedures, focusing on the spacecraft’s terminal tracking system, designed to keep the asteroid within the instruments’ fields of view as the spacecraft flies by at 10,000 mph (4.5 km/s). Lucy will continue to image the asteroid over the next months as part of its optical navigation program, which uses the asteroid’s apparent position against the star background to determine the relative position of Lucy and Dinkinesh to ensure an accurate flyby. Dinkinesh will remain an unresolved point of light during the long approach and won’t start to show surface detail until the day of the encounter.

Lucy’s primary targets are asteroids in the two Trojan groups that orbit the Sun in the two Lagrange points in same orbit as Jupiter, fore and aft of the gas giant by 60 degrees. For a map of Lucy’s full mission profile, go here.

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Frank Rubio on ISS sets new record for an American in space

10:10 am

Though Frank Rubio was only supposed to do a six month mission, a leak on the Soyuz capsule that brought him and his two crewmates into space has resulted in all three doing a mission exceeding one year, and setting a new record for an American in space.

Today Rubio broke the old American record of 355 days, set by Mark Vande Hei in 2022. When they return on September 27, 2023, all three will have spent 371 days in space, the third longest manned mission in history, exceeded only by Sergei Avdeyev’s 381 in 1999 and Valeri Polyakov’s 437 in 1994-1995, both on Russia’s Mir space station.

Based on my interviews with Polyakov and Musa Manarov (who was on the first mission with Vladimir Titov to spend one year in space — 366 days total — in 1988) for my book Leaving Earth, it will take Rubio about one year to fully recover from this mission, though he will likely be able to function almost normally within a month or so.

It remains interesting that these American records set by Rubio and Vande Hei occurred because of decisions by the Russians, not the American space agency NASA. NASA has consistently resisted doing long missions on ISS, even though this is exactly the kind of medical research required if we are to send humans on multi-year missions to Mars and beyond. Even more embarrassing, the longest NASA planned mission, flying Scott Kelly for 340 days, was touted by NASA as a year-long mission, even though it was never going to and did not achieve that distinction.

In doing this research the Russians have always led, and appear to continue to do so on ISS.

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SpaceX launches 21 Starlink satellites

9:38 am

SpaceX last night launched 21 Starlink satellites from Vandenberg in California, using its Falcon 9 rocket.

The first stage completed its eleventh flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

64 SpaceX
42 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

In the national rankings, American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 74 to 42. It also now leads the entire world combined, 74 to 67, while SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) only 64 to 67.

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September 11, 2023 Quick space links

4:33 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

 

 

 

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Real pushback: Defiance from all sides to New Mexico’s unlawful suspension of the 2nd amendment

1:27 pm

Michelle Lujan Grisham

When New Mexico’s Democratic Party governor Michelle Lujan Grisham suddenly declared on September 8, 2023 that she was unilaterally suspending the second amendment by outlawing for 30 days the right to carry firearms by any citizens in Albuquerque and its surrounding Bernalillo county, no one should have been surprised.

All Grisham was doing was following the many precedents set during the COVID epidemic, where nationwide governors routinely made unilateral and unlawful declarations violating the Constitutional rights of citizens, with no pushback at all. Grisham was merely following those precedents. To her, it was now okay for a governor to routinely declare a “health emergency” for any reason under the sun (in this case the violent shooting death of an innocent eleven-year-old boy), and declare any law she didn’t like to be null and void.

Grisham was simply demonstrating forcefully the worst lessons learned from the COVID panic. It taught power-hungry politicians that they could get away with any abuse of power they conceived, as long as they dressed that power grab as part of some sort of “health emergency.”

You see, power is very habit-forming, and when you find you suffer no pain for abusing it it is then very easy to abuse it again, and again and again.

The response to Grisham’s unlawful abuse of power however suggested strongly that things are no longer going to follow the script of the COVID panic, when the public meekly went along. Instead, the uproar in the past three days has been astonishing, not so much from the ordinary citizens defying the ban, but from politicians and pundits from across the entire political spectrum.
» Read more

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Ridge in Martian lowland plains

11:47 am

Tiny ridge in Martian lowlands
Click for original image.

Today’s cool image is interesting not because it shows us some spectacular Martian terrain, but because the most distinct feature is a thin ridge only a few feet high that pokes up out of the northern lowland plains for apparently no reason.

The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 1, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The ridge is about 1.8 miles long, and is only about five feet high on its western end, rising to about 25 feet on its eastern end.

The colors differences indicate that the ridge’s peak is likely bedrock, and the surrounding greenish/blue hue suggesting sand and rocks covered with dust. The ridge might be the top of a deeper buried topological feature but that is only a guess.
» Read more

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The actual truth behind the so-called “hidden figures” of the early space race

9:57 am

It is Monday, and thus the news in the morning is somewhat slim. With this in mind I offer my readers some worthwhile history, a long review dubbed “The Portrayal of Early Manned Spaceflight in Hidden Figures: A Critique. The actual review is available here [pdf].

The review uses primary source material, the actual words of the engineers and managers who worked next to black mathematician Katherine Johnson at NASA in the 1960s (both new and old writings and interviews), assessing the historical accuracy of Margot Shetterly’s book Hidden Figures, which essentially claimed that Johnson was a central figure making possible the entire American effort land on the Moon, and whose credit was purposely squelched because she was black, and a woman.

Not surprisingly, you will find that claim to be absurdly false. Not only was Johnson only one of many who did the work, she was treated then fairly and with respect. If anything, her place at NASA was proof that the agency was a forceful part of the civil rights movement, working to give qualified people of all races a fair chance.

Thus, the effort of modern leftist revisionists, led by Barack Obama when he gave Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, to smear America and NASA in the 1960s as racist and bigoted in supposedly suppressing Johnson’s participation is not only unfair, it is an outright lie. If anything, her magnification to star status by today’s politicians, historians, and the entertainment industry has acted to discredit the work done by the many others who worked side-by-side with her, as co-workers.

If you’ve got the time, read the critique. It will not only teach you something about the behind the scenes effort that made the lunar landing possible, it will help you recognize the bigoted dishonesty that is so rampant in today’s intellectual and political culture.

Hat tip to reader Chris Dorsey for letting me know of this review.

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On the radio today

9:39 am

Robert Pratt of Pratt on Texas will be airing a segment with me today we taped late last week, discussing SpaceX’s effort to get the FAA to issue a launch license for the next test orbital launch of Starship/Superheavy. It will run as the last segment today, somewhere after 5:30pm Central (with some affiliates differing on the timing). The live stream links are here.

Afterward it will post as a podcast here. The podcast is now available here. I have embedded it below.

Though there has been some additional information in the licencing since last week, nothing I said has become invalid. SpaceX still waits for the blessings of the nobility in Washington’s bureaucracy, controlled by people who have become very addicted to ruling over others.

The sad part is that so many news sources today seem okay with that, and don’t like it when people like me question it. Whatever happened to the independent and skeptical press?
» Read more

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A galactic cloud

9:27 am

A galactic cloud
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. It shows what scientists dub a lenticular galaxy, with features that put it somewhere between a spiral galaxy and an elliptical (which has no structure a appears instead a cloud of stars), sitting about 73 million light years away.

NGC 3156 has been studied in many ways … from its cohort of globular clusters, to its relatively recent star formation, to the stars that are being destroyed by the supermassive black hole at its centre.

Why this galaxy has no spiral arms is somehow related to its age and its central black hole, but the detailed theories that astronomers have to explain this are far from confirmed.

The image is interesting also because of its lack of foreground stars or background galaxies. Its location in the sky explains this, as Hubble was looking at right angle to the Milky Way’s galactic plane, essentially looking directly into the vast emptiness between the galaxies.

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Two launches today, one by ULA and one by China

10:16 am

Today there were two successful launches. First China launched a remote sensing satellite using its Long March 6 rocket that lifted off from its Taiyuan spaceport in the south of China.

No word on where the rocket’s lower stages and four strap-on boosters crashed inside China.

Shortly thereafter, ULA used its Atlas-5 rocket to place a reconnaissance satellite into orbit for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

For ULA, this was only its second launch in 2023. The leaders in the 2023 launch race are now as follows, with China’s total corrected:

63 SpaceX
42 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

In the national rankings, American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 73 to 42. It also now leads the entire world combined, 73 to 67, while SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) only 63 to 67.

CORRECTION: Hat tip to reader John Foley (see his comment below), who noted that China’s total appeared to be one short. I went back and discovered I had missed a March 22, 2023 launch of a Kuaizhou 1A rocket from the Jiujian spaceport, placing four weather satellites in orbit. I have now added that launch to China’s total, and corrected the other numbers.

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SpaceX launches 22 Starlink satellites

8:22 pm

SpaceX tonight successfully launched another 22 Starlink satellites, lifting off from Cape Canaveral using its Falcon 9 rocket.

The first stage completed its seventh flight, landing safely on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

63 SpaceX
40 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

In the national rankings, American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 72 to 40. It also now leads the entire world combined, 72 to 65, while SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) only 63 to 65.

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September 8, 2023 Quick space links

3:44 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

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Today’s blacklisted American: Law professor fired and escorted by police off campus for being conservative

1:29 pm

Law professor Scott Gerber
Law professor Scott Gerber

They’re coming for you next: In an ugly act of outright thuggery, Ohio Northern University (ONU) recently fired tenured law professor Scott Gerber, without any standard due process as required by its own procedures, and did so by having the campus police arrive unannouced in his classroom to escort him off campus.

As Gerber recounts, “Around 1 p.m on Friday, April 14, Ohio Northern University campus security officers entered my classroom with my students present and escorted me to the dean’s office. Armed town police followed me down the hall. My students appeared shocked and frightened. I know I was.”

Gerber was not given any concrete reasons after being told that he was being banned from campus, other than his lack of “collegiality.” He was directed to sign a separation agreement.

The reason for Gerber’s firing however appears quite obvious if you want to look. The university did not like his uncompromising and public opposition to ONU’s racist Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies, which focus solely on favoring minorities in hiring and admissions while working to eliminate and remove any opposition to those racist policies. As he wrote in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal:
» Read more

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Curiosity’s upcoming travels on Mount Sharp

12:31 pm

Curiosity's view on September 6, 2023
Click for original image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

The panorama above, cropped, reduced, sharpened, and annotated to post here, was created on September 6, 2023 from eleven pictures taken by the right navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity.

This mosaic looks south, into the slot canyon dubbed Gediz Valles. The red dotted line on the panorama as well as the overview map to the right indicates the planned route the science team plans on traveling as it sends Curiosity higher and higher on Mount Sharp. On the overview map Curiosity’s present position is indicated by the blue dot. The yellow lines show the approximate area covered by the panorama above.

As noted in today’s update from the science team:

The rover is currently driving across bumpy terrain consisting of rounded bedrock sticking up between dark sand and drift as she drives south, and slightly uphill, along the Mt. Sharp Ascent Route. Due to the rugged ground, the rover sometimes ends her drive with a wheel or two perched on a rock.

When the rover’s placement prevents use of the arm, the scientists have it do other things, such as take more images of the many layers on Kukenan.

As rocky as this future route is, it appears it is less rocky than earlier terrain, which the science team found impossible to traverse requiring several route detours. Thus, the pace forward has been a bit faster lately.

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Good news? FAA issues own report on April Starship/Superheavy launch

11:30 am

The FAA today closed out its own investigation into the April test launch failure of SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy rocket, stating that it found “63 corrective actions SpaceX must take” before another launch license will be issued.

Corrective actions include redesigns of vehicle hardware to prevent leaks and fires, redesign of the launch pad to increase its robustness, incorporation of additional reviews in the design process, additional analysis and testing of safety critical systems and components including the Autonomous Flight Safety System, and the application of additional change control practices.

It is not clear how many of these corrections have already been completed by SpaceX. The FAA made it clear however that it does not yet consider its requirements to have been met.

The closure of the mishap investigation does not signal an immediate resumption of Starship launches at Boca Chica. SpaceX must implement all corrective actions that impact public safety and apply for and receive a license modification from the FAA that addresses all safety, environmental and other applicable regulatory requirements prior to the next Starship launch.

The timeline suggests FAA is demanding additional actions from SpaceX. The company submitted its own investigation report to the FAA on August 16th. The FAA then spent almost a month reviewing it, during which it almost certainly decided some of SpaceX’s corrections were insufficient. It has now followed up with its own report, listing additional actions required.

Remember, no one at the FAA is qualified or even in a position to do a real investigation. They are simply acting as a chess kibitzer on the sidelines, making annoying commentary based on less information than held by the players of the game (in this case SpaceX). Unlike a chess kibitzer, however, the FAA controls the board, and can force SpaceX to do its recommended moves, or declare the game forfeited by SpaceX.

If the FAA has required additional actions, we will find out in the next few days when SpaceX destacks Starship/Superheavy and rolls both back into the assembly building. It is also possible we instead shall have a few weeks of back-and-forth negotiations by phone, zoom, paper, and face-to-face meetings, whereby SpaceX engineers will be desperately trying to make FAA paper-pushers understand some of their engineering work which will eventually result in an agreement by the FAA to let SpaceX launch.

Remember, none of this kind of regulatory interference and investigation took place between SpaceX and the FAA during the Trump administration when SpaceX was flying a Starship suborbital test flight almost monthly. The heavy boot of regulation arrived soon after Biden. The two are closely linked.

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GAO blasts NASA for purposely failing to control the budget of its SLS rocket

10:21 am

In a new report [pdf] released yesterday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) strongly blasted NASA’s non-budgeting process for financing the costs for this SLS rocket, which appear specifically designed to allow those costs to rise uncontrollably.

This one sentence from the report says it all:

NASA does not plan to measure production costs to monitor the affordability of the SLS program.

That non-plan is actually in direct defiance of four different reports by both the GAO and NASA’s inspector general over the past decade, all of which found that NASA was not using standard budgeting practices with SLS and which all demanded it do so forthwith. As this new report notes in reviewing this history, in every case NASA failed to follow these recommendations, and instead created budgetary methods designed to instead obscure the program’s cost.

This report notes that NASA continues to do so.
» Read more

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Senate approves Biden’s FCC nominee, giving him a Democrat majority on FCC

9:48 am

FCC: now controlled by Democrats
The FCC, now controlled by the
power-hungry Democratic Party

Failure theater: The Senate yesterday voted 55 to 43 to approve Biden’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) nominee, Anna Gomez, thus giving the Democrats a 4 to 3 majority on the Commission.

This was Biden’s second nominee to the commission, with the first withdrawn when it was clear the Senate opposed the nominee.

Biden tried again in May with the nomination of Gomez, a State Department digital policy official who was previously deputy assistant secretary at the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) from 2009 to 2023. A lawyer, Gomez was vice president of government affairs at Sprint Nextel from 2006 to 2009 and before that spent about 12 years at the FCC in several roles.

Gomez got through the confirmation process with relative ease, though most Republicans voted against her. Both parties seem to expect the FCC to reinstate net neutrality rules now that Democrats will have a majority.

Imposing net neutrality is essentially socialism/communism for the internet. It will squash competition, cost a fortune, and eventually be used as well to squelch dissent online (which translates into silencing conservatives).

From the perspective of space, the majority on the FCC is likely very bad news as well, for several reasons. » Read more

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September 7, 2023 Quick space links

3:23 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

  • ISRO releases two images from its Aditya-L1 solar observatory

    • One image shows several instruments on the spacecraft, and the other shows the Earth with the Moon in the background. Both demonstrate that the solar observatory is functioning properly as it works its way toward the L1 point a million miles from Earth and closer to the Sun.

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Judge to blacklisting Maine governor: The lawsuit against your COVID jab mandate will continue

3:00 pm

Democrat Janet Mills, a proud dictator

A federal district court judge ruled last week that a lawsuit by seven former health employees in Maine can continue, dismissing the absurd argument by Maine’s Democrat governor, Janet Mills, that even though these employees were illegally denied a religious exemption and got fired for not getting the COVID jab, the harm they have endured no longer exists because Mills eventually stopped enforcing her mandate and will repeal it later this month.

The lawsuit in question — Alicia Lowe, et al., v. Janet Mills, et al. — alleges that the State of Maine violated healthcare workers’ First Amendment rights by refusing to allow a religious exemption to the vaccine mandate. The healthcare workers argue that healthcare facilities should have offered reasonable accommodations for employees who objected to the COVID-19 shots for religious reasons.

Because of Mills’ vaccine mandate, which specifically barred any religious exemption, healthcare facilities were unable to offer a testing option for employees. As a result of this, several healthcare workers were fired after requesting a religious exemption to the mandate. Some of those workers have now filed a lawsuit against both members of the state government and their employers.

You can read the judge’s ruling here [pdf]. » Read more

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Layered glaciers in two small Martian craters

11:19 am

Layered glaciers in two small Martian craters
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on April 7, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what planetary scientists label somewhat vaguely as “layered deposits,” because though the features inside both of these craters strongly resemble glacial ice features, until this is confirmed a good scientist remains skeptical.

I can be more bold, and call the layers glacial in both of these small and very shallow craters (less than a 100 feet deep). To explain this it is important to understand that the lighting and shadows make it hard to distinguish the high points of these layers. Based on the elevation data from MRO, the ground descends to the south, and the mesa in the southern half of each crater’s floor is actually far below the layers and material to the north.

This elevation data suggests that the layered material is surviving best against the crater’s northern interior wall, which at this latitude, about 36 degrees south, will be in shadow the most.
» Read more

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Ingenuity flies on, completing its 57th flight

10:06 am

Overview map
Click for interactive map

On September 3, 2023 Ingenuity successfully completed its 57th flight on Mars, traveling 713 feet for two minutes and nine seconds. As noted at the tweet at the link, the helicopter has now accumulated more than 100 minutes of flight time.

As it has on almost all its recent flights, the helicopter flew a slightly longer distance for slightly longer that its flight plan, probably because it was taking time to find a safe landing spot.

The green dot on the overview map above shows Ingenuity’s new location. It has moved west and north of Perseverance, following the rover’s planned route as indicated by the red dotted line. The blue dot marks Perseverance’s present location. The yellow lines indicate the approximate area of the mosaic below, just released by the Perseverance science team, taken on July 8, 2023 by the rover’s high resolution camera and cropped and reduced to post here. It shows us the rover’s eventual path forward, into that mountain gap.

Mosaic looking west at the rim of Jezero Crater
Click for original, full resolution image (a large file).

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MOXIE completes its last run on Mars, producing oxygen from the atmosphere

9:02 am

The MOXIE instrument on the rover Perseverance in Jezero Crater on Mars has completed its sixteenth and last operational run, once again demonstrating that oxygen can be extracted from the Martian atmosphere in sufficient quantities to supply a future colony of humans.

Since Perseverance landed on Mars in 2021, MOXIE has generated a total of 122 grams of oxygen – about what a small dog breathes in 10 hours. At its most efficient, MOXIE was able to produce 12 grams of oxygen an hour – twice as much as NASA’s original goals for the instrument – at 98% purity or better. On its 16th run, on Aug. 7, the instrument made 9.8 grams of oxygen. MOXIE successfully completed all of its technical requirements and was operated at a variety of conditions throughout a full Mars year, allowing the instrument’s developers to learn a great deal about the technology.

Future MOXIEs will likely be larger in scale, even more efficient, and include methods for liquifying and storing any oxygen produced, though for producing a breathable atmosphere for Martian colonists all that would be needed would be an enclosed habitat. An operating MOXIE-type oxygen generator could fill it.

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Targeted layoffs at Blue Origin

8:55 am

It appears that the upper management at Blue Origin has finally realized that a large Human Resource (HR) department contributes no real productive quality to a company, and in fact usually acts to reduce the company’s productive capabilities. According to reports from some company employees, it has begun to downsize this division.

Micah Thornton, a production control specialist at Blue Origin, wrote on LinkedIn that “several people from the Blue Origin Space Human Resource/Talent Acquisition team have been let go due to downsizing.” Several other employees wrote that they were laid off on Tuesday and are seeking new roles elsewhere.

This could be a very good sign for Blue Origin, or it could mean nothing. Other than periodically flying its reusable New Shepard suborbital spacecraft, the company’s main accomplishment since its formation more than two decades ago has been to establish a reputation as an unfocused operation unable to get its most important projects completed on time. Having a big HR department likely helps explain that history, and getting it reduced suggests management might be trying to get the company focused on its real mission.

Or not. HR employees are not engineers. Shifting them to other positions (which it appears the company is doing) simply rearranges the deck chairs on the Titanic.

We shall have to wait and see what transpires next. But then, that is all we have been doing in connection with Blue Origin for the past seven years.

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China’s Long March 4C rocket launches classified remote sensing satellite

5:15 pm

China’s three-stage Long March 4C rocket today (early morning on September 7th in China) successfully placed a classified remote sensing satellite into orbit, lifting off from China’s Jiuquan spaceport in the Gobi Desert.

This launch occurred prior to Japan’s H-2A launch, but I am only catching up with it now. As always, China’s state run press released little information, including where the first and second stages crashed inside China. All three stages of the Long March 4C use very toxic hypergolic fuels, so if those stages landed near habitable areas, there will be significant risk to bystanders.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

62 SpaceX
40 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

In the national rankings, American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 71 to 40. It also still leads the entire world combined, 71 to 65, while SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) only 62 to 65.

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Japan successfully launches XRISM X-ray space telescope and SLIM lunar lander

4:57 pm

SLIM's landing zone
Map showing SLIM landing zone on the Moon.
Click for interactive map.

Japan today (September 7th in Japan) successfully used its H-2A rocket to place both the XRISM X-ray space telescope and SLIM lunar lander into orbit.

As of posting XRISM has been successfully deployed. SLIM has not, as it needs to wait until after a second burn of the rocket’s upper stage about 40 minutes later. The map to the right shows SLIM’s landing target on the Moon, where it will attempt a precision landing within a zone about 300 feet across.

This was Japan’s second launch this year, so it does not get included in the leader board for the 2023 launch race:

62 SpaceX
39 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

In the national rankings, American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 71 to 39. It also still leads the entire world combined, 71 to 64, while SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) only 62 to 64.

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September 6, 2023 Quick space links

2:34 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

 

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Martian ice islands amidst a Martian ice ocean

12:18 pm

Glacier country on Mars
Glacier country on Mars

Martian ice islands in a Martian sea of ice
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 19, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The scientists simply labeled this “Deposit Layers,” but that description hardly covers the incredibly diverse and puzzling features within the picture. We see layers, swirls, and radiating groves, all suggesting glacial features. We see mesas apparently covered with ice, and a flat surrounding lower plain that appears to be also ice but acting more like an ocean or sea. If there is any visible bedrock at this location it is difficult to determine.

The dominance of ice features is not surprising however, considering the location. The red dot on the overview map above marks this location, in a large 80-by-56-mile-wide basin inside the 2,000-mile-long northern mid-latitude strip I dub glacier country, because almost every image from MRO shows distinct glacial features. This particular basin is considered part of the segmented and indistinct canyon dubbed Mamers Valles, that winds its way through this glacier country of chaos terrain to eventually drain into the northern lowland plains.

From a geologist’s perspective, however, the layers are the most significant feature in the picture, as those layers mark the innumerable climate cycles that have apparently shaped the Martian surface. Mapping those layers will likely involve decades of work, but when largely completed we shall have a very precise history of the red planet’s geological history, going back several billion years.

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Firefly wins three launch contract from L3Harris

9:25 am

Firefly today announced that the satellite company L3Harris has awarded it a three-launch contract as part of Space Force’s quick response satellite launch program.

Firefly will provide rapid launch capabilities for L3Harris to achieve direct access to low Earth orbit at a lower cost and support the responsive space needs of the U.S. government. The three missions will launch from Firefly’s SLC-2 launch site at the Vandenberg Space Force Base.

The missions are scheduled for 2026, which makes sense as Firefly has yet to make its Alpha rocket operational. It has attempted two launches, the first a failure and the second reaching orbit but at an altitude lower than planned. Its third attempt, also a rapid response launch for the Space Force, was officially declared ready for launch within 60 hours, anytime within the next six months when the Space Force demands it.

A side note: It has seemed to me that in 2023 the launch of new American rockets by launch startups has slowed considerably. Why this is occurring is likely the result of many factors. First, two companies (Astra and Relativity) have abandoned their first iteration of their rocket, and appear unready to launch again for several years, if ever. Second, we may be seeing evidence of the heavier regulatory fist under the Biden administration, making it more difficult for new rockets to get launch license approval.

Third, it appears investor enthusiasm for this new industry has cooled, partly because of the first two reasons above as well as the poor stock trends of the new rocket companies that went public.

It is also possible the slowdown is simply the normal fluctuation one sees in any new industry with a relatively small number of players. This could simply be a pause as they gear up for a string of new launches next year.

Only time will answer this question. Stay tuned.

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