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Curiosity produces new 360 degree hi-res panorama

9:50 am

360 degree hi-res panorama from Curiosity
Click for full resolution image.

The Curiosity science team has used the rover’s high resolution camera to produce a new 360 degree panorama, with the center of the image looking directly up at Navarro Mountain.

To get a really good idea of what this panorama shows, I have embedded below a video the scientists have produced giving a tour of the image, which reveals two especially interesting details. First, their future route will go between Navarro Mountain (the highest visible peak) and the 80-foot-high dark butte to its right. This is as planned, as indicated by the red dotted line on the overview map show in this July 8, 2021 post.

Second, the air was very clear when this panorama was taken, and so the rim of Gale Crater can be distinctly seen, 20 miles away.

» Read more

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Russian space junk hit Chinese satellite in March

9:16 am

It now appears that the partial breakup of a Chinese military satellite in March 2021 was caused when it collided with a piece of rocket space junk leftover from a 1996 Russian launch.

It appears that the object that hit the satellite was one of eight pieces left over in orbit from that Russian launch that have been tracked over the years, and was somewhere between 4 and 20 inches in size. The result of the collision?

Thirty-seven debris objects spawned by the smashup have been detected to date, and there are likely others that remain untracked, he added.

Despite the damage, Yunhai 1-02 apparently survived the violent encounter, which occurred at an altitude of 485 miles (780 kilometers). Amateur radio trackers have continued to detect signals from the satellite, McDowell said, though it’s unclear if Yunhai 1-02 can still do the job it was built to perform (whatever that may be).

According to the article, this was the first major orbital collision since 2009, though similar collisions are suspected in 2013 and 2015.

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Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon, any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

Zhurong completes its planned 90-day mission on Mars

8:54 am

China’s state-run press announced today that its Mars rover Zhurong has successfully completed its planned 90-day mission, is operating without issues, and will continue its exploration of the Red Planet.

The rover has traveled 889 meters as of Aug. 15, and its scientific payloads have collected about 10 Gb of raw data. Now the rover runs stably and operates in good condition with sufficient energy. The CNSA added that the rover will continue to move to the boundary zone between the ancient sea and the ancient land in the southern part of Utopia Planitia and will carry out additional tasks.

According to the administration, Zhurong operated with a cycle of seven days during its exploration and detection. Its navigation terrain camera obtained topographic data along the way to support the rover’s path planning and detection target selection.

Zhurong’s subsurface detection radar acquired the data of the layered structure below the Martian surface, which analyzes the shallow surface structure and explores the possible underground water and ice. [emphasis mine]

This announcement reveals two tantalizing details. First, they are extending the mission, and plan to continue traveling to the south, with a very long term fantasy goal of reaching the transition zone between the northern lowland plains that Zhurong landed in and the southern cratered highlands. That fantasy goal is about 250 miles away. At the pace Zhurong is traveling, about 1,000 feet per month, it will take about a 100 years to cover that ground. Even so, as they move south they are slowly going up hill, and have the chance of seeing some change in the geology along the way.

The second tantalizing detail is indicated by the highlighted last sentence, and is probably the most important data obtained by Zhurong. It suggests they obtained good data from the rover’s ground penetrating radar, and it indicated the existence of underground layers. Whether those layers contain ice however is not clear. From the story it appears the data has not yet been analyzed enough to say.

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Conscious Choice cover

Now available in hardback and paperback as well as ebook!

 

From the press release: In this ground-breaking new history of early America, historian Robert Zimmerman not only exposes the lie behind The New York Times 1619 Project that falsely claims slavery is central to the history of the United States, he also provides profound lessons about the nature of human societies, lessons important for Americans today as well as for all future settlers on Mars and elsewhere in space.

 
Conscious Choice: The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today and for our future in outer space, is a riveting page-turning story that documents how slavery slowly became pervasive in the southern British colonies of North America, colonies founded by a people and culture that not only did not allow slavery but in every way were hostile to the practice.  
Conscious Choice does more however. In telling the tragic history of the Virginia colony and the rise of slavery there, Zimmerman lays out the proper path for creating healthy societies in places like the Moon and Mars.

 

“Zimmerman’s ground-breaking history provides every future generation the basic framework for establishing new societies on other worlds. We would be wise to heed what he says.” —Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society.

 

All editions are available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all book vendors, with the ebook priced at $5.99 before discount. All editions can also be purchased direct from the ebook publisher, ebookit, in which case you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.

 

Autographed printed copies are also available at discount directly from the author (hardback $29.95; paperback $14.95; Shipping cost for either: $6.00). Just send an email to zimmerman @ nasw dot org.

Lacy patterns in the high north of Mars

12:27 pm

lacy patterns in the high north of Mars

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped, reduced, and rotated so that north is up, was taken on May 12, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the strange lacy patterns seen routinely in the very high northern latitudes surrounding the Martian north pole.

Located in a region of the vast northern lowland plains dubbed Scandia Tholi, such features are apparently common here. From a 2011 geology paper of the region’s geological history:

We find that Scandia Tholi display concentric ridges, rugged peaks, irregular depressions, and moats that suggest uplift and tilting of layered plains material by diapirs and extrusion, erosion, and deflation of viscous, sedimentary slurries as previously suggested. These appear to be long-lived features that both pre-date and post-date impact craters.

The small circular feature near the bottom of the picture appears to be a mesa, and might be a pedestal crater, so old that the surrounding terrain has worn away and left the hardened-by-impact crater as a butte. To its right is a larger circular mesa with its scarp well eroded into hollows. This might also be a pedestal crater, or not.

The white lacy patterns could be frost, either water ice or dry ice. That the white lace tends to favor the north-facing slopes lends support to this guess. The photo was taken in the early spring, so the thin mantle of carbon dioxide that falls to cover the polar region south to sixty degrees latitude is only beginning to sublimate away.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Big time comic book artist and screenwriter Frank Miller banned from British comic convention

11:28 am

Banned: Artist and screenwriter Frank Miller
Banned: Comic book artist and movie screenwriter Frank Miller

Genocide is coming: Frank Miller, well known comic book artist and the screenwriter of several major Hollywood movies, was banned from a British comic convention recently because fifteen years earlier — only a few years after the destruction of the World Trade Center and during the American effort to defeat the Islamic terrorist organization al-Qaeda — Miller had penned a comic book whose main character fought those terrorists.

And what prompted Miller’s banning by the convention, dubbed the Thought Bubble festival? Apparently, it received a single complaint from one very unknown Islamic cartoonist.

Miller was dropped after Zainab Akhtar, whom The Mix describes as an “award-winning cartoonist and small press publisher ShortBox founder,” said that she would “no longer be attending Thought Bubble festival this November” because Miller was set to be there. Akhtar explained: “As a proud Muslim woman, I cannot in good conscience attend a festival that deems it appropriate to invite and platform Frank Miller, a person who is responsible for the propagation of abhorrent anti-Muslim hate, particularly via his work.”

Akhtar in her complaint never actually cites any specific examples of Miller’s anti-Muslim hate, thus forcing everyone to guess what Miller’s specific crime might be. The only possible example is that earlier work, which very specifically attacked a terrorist group, not all of Islam.

But then, for the oppressive left, which includes radical Islamists like Akhtar, any criticism of their allies or agenda must always be labeled as “racist.”

As usual, what makes this story most appalling is the obsequiousness of the convention management, which immediately bowed to Akhtar’s slanderous complaint, begging forgiveness in the most cowardly way.
» Read more

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Leaving Earth cover

Leaving Earth: Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel, can be purchased as an ebook everywhere for only $3.99 (before discount) at amazon, Barnes & Noble, all ebook vendors, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.

 

If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big oppressive tech companies and I get a bigger cut much sooner.

 

Winner of the 2003 Eugene M. Emme Award of the American Astronautical Society.

 
"Leaving Earth is one of the best and certainly the most comprehensive summary of our drive into space that I have ever read. It will be invaluable to future scholars because it will tell them how the next chapter of human history opened." -- Arthur C. Clarke

Saturn’s core is a slushy mix of rocks and liquid

9:31 am

Saturn's rings
Click for more information.

Using archival data from the Cassini orbiter that mapped ripples in the rings of Saturn, scientists have produced a model of Saturn’s core that suggests it is a slushy soup that as it sloshes about shifts the gas giant’s gravitational field.

By using the famous rings like a seismograph, scientists studied processes in the planet’s interior and determined that its core must be “fuzzy.” Instead of a solid sphere like Earth’s, the core of Saturn appears to consist of a ‘soup’ of rocks, ice and metallic fluids that slosh around and affect the planet’s gravity.

…Not only does the planet’s core seem sludgy, it also appears to extend across 60% of the planet’s diameter, making it much larger than previously estimated. The analysis showed that Saturn’s core might be about 55 times as massive as the entire planet Earth. Of the total mass of the core, 17 Earth masses are made of ice and rock, with the rest consisting of a hydrogen and helium-based fluid, the study suggests.

The image above was taken in 2017, and shows both a density wave in the rings (the parallel lines in the center) caused by a Saturn moon, and numerous “propellers”, small distortions in the rings caused by slightly larger objects.

4 comments

Ingenuity’s 12th flight successful

9:15 am

Ingenuity's shadow just before landing.

According to the Perseverance science team, the Mars helicopter Ingenuity successfully completed its twelfth flight on Mars early yesterday, making a short scouting round trip over an area called South Seitah to provide images that the team can use to plan the rover’s future route.

All told, Ingenuity flew just under 1,500 feet flying about 30 feet above the ground for just under three minutes. The picture to the right was taken just before landing, and shows the helicopter’s shadow on the ground. It is one of six so far downloaded. The remaining images will follow later.

The announcement was made on Twitter, and included some embarrassingly over-the-top prose:

The #MarsHelicopter’s latest flight took us to the geological wonder that is the “South Séítah” region.

South Seitah is hardly a “geological wonder”. It is a sandy area with some rocks and interesting geology.

I’m not sure why, but the Perseverance rover team seems prone to do this with their press releases and announcements. The claim they make over and over that Perseverance’s prime mission is to look for ancient life is junk Now they call a relatively undistinguished and small area on a crater floor a “wonder.”

Makes one think they somehow feel a need to justify what they are doing, something that is patently absurd. They are controlling a robotic rover and helicopter tens of millions of miles away as both explore a place on another planet no one had ever visited before. That certainly is spectacular enough, and does not need purple prose to justify.

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Blue Origin files lawsuit against Starship lunar contract award

8:40 am

What a joke: Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin on August 13th filed a lawsuit in federal court, attempting to overthrow the contract award NASA gave SpaceX’s Starship in its manned lunar lander Artemis project

In a court filing on Friday, Blue Origin said it continued to believe that two providers were needed to build the landing system, which will carry astronauts down to the Moon’s surface as early as 2024. It also accused Nasa of “unlawful and improper evaluation” of its proposals during the tender process. “We firmly believe that the issues identified in this procurement and its outcomes must be addressed to restore fairness, create competition and ensure a safe return to the Moon for America,” Blue Origin said.

The article then goes on to list the basic facts that make this lawsuit absurd. First, NASA had not been appropriated enough money by Congress to award two contracts, and had it done so, it would have violated the law. Second SpaceX’s bid was the lowest bid, far less than Blue Origin’s expensive price. Third, SpaceX was already test flying early prototypes of its Starship lander, while Blue Origin had built nothing. Fourth, many other technical issues made SpaceX’s bid superior.

Finally, the GAO, as an independent arbitrator, has already ruled against a Blue Origin protest, stating unequivocally that NASA had done nothing wrong in its contract process.

This lawsuit makes Blue Origin appear to be a very unserious company. Rather than putting its energies towards building rockets and spacecraft to demonstrate its capabilities, it focuses its effort on playing legal games in the courts. Such behavior will only make it seem less appealling when next it bids on a NASA or Space Force contract.

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Arianespace’s Vega rocket successfully launches five satellites

8:54 pm

Capitalism in space: Arianespace’s Vega rocket today successfully launched five satellites into orbit, completing the company’s third launch in 2021 and the second Vega launch this year.

With only three launches so far in 2021, Arianespace does not make the leader board, which is presently as follows:

26 China
20 SpaceX
12 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman

The U.S.’s lead over China in the national rankings remains 31 to 26.

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Regional Martian dust storms help suck water from Mars

2:55 pm

Orbital data now shows that both global and regional dust storms on Mars help remove the planet’s water, allowing it to reach higher atmospheric elevations where solar radiation breaks it up and it escapes into space.

Scientists have long suspected that Mars, once warm and wet like Earth, has lost most of its water largely through this process, but they didn’t realize the significant impact of regional dust storms, which happen nearly every summer in the planet’s southern hemisphere. Globe-enveloping dust storms that strike typically every three to four Martian years were thought to be the main culprits, along with the hot summer months in the southern hemisphere when Mars is closer to the Sun.

But the Martian atmosphere also gets heated during smaller, regional dust storms, according to a new paper published August 16 in the journal Nature Astronomy. The researchers, an international team led by Chaffin, found that Mars loses double the amount of water during a regional storm as it does during a southern summer season without regional storms.

This conclusion is based on data gathers from three different orbiters during a regional dust storm in early 2019.

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A Martian river of ice

12:59 pm

Glacial flow on Mars?
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on May 13, 2021 by the high resolution camea on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It spans the entire 4.7 mile width of the southern hemisphere canyon dubbed Reull Vallis. The white arrow indicates the direction of the downhill grade

The scientists title this image “Lineated Valley Fill.” The vagueness of this title is because they have not yet confirmed that this lineated valley fill is a glacier flowing downhill to the west.

Nonetheless, the material filling this valley has all the features one expects glaciers to exhibit. Not only is the the lineation aligned with the flow, it varies across the width of the canyon as glaciers normally do. At the edge the parallel grooves are depressed, probably because they are torn apart by the canyon walls as the glacier flows past. In turn, at the center of the flow the grooves are thinner and more tightly packed, and appear less disturbed. Here, the flow is smooth, less bothered by surrounding features.

This pattern also suggests the merging of two flows somewhere upstream.

A glance at the spectacular Concordia glacier in the Himalayas near the world’s second highest mountain, K2, illustrates the similarity of this Martian feature to Earth glaciers.

Reull Vallis itself flows down to Hellas Basin, the deepest basin on Mars. As it meanders downhill along its 650 mile length it steadily gets wider and less distinct as it drops into Hellas. Along its entire length MRO has photographed numerous similar examples of this lineated fill, all suggesting that under a thin layer of debris is a thick glacier, slowerly carving this canyon out.

The overview map below illustrates these facts nicely, while further reinforcing these glacial conclusions.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Illinois University now proudly discriminating according to race

12:15 pm

The Civil Rights Act of 1964: repealed the University of Illinois
The Civil Rights Act of 1964: Doesn’t exist at the University of Illinois

Genocide is coming to America: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has established a mentoring program, with financial rewards, that expressly discriminates against Asians and whites (unless the whites happen to have Latin American genes).

From the program’s own webpage:

[W]e are pleased to launch the Milliman Mentorship Program, an actuarial mentorship program for students of underrepresented minorities (Black, Latino, Native American) at the University of Illinois.

…This program is currently targeted towards students of color, early in their college career, who may be interested in a STEM-oriented career.

The webpage then lists the benefits, including financial support and additional free mentoring assistence.

As noted at the Campus Reform article at the first link, this is clearly a violation of numerous civil rights laws.
» Read more

8 comments

China, politics, and space

11:17 am

This interesting essay today describing China’s space policy and its ramifications for the United States found this most significant quote from a Chinese official:

A senior official with the CNSA’s lunar program has been reported by the Daily Beast as saying the moon and Mars (and presumably myriad other rocks out there) are the equivalent of the islands in strategic locations in the Indo-Pacific region that China contests with Japan and other countries:

The universe is an ocean, the moon is the Diaoyu Islands, Mars is Huangyan Island. If we don’t go there now even though we’re capable of doing so, then we will be blamed by our descendants. If others go there, then they will take over, and you won’t be able to go even if you want to. This is reason enough.

The fact the CCP views real estate in the solar system the same way as real estate on Earth is both instructive and amusing.

I don’t find this Chinese attitude amusing in the least. It suggests quite starkly China’s intention to claim all the land it occupies in space, in direct violation of the Outer Space Treaty. Unlike the western nations, it doesn’t care that under that treaty’s restrictions, it can’t provide property rights to its citizens. It will possess everything it gets in space, for itself.

All the more reason for the U.S. to push for the Artemis Accords, which China rejects, as those accords bypass the restrictions of the Outer Space Treaty and make property rights possible in western space settlements. In the end, every nation that establishes a base or colony in space is going to claim it, notwithstanding the Outer Space Treaty, so establishing a framework for U.S. law in those colonies is essential. The accords are a first step in doing so.

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Georgian election official resigns who announced fake water main break

10:01 am

Georgia Fulton County elections chief Ralph Jones has suddenly resigned.

Jones was the man who shuttered the official count at the State Farm Arena in Fulton County on election night in November 2020, claiming falsely to reporters that a water main had broken. Everyone was sent home, the count supposedly suspended for the night.

Surveillance cameras at the arena however continued to record his actions. Jones then joined a handful of election officials to pull boxes of ballots from under a table and continue their private count, with no independent observers on hand. The videos also appear to show these election officials illegally running the same ballots through the computer tabulators repeatedly.

At the moment we do not know which candidate those ballots were for, but Fulton County is essentially Atlanta, a city entirely controlled by the Democratic Party. Like most such cities, election boards are heavily dominated by Democrats, because it is so hard to find Republicans to serve. Want to bet that a forensic audit would discover that those ballots were all for Biden, and were also manufactured falsely?

The audit ongoing in Fulton County is finding strong evidence that this supposition is true, and that these ballots were fake and designed to steal the election in Georgia for Biden.

Jones’ resignation now, during this audit, appears to confirm these allegations.

7 comments

Ingenuity’s next flight

1:17 pm

Ingenuity's flight plane for 12th flight
Click for full image.

The Ingenuity engineering team today announced their plans for the helicopter’s twelfth flight on Mars, scheduled for early tomorrow.

Ingenuity will climb to an altitude of 10 meters and fly approximately 235 meters east-northeast toward the area of interest in Séítah. Once there, the helicopter will make a 5-meter “sidestep” in order to get side-by-side images of the surface terrain suitable to construct a stereo, or 3D, image. Then, while keeping the camera in the same direction, Ingenuity will backtrack, returning to the same area from where it took off. Over the course of the flight, Ingenuity will capture 10 color images that we hope will help the Perseverance science team determine which of all the boulders, rocky outcrops and other geologic features in South Séítah may be worthy of further scrutiny by the rover.

The map above shows South Seitah in the yellow oval. The yellow line marks Ingenuity’s past flights. The white line marks the path Perseverance has taken south since landing. The dashed lines mark Perseverance’s planned route.

Thus, the helicopter will be obtaining aerial photos of the region in Seitah where the scientists want to send Perseverance, in order to help them pick the best route.

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One Voice Children’s Choir – America the Beautiful

6:01 pm

An evenig pause: Man, do these kids belt this out.

This was once a standard that all kids sang in school. I doubt they teach it anymore. Even when they did, they would rarely make the meaning of the lyrics very clear (Read them all, they are quite profound). Consider for example the most well know first chorus:

America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

It asks for God’s grace, demands goodness from us all, for the sake of brotherhood.. I’ll take that aspiration any day over the modern hateful, diversive Marxist ideologies of critical race theory that strives to tear people apart and instill distrust and racial bigotry.

Hat tip Dan Morris.

4 comments

Today’s blacklisted Americans: Farm banned from farmers market because owners are Christian

1:36 pm

Country Mills Farms-banned!
The Tennes are a normal family! We must blacklist them!

They’re coming for you next: A Michigan farmer was banned from a local farmers market by the city government of East Lansing because the owners, Steve and Bridget Tennes, are Christian and had publicly stated their opposition to homosexual marriage.

The ban against their business, Country Mill Farms, was begun in 2016. Though a court quickly ruled that it was unconstitutional, the city renewed the ban in 2018 and has maintained it since, claiming the court’s ruling only applied to the 2017 season.

The logic of the East Lansing government is actually quite blatent: It believes it has the right to dictate what others can or cannot say in public, the first amendment be damned.

[C]ity officials asserted that the Tennes’ expression conflicted with East Lansing’s marriage views and its new market policy. The policy requires vendors to agree to comply with the city’s “Human Relations Ordinance and its public policy against discrimination while at the market and as a general business practice.”

It’s illegal for anyone to “make a statement which indicates that an individual’s patronage or presence at a place of public accommodation is unwelcome or unacceptable because of sexual orientation, gender identity, or expression…” among other designated classes. [emphasis mine]

In other words, East Lansing wants to forbid any dissent to the modern and very perverse sexual movement. You will not be allowed to disagree, under any condition. And if you try, you will be blackballed, censored, and squashed, as is the right of our all-knowing government.

Stalin would be proud. So would Hitler, Mussolini, and all past despots who liked killing people who disagreed with them.
» Read more

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Curiosity looks backwards

12:40 pm

Curiosity panorama looking southeast
Click for full resolution version. For original images go here and here.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The mosaic above was created from two photos taken on August 13, 2021 by Curiosity’s right navigation camera. It looks to the southeast, at the mountainous Martian terrain that the rover had been traveling just below for the past two months.

The overview map to the right shows with the yellow lines the approximate area covered by this mosaic. The white mountain at the top is the highest visible flank of Mount Sharp, and is beyond the right/bottom edge of the overview map. Mt. Sharp’s peak itself is not visible, as it is higher up and to the right. It is presently blocked by these mountainous foothills.

The science team probably took this image partly to provide another view of these mountains for comparison with earlier views. They can use this new data to look for changes as well as obtain better three-dimensional data.

They also took the image for the same reason I post it here. Having now climbed more than 1,500 feet from the floor of Gale Crater, Curiosity’s view is routinely spectactular. Why not enjoy it?

Mt. Sharp’s peak however is still about 13,000 feet above the rover. The climb up the mountain has just begun.

14 comments

Boeing to return Starliner to factory

11:11 am

Capitalism in space: According to a Wall Street Journal story today, Boeing and NASA have decided to remove the Starliner capsule from the Atlas-5 rocket and return it to Boeing’s factory in order to do a more thorough inverstigation into the capsule’s failing valves.

This decision means that the launch of the second unmanned demo test flight of Starliner will not occur in August, and will likely be delayed several more months. NASA and Boeing just held a press conference in which they made this decision official. During that conference they said they think the moist environment at Kennedy might have caused corrosion in the valves, which caused them to stick.

I once again wonder if Boeing has any quality control systems at all. For such a serious problem — the failure of 13 valves out of 24 — to suddenly pop up just hours before launch, when they have been developing this capsule for years, and even had an extra year and a half to check the capsule out after the failures during the first unmanned demo flight in December 2019, is somewhat astonishing, and very disturbing.

Others will argue that problems like this can always appear unexpectedly in space hardware. I say hogwash. Boeing is not inventing something new with Starliner. This is a capsule, using heritage engineering first invented in the late 1950s. It should not be so hard to get this right.

57 comments

South Korean company invests $300 million in OneWeb

10:51 am

Capitalism in space: Hanwah, a South Korean conglomerate, has now invested $300 million in private capital in the satellite communications company OneWeb.

U.K.-headquartered OneWeb expects regulatory approvals to complete the Hanwha transaction in the first half of 2022, bringing its total investment since emerging from bankruptcy protection in November to $2.7 billion. The startup has said it only needed $2.4 billion to fund its initial constellation of 648 satellites in low Earth orbit.

It reached that in June, after Indian telecom company Bharti Global doubled its investment to $1 billion to secure what would have been a 38.6% stake before Hanwha’s announcement. The U.K. government, French satellite operator Eutelsat and Japanese internet giant Softbank were each in line for just under 20% after making their own investments. U.S.-based Hughes Network Systems, which is supplying parts for OneWeb’s ground segment, also had a small stake.

Hanwha also wishes to build its own 2,000 satellite constellation, targeted for operation by 2030. This investment gives it access to OneWeb’s technology which it can later use.

For OneWeb, this new capital solidifies its full recovery from bankruptcy, and makes it a very viable competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink constellation.

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Russians accuse American astronaut of drilling hole in Soyuz

10:41 am

In several articles published today in the state-run Russian press, the Russians made the accusation that the hole and drilling damage that had been found on an in-orbit Soyuz capsule was put there by an American astronaut.

The first link above notes that while the Russians took a lie detector test, showing they didn’t drill the hole, the Americans refused. A second TASS link argues that their investigation proves that all the drill damage had to been done in orbit, for two reasons. First, they always test the capsule’s intergrity in a vacuum chamber before launch, and would have discovered it then. Second, the nature of the drill damage suggests it was done in zero gravity.

A third link provides an English translation of the more detailed Russian report, which made this direct accusation:

Firstly, the illness of the female astronaut, which is the first known incident of deep vein thrombosis in orbit, and the fact that Serena Maria Auñón-Chancellor had suffered the condition was published in a scientific article only after she had returned to Earth. This could have provoked ‘an acute psychological crisis’, which could have led to attempts by various means to speed up her return to the planet, according to my anonymous source. Secondly, for some reason unknown to Roscosmos, the video camera at the junction of the Russian and American segments was not working at that time. Thirdly, the Americans refused to perform a polygraph examination, while the Russian cosmonauts were polygraphed. Fourthly, Russia never had an opportunity to study the tools and the drill which are aboard the ISS to see if there are any signs of metal shavings from the hull of our ship’s orbital module.

This longer article also makes the claim that, because of the location of some of the drill attempts, whoever did drilling had no knowledge of the Soyuz’s construction.

All this may be true, but it conveniently ignores several very important facts: The one successful drillhole that caused the leak had been patched, which would have prevented any leak during the vacuum tests on the ground. The leak occurred because the patch was not designed to survive the hostile environment of space and eventually failed.

Also, the Russians’ own investigation had found that there was plenty of time on the ground for this sabotage to have occurred, so saying it had to have happened in space is incorrect.

Finally, the claim that the drill damage had to have been done in zero gravity is pure opinion, and hardly evidence.

In other words, it sounds as if the Russians are trying to shift blame from themselves (and an unknown ground worker) to an American astronaut. It is certainly possible that their claims are true, but they seem incredibly implausible. Much more likely would be sabotage on the ground by a very disgruntled Russian worker, routinely underpaid and resentful of the corruption that permeates Roscosmos and all of Russian society.

Such a conclusion however would be beyond embarrassing for the Putin government and the head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin. It is far better to place the blame on an American, especially because the end of the U.S.-Russian partnership on ISS is only a few years away.

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Branson sells more than ten million shares of Virgin Galactic

10:07 am

Capitalism ?in? space? Continuing his steady off-loading of Virgin Galactic stock since the company went public, Richard Branson has sold another 10.5 million shares, lowering his steadily shrinking ownership share another 4% to 18% total.

The sale garnered him $300 million in cash.

When the company went public in 2019, Branson reserved for himself 51% ownership. Since then he has periodically sold off large chunks, usually well timed to specifically planned events that worked to pump up the stock’s price. This last sale obviously was planned to take advantage of the publicity following Branson’s own suborbital flight in July.

While Virgin Galactic might have a future in suborbital space tourism, I remain very skeptical. It certainly does not have a future in the larger orbital market, as it has no experience building real rockets (Virgin Orbit was spun off this company years ago, taking with it all that experience). Thus, the company has very limited possibilities. As the orbital market grows and becomes dominant, I can’t see there being that much long term interest in short suborbital hops.

I think Branson agrees with me, which is why he is getting out when the getting is good. That he is following the classic and very corrupt method of “pump and dump” only solidifies my belief that he is an outright con-man.

That the mainstream press continues to genuflect before him only tells us how corrupt and incompetent that press has become.

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A chain of Martian sinkholes

3:19 pm

Chain of sinkholes 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 17, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a somewhat straight depression with several wider and deeper pits along it.

The feature immediately suggests sinkholes that exist because the ground is sagging into voids below ground. Yet, both the straight and circular depressions also appear filled, showing no evidence that they connect to any below ground cavities.

Are the sinks the result of a fissure produced by a graben, when two large blocks shift relative to each other to cause a fissure to appear? Or are they evidence of an underground lava tube? Or maybe they are the filled remains of a now mostly buried canyon carved by water or ice?

As always, a wider view helps clarify things, though whether it answers the question is uncertain.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Leftist activist group wants Fox News banned

1:04 pm

Fox News: Banned!

Blacklists are back and the Democrats have got ’em: A leftist activist veterans group aligned closely with the Democratic Party has begun a campaign to get Fox News banned from all military bases.

The group VoteVets, which works to elect liberal veterans to public office, took specific aim at controversial Fox News personality Tucker Carlson. Mr. Carlson has been at odds with Pentagon leaders in recent months after segments in which he seemed to suggest the U.S. military has become more concerned with diversity and political correctness than winning wars.

But the VoteVets petition steered clear of those issues. Instead, it took aim at Mr. Carlson‘s ambivalent comments about COVID-19 vaccines and specifically blasted a recent segment in which the Fox host said that Democrats want to make life difficult for the unvaccinated.

Essentially, this Democratic Party political organization wants to ban on military bases the speech of anyone who might express skepticism about any policy put forth by that party.

And why not? This tactic by Democrats and their ilk — of blacklisting and silencing their opponents — has been working like a dream. They are finding that Americans are afraid of them, and are willing to meet their every demand in order to avoid being attacked themselves.
» Read more

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The number of new smallsat rocket startups continues to grow

9:31 am

Capitalism in space: According to a new annual report, the number of new smallsat rocket startups that have been proposed continues to grow, though the number presently in actual development or operation declined slightly in the past year.

That total has grown to 155 vehicles, he said, ranging from 10 vehicles in operation to several dozen that have gone defunct since the survey started in 2015, when about 30 vehicles were included. “I was really expecting to see a slowdown in the number of new launch vehicles that we were seeing coming out of the woodwork in the last few years,” he said during a conference session Aug. 11. “It turns out that slowdown has not happened at all.”

There have been some changes in the industry, though. He found the number of vehicles in active development declined slightly from last year, to 48, with a decrease as well in the number of vehicle concepts on a “watch” list that have not yet entered active development. More than 40 vehicles are now classified as defunct, about 10 more than last year. “This is not surprising given the challenges of getting one of these vehicles fielded,” he said.

The U.S. has the most smallsat startups in development, 22, but China has the most that the report defines as operational, six of ten. This last number should change considerably if the planned launches of six or so American smallsat rocket startups occur as promised in the next six months.

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China to fly asteroid sample mission in ’24

9:19 am

The new colonial movement: Chinese scientists have revealed that China is now building an asteroid sample mission to launch in ’24 and grab samples in ’25 from the near Earth asteroid dubbed Kamoʻoalewa.

According to a correspondence in Nature Astronomy, there are two typical approaches to sampling asteroids like Kamoʻoalewa, namely anchor-and-attach and touch-and-go.

The former requires delicate and dangerous interactions with the planetary body but allows more controllable sampling and more chances for surface analysis. The latter, used by Hayabusa 2 and OSIRIS-Rex, is a quick interaction facilitated by advanced navigation, guidance and control and fine control of thrusters.

China’s mission will use both architectures in order to “guarantee that at least one works.” The paper states that there is “still no successful precedent for the anchor-and-attach architecture,” meaning a possible deep space first. A 2019 presentation reveals that China’s spacecraft will attempt to land on the asteroid using four robotic arms, with a drill on the end of each for anchoring.

The attempt to do both these approaches is audacious, especially because the evidence from both OSIRIS-REx and Hayabusa-2 is that it will be difficult to safely land and hold onto a rubble pile asteroid. The material is too loosely held together.

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