Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman

Have these Martian dunes changed in sixteen years?

January 31, 2024 1:57 pm Robert Zimmerman

Comparing two MRO images taken 16 years apart
Click here and here for the original images.

Overview map

Cool image time! The two pictures above, both rotated, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to match and to post here, were taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) sixteen years apart. The first, on the left, was taken on February 23, 2007, while the second, on the right, was taken on November 1, 2023.

What drew me to both images was the label for the second: “Dune Change in Arabia Region Crater.” To find out if this image had revealed any changes in the dunes I went back and found the earliest MRO picture of this location, and sized and enhanced the dunes in both to match.

Do you see any changes? I don’t. However, that really means nothing. These are not the highest resolution versions that MRO obtains, and a very careful comparison of those best images might detect more subtle changes than our eyes can perceive in the versions above. Also, there might be brightness changes that require careful software analysis.

The white dot on the overview map to the right marks the location, in Arabia Terra, the largest transition region on Mars between the northern lowland plains and the southern cratered highlands. The inset shows the half filled crater in which these dunes sit. The grayed area on the floor of the crater marks the entire dune field, extending eastward to the crater rim from this one spot, indicated by the black dot.

It is likely that the dust is blown into this crater and gets trapped there. Whether the dunes move or change is not clear, though if they do the changes are small, even after almost two decades. Instead, the two pictures suggest these dunes have hardened into a form of sandstone, that can be eroded over time by the wind, but only very very slowly.

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Shoddy Harvard — home of plagiarism and bigotry — loses another big donor

January 31, 2024 12:52 pm Robert Zimmerman

Harvard: where you get can get a shoddy education centered on hate and bigotry
Harvard: where you can spend a lot of money
getting a shoddy education teaching hate and bigotry

One of Harvard’s biggest donors, Ken Griffin, has announced that he is pausing all further donations to the university due to its now obviously shoddy educational standards combined with its advocacy of racial quotas under its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion program.

Griffin announced his decision to stop donating to Harvard during a keynote talk at a conference hosted by the Managed Funds Association in Miami. Griffin, however, left open the possibility that the University could win back his support. “I’d like that to change and I have made that clear to members of the corporate board,” he said. “But until Harvard makes it very clear that they’re going to resume their role as educating young American men and women to be leaders, to be problem solvers, to take on difficult issues, I’m not interested in supporting the institution.”

He added that Harvard students were “whiny snowflakes” caught in a misguided ideology of oppressor and oppressed during his remarks.

Griffin also stated that his companies will hire no students who signed a group letter that expressed support for Hamas’ rape, torture, and massacre of more than 1,400 Israelis on October 7, 2023.

Griffin has donated more than half a billion to Harvard in recent years, including a $300 million donation to Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences last year.

He is also not the first billionaire to announce a boycott of Harvard. In November Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager and Harvard alumni, released a long letter condemning the university’s former president Claudine Gay for allowing anti-Semitism to fester at the school. Like Griffin, he is apparently withholding further donations while refusing to hire students. Ackman has since repeatedly harangued Harvard in public for its refusal to take any serious reform actions.

Then in December billionaire Leonard Blavatnik stopped his own donations, also because he was appalled by the uinversity’s willingness to allow anti-Semitism to run rampant on campus.

These three men combined had previously donated almost a billion dollars total to the university. One would think their boycott would carry profound weight, and force some immediate changes at Harvard.

Don’t bet on it. » Read more

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Scientists: No obvious ice in the permanently-shadowed interior of Shackleton Crater

January 31, 2024 10:59 am Robert Zimmerman

Click for original image.

Using the low-light image produced by the American Shadowcam instrument on South Korea’s lunar orbiter Danuri, scientists now belief that there are no thick obvious deposits of water ice in in the permanently-shadowed interior of Shackleton Crater at the Moon’s south pole.

The image to the right combines pictures taken by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) of the region around Shackleton with pictures produced by Shadowcam of its permanently-shadowed interior. From their paper’s conclusion:

The trailing (right) side of Shackleton’s interior is warmer owing to the secondary illumination asymmetry and floor topography. Illumination at the floor of Shackleton is patchy and possibly indicates a similar patchy (50 m scale) temperature distribution, which could mean a spatially irregular concentration of cold-trapped volatiles at the subsurface or mixed with regolith.

According to our Shackleton crater interior mapping from ShadowCam images, there is no observed evidence of thick ice deposits or surface ice that could be easily recognized by any relative brightness features observed in multiple illumination geometries. However, this analysis did not include the estimation of reflectance, nor did it involve reviewing all of the images of Shackleton in this preliminary study. Our hypothesis, in the context of water frost detections in Shackleton, is that if ice or frost is present in Shackleton’s interior, then the concentrations are either below the threshold that results in an observable signature in ShadowCam images, or might be mixed with the regolith at the detected areas. At other places where surface temperatures are below 110K, water frost could be hidden in subsurface layers.

The paper’s main purpose was to identify the dim lighting sources within the crater, all of which come from light bouncing off other surfaces. In the process the scientists obtained a better understanding of the surface itself.

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Pentagon in discussions with SpaceX about buying a Starship outright for military missions

January 31, 2024 9:49 am Robert Zimmerman

The Pentagon is negotiating with SpaceX the idea that in certain cases where it deems it legally necessary it will buy outright full ownership of a SpaceX Starship/Superheavy launch rocket in order to fly some military missions.

The idea is similar to how the Air Force moves cargo. At times, the service contracts with private carriers to deliver cargo, but for certain critical missions it uses service “gray tail” aircraft. In this hypothetical case, the military could take a Starship off the line for a specific mission and return it to SpaceX after it is complete.

I suspect such situations involve very risky wartime missions that carry liabilities that a private company cannot accept. The military takes over ownership, relieving the company of risk, and then returns ownership afterward. Such a plan requires the company to agree to it, and the military to pay extra for these temporary rights. According to the article at the link, SpaceX is presently exploring its options.

That the Pentagon is discussing this with SpaceX at all tells us that it sees Starship/Superheavy as having a lot of value. It wants to buy its services, one way or the other.

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Tank explosion in Shanghai injured three

January 31, 2024 9:38 am Robert Zimmerman

The supposed test-to-tank failure of a rocket tank being tested by the Chinese pseudo-company Landspace on January 29, 2024 apparently injured three workers, though officials also claimed everything worked as planned.

Three workers were injured and nearby residents reported that “a huge boom” shook their windows during testing of a LandSpace rocket fuel tank in Shanghai on Monday evening. The Chinese start-up – which last year beat its rivals, including US-based SpaceX, to launch Zhuque-2, the world’s first methane-fuelled rocket, into orbit – said there were no abnormalities during the test.

A LandSpace representative told local media on Tuesday that the test “left some glass damaged and three production personnel with minor scratches”. The company and the district government said no explosion occurred.

This explosion was reported on X by nearby residents earlier this week (see the quick links here and here), with no confirmation from the pseudo-company. Even now it is being very coy about what it is telling us. An anonymous source at the link says the test filled the tank with nitrogen, and was intended “to establish the tank’s limits.”

No one however should have gotten injured during such a test, if everything took place as planned.

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Private company in India aims to build its own manned capsule and astronaut training facility

January 31, 2024 9:27 am Robert Zimmerman

A private company in India, Astroborne Aerospace, is now developing its own commercial manned capsule as well as a commercial astronaut training facility, targeting as customers Earth-based tourists as well as those hoping to fly in space.

The capsule, dubbed Airawat, will seat six, and will be designed for suborbital flights, similar to Blue Origin’s New Shepard capsule. The training facility will be on a four-acre site the company is presently negotiating either a lease or purchase from the local government.

The company says it has obtained investment capital, but also says that money will arrive next month.

Whether this deal is real or not is actually irrelevant. Its existence illustrates the underlying enthusiasm in India for private commercial space, now that the Modi government has ended the monopoly on all space activities by its space agency ISRO.

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China’s Chang’e-7 lunar mission will target the rim of Shackleton Crater

January 31, 2024 9:15 am Robert Zimmerman

The Moon's south pole, with landers

China’s Chang’e-7 lunar mission, which will include an orbiter, lander, rover, and “mini-flying” probe, will land in 2026 on the rim of Shackleton Crater, one of the same candidate landing zones for NASA’s manned Artemis program.

The map to the right shows the lander’s approximate landing site, on the illuminated rim of thirteen-mile-wide Shackleton Crater at the Moon’s south pole. The candidate landing zone for NASA is also on this rim, but the location might not be precisely the same. From the abstract of the published paper [pdf] outlining the project’s science goals:

The lander will land on Shackleton crater’s illuminated rim near the lunar south pole, along with the rover and mini-flying probe. The relay satellite (named Queqiao-2) will be launched in February 2024 as an independent mission to support relay communication for ongoing scientific exploration of Chang’E-4 (CE-4), the upcoming Chang’E-6 (CE-6) in 2024, and subsequent lunar missions.

Though the abstract states the target is Shackleton’s rim, the paper is less specific, showing a map with a much wider “candidate landing region”. It is unclear if China as yet has the ability to land with the pinpoint accuracy necessary to hit the rim as stated. The paper is also devoid of any technical details about the lander, rover, or its mini-flyer. It lists the science instruments and their science goals, but describes nothing more specific. For example, will the flyer bounce or use small rockets to lift off? Or will it simply be released prior to landing with no capability of taking off again?

The big story here is the race to get to Shackleton first. NASA presently hopes its first Artemis manned mission to land on the Moon, Artemis-3, will arrive in September 2026, with its stated goal landing at or near the south pole. That schedule is certainly tentative, based on NASA’s recent track record. China is now targeting that same year, but its recent track record for its lunar program has been far more reliable.

The Outer Space Treaty forbids both countries from claiming any territory, but possession is always nine-tenths of reality. Expect China to touch down first, and hold what it touches.

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Rocket Lab launches four commercial satellites

January 31, 2024 12:15 am Robert Zimmerman

Electron 1st stage floating in the water

Rocket Lab today successuflly launched four satellites as part of a commercial constellation designed to track all objects in orbit, its Electron rocket lifting off from one of its two New Zealand launchpads.

The company also successfully recovered the first stage using a parachute system to slow it down for a soft splashdown in the Pacific where a ship picked it up. The image to the right is a screen capture shortly after the recovery ship reached the stage, which can be seen floating in the water on the left. As of posting the ship was in the process of pulling the stage from the water. Once completed, the stage will be returned to Rocket Lab’s rocket factory for refurbishment and tests to see if it can fly again.

The 2024 launch race:

10 SpaceX
6 China
2 Iran
1 India
1 ULA
1 Japan
1 Rocket Lab

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Glen Hansard & Lisa O’Neill – Fairytale Of New York

January 30, 2024 6:01 pm Robert Zimmerman

An evening pause: Sung at the funeral in December 2023 for Shane MacGowan, who wrote it.

Hat tip Altons Blevins.

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January 30, 2024 Quick space links

January 30, 2024 3:27 pm Robert Zimmerman

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.

Ingenuity’s use of off-the-shelf commercial products will be a game-changer for space engineering

The article provides a nice summary of Ingenuity’s overall future impact, but notes that its use of such products might be its biggest legacy. Their use would significantly reduce the cost of future government space probes, and based on its experience with the helicopter NASA might be more willing to accept their use in the future.

Explosion heard yesterday in Shanghai was due to a test-to-failure tank test by a Chinese pseudo-company

At least, that is what China is telling us.

China ignites and operates its first 50-kilowatt nested Hall thruster, proving the ability of two-ring ignition

Jay notes that the University of Michigan tested a 3-channel ion thruster some years ago, suggesting that though China has done good work here, it is still years behind.

Weather looks good for Rocket Lab’s next launch tomorrow

Right now the launch is targeting a 1:15 am (Eastern) launch tonight. Live stream available here.

On this date in 1964 Ranger 6 was launched, hitting the Moon as planned but failing to transmit any images during its plunge to the surface

It was the third spacecraft to impact the Moon, and the first in the Ranger program to do so. It wasn’t until Ranger 7 six months later that a mission succeeded in sending pictures back before crashing.

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Today’s blacklisted American: U.S. Court rules against coach fired for simply stating a fact in a casual conversation

January 30, 2024 2:51 pm Robert Zimmerman

Vermont: Where you are only allowed to say things that support the queer agenda
Vermont: Where the only speech allowed must
support the queer agenda

If you are depending on the federal courts to defend your fundamental rights, as outlined very bluntly in the Bill of Rights, you are being very naive. On December 28, 2024 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled against David Bloch, who had been fired in February 2023 without due process as the snowboarding coach at Woodstock Union High School in Vermont — a team that he had founded in 2011 — because he had simply mentioned in a casual and very civil conversation with two of his students that men and women are genetically different.

He was fired the next day, even though no investigation into the incident had been done, and no one involved in the conversation had complained. School officials made it clear that Bloch was being fired for daring to have an opinion they did not like.

The notice accused Bloch of violating Windsor Central Supervisory Union Board’s Harassment, Hazing, and Bullying policy and the Vermont Principals’ Association related policy for “ma[king] reference to [a] student in a manner that questioned the legitimacy and appropriateness of the student competing on the girls’ team to members of the WUHS snowboard team”—all outside the student’s presence.

» Read more

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A plateau of friable rock on Mars

January 30, 2024 2:11 pm Robert Zimmerman

Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on September 13, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this “Friable Outcrops in Aeolis Dorsa.” What we are looking at is the northeasternmost tip of a 30-mile long plateau that marks the northern edge of Mars southern cratered highlands. For most of its length the top of that plateau is relatively smooth, broken by some vague surface features and a few scattered craters (suggesting it is relatively young). However, as you approach the plateau’s edges and especially that northeastern tip the surface begins to break up into the rough terrain shown to the right. It appears that the prevailing winds from the north are scouring the soft topsoil here and causing it to wear away, leaving behind those innumerable small ridges, almost all of which are oriented from north-to-south.

But why is the topsoil here soft and so easily scoured?
» Read more

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