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Potentially serious problem on BepiColombo Mercury mission

10:14 am

According to the European Space Agency (ESA), engineers have discovered what could be a potentially serious problem on BepiColombo mission that is presently on its way to Mercury.

The solar arrays and electric propulsion system on the Mercury Transfer Module are used to generate thrust during the spacecraft’s complex journey from Earth to Mercury.

However, on 26 April, as BepiColombo was scheduled to begin its next manoeuvre, the Transfer Module failed to deliver enough electrical power to the spacecraft’s thrusters.

A combined team from ESA and the mission’s industrial partners set to work the moment the issue was identified. By 7 May, they had restored BepiColombo’s thrust to approximately 90% of its previous level. However, the Transfer Module’s available power is still lower than it should be, and so full thrust cannot yet be restored.

The press release implies that this issue won’t prevent the spacecraft from entering orbit around Mercury as scheduled in December 2025, but one wonders how that could be if it doesn’t have sufficient power to do the proper course correction during its last major flyby of Mercury in September 2024. If it misses its precise route in ’24 it could miss Mercury entirely in ’25.

Engineers are analyzing the situation to see what can be done to get it to Mercury, while also trying to figure out what caused this power problem in the first place in order to fix it.

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Congress passes new authorization bill for FAA that includes short extension of “learning period”

10:05 am

The new FAA authorization bill that that House approved yesterday and was passed previously by the Senate includes a short extension to the end of the year of the so-called “learning period” that is supposed to restrict the agency’s ability to regulate the new commercial space industry.

That limitation was first established in 2004 with a time period of eight years. It has been extended numerous times since then. The most recent extensions however have been very short, suggesting Congress (mostly from the Democrat side of the aile) wants to soon eliminate it. Whether that happens when it comes up for extension again at the end of 2024 will depend greatly on which party is in control after the election.

It really doesn’t matter. Everything the FAA has been doing in the past three years suggests this learning period no longer exists anyway. The agency has been demanding every new American company or rocket or spacecraft meet much higher regulatory requirements, which appears to have slowed significantly the development of those new companies, rockets, or spacecraft in the past two years.

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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

Lithuania signs Artemis Accords

9:54 am

Lithuania yesterday became the 40th nation to sign the Artemis Accords, joining the American alliance for exploring the solar system.

The alliance now includes these nations: Angola, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Columbia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Poland, Romania, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, the United States and Uruguay.

The press release for this announcement differed slightly from the last few, all of which emphasized how the accords were designed to “reinforce” the Outer Space Treaty, the exact opposite of its original goals, which was to build an alliance of nations focused on getting around or eliminating the restrictions of the Outer Space Treaty on private property in space. Today the press release was more vague:

NASA, along with the Department of State and seven other nations, established the Artemis Accords in 2020 to lay out a set of principles grounded in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and three related space treaties. With the commitment of now 40 nations, the accords community will facilitate a long-term and peaceful presence of deep space exploration for the benefit of humanity.

Does this mean the Biden administration is going to return to the accords’ original goal? I doubt it. I think instead they decided they needed to be less obvious about their new intentions, which increasingly appears to be to use this alliance to foster globalist international cooperation aimed at keeping all power and legal control in the hands of the governments themselves.

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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.

May 15, 2024 Quick space links

4:55 pm

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.

 

 

 

 

 

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Why are so many conservatives such downers?

4:07 pm

Frankly, for the Joe Biden campaign these numbers are an absolute disaster
“Frankly, for the Joe Biden campaign these numbers
are an absolute disaster.” Click for full video.

In the past two weeks I have noticed two political trends within the United States, one that seems quite hopeful and another that depresses me to the bottom of my soul.

The hopeful trend has to do with the left and what appears to be a growing collapse of its political support. The pro-Hamas riots on college campuses and elsewhere have not had the impact of the 2020 Antifa and BLM riots, where those disruptions struck fear into ordinary Americans while instilling them with a deep unfounded guilt that paralyzed them into either inaction or endorsing the foolish racist policies of that BLM movement.

In 2024 the pro-Hamas riots are doing the exact opposite. They are antagonizing everyone, and highlighting the racism and violence that is presently very inherent within the modern policies of the Democratic Party. Who wants to support a party whose base justifies and supports the work of terrorist organizations like Hamas, that torture, rape, and murder of innocents, including women, children, and babies?

On top of those ugly riots, Biden’s administration in almost all things has proven to be a disaster. Inflation has been terrible, the economy has doing poorly, the illegal immigration is out-of-control and impacting not just Republican border states but the Democratically-controlled inner ciites. Internationally Biden’s weak and indecisive leadership has led to wars in the Ukraine and Middle East, with tensions rising in many other places.

The result has been disastrous polls for Joe Biden — across the board — suggesting that not only will Donald Trump win the November election, he will do so with such strong numbers it will be impossible for even the worst vote tampering by the Democrats to overthrow that victory. Those polls also suggest that the Republicans will gain a large majority in the Senate, and likely a larger renewed majority in the House.

The disaster that is Joe Biden and the viciousness of the Democratic Party base has become so evident that even some previously knee-jerk Democrats are beginning to admit to it, and are attempting to change it. They don’t seem to be succeeding, but that effort illustrates further these hopeful trendlines. If even Democrats can no longer stand what their party stands for, then there is a good chance we might finally see that party clean up its act, or die and be replaced with something more laudable.

You must then wonder: What trend could possibly exist at this time that could be depressing me to the bottom of my soul?
» 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

Juno looks down at Jupiter

9:50 am

Jupiter as seen by Juno on May 12, 2024
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, reduced, and annotated to post here, was taken on May 12, 2024 by the camera on the Jupiter orbiter Juno during its most recent close-fly of the gas giant, its sixty-first since it arrived in 2016. The picture was snapped when Juno was about 34,674 miles away from Jupiter as it flew over the northern hemisphere.

Citizen scientist Thomas Thomopoulos then took that raw image and enhanced and enlarged it to bring out the storm details. You can see the distinct bands that cut across Jupiter’s equatorial and mid-latitudes. The reddish band is where the Great Red Spot is located, though that spot is not seen in this picture.

As we move north those bands slowly transition into the chaotic storms of the polar regions, which also circle the pole but do not form bands.

For scale I have added a circle that approximates the Earth’s size in comparison to Jupiter. You will notice that some of those polar storms are as big if not bigger than the Earth itself. To think we presently have any real understanding of the processes that create Jupiter’s climate and weather systems is to be arrogant beyond belief.

Fortunately, the scientists who study Jupiter are not that arrogant, though they often can’t admit it and are forced to sound otherwise when ignorant journalists and NASA managers demand more answers from them then are possible. The scientists understand that what makes pictures like this intriguing is not what it tells us but the amount of ignorance it reveals. To get funding for future research however sometimes requires they sound more knowledgeable than they are.

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The aurora as seen looking down from space

9:12 am

The aurora over the U.S. on May 11, 2024
Click for original image.

NOAA on May 13, 2024 released a set of eight images taken by its fleet of JPSS weather satellites, showing the strong Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights that were activated over the May 11th weekend due to several very strong solar flares on the Sun and sent a geomagnetic storm at the Earth.

One of those images, reduced to post here, is to the right. You can see the eastern coast of the United States, outlined by city lights, with a band of aurora cutting across the northern half and reaching south below the Great Lakes. The other seven images are available at the link above.

The geomagnetic storm was the strongest produced by the Sun in more than two decades, since 2003. That storm occurred during solar maximum, as did the May 11th this past weekend. However, the Sun experienced another solar maximum in-between, in 2014, which produced few such storms, and none as strong.

I want to add that despite the screams of panic prior to the arrival of this storm, its arrival produced only minor disturbances in the world’s electrical grid, and in fact was proof positive that the many decades of work that electrical companies have devoted to protecting the grid from such storms has paid off. It is very unlikely any major storm from the Sun can harm that grid in the future, unless of course we get lazy and stop maintaining it.

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FAA schedules first three public meetings for Starship/Superheavy impact statement review

8:48 am

The FAA has now scheduled the first three public meetings as part of its new environmental impact statement review of SpaceX’s proposed construction plans at Cape Canaveral.

The in-person open houses will feature information stations where the FAA will “provide information describing the purpose of the scoping meetings, project schedule, opportunities for public involvement, proposed action and alternatives summary, and environmental resource area summary. Fact sheets will be made available containing similar information,” the project website says.

“At any time during the meetings, the public will have the opportunity to provide verbal comments to a court reporter or written comments via a written comment form at one of several commenting stations,” the website says.

It appears that SpaceX is proposing two different options for establishing an additional launchpad for Superheavy/Starship. Its preferred option is to refurbish pad LC-37, which was most recenly used by ULA to launch its Delta-4 Heavy in April. A second option is to develop a new pad entirely, dubbed LC-50.

Though the FAA claims this new impact statement is necessary because SpaceX has upped the planned annual Superheavy/Starship launches from 24 to 44, that claim is bogus. The difference is not that significant, and more important, rockets have been launching from these pads now for almost three-quarters of a century, and the environment has not only not been harmed by that activity, the wildlife surrounding the cape has prospered tremendously by the creation of a large zone where no development can occur.

That history is the real impact statement, and it proves the new red tape is unecessary. What the FAA (and the Air Force) are now doing is simply lawfare against SpaceX.

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May 14, 2024 Quick space links

3:29 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, who also tipped me off to the Starliner and Ispace stories earlier today.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

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A database for identifying pro-Hamas anti-Semites

2:51 pm

Hamas protesters threaten blind children
Pro-Hamas protesters threaten blind children.
Click for story.

Two weeks ago I urged the UNC fraternity brothers who stood up to pro-Hamas rioters at their college by protecting Old Glory from desecration to use the half million dollars raised for them for something more worthwhile than a big party.

Why not use these funds instead to create a database that identifies every single one of the Hamas protesters who attempted to take over the UNC campus so that future employees will have a resource when it comes time to hire graduates? Why not then use that UNC database as the starting point for a nationwide database, to identify other Hamas protesters who took over colleges at every other university?

It seems that database already exists, called Canary Mission, which was revealed to me first in this somewhat hostile news article on May 12, 2024 from the Times of Israel, which seems more interested in protecting pro-Hamas rioters from the consequences of their actions than defending Jews and Israel from attack.

The goal of Canary Mission is very straight-forward, and utterly legal. From its About webpage:
» Read more

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UN slashes in half its death count of women and children for Gaza

2:40 pm

Hamas vs Israel
The blunt truth. Courtesy of Doug Ross.

The United Nations on May 8, 2024 very quietly cut in half the number of women and children listed as killed in Gaza during the Israeli operation.

The United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) revised its child fatality figure from the Gaza war sharply downward, reporting more than 14,500 deaths on May 6 but then 7,797 on May 8. OCHA also revised downward its figure for women fatalities from more than 9,500 deaths to 4,959 deaths.

This follows the recognition in April that more than 10,000 casualities on Hamas’ list had no names or identifying information, and were removed. At that same time Hamas’ Gaza Ministry of Health stopped claiming that 70% of those killed were women and children. It apparently realized the lie was no longer working, that even its allies in the UN couldn’t buy it any longer.

In other words, the UN has finally acknowledged that the numbers it was getting from Hamas were bogus and made-up. » Read more

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Ispace gets a new payload for its first NASA lunar landing mission

1:33 pm

Capitalism in space: The Japanese company Ispace has won a contract with the European company Control Data Systems (CDS) to place CDS’s precise localization instrument on Ispace’s APEX lunar lander, its first NASA mission.

CDS’s technology, which combines precision localization with telecommunications, uses Ultra-Wideband for determining precise positions and was developed specifically for space applications with support from the European Space Agency. The lack of a GPS-like system on the Moon, makes the technology ground-breaking for future applications related to lunar exploration.

The agreement … also represents the first Romanian payload to be delivered to the lunar surface. The technology will be integrated into the APEX 1.0 lunar lander as part of ispace technologies U.S. (ispace-U.S.) Mission 3, currently scheduled for 2026. A lunar rover will transport the CDS equipment on the surface to test the localization technology using an antenna that will remain on the APEX 1.0 lander.

Though Ispace is based in Japan, it has divisions in both the U.S. and Europe, which is allowing it to sign contracts with NASA and companies in both locations.

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Atlas-5 launch of Starliner slips to May 21, 2024

1:25 pm

While ULA has successfully replaced the valve in the upper stage of the Atlas-5 rocket, the first manned launch of Boeing’s Starliner capsule has slipped another four days, to May 21, 2024, because a newly discovered helium leak in the capsule’s service module.

Starliner teams are working to resolve a small helium leak detected in the spacecraft’s service module traced to a flange on a single reaction control system thruster. Helium is used in spacecraft thruster systems to allow the thrusters to fire and is not combustible or toxic.

NASA and Boeing are developing spacecraft testing and operational solutions to address the issue. As a part of the testing, Boeing will bring the propulsion system up to flight pressurization just as it does prior to launch, and then allow the helium system to vent naturally to validate existing data and strengthen flight rationale.

The prevous launch scrub was entirely due to the ULA’s rocket, not anything related to Boeing. This delay however is a Boeing issue, and it only reinforces the general uneasiness everyone feels about Boeing’s quality control work.

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SpaceX launches 20 more Starlink satellites

12:01 pm

SpaceX last night successfully placed another 20 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.

The first stage completed its eighteenth launch, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

51 SpaceX
21 China
6 Russia
5 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the world combined in successful launches, 58 to 33. SpaceX by itself now leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 51 to 40.

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Curiosity looks forward and back

11:34 am

Panorama looking north
Click for original image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map

The images above and below are small sections from 360 degree panorama created on May 13, 2024 from 31 photos taken by the right navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity.

The overview map to the right provides the context. The red dotted line indicates Curiosity’s planned route, while the white dotted line its actual route. The rover’s present position is marked by the blue dot. The yellow lines indicate the area covered by the picture above, while the green lines indicate the area covered by the picture below.

The image above looks north, back down Gediz Vallis and across to the north rim of Gale Crater, about 20-25 miles away. The red dotted line marks the rover’s path to get up to this point. All told, Curiosity has climbed about 2,500 feet in elevation since it left the floor of Gale Crater about nine years ago.

The image below looks south, up Gediz Vallis and towards the peak of Mount Sharp (not visible), about 26 miles away and about 16,000 feet higher up. Curiosity might move forward about 500 feet to the small hill on the left (indicated by the red dot), or it might turn west from this point, as indicated by the red dotted line on the overview map.

Panorama looking south
Click for original image.

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A planet with the density of cotton candy?

10:32 am

The uncertainty of science: According to data obtained from ground-based telescopes of a newly discovered transiting exoplanet, that planet has the density of cotton candy.

This new planet, located 1,200 light-years from Earth, is 50% larger than Jupiter but seven times less massive, giving it an extremely low density comparable to that of cotton candy. “WASP-193b is the second least dense planet discovered to date, after Kepler-51d, which is much smaller,” explains Khalid Barkaoui, a Postdcotral Researcher at ULiège’s EXOTIC Laboratory and first author of the article published in Nature Astronomy. Its extremely low density makes it a real anomaly among the more than five thousand exoplanets discovered to date. This extremely-low-density cannot be reproduced by standard models of irradiated gas giants, even under the unrealistic assumption of a coreless structure.”

Such a gas giant is not impossible. For example, Saturn’s density is so low that if you could find an ocean large enough it would float. The scientists theorize that this exoplanet is likly comprised mostly of hydrogen and helium.

Nonetheless, there are phenomenon here that we certainly do not understand.

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Air Force sends letter of concern about Vulcan to ULA

10:21 am

According to a report yesterday [behind a paywall], the Air Force has sent a letter of concern to ULA and its joint owners, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, about the long delays getting its new Vulcan rocket operational.

When the military chose in 2021 ULA and SpaceX to be its two launch providers for the first half of the 2020s, it expected ULA to complete 60% of the launches and SpaceX 40%. It also expected Vulcan to being launching within a year or two, at the latest.

Instead, the first launch of Vulcan did not occur until 2024, and its second launch — required by the military before it will allow Vulcan to launch its payloads — won’t occur until late this year. Worse, the military has a large backlog of launches it has assigned to Vulcan that need to launch quickly.

“I am growing concerned with ULA’s ability to scale manufacturing of its Vulcan rocket and scale its launch cadence to meet our needs,” [Air Force Assistant Secretary Frank] Calvelli wrote. “Currently there is military satellite capability sitting on the ground due to Vulcan delays. ULA has a backlog of 25 National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 2 Vulcan launches on contract.”

These 25 launches, Calvelli notes, are due to be completed by the end of 2027. He asked Boeing and Lockheed to complete an “independent review” of United Launch Alliance’s ability to scale manufacturing of its Vulcan rockets and meet its commitments to the military. Calvelli also noted that Vulcan has made commitments to launch dozens of satellites for others over that period, a reference to a contract between United Launch Alliance and Amazon for Project Kuiper satellites.

ULA says that once operations ramp up, it plans to launch Vulcan twice a month. The Air Force doubts about whether that will be possible however are well founded. To meet that schedule ULA will need delivery per month of at least four BE-4 engines from Blue Origin, and so far there is no indication the Bezos company can meet that demand. Delays at Blue Origin in developing that engine are the main reason Vulcan is so far behind schedule in the first place.

In order to get Vulcan operational, ULA needs to fly a second time successfully. The second launch of Sierra Space’s Tenacity mini-shuttle is booked for that flight, and was originally supposed to launch this spring. Tenacity however was not ready, as it is still undergoing final ground testing. The launch is now set for the fall, but both ULA and the Pentagon are discussing replacing it with a dummy payload should Tenacity experience any more delays.

The source of all of these problems points to Blue Origin. Not only has it been unable to deliver its BE-4 rocket engine on schedule — thus blocking Vulcan — the long delays in developing its own New Glenn orbital rocket (which uses seven BE-4 engines) has given the military fewer launch options. As a result the military has been left with only one rocket company, SpaceX, capable of launching its large payloads.

To put Blue Origin’s problems in perspective, for Blue Origin to finally achieve its many promises and get both Vulcan and New Glenn flying regularly, it will need to begin producing a minimum of 50 to 150 BE-4 engines per year, with two-thirds for its own New Glenn rocket. Right now all evidence suggests the company is having problems building two per year.

In other words, the Pentagon might send a letter of concern to ULA, but it should instead be focusing its ire on Blue Origin.

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XRISM X-ray space telescope functioning despite closed “aperture door”

9:50 am

XRISM, a joint X-ray space telescope built by NASA and Japan’s space agency JAXA, is collecting data despite the failure on one instrument of an aperture door to open.

In January, project scientists said that XRISM was working well except for an aperture door, also called a gate valve, for the Dewar on its imaging instrument, Resolve, which failed to open. The instrument can still operate with the door closed, although the door, made of beryllium, does attenuate some X-rays at lower energies.

At the time, efforts were underway to try and open the gate valve. However, speaking at a May 7 meeting of the National Academies’ Board on Physics and Astronomy, Mark Clampin, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, said those efforts were on hold for the next year and a half.

Instead, the science team decided to proceed with science operations, since the telescope has two other working instruments, and can get data even from this hindered third.

XRISM is a replacement of a previous JAXA X-ray telescope that launched in 2016 but failed immediately.

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May 13, 2024 Quick space links

3:39 pm

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.

 

 

 

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The left begins recognizing Biden is going to lose

1:08 pm

Frankly, for the Joe Biden campaign these numbers are an absolute disaster
“Frankly, for the Joe Biden campaign these numbers
are an absolute disaster.” Click for full video.

The conservative press this past weekend went gaga over a number of CNN reports that were shockingly negative about Joe Biden’s chances of winning re-election as president.

First CNN’s Fareed Zakaria reviewed the overall situation and bluntly concluded, “The trendlines are not working in Biden’s favor.” Then CNN had several reports outlining Biden’s very bad polling numbers:

The right saw these reports as confirmation from the left — which CNN represents as an operative of the leftist Democratic Party — that the campaign is not going well for Joe Biden, that the momentum right now is for Donald Trump.

What I see is something even more fundamental. The left, for the first time in almost a decade, is accepting the possibility of defeat, and these reports are an almost unprecedented effort by the left to process this possibility.
» Read more

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A galaxy’s net of dust

10:02 am

A galaxy's net of dust
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the central part of galaxy NGC 4753, 60 million light years away and known as a lenticular galaxy because of its elongated elliptical shape and ill-defined spiral arms. It is believed we looking at this galaxy edge-on.

You can see a wider image of NGC 4753 here, released in January and taken by the Gemini South telescope in Chile. According to that press release, the brown dust lanes that seem to form a wavy net in the foreground are created by a process called differential precession:

Precession occurs when a rotating object’s axis of rotation changes orientation, like a spinning top that wobbles as it loses momentum. And differential means that the rate of precession varies depending on the radius. In the case of a dusty accretion disk orbiting a galactic nucleus, the rate of precession is faster toward the center and slower near the edges. This varying, wobble-like motion results from the angle at which NGC 4753 and its former dwarf companion collided and is the cause of the strongly twisted dust lanes we see wrapped around the galaxy’s luminous nucleus today.

Once again, the limitation of only observing this object from one angle makes it very difficult to untangle what it really looks like. Therefore, these conclusions carry a great deal of uncertainty.

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A detailed look, using satellite imagery, of North Korea’s coastal spaceport

9:41 am

North Korea

Link here. The article, written by analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, describes in detail the work being done in the past few years at North Korea’s Sohae spaceport on that nation’s western coast, as shown on the map to the right.

This work allowed North Korea to complete its first successful orbital satellite launch of its Chollima-1 rocket in November, after two previous failures.

As North Korea releases almost no information, the analysis depended entirely on high resolution orbital data.

While construction of the coastal launch pad is largely complete and work on refurbishing the original launch pad is largely suspended, work is now concentrated on constructing a large new processing/assembly building and an associated underground facility. Several smaller construction projects are also being pursued.

Overall it appears that North Korea is very serious about developing a full spaceport for both satellite and missile launches.

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ISRO to land its Chandayaan-4 lunar sample return mission near where Chandrayaan-3 landed

9:09 am


Click for interactive map. To see the original
image, go here.

India’s space agency ISRO announced on May 11, 2024 that the landing site for its Chandayaan-4 lunar sample return mission will be in the same area where its Chandrayaan-3’s Vikram lander touched down, carrying the Pragyan rover.

The map to the right shows that location, at about 69 degrees south latitude. The mission will require two launches, and will have five components, a propulsion module, a transfer module, a lander module, an ascender module and a re-entry module. The two rockets will use India’s LVM-3 and PSLV rockets.

The actual mission concept, including which modules will be launched with which rocket as well as whether they will dock in Earth or lunar orbit, has not yet been released. This most recent tweet however mentioned that the lander will only operate for one lunar day, which means it will land, grab its samples quickly, and send the ascender capsule up, all within an Earth week.

A launch timeline for the mission also remains unclear.

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SpaceX launches 23 more Starlink satellites

8:41 pm

SpaceX tonight successfully launched 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

This was the 50th successful launch by SpaceX this year, in only a little more that five months. Reaching the company’s goal of 150 launches in 2024 (six of which were planned to be Starship/Superheavy test launches) remains a challenge, but if the company reaches even 80% of that goal (120) it will have set a record for launches greater than what the entire world achieved for every year of the space age until 2020.

This was also the 15th launch of the rocket’s first stage, landing successfully on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

50 SpaceX
21 China
6 Russia
5 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the world combined in successful launches, 57 to 33. SpaceX by itself now leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 50 to 40.

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China today launches “experimental” satellite

11:42 am

China today successfully launched what it called an “experimental” satellite designed to “monitor the space environment”, its Long March 2C rocket lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in the northwest of China.

The state-run press provided no other information. Nor did it tell us where the rocket’s lower stages, which use toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed inside China.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

49 SpaceX
21 China
6 Russia
5 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the world combined in successful launches, 56 to 33. SpaceX by itself now leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 49 to 40.

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Significant water found in samples from China’s Chang’e-5 Moon mission

12:33 pm

According to a new paper published in late April, scientists analyzing the samples returned from the Moon by China’s Chang’e-5 Moon mission in 2021 have found more water embedded in the topsoil than expected. From the paper’s conclusions:

[O]ur results indicate that a considerable [solar wind]-derived water is stored within at least the uppermost meter (down to 0.8 meters) of the regolith beneath the lunar surface. This type of water represents a valuable potential resource for future in situ exploration of the Moon, as it not only has higher contents than indigenous water (up to several wt.% vs. <50 ppm) but could also be extracted by heating.

We are still not talking about a lot of water, but this result suggests there is more than earlier reports from Chang’e-5’s samples. This result also could explain the hydrogen signature across much of the Moon’s surface by Chandrayaan-1.

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Serbia joins China’s lunar base project

12:21 pm

Serbia this week signed an agreement with China to become the eleventh nation to join its International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) lunar base project.

China’s project now has eleven partner nations (Azerbaijan, Belarus, Egypt, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Russia, Serbia, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, and Venezuela) and eleven academic or governmental bureaucracies.

Except for China and Russia, the other partners are very minor players in space, and will likely contribute relatively little to the lunar base other than providing China some shallow positive PR.

Nonetheless, the two competing alliances in settling the solar system are becoming clear. On one side you have the alliance led by the U.S. under the Artemis Accords, while on the other you have an alliance led by China, under its lunar base project. Both right now appear only interested in establishing government power in space.

In the middle will be ordinary people, dreaming of building new societies to live in on other worlds. Sadly it increasingly appears they will be crushed between these two big government alliances. Though the U.S. alliance was initially established to foster private property and ownership so that those settlers could have as free and as prosperous a life as the Americans who settled the United States, it no longer seems interested in that goal.

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