Chandrayaan-2 has successfully made its third lunar orbit engine burn, lowering its orbit to 179 x 1412 kilometers.
They are aiming for a 100 kilometer orbit. Once they reach that, the lander/rover will separate from the orbiter to begin its descent to the surface, on September 7.
An evening pause: As played on a zither.
Hat tip Thomas Biggar.
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 or any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
"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
Click for full image.
It appears today’s 150 meter hop (about 500 feet) of SpaceX’s Starhopper prototype was a complete success. To the right, and also below, are screen captures grabbed by me from one private live stream as well as from SpaceX’s own live stream.
In fact, this quick hop appears to have gone amazingly smoothly. It launched almost exactly at the target time, and landed quite softly on the launchpad, as intended. You can see the nozzle of the Raptor engine shifting and adjusting throughout the flight, also another indication that their engineering here is working perfectly. Congratulations SpaceX!
I have embedded SpaceX’s video below the fold. The flight begins around 30 minutes in.
Worlds without end: Astronomers have discovered a Jupiter-sized exoplanet with an extremely eccentric and comet-like orbit circling a star about 103 light years away.
Astronomers have discovered a planet three times the mass of Jupiter that travels on a long, egg-shaped path around its star. If this planet were somehow placed into our own solar system, it would swing from within our asteroid belt to out beyond Neptune. Other giant planets with highly elliptical orbits have been found around other stars, but none of those worlds were located at the very outer reaches of their star systems like this one.
This discovery, like so many others, illustrates again our lack of knowledge about the make-up and formation of solar systems. According to modern formation theories, you shouldn’t get such a large exoplanet in such an eccentric orbit. But here we are.
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.
“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.
Engineers have completed the assembly of Europe’s Rosalind Franklin rover that is scheduled for launch to Mars in July 2020
Rosalind Franklin, which is the result of cutting edge work from UK, European and Canadian scientists and engineers will now be shipped from the Airbus factory in Stevenage, Hertfordshire to Toulouse in France for testing to ensure it survives its launch from Earth next summer and the freezing conditions of Mars when it lands on the planet in March 2021.
Whether they can meet this schedule remains unknown because of the problems that occurred during testing of the spacecraft’s landing parachutes.
The planned 150-meter-high test flight of SpaceX’s Starhopper test prototype was aborted at T-0 seconds last night when the Raptor engine did not ignite as expected.
A live video feed provided by SpaceX showed the squat, 30-foot-wide (9-meter) Starhopper vehicle counting down to a planned liftoff shortly after 6 p.m. CDT (7 p.m. EDT; 2300 GMT) Monday from the company’s facility in South Texas. The vehicle’s single methane-fueled Raptor engine could be seen swiveling side-to-side in a preflight steering check, as the Starhopper pad’s sound suppression system dumped water under the vehicle.
But the Raptor engine did not ignite as the countdown clock reached zero.
“Test aborted just after T-0,” read a text banner on SpaceX’s webcast. “Teams evaluating next test opportunity.”
They say they will try again today. If you want to watch this link provides some suggestions.
These test flights are testing the Raptor engine more than they are testing vehicle take-off and landing. This engine is a significant advancement from not only SpaceX’s Merlin engine but from almost every rocket engine previously built. It has the potential to set the record for the most efficient and powerful engine. It is therefore not unexpected that there will be issues during these test flights.
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.
"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
An unmanned Soyuz capsule successfully docked to ISS tonight at a different docking port than the port where a failed component in the radar system caused the first attempt to be aborted two days ago.
This successful automatic docking confirms that the radar equipment on the other port was the problem. While manual manned dockings can occur there, the Russians will not be able to use it for unmanned Progress freighters until they get the faulty amplifier in the radar system fixed. To fix it will require a spare part and a spacewalk, and at the moment the Russians have said nothing about whether they have the part at the station.
An evening pause: Some jazz, that starts like 1950s cocktail music, and transcends into something very different.
Hat tip Diane Wilson.
Click for full image.
Using temperature stations specifically picked to eliminate as many biases and temperature errors as possible, NOAA has found that since 2005 the continental United States has experienced no warming at all.
The graph at the right, reduced to post here, illustrates this.
In January 2005, NOAA began recording temperatures at its newly built U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN). USCRN includes 114 pristinely maintained temperature stations spaced relatively uniformly across the lower 48 states. NOAA selected locations that were far away from urban and land-development impacts that might artificially taint temperature readings.
Prior to the USCRN going online, alarmists and skeptics sparred over the accuracy of reported temperature data. With most preexisting temperature stations located in or near urban settings that are subject to false temperature signals and create their own microclimates that change over time, government officials performed many often-controversial adjustments to the raw temperature data. Skeptics of an asserted climate crisis pointed out that most of the reported warming in the United States was non-existent in the raw temperature data, but was added to the record by government officials.
The USCRN has eliminated the need to rely on, and adjust the data from, outdated temperature stations. Strikingly, as shown in the graph below, USCRN temperature stations show no warming since 2005 when the network went online. If anything, U.S. temperatures are now slightly cooler than they were 14 years ago.
What is significant about this data is how it reveals the dishonesty of the adjustments that NOAA and NASA have been making to the temperature data. Those adjustments, supposedly done to make the data more accurate, have always cooled the past and warmed the present, a pattern that by itself is very suspicious.
These temperature stations were chosen to create a reliable baseline, picking stations that needed no adjustment and would thus give scientists a measure for justifying any alterations they impose on the raw data. Not only does this data suggest strongly that the claims of global warming year after year (“This year was the hottest on record!”) are suspect, it also shows that there is something seriously wrong with their adjustments. If their modifications to the raw data was correct, then this set of data should have matched it. It does not.
Will this mean they will readjust the overall data to eliminate the cooling in the past and the warming in the near present to make the data better fit what these results prove? Don’t be silly! That would show that there is little merit to the theories of the global warming alarmists, something that cannot be tolerated. It might cause those big government contracts to be cancelled. Worse, it will make it more difficult for these leftists to use the data to justify reshaping society into their vision of a socialist utopia.
No, what I expect to happen is that the scientists at NOAA (who also happen to be the ones who have been tampering with all the other data) to begin altering the temperature data from these baseline stations, to make them fit their theories. Or as Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden recently put it, “We choose truth over facts.”
The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico was today awarded an $19 million NASA research/education grant for studying near Earth asteroids.
NASA awarded the University of Central Florida (which manages the site on behalf of National Science Foundation) the four-year grant to observe and characterize near-Earth objects (NEO) that pose a potential hazard to Earth or that could be candidates for future space missions.
…The award also includes money to support STEM education among high school students in Puerto Rico. The Science, Technology And Research (STAR) Academy brings together 30 local high-school students per semester once a week for 16 classes to learn about science and research at the observatory.
This, plus the recent NSF grant, will keep the telescope operating for at least the next few years.
The Air Force’s X-37B presently in orbit has now broken the record set by the other X-37B for the longest mission, with 717 days in orbit and now indication when it will return.
The previous mission had broken the earlier record by a little more than a month. How long the X-37B that is in space now will extend this new record is as yet unknown.
Click for full image.
The Chandrayaan-2 engineering team has released more lunar images from Chandrayaan-2, this time from its higher resolution Terrain Mapping Camera 2.
One example is to the right, reduced to post here. It was taken from about 2,700 miles altitude, and shows a section of the northern hemisphere on the Moon’s heavily cratered far side. There are other images at the link.
The goal of these images is to demonstrate that the camera and spacecraft pointing systems are working. It appears they have done so successfully.
Russian astronauts today undocked their older Soyuz MS-13 Soyuz from its docking port and manually docked it to the port with the technical issue, thereby clearing a different but functioning port for the unmanned Soyuz MS-14 capsule that failed to dock last week.
From the report it sounds like the Russians also did a test during the manual docking of the problematic docking radar on the older port, but no information about this has been released.
The unmanned MS-14 Soyuz will now make its second automatic docking attempt tomorrow, using the the cleared port.
SpaceX’s planned next hop of its Starhopper test vehicle is apparently forcing local residents from their homes, as well as threatening damage to buildings as much as two miles away.
Those residents live in tiny Boca Chica Village, Texas, which sits less than 2 miles (3 km) from a SpaceX-operated launch site near the US-Mexico border along the Gulf Coast. SpaceX’s test of the so-called “Starhopper”—a prototype of a reusable shuttle meant for human transit—may well create an “overpressure event” capable of breaking glass in buildings nearby. The police-delivered warnings advise residents to, at a minimum, exit their homes when they hear police sirens around the 4pm launch window.
Comments posted under the Brownsville Herald article include, “Doesn’t sound good to me that they have to evacuate their homes all because Space X is testing” and “I think spacex should be prepared to pay for the window replacements.”
The test is also forcing the closure of roads required by residents to access or leave their neighborhoods.
It seems that SpaceX’s decision to conduct their Starhopper tests in Boca Chica rather than at their McGregor, Texas, engine test facility might have been a mistake. Unlike Boca Chica, McGregor is a much larger facility, which means tests are farther away from local residences. While Boca Chica gives SpaceX great visibility (hence some great publicity) for Starhopper, it appears to also be causing some bad press because of these negative impacts on the local community.
Either way, expect news of Starhopper’s biggest hop in the next day or so.
It’s Sunday, not much happening, so why not watch this hilarious and sadly accurate description of every Democratic candidate for president.
The first gunshot and use of water cannons by Hong Kong police occurred today against protests opposed to increased Chinese rule over that former British colony.
Earlier Sunday, after thousands of people marched peacefully in pouring rain, a group of hardcore protesters erected makeshift roadblocks and threw bricks and Molotov cocktails at riot police. After firing tear gas in an attempt to dispers the crowds, police drove water cannon vehicles onto the streets for the first time during the protests, unfurling signs warning demonstrators they would deploy the jets if they did not leave. The jets were later fired down from the moving trucks down a road towards a crowd of protesters who ran away.
There were no immediate reports of injuries.
There is also no additional information about the gunshot, though it appears it caused no injuries.
Embedded below the fold in two parts. As John Batchelor would say, I was especially “grumpy” in the first segment, blasting our dysfunctional and very corrupt federal government for its dishonest misuse of taxpayer money, designed specifically to create failure rather than achieve anything.
» Read more
Capitalism in space: The communications satellite company Ovzon has switched from SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy to Arianespace’s Ariane 5 for the launch of its first wholly owned satellite in 2021.
In an interview Aug. 24, Ovzon CEO Magnus René told SpaceNews the company received a more appealing launch offer from Arianespace. “It’s nothing political or anything like that, it’s not that we don’t trust SpaceX — it’s just that we could get a better deal in cost and time and so on from Ariane at this time,” René said.
SpaceX charges $100 million for a Falcon Heavy launch, about the same as Arianespace charges for one of the two berths on its Ariane 5. Arianespace must have therefore cut its standard price to make it more attractive, and win the deal.
Ain’t competition wonderful? Governments have been trying (and failing) to get us into space for half a century, using the model of international cooperation. Introduce some competition and suddenly it becomes both easier and cheaper to do it. Who woulda thunk it?
China’s lander Chang’e-4 and rover Yutu-2 have been reactivated from sleep mode to begin their ninth lunar day on the far side of the Moon.
Their nominal mission had been three lunar days, so both spacecraft have now exceed that three times over.
Global warming scientist Michael Mann has lost a Canadian libel lawsuit he had filed against a skeptical scientist who had said that Mann “belongs in the state pen, not Penn State.”
More details here. The court also ruled that Mann must pay the defendant’s court costs. The key quote that proves Mann’s scientific work is either incompetent or fraudulent is this:
Dr Mann lost his case because he refused to show in open court his R2 regression numbers (the ‘working out’) behind the world-famous ‘hockey stick’ graph.
Mann is most well known for his hockey stick graph that eliminated any evidence of the well-documented Medieval Warming Period and thus made it appear global warming only began with the industrial age.
Many good scientists have questioned this graph, including Canadian scientist Dr. Tim Ball, the victorious defendant in this case. The court had demanded that to prove Ball’s statement was libel, Mann had to show everyone the legitimate scientific methods he used to create the graph. Mann refused to do so, and so the court ruled against him.
I should add that a number of different scientists have analyzed Mann’s hockey stick graph and have found that, based on the information in Mann’s own published papers, they could plug the data in and with his methods create any graph they wanted, essentially demonstrating that what Mann did was junk.
Does this prove human-caused global warming isn’t happening? No, it doesn’t. What it does demonstrate once again is that another one of the icons of that theory is either a fraud or incompetent, and that his work is not worth the electrons used to publish it. In the case of Mann, the evidence of his political biases and corrupt science practices has been evident for years, first exposed in his emails in the climategate emails. There, he actually worked to destroy the careers of any scientist who questioned his work, rather than debate the facts with them.
He tried to do the same this time with Dr. Ball, and has been soundly slapped down.
