Tag: engineering

China completes two launches

2:23 pm

China today successfully completed two launches, using from different spaceports its Long March 2C and Long March 3B rockets.

The 2C launched a two demo internet communications satellites designed to eventually be used in a large constellation similar to the constellations of SpaceX and OneWeb. The launch also included a third unidentified communications satellite.

The 3B placed in orbit what is believed to be a military reconnaissance satellite.

Both rockets dumped their first stages somewhere in the interior of China. No word on whether those stages carried parachutes or grid fins to better control their landing, or crashed near habitable regions.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

29 China
20 SpaceX
13 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman

The U.S. still leads China 31 to 29 in the national rankings.

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Wind-blown dark material on Mars

11:59 am

Dark wind-blown material on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on May 13, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a cluster of small depressions from which has blown dark material across the ground to the south. The full image also shows two craters north and south of this cluster that have similar dark material blown from their interiors.

When I first looked at this image, I wondered if the dark material and these depressions signaled a recently active volcanic vent where magma had spewed upward to stain the nearby ground. See for example this recent post about what some scientists believe might the most recent volcanic event so far found on Mars. I emailed several scientists for their thoughts, all of whom said this appears to not be active volcanism but merely windblown dark material.

Kim Seelos, science operations lead for MRO’s visible-near infrared spectrometer, put it simply. “My own reading of this image is that the dark areas here are likely akin to wind streaks.” Instead of the dark material being thrown from the depressions by a volcanic event, it was swept to the south by the prevailing winds.

How that dark material got into the depressions, and why it was so comparably darker than the surrounding terrain, remains unclear. David Horvath of the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona speculated that the low hills just north of the dark patch might be a factor.
» Read more

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First hi-res radio wavelength images of metal asteroid Psyche

9:46 am

Psyche in thermal

Using the ALMA telescope in Chile astronomers have obtained the highest resolution radio images of the surface of the metal-rich asteroid Psyche yet obtained. The image to the right is from their just published paper. From the article:

These new images reveal that some regions of the asteroid have surface temperatures different from the average, indicating that Psyche’s composition is not uniform. The researchers also found that Psyche has a relatively high thermal inertia compared to other asteroids, yet it radiates approximately 60% less heat than would be expected for an object with such a high inertia. The researchers hypothesize that this is because the asteroid’s surface is at least 30% metal. However, the light reflecting off Psyche’s surface is unpolarized, which would not be the case for an object with a smooth or solid metallic surface. They therefore hypothesize that metallic grains are spread throughout its surface material, causing the light to scatter.

Though Psyche is large, 178 by 144 by 101 miles, it is not spherical like Ceres, the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt at 580 miles diameter. Thus, somewhere from the size of Psyche to the size of Ceres we move from an irregular asteroid body to a spherical planetary body, as it appears most planetary scientists define planets.

The probe Psyche is scheduled to launch in August ’22 to arrive at Psyche in ’26.

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ISS spacewalk postponed due to “minor medical issue”

9:16 am

NASA announced yesterday that a spacewalk planned for today on ISS has been postponed because of ” a minor medical issue” involving American astronaut Mark Vande Hei.

This issue is not a medical emergency. The spacewalk is not time-sensitive and crew members are continuing to move forward with other station work and activities. Teams are assessing the next available opportunity to conduct the spacewalk following the SpaceX CRS-23 cargo resupply launch planned for Aug. 28 and upcoming Russian spacewalks.

The NASA announcement provided no other information, which is unfortunate. While Vande Hei’s medical privacy must be respected, his decision to not disclose the issue will only fuel some foolish speculation that is likely false. It is always better to be transparent.

Update: It appears the medical issue was a pinched nerve, which will likely cause the spacewalk to be delayed into September at the soonest.

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Ispace’s 3rd lunar lander to be larger, built entirely in U.S.

9:06 am

Capitalism in space: The private Japanese company Ispace announced yesterday that its third lunar lander will be larger (to provide more payload space for customers) and built entirely in U.S. (to better garner NASA contracts).

The lander, being developed by the company’s U.S. office in Denver, will fly as soon as 2024 on the company’s third mission to the moon.

A major difference in the new design, company officials said in interviews, is the payload capacity. While the lander ispace is building for its first two missions in 2022 and 2023 can carry 30 kilograms of payload to the lunar surface, the new lander will have a payload capacity of 500 kilograms to the surface. It will also be able to deploy an additional 2,000 kilograms of payloads to lunar orbit.

The company is also hardening the lander to survive the two week long lunar night.

The decision to shift operations to the U.S., and partner with U.S. companies General Atomics and Draper, makes Ispace a viable competitor for later NASA contracts, which in turn can encourage other privately funded payloads to sign on.

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Two smallsat orbiters to launch in ’24 to study Martian upper atmosphere

11:53 am

NASA has picked a twin orbiter mission being built by a partnership of the University of California-Berkeley and the private rocket company Rocket Lab to place two smallsats in orbit around Mars to study how the harsh environment of space might be causing the red planet to lose its atmosphere.

The entire project is dubbed ESCAPADE (an insanely contrived acronym) but the two smallsats have been dubbed “Blue” and “Gold.”

The mission builds on decades of experience at SSL in building satellite instruments and fleets of spacecraft to explore regions around Earth, the moon and Mars, specializing in magnetic field interactions with the wind of particles from the sun. Each of the two satellites, named after UC Berkeley’s school colors, will carry instruments built at SSL to measure the flow of high energy electrons and ionized oxygen and carbon dioxide molecules escaping from Mars, magnetic field detectors built at UCLA and a probe to measure slower or thermal ions built at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida.

With twin satellites, it is possible to measure conditions simultaneously at two places around the planet, Lillis said, allowing scientists to connect plasma conditions at one site to the escaping ion flux at another. Over the course of the mission, the two satellites will change positions to map the upper atmosphere and magnetosphere of nearly the entire planet from an altitude of between 150 and 10,000 kilometers.

Maybe the most important aspect of this mission however is not what it will learn at Mars, but how it is being financed and built. NASA is only paying about $80 million, a tiny amount compared to most past unmanned planetary probes. The university in turn is buying Rocket Lab’s Photon satellite structure rather than building the satellites from scratch. It will configure the instruments to fit into that ready made satellite body, thus saving time and money.

By doing it this way NASA and the planetary science community is increasingly relying on private companies to provide them their planetary probes, rather than building such things by hand themselves, at much greater cost. The result is a growing and thriving private commercial sector that owns and builds its own planetary probes, for profit.

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Curiosity’s coming mountainous target

10:38 am

Curiosity's upcoming mountainous target
Click for full image.

Overview map


Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The photo above, taken on August 22, 2021 by Curiosity’s left navigation camera and reduced to post here, looks ahead at the rover’s upcoming mountainous goals. The overview map to the right shows the area covered by this image by the yellow lines. The dotted red line indicates the rover’s original planned route, with the white dotted line its actual path of travel.

The cliff ahead is about 400-500 feet away. The top of this cliff is the Greenheugh Pediment, its blocky top geological layer visible as the dark cap at the top of the cliff face. Back in March 2020 Curiosity had climbed up to view across this pediment, from a point to the northwest and off the overview map to the left. (Go to this link to see what the view was like from there.) Since then the science team has had the rover travel quite a distance, to circle around to now approach the pediment from the east.

The white box marks the area covered by a close-up high resolution mast camera image, shown below.
» Read more

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Update on Starship/Superheavy preparations for orbital test flight

9:15 am

Starship prototype #20 being prepped
Screen capture from Labpadre live stream, available here.

Link here. In sum it appears that SpaceX is getting very close to launch, with the permit approval of the FAA increasingly becoming the biggest obstacle to progress.

Although the completion of all of this testing could take a long time, in Elon Musk’s mind, the path to returning B4 and S20 to being an integrated stack could be during this month.

A week ago, Musk tweeted that the “first orbital stack of Starship should be ready for flight in a few weeks, pending only regulatory approval.” Ultimately, once the vehicle is in its launch configuration, there will be a lengthy process of passing the aforementioned regulatory approval, with an environmental public comment period triggered ahead of launch. This has to be completed before the launch license can be granted by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

The screen capture above shows Starship prototype #20 sitting on the suborbital flight test pad, as workers on cherry-pickers work on its exterior. The orange, green, and white tiles are likely tile locations still needing some level of installation work.

Based on SpaceX’s normal pace of operations, the engine testing for both Starship and Superheavy will take several weeks, once both are ready for such testing. While Starship appears just about ready, Superheavy apparently needs more work. When SpaceX stacked both together on the orbital launchpad several weeks ago, it suggested both were closer to launch than they were. Their present status suggests engine testing will likely begin in September, with Starship at the beginning of the month and Superheavy at the end of the month. That would make a launch possible sometime in late October, assuming the federal government doesn’t decide to shut this entire operation down by refusing to issue a permit.

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Russia launches another 34 OneWeb satellites

12:38 am

Russia today put another 34 OneWeb satellites into orbit, using its Soyuz-2 rocket.

OneWeb now has 288 satellites in orbit, out of the planned 648. At present the constellation is able to provide service to customers in latitudes north of 50 degrees. Though SpaceX’s Starlink constellation is also offering service to customers in the same northern latitudes, the two companies service different customer bases, with OneWeb aimed at big business and government operations and Starlink aimed at individual residential customers.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

27 China
20 SpaceX
13 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman.

The U.S. still leads China 31 to 27 in the national rankings.

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Russia delays launch of next unmanned lunar probe

9:04 am

According to a story in Russia’s state-run press, Roscosmos has decided to delay the launch of its Luna-25 lander from October 2021 to May 2022.

The story gave no reason for the delay.

Luna-25 would be the first Russian lunar probe since the 1970s, and is supposed to be that country’s first probe in a partnership with China to establish a manned lunar base by the 2030s.

Want to bet the Russian contribute to this project will be repeatedly delayed, and will also likely be disappointing? That has been the track record of Roscosmos for the past two decades (like all 21st century government projects). This first delay signals many more to come.

I am not saying Russia will fail to launch anything. What I am saying is that everyone should reserve a large store of skepticism about any promises Russia’s makes.

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Top engineers and managers fleeing Blue Origin

3:58 pm

According to this story today, Blue Origin this summer lost at least sixteen top management and engineering employees, all leaving in a very short time.

At least 16 key leaders and senior engineers have left Blue Origin this summer, CNBC has learned, with many moving on in the weeks after Bezos’ spaceflight.

…Others quietly updated their LinkedIn pages over the past few weeks. Each unannounced departure was confirmed to CNBC by people familiar with the matter. Those departures include: New Shepard senior vice president Steve Bennett, chief of mission assurance Jeff Ashby (who retired), national security sales director Scott Jacobs, New Glenn senior director Bob Ess, New Glenn senior finance manager Bill Scammell, senior manager of production testing Christopher Payne, New Shepard technical project manager Nate Chapman, senior propulsion design engineer Dave Sanderson, senior HLS human factors engineer Rachel Forman, BE-4 controller lead integration and testing engineer Jack Nelson, New Shepard lead avionics software engineer Huong Vo, BE-7 avionics hardware engineer Aaron Wang, propulsion engineer Rex Gu, and rocket engine development engineer Gerry Hudak.

Those who announced they were leaving Blue Origin did not specify why, but frustration with executive management and a slow, bureaucratic structure is often cited in employee reviews on job site Glassdoor.

There is another possibility that would be more hopeful. It could be that Jeff Bezos is shaking up the company because of its poor accomplishments during the past four years, since CEO Bob Smith was hired.

That Smith however is still there makes this guess unlikely. The article also notes that Smith’s approval among Blue Origin employees is abysmal, with only 15% approving his management, when compared to high numbers given to the management leaders at SpaceX and ULA.

Thus, this exodus is more likely a sign that that the rats are fleeing what they see as a sinking ship.

It would be a mistake to dismiss Blue Origin however. The company is swimming in dough because of Bezos’ deep pockets, and he is free to do what he thinks must be done to fix things. Under such conditions it is very unlikely Blue Origin will disappear. More likely Bezos will straighten things out, though the company now has to play big catch up, not only against SpaceX but also against the fleet of new orbital rocket companies about to come on line — all doing so ahead of Blue Origin.

There is also the possibility that this story has got its facts wrong. It makes a very big error near the beginning, claiming that former SpaceX engineer Lauren Lyons had left Blue Origin to join SpaceX, when she had actually left SpaceX to take a big promotion at Firefly. My mistake. Lyons had moved from SpaceX to Blue Origin. This job change was leaving Blue Origin to go to Firefly.

Hat tip to reader Jay.

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New cracks across old Martian lava flows

1:03 pm

New cracks across an old lava flow
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on June 4, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It captures one of the many deep straight fissure canyons that make up the feature dubbed Cerberus Fossae in the center of Mars’ volcano country.

The crack is called a graben, and happens when the ground is either stretched from pressure from below, or when two adjacent large blocks of material move sideways relative to each other.

What makes this particular graben interesting are two features. First, the overlapping break suggests something complex took place at this spot when the crack separated. Second, the crack cut across the foot of an older frozen lava flow, meaning it has to be younger than that flow.

The overview map below provides a clue when that lava flow might have occurred, while also suggesting this crack in Cerberus Fossae might be much younger than expected.
» Read more

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China’s astronauts complete 2nd spacewalk at Tianhe space station

9:50 am

The new colonial movement: Two Chinese astronauts yesterday successfully completed a six hour spacewalk, installing components on the outside of the Tianhe space station module necessary for future construction work.

The pair, wearing second generation Feitian (“flying to space”) extravehicular mobility suits, completed installing foot restraints and an extravehicular working platform to the large robotic arm. Chinese media outlets streamed footage of the EVA. … The EVA also included work on a panoramic camera, installing a toolkit, adding a pump set for the Tianhe thermal control system and other apparatus in preparation for the arrival of two further modules in 2022. The EVA was completed at 2:33 a.m. Friday, around an hour ahead of schedule.

The first spacewalk occurred in the first week in July.

These astronauts have been working at the station since mid-June, and are expected to return to Earth in mid-September, completing a three month mission. Shortly thereafter a new cargo freighter will launch to the station to provide supplies for the next crew, due in October.

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Perseverance’s next drill attempt

9:40 am

Perseverance short term planned route
Click for full image.

The Perseverance science team today announced its near-future plans for where it will send the rover, but also when and how it will attempt its next core sample drilling.

The map to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, shows the rover’s future route. The red dot indicates its present location. The blue dot indicates where next they will attempt to drill. The route shows that they have decided to also make a short side trip south, an target that until now was considered optional.

As for what they plan to do in that next drill attempt:

We will first abrade the selected rock and use the science instruments to confirm (to the best of our ability) that the new target is likely to result in a core after the sampling process.

If we choose to sample the rock, Perseverance will perform a set of activities very close to what was done on the prior coring target. The main difference will be, after coring, we’ve added a “ground in the loop” session to review the images of the tube in the bit and confirm a sample was collected. Then, the tube will be transferred into the rover for processing.

If post-coring imagery shows no sample in the tube, we may elect to try again, using an alternate geometry (e.g. more horizontal) for the coring activity. Another option, if the targeted rock doesn’t allow for a change in geometry, is to look for a different rock in this region that is more easily cored horizontally.

They really want to get a sample of this particular bedrock on the floor of Jezero Crater. Their problem is that the first core sample failed because the bedrock was too structurally weak, crumbled into powder during drilling, and thus poured out of the drillbit once retracted from the ground. It could be that this will be a consistent issue with any sample attempts in this bedrock. This is why they are also considering drilling sideways, in order to hold any material they grab.

I suspect that the short side trip south might be to an outcrop that the rover could drill sideways into. Thus, if they are successful in getting a sample at the blue dot they might still cancel that side trip.

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NASA freezes work on SpaceX’s lunar lander version of Starship

9:23 am

In response to Blue Origin’s lawsuit that is attempting to cancel the contract award to SpaceX for adapting its Starship upper stage rocket as a manned lunar lander, NASA yesterday officially paused all work by it and SpaceX on this project.

From NASA’s statement:

NASA has voluntarily paused work with SpaceX for the human landing system (HLS) Option A contract effective Aug. 19 through Nov. 1. In exchange for this temporary stay of work, all parties agreed to an expedited litigation schedule that concludes on Nov. 1. NASA officials are continuing to work with the Department of Justice to review the details of the case and look forward to a timely resolution of this matter.

The optics for Blue Origin remain ugly. Not only does the company appear more interested in fighting court battles than building spaceships and rockets, it now is acting to prevent others from doing so.

The timeline of events however is interesting. Blue Origin filed its lawsuit on August 13th. NASA issued the first $300 million payment to SpaceX for this $2.9 billion contract on August 16th. Even with this announcement today, the payment suggests that NASA is doing what it can to make the contract award an accomplished fact that the courts will not find easy to overturn.

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Japan to attempt sample return mission to Martian moon

9:06 am

Japan’s space agency JAXA today announced that it will launch in ’24 an unmanned probe to the Martian moon Phobos that will return a sample to Earth in ’29.

The plan is to bring back about 10 grams of material.

If launched as planned, Japan will beat everyone in getting the first samples back from Martian space. China says it hopes to grab samples from Mars itself by 2030, while the U.S. and Europe hope to launch a mission to return the Perseverance cached samples sometime in the 2030s.

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Two new smallsat rockets now set for launch

8:57 am

Capitalism in space: The launch dates of two different new smallsat rockets is now confirmed.

First, Astra has obtained from the FAA a launch operator license that will allow it to launch rockets from now until March 2026. This license now allows the company to proceed with its August 27th first orbital launch of its Rocket-3 rocket. If successful, Astra hopes to move to monthly launches before the end of the year.

Second, Firefly has announced that it will attempt its own first orbital launch of its Alpha rocket on September 2nd. The company had been promising a launch before the end of the year, but until now had not set a date. The successful completion of a static fire test of the rocket cleared the way.

Three other smallsat rocket companies, Relativity, ABL, and Aevum, have also said they are targeting this year for their first orbital launches, but none has set any dates yet.

If successful, these companies will join Rocket Lab and Virgin Orbit in providing launch capabilities for tiny satellites like cubesats and nanosats.

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A weak avalanche season on Mars?

1:39 pm

The north pole scarp
Click for full image.

Today’s cool image from Mars is cool both for what is visible in the photo and for what is not, the latter of which might turn out to be a discovery of importance.

The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on June 24, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a section of the edge of Mars’ north polar ice cap, with north at the top.

This scarp is probably more than 2,000 feet high, though that height drops to the south as the upper layers disappear one by one from either long term erosion or sublimation. Those layers represent the visible information in the photo that is cool. They give us tantalizing clues about the geological and climatic history of Mars. Each layer probably represents a climate period when the north icecap was growing because the tilt of the planet’s rotation was even less than the 25 degrees it is now. When that tilt is small, as small as 11 degrees, the poles of Mars are very cold, and water ice migrates from the mid-latitudes to the poles, adding thickness to the icecaps. When the tilt grows, to as much as 55 degrees, the mid-latitudes are colder than the poles, and the water ice migrates back to the mid-latitudes.

What is not visible in this picture, however, might be far more significant.
» Read more

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The knives aimed at SpaceX are getting sharpened

10:01 am

Starship must be banned!
Banning Starship: The new goal of our leftist masters.

Two stories today mark what appears to be a growing political campaign focused on squelching by any means possible the continued unparalleled success of the company SpaceX. And the simultaneous publication of both stories on the same day also suggests that this campaign is deliberately timed to force the FAA to shut down SpaceX at Boca Chica.

First we have a story at Space.com aimed at SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, making it the big villain in the growing threat of satellite collisions.

SpaceX’s Starlink satellites alone are involved in about 1,600 close encounters between two spacecraft every week, that’s about 50 % of all such incidents, according to Hugh Lewis, the head of the Astronautics Research Group at the University of Southampton, U.K. These encounters include situations when two spacecraft pass within a distance of 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) from each other.

Lewis, Europe’s leading expert on space debris, makes regular estimates of the situation in orbit based on data from the Socrates (Satellite Orbital Conjunction Reports Assessing Threatening Encounters in Space ) database. This tool, managed by Celestrack, provides information about satellite orbits and models their trajectories into the future to assess collision risk.

Though his data appears accurate and the growing risk of collisions is real, it appears from the story that Lewis, one of only two experts interviewed, has a strong hostility to SpaceX. He doesn’t like the fact that SpaceX is so successful in such a short time, and appears to want something done to control it.

The article also nonchalantly sloughs off one very significant fact: Very few satellite collisions have actually occurred. While the risk is certainly going to increase, that increase is not going to be fueled just by SpaceX. At least four large constellations are presently in the works, all comparable to Starlink in some manner. To focus on SpaceX in particular makes this article appear like a hatchet job.

Then we have a news story from CBS and its very partisan and leftist news show, Sixty Minutes+, providing a loud soapbox for the very small number of anti-development environmentalists fighting to block SpaceX’s operations in Boca Chica, Texas.
» Read more

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Firefly hires noted SpaceX engineer

9:03 am

Capitalism in space: Firefly Aerospace announced earlier this week that it has hired as it chief operating officer Lauren Lyons, a former SpaceX engineer familiar to many for her regular appearances as a announcer on SpaceX’s launch telecasts.

The company said that Lyons will focus on “transitioning Firefly from an R&D environment to a production environment” for its Alpha small launch vehicle, Space Utility Vehicle tug and Blue Ghost lunar lander. “Firefly is entering a pivotal and exciting phase of its growth,” Lyons said in the statement. “I’m thrilled to take on the challenge of leading the efforts in scaling the company’s infrastructure to support rapid growth, high execution rate, and deliver exceptional value and service to our customers.”

Translation: Using Lyons expertise from SpaceX, Firefly intends to operate much like SpaceX, upgrading its rockets and spacecraft continuously even as they operate commercially.

The launch date for the company’s first orbital attempt remains unannounced, though it says it will occur before the end of the year. It appears they are ready to go, except for one component of their flight termination system.

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China launches two more military surveillance satellites

8:52 am

China today used its Long March 4B rocket to put two more military surveillance satellites into orbit.

No word on whether the spent first stage landed near habitable areas in China. China also said nothing about whether that stage carried grid fins or parachutes for bringing it back to Earth more precisely.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

27 China
20 SpaceX
12 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman

Russia plans a launch later today (tomorrow in Russia) of another 34 OneWeb satellites. In the national rankings, the U.S. still leads China 31 to 27.

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A dry bedrock Martian crater floor?

1:01 pm

A dry bedrock crater floor?
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on June 21, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The location is a very eroded crater at about 26 degrees north latitude. The image shows the crater’s crater floor, with a variety of bedrock-type features, sharp ridges, abrupt scarps, and flat smooth plateaus, with a hint of lobate glacial flows in the image’s southeast quadrant.

At 26 north latitude, it is unlikely that anything here is icy, unless it is very well protected by debris. Most of these features are almost certainly bedrock, though their formation could very well have been shaped by ice in past eons when this location was more amenable to water ice.

The wider MRO context camera image of the entire crater, plus the overview map, give a larger picture, and raise some interesting questions.
» Read more

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

9:31 am

Saturn's rings
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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.

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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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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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