Tag: engineering

New gravity map of Mars released

9:09 am

New global map of Mars gravity field
Click for original image.
Using both seismological data compiled over four years by the InSight Mars lander as well tiny changes in the orbits of Martian satellites, scientists have now created a global gravity map of the red planet, indicating the regions below the surface that are either low or high density.

That map is above, annotated by me to indicate some of Mars’ major surface features.

The density map shows that the northern polar features are approximately 300-400 kg/m3 denser than their surroundings. However, the study also revealed new insights into the structures underlying the huge volcanic region of Tharsis Rise, which includes the colossal volcano, Olympus Mons.

Although volcanoes are very dense, the Tharsis area is much higher than the average surface of Mars, and is ringed by a region of comparatively weak gravity. This gravity anomaly is hard to explain by looking at differences in the martian crust and upper mantle alone. The study by Dr Root and his team suggests that a light mass around 1750 kilometres across and at a depth of 1100 kilometres is giving the entire Tharsis region a boost upwards. This could be explained by huge plume of lava, deep within the martian interior, travelling up towards the surface.

I once again note that the largest impact basin on Mars, Hellas Basin, sits almost exactly on the planet’s far side from Tharsis, and appears to have a light density. This contrast once again makes me wonder if the origin of that impact and the Tharsis Bulge are linked.

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Boeing employees reject deal of union and company and go on strike

8:47 am

In another blow to the company, Boeing’s employees have gone on strike after overwhelming voting to reject a new deal their union officials had negotiated with the company that had called for a 25% salary increase across the board.

Members of the International Association of Machinists District 751, which represents about 33,000 Boeing workers in Washington state, walked off the job when their contract expired at midnight on Thursday night. Almost 95 per cent rejected the deal endorsed by their bargaining team on Sunday and 96 per cent voted to strike, easily exceeding the two-thirds majority needed to trigger a walkout.

Many of the union’s members expressed anger on social media, criticising the deal and accusing IAM leaders of settling for too little. Many had been ready to strike, partly fuelled by residual anger from a 2014 deal that eliminated defined-benefit pensions.

Boeing on Thursday said it was ready to renegotiate a deal to halt a crippling strike.

Right now Boeing’s credit rating is “one notch above junk” and if the strike isn’t settled quickly that rating could drop more. It will also prevent the company from taking any action to recover from its numerous problems that are limiting sales of its airplanes and its military and space products.

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SpaceX launches 21 more Starlink satellites

8:39 am

SpaceX last evening successfully placed another 21 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.

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

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

91 SpaceX
38 China
10 Rocket Lab
10 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 106 to 58, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 91 to 73.

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A fluted mesa on Mars

1:27 pm

A fluted mesa on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 9, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the science team labels a “silica-rich mound”, as indicated by the bright streaks on all the high ridge points.

The flat-topped mesa on the right drops about 200 feet to the valley floor. The rims of that depression to the west rise about 50+ feet higher, while mesa nose in the upper left rising another 50+ feet more.

Was the depression caused by an impact? If so, the landscape has changed radically since that impact occurred, with most of the surrounding terrain eroded away. The two flat-topped mesas hint at the ancient surface when that impact occurred.

A wider view however raises questions about this impact theory.
» Read more

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Scientists re-create on Earth the sublimation of Mars’s winter mantle of dry ice

11:32 am

Spiders created on Earth
Click for original image.

Scientists have successfully re-created on Earth the process on Mars that creates the unique “spider” formations seen in the the Martian south pole region, produced when the winter mantle of dry ice begins to sublimate away into a gas.

The study confirms several formation processes described by what’s called the Kieffer model: Sunlight heats the soil when it shines through transparent slabs of carbon dioxide ice that built up on the Martian surface each winter. Being darker than the ice above it, the soil absorbs the heat and causes the ice closest to it to turn directly into carbon dioxide gas — without turning to liquid first — in a process called sublimation (the same process that sends clouds of “smoke” billowing up from dry ice). As the gas builds in pressure, the Martian ice cracks, allowing the gas to escape. As it seeps upward, the gas takes with it a stream of dark dust and sand from the soil that lands on the surface of the ice.

At the south pole, the ground below the mantle is stable enough that each winter the trapped CO2 gas follows the same path to the same points where the dry ice cracks, slowly creating “tributaries” that combine to form the spider formations.

The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, comes from figure 9 of the paper [pdf]. It shows the lab-created spiders formed by this simulated process, thereby confirming this hypothesis about how the spiders form.

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Italian rocket company Avio outlines its future rocket plans

11:07 am

Link here. The plans include steady upgrades to its Vega-C rocket, including replacing the upper stage engine presently provided by a Ukrainian company with an engine built by Avio itself.

The bigger development will be a more powerful rocket, the Vega-E, to replace the Vega-C in 2027.

This version of the rocket will retain the first and second stages of the Vega C+ rocket and substitute the third and fourth stages for a single liquid fuel stage powered by the company’s new M10 methalox rocket engine.

The company is also hoping to begin test flights in 2026 of a Grasshopper-type small-scale demonstration rocket leading to the development of a reusable two-stage rocket that would eventually replace Vega-E.

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NASA receives 11 VIPER proposals from the private sector

10:58 am

NASA is now evaluating eleven different proposals from private companies to take over the agency’s canceled VIPER lunar rover.

Equipped with three scientific instruments and a drill, the rover was to be delivered to the Moon by a commercial lander, Griffin, built by Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. Astrobotic and several other companies have CLPS contracts to deliver NASA science and technology experiments to the Moon. NASA pays for delivery services for its payloads. The companies are expected to find non-NASA customers to close the business case.

NASA is paying Astrobotic $323 million for landing services on top of the cost of VIPER itself. NASA’s commitment to Congress was that VIPER would cost $433.5 million with landing in 2023. By the beginning of this year, that had become $505.4 million with landing in 2024.

It appears NASA canceled the VIPER mission because the agency had doubts Astrobotic would launch Griffin on time. The rover cost overruns, plus additional costs from that launch delay, made NASA management back out.

Though NASA has not revealed any details about the new eleven proposals, we know that Astrobotic’s competitor, Intuitive Machines, is one of those proposals. How it can get it launched to the Moon for less than it would have cost to launch on Astrobotic’s Griffin however is a mystery to me.

Meanwhile, Griffin is still going to launch, with Astrobotic now able to sell that VIPER payload space to others and NASA paying for the flight.

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The UK awards space removal contract to Astroscale/Clearspace partnership

10:49 am

The United Kingdom yesterday awarded a new $3 million contract to a partnership of the Japanese company Astroscale and the Swiss company Clearspace to further develop a mission to de-orbit two satellites in 2026.

The British subsidiaries of Japan-based Astroscale and Switzerland’s ClearSpace announced about 2.35 million British pounds ($3 million) each in funding before tax Sept. 11 to continue de-risking their robotic arm capture system and debris de-tumbling capabilities. The grants enable the ventures to continue working on their technologies until March, when the UK Space Agency is expected to decide which will conduct the demonstration mission.

Both consortiums passed preliminary design reviews for their mission earlier this year.

Both companies are positioning themselves as space junk removal operations, with Astroscale having already flown a partly successful mission to demonstrate rendezvous and capture technologies using its own proprietary magnetic capture system.

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Ispace targeting a December launch for its second attempt to softland on the Moon

10:41 am

Landing zone for Resilience lander

At a press conference yesterday officials of the Japanese company Ispace announced that they are now targeting a December 2024 launch of their second Hakuto-R lunar lander, dubbed “Resilience”, with the landing site located in the high mid-latitudes of the near-side of the Moon.

The map to the right indicates that location, inside Mare Frigoris. Atlas Crater is where Ispace attempted but failed to soft land its first lunar lander, Hakuto-R1, in April 2023.

This new lander will be launched on a Falcon 9 rocket. It carries six commercial payloads. It also appears the company decided to go for an easier landing site on this second mission. Rather than try to land inside a crater, it is targeting a very large and flat mare region, thus reducing the challenges presented to its autonomous software.

Ispace already has contracts both with NASA ($55 million) and Japan’s JAXA space agency ($80 million) for two more future landers, so a successful landing this time is critical to the company’s future.

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FAA attempts to justify its red tape

10:06 am

The FAA today responded to SpaceX’s harsh criticism of the licensing process that is delaying the next test orbital launch of Starship/Superheavy, claiming the delays were entirely SpaceX’s fault for changing the flight profile of the mission, likely involving the landing of Superheavy at the launch tower rather than in the Gulf of Mexico.

The agency also claimed that this change meant that the “environmental impact” would cover a wider area, requiring imput from “other agencies.”

An FAA official reiteriated these claims at a conference yesterday, stating that the delay was “largely set by the choices that the company makes.”

All crap and utter rationalizations. The FAA has decided that any change of any kind in the launch operations will now require major review, including bringing in Fish & Wildlife, the Coast Guard, and others to have their say. This policy however has nothing to do with reality, as there is absolutely no additional threat to the environment by these changes. Nor is there any significant increase in safety risks by having Superheavy land at Boca Chica. Even if there were, the only ones qualified to determine that risk are engineers at SpaceX. The FAA is merely rubberstamping SpaceX’s conclusions, and taking its time doing so.

This is America today. Unless something changes soon, freedom is dead. To do anything new and challenging Americans will have to beg permission from bureaucrats in Washington, who know nothing but love to exert their power over everyone else. Under these circumstances, we shall see the end of a great and free nation.

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SpaceX launches AST SpaceMobile’s first five operational cellphone satellites

9:45 am

SpaceX this morning successfully launched the first five operational satellites in the planned constellation by the company AST SpaceMobile’s for providing cellphone service from orbiting satellites, the Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage completed its thirteenth flight, landing back at Cape Canaveral.

AST’s orbital cellphone capability is in direct competition with SpaceX’s own Starlink orbital cellphone service. By launching this competitor SpaceX demonstrates that it is not using its dominance in the launch industry to squelch competition.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

90 SpaceX
38 China
10 Rocket Lab
10 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 105 to 58, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 90 to 73.

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Two astronauts on commercial Polaris Dawn manned mission complete spacewalk

9:37 am

Jared Isaacman during his spacewalk
Jared Isaacman during his spacewalk

Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis this morning each successfully completed short spacewalks outside their Resilience capsule, exiting about halfway into space but floating free except for a umbilical tether.

It was very evident that the goal of both EVAs was to check out the engineering upgrades created by SpaceX to make this spacewalk possible. Both astronauts worked very carefully to vent the capsule’s atmosphere, open the hatch, exit, then close the hatch, though Isaacman (who exited first) opened the hatch and Gillis closed the hatch. All in all it took a little less then two hours to complete both spacewalks, with Isaacman outside for about ten minutes, and Gillis for a little less.

Though the actual EVAs were relatively unambitious, they were very comparable to the first government spacewalks by America’s Ed White and Russia’s Alexei Leonov in the 1960s. The engineering data that SpaceX obtained from this spacewalk will allow it to refine its spacesuits, its capsule, and make later commercial spacewalks more complex.

This new SpaceX capability is now something the company can market to other future customers. It not only gives this American private enterprise another skill, it makes SpaceX’s commercial capabilities more valuable.

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