Tag: engineering

Curiosity begins to round the corner out of Gediz Vallis

11:37 am

Curiosity looks ahead
Click for original image.

According to an update yesterday from the rover team, the Mars rover Curiosity has finally begun to round the corner of the northern nose of the long ridge dubbed Texoli that forms the western wall of Gediz Vallis, the slot canyon that the rover has been exploring since August 2022.

The picture to the right, reduced, sharpened, and annotated to post here, was taken on December 10, 2024 and shows the view looking west. The red dotted line indicates the planned route. As the rocky ground indicates, travel forward in the near term will be interesting. As noted in the update:

While we want to head southwest, we had to divert a bit to the north (right of the image shown) to avoid some big blocks and high tilt. The path is very constrained in order to avoid driving over some smaller pointy rocks, scraping wheels along the sides of blocks, or steering into the side of blocks that might cause the steering to fail. And we also needed to worry about our end-of-drive heading to be sure the antenna will be clear to talk to Earth for the next plan. We ended up relying on the onboard behavior to help us optimize everything by implementing a really interesting and curvy 24-meter path (about 79 feet).

» Read more

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Rocket startup Stoke Space completes static fire test of first stage engine

10:02 am

Stoke's Nova rocket
Stoke’s Nova rocket

The rocket startup Stoke Space revealed yesterday that it has completed a static fire test of the first stage engine it will use on its Nova rocket, shown in the graphic to the right.

The test, which was not the first for this engine, proved out several new technologies.

Stoke Space called the test significant for several reasons. It’s the first hotfire of the company’s Block 2 (flight layout) stage 1 engine, and this engine architecture — called full-flow staged combustion (FFSC) — is considered particularly challenging. Only two entities in the world — Stoke and SpaceX — have successfully developed FFSC engines. … Stoke’s stage 1 engine is a liquified natural gas/liquid oxygen engine capable of producing 100,000 pounds of thrust. The duration of the test was not revealed.

It was the first time Stoke has tested on its new vertical test stand in Moses Lake. The company’s testing philosophy is that you must “test like you fly,” and it believes vertical testing is key to engine development.

Nor is the first stage engine the only technological innovation. Nova’s second stage uses a radical design whereby the engine releases its thrust through a ring of small nozzles on the outside perimeter of the stage, rather than a single central nozzle. This design is what the company hopes will allow it to return that upper stage intact for reuse.

The four year old company has raised $100 million in investment capital, but has also faced environmental red tape from the Space Force for its launch facility at Cape Canaveral. It had previously targeted 2025 for the first test flights of Nova, but that schedule appears unlikely because of this red tape.

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Land of knobs

12:53 pm

Land of knobs
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 17, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled merely as a “terrain sample,” it was likely taken not as part of any specific research project, but to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule in order to maintain its proper temperature.

When the camera team does this, they try to pick interesting targets. In this case, they targeted this 400-foot-high pointy-topped hill. The smoothness of its slopes suggest this hill is made up largely of packed dust, possibly a hardened former dune. This hypothesis seems strengthened by the erosion on the eastern slopes, which appears to be areas where that packed sand has worn or blow away.

Think of sandstone in the American southwest. It is made of sand that has hardened into rock, but wind and water and friction can easily break it back into dust particles, resulting often in the spectacular and weird geological shapes that make the southwest so enticing.

But is this sand?
» Read more

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Io’s volcanoes get their lava from separate magma chambers, not a global underground ocean of magma

11:11 am

Io's interior as presently theorized
Click for original animation.

Using data collected from Juno’s multiple fly-bys of the Jupiter moon Io, scientists now hypothesize that the moon does not have a global underground ocean of magma, feeding its many volcanoes, but that instead each volcano is fed its lava from a separate magma chamber.

The graphic to the right illustrates the present conclusion. You can read the paper here [pdf]. From the press release:

The Juno team compared Doppler data from their two flybys with observations from the agency’s previous missions to the Jovian system and from ground telescopes. They found tidal deformation consistent with Io not having a shallow global magma ocean.

“Juno’s discovery that tidal forces do not always create global magma oceans does more than prompt us to rethink what we know about Io’s interior,” said lead author Ryan Park, a Juno co-investigator and supervisor of the Solar System Dynamics Group at JPL. “It has implications for our understanding of other moons, such as Enceladus and Europa, and even exoplanets and super-Earths. Our new findings provide an opportunity to rethink what we know about planetary formation and evolution.” [emphasis mine]

The highlighted words indicate the significance of this data. It possibly suggests that the underground oceans of water that have been theorized for these other moons — where life could possibly exist — might be mistaken. Instead, they might have smaller pockets of water, similar to Io’s many magma chambers.

Everything here however is uncertain, including these new conclusions about Io. We just don’t have enough data from any of these moons to make any definitive conclusions.

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Ispace signs agreement with lunar mining startup

10:15 am

Landing sites on Moon

The Japanese lunar lander startup Ispace has now signed an agreement with a lunar mining startup dubbed Magna Petra to transport the latter company’s helium-3 mining equipment to the Moon.

In a memo of understanding, ispace and Magna Petra have agreed to collaborate to utilize the moon’s resources for economic benefits to life on Earth, the companies announced Tuesday, Dec. 10. Through “non-destructive, sustainable harvesting,” according to a joint statement, Magna Petra plans to one day extract “commercial quantities” of helium-3 isotopes from regolith on the lunar surface for delivery and distribution back on Earth, where the resource is facing an extreme supply shortage.

Ispace meanwhile still has to prove it can put a lander on the Moon. Its first attempt, Hakuto-R1, almost succeeded, but crashed in April 2023 when its software thought it was just above the ground and shut down its engines when it was still three miles high. The company’s second attempt, dubbed Resilience and carrying a rover dubbed Tenacious, is scheduled for launch in January 2025. The landing site is shown on the map to the right, within Mare Frigoris in the northern part of the Moon’s nearside hemisphere.

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A satellite startup in Oman signs on to China’s lunar base partnership

10:03 am

Middle East, showing Oman's proposed spaceport

Oman Lens, a satellite startup in Oman, has signed an agreement with China to participate in its International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) lunar base project.

This follows Oman’s first suborbital launch, which according to Oman’s state-run press lifted off from its Duqm proposed spaceport facility and reached space. None of this however has been confirmed, though government officials said they hope to do three more suborbital test flights in the next year.

The Duqm spaceport hopes to be fully operational for orbital flights by 2026. Besides China, Oman has also been in negotiations with various American rocket startup companies, though no deals have been announced, mostly because of the State Department’s ITAR restrictions protecting American technology from hostile foreign theft. Oman is not necessarily considered a friendly country.

It appears Oman decided to make a deal with China when it couldn’t make one with the U.S.

As for China’s ILRS project — it formed in competition with the U.S. Artemis Accords — it has now signed thirteen countries and about a dozen academic institutions and international companies. It claims it hopes to get fifty countries on board, but that number likely includes such institutions, not nations.

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China launches five satellites to test the design of a planned laser communications constellation

9:41 am

China today successfully placed the first five satellites of a planned satellite constellation called the “High Speed Laser Diamond Constellation,” its Long March 2D rocket lifting from the Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.

The satellites are apparently intended to test the engineering of using lasers for communications. China’s state-run press provided little further information. Nor did it say where the rocket’s lower stages, using toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed inside China.

128 SpaceX (with a launch scheduled for later today)
60 China
16 Russia
13 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 147 to 92, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 128 to 111.

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ADRAS-J gets within 50 feet of abandoned rocket stage

3:28 pm

abandoned upper stage, taken by ADRAS-J
Image taken during ADRAS-J’s initial approach in April 2024.
Click for original image.

The demo maneuvering spacecraft ADRAS-J, built by the Japanese orbital tug startup Astroscale, has successfully maneuvered to within 50 feet of the abandoned rocket stage that the company hopes to grab and de-orbit on a later mission.

When ADRAS-J was 50 meters behind the upper stage the spacecraft reduced the gap in a straight-line approach then maneuvered to approximately 15 meters below the Payload Attach Fitting (PAF) — the planned capture point for the follow-on ADRAS-J2 mission — aligning the spacecraft’s relative speed, distance, and attitude. ADRAS-J successfully maintained this position until an autonomous abort was triggered by the onboard collision avoidance system due to an unexpected relative attitude anomaly with the upper stage. The spacecraft safely maneuvered away from the debris as designed before reaching the CIP. Astroscale Japan is currently investigating the cause of the abort.

Engineers will have to understand that the cause of that abort prior to launching ADRAS-J2, the mission that will grab the stage and de-orbit it.

Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.

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Land-locked Zimbabwe wants a spaceport, and is asking the Russians to help build it

9:47 am

According to the head of Zimbabwe’s space agency, Painos Gweme, the land-locked African country hopes to build its own spaceport and launch its own rocket sometime in the next ten years, and is in negotiations the Russians for aid.

In an interview published on Tuesday, Gweme told TASS that his country has begun negotiations with Russia’s national spaceflight corporation, Roscosmos, about the planned projects, including connecting Zimbabwe to Moscow’s cosmonaut training system. “We expect that with the assistance of our Russian colleagues, we will be able to launch our own rocket into space within the next 10 years,” he said, according to the news agency.

“We hope that our first rocket will be launched from our own cosmodrome. We have already begun working on plans, selecting a location whose natural conditions would be best suited for creating a launch complex,” Gweme added.

Any launches that take place from Zimbabwe will have to cross either South Africa or Mozambique, so expect their to be some objections from those quarters.

I also suspect that if Russia is considering this, it is doing so with the intention of building that Zimbabwe spaceport for its own uses. Zimbabwe certainly doesn’t have the capability to do this, even in ten years. Because of Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine in 2022 it was banned from its launch site in French Guiana, operated in partnership with the European Space Agency. Roscosmos might be hunting for another international site to give it more options, as well as some good international publicity.

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Lucy about to do close fly-by of Earth in order to slingshot it towards the orbit of Jupiter

9:33 am

Lucy's future route through the solar system
Lucy’s route to the asteroids. Click for original image.

On December 12, 2024 the asteroid probe Lucy will do a very close fly-by of Earth, dipping to only 220 miles of the ground and thus giving it the velocity to fly through asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and on to the Trojan asteroids that orbit with Jupiter.

During the gravity assist, the Lucy spacecraft, from Earth’s perspective, will approach from the direction of the Sun. This means that observers on Earth will not be able to see Lucy approaching, as it will be lost in the Sun’s glare. Lucy’s trajectory will bring the spacecraft very close to the Earth, even lower in altitude than the International Space Station. To ensure the safety of the spacecraft as it passes through this region full of Earth-orbiting satellites and debris, NASA has procedures to anticipate and avoid potential collisions. If needed, the spacecraft will execute a small trajectory correction maneuver 12 hours before closest approach to alter the time of closest approach by 1 or 2 seconds — enough to avoid a potential collision.

Shortly after sunset, keen observers in the Hawaiian Islands may be able to catch a glimpse of Lucy as the spacecraft approaches Earth before it passes into Earth’s shadow at 6:14 p.m. HST. Lucy will speed over the continental U.S. in darkness, travelling over 33,000 miles per hour (14.8 kilometers per second), and emerge from Earth’s shadow 20 minutes later at 11:34 p.m. EST. At that time, Lucy may be visible to observers with a telescope in the western regions of Africa and the eastern regions of South America as sunlight reflects off the spacecraft’s large solar panels (observers in the eastern United States will be looking at the much dimmer “back” side of the solar panels, making Lucy harder to see

No imagery is planned for this flyby in order to protect the spacecraft’s science instruments.

After the fly-by, Lucy’s next target will be the main belt asteroid Donaldjohanson in April 2025. Its arrival in Jupiter orbit will follow in 2027.

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SpaceX recovers parts of Starship from its last test launch on November 19th

9:22 am

Two teams of SpaceX employees have successfully recovered parts of the Starship that completed a soft vertical landing over the water in the Indian Ocean during the last test launch on November 19th.

The recovery included heat-resistant panelling and large bags of “miscellaneous metal pieces”. Images also showed large tanks being loaded off the ship, however it is unclear what they contained. Recovery of the rocket’s main section also proved too difficult, and it was left to sink to the bottom, with that part of the Indian Ocean about 6km deep. Mr Leal said allowing space material to sink after a splashdown was “pretty normal”.

It appears from this report that the Starship broke in two pieces when it fell over and hit the water. It sounds like the recovery teams focused mostly on recovering the flaps and heat shield, though getting them off the spaceship’s outer hull while it floated in the water and was sinking must have been quite an interesting experience. My guess is that salvage operations lifted out of the water for this purpose.

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Ingenuity’s last flight: an accident investigation

9:10 am

Ingenuity accident investigation conclusions
Click for original image.

Using all the data available, engineers at JPL have done a more detailed accident investigation into Ingenuity’s last flight on Mars on January 18, 2024, and are about to publish their report. Their conclusions however were published today by NASA, with the graphic to the right the main conclusion.

One of the navigation system’s main requirements was to provide velocity estimates that would enable the helicopter to land within a small envelope of vertical and horizontal velocities. Data sent down during Flight 72 shows that, around 20 seconds after takeoff, the navigation system couldn’t find enough surface features to track.

Photographs taken after the flight indicate the navigation errors created high horizontal velocities at touchdown. In the most likely scenario, the hard impact on the sand ripple’s slope caused Ingenuity to pitch and roll. The rapid attitude change resulted in loads on the fast-rotating rotor blades beyond their design limits, snapping all four of them off at their weakest point — about a third of the way from the tip. The damaged blades caused excessive vibration in the rotor system, ripping the remainder of one blade from its root and generating an excessive power demand that resulted in loss of communications.

The reason Ingenuity’s system couldn’t find enough features to track was because it was flying over a dune field, the ground almost all smooth sand. The only features were the soft changes of topography caused by the dunes, which were not small.

Not surprisingly, these same engineers are working on a larger drone-type helicopter for a future mission, dubbed Mars Chopper, which based on an short animation released by NASA, is the mission targeting Valles Mariner that I first described in June 2022. The investigation into Ingenuity’s failure will inform the design of Chopper.

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ULA’s CEO outlines a bright 2025 for its Vulcan rocket

4:18 pm

In an interview for the website Breaking Defense, ULA’s CEO Tory Bruno outlined his optimistic outlook in 2025 for its Vulcan rocket, despite the loss of a nozzle from a strap-on booster during its second test launch.

The important take-aways:

  • He expects the military to certify the rocket “momentarily”, though this could mean one to several months.
  • The company plans 20 launches in 2025, with 16 Vulcans already in storage.
  • Eventually Bruno expects to be launching 20 to 30 times per year.
  • Blue Origin has so far delivered 12 BE-4 engines, of which four have flown.
  • Blue Origin’s production rate is presently one per week.

The last two items are significant. If this production rate is the fastest Blue Origin can do, it will limit the number of Vulcan and New Glenn launches significantly per year. For example, Vulcan uses two engines per launch. To do 20 launches in 2025 will require 40 engines. Blue Origin however wants to also launch its New Glenn a number of times in 2025, and it uses seven BE-4 engines per launch. A production rate of one per week means that Blue Origin will not be producing enough engines for the number of launches planned for both rockets. Either ULA will have to delay its Vulcan launches awaiting engines, or Blue Origin will have to do the same for its New Glenn.

Of course, it is also possible that Blue Origin will be able to up this production rate with time. It has certainly made progress in this area in the past year, since a year ago it was having trouble producing one engine per month.

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Part 1 of 2: What NASA’s next administrator should do if SLS and Orion are cancelled

2:29 pm

When George Bush Jr. first proposed in 2004 an American long term effort to return to the Moon that has since become the Artemis program, he made it clear that the goal was not to simply land in 2015 and plant the flag, but to establish an aerospace industry capable of staying on the Moon permanently while going beyond to settle the entire the solar system.

The problem was that Bush proposed doing this with a government-built system that was simply not capable of making it happen. Though this system has gone through many changes in the two decades since Bush’s proposal, in every case it has been centered on rockets and spacecrafts that NASA designed, built, and owned, and were thus not focused on profit and efficiency. The result has been endless budget overruns and delays, so that two decades later and more than $60 billion, NASA is still years away from that first Moon landing, and the SLS rocket and Orion capsule that it designed and built for this task are incapable of establishing a base on the Moon, no less explore the solar system.

The real cost of SLS and Orion
The expected real per launch cost of SLS and Orion

For one thing, SLS at its best can only launch once per year (at a cost of from $1 to $4 billion per launch, depending on who you ask). There is no way you can establish a base on the Moon nor colonize the solar system with that launch rate at that cost. For another, Orion is simply a manned ascent/descent capsule. It is too small to act as an interplanetary spacecraft carrying people for months to years to Mars or beyond.

These basic design problems of both SLS and Orion make them impractical for a program to explore and colonize the solar system. But that’s not all. Orion has other safety concerns. Its heat shield has technical problems that will only be fixed after the next planned Artemis-2 manned mission around the Moon. Its life support system has never flown in space, has issues also, and yet will also be used on the next manned flight.

Thus, it is very likely that when Jared Isaacman, Trump’s appointee for NASA administrator, takes over running the agency, he will call for the cancellation of both SLS and Orion. How can he ask others to fly on such an untested system?

When he does try to cancel both however the politics will require him to offer something instead that will satisfy all the power-brokers in DC who have skin in the game for SLS/Orion, from elected officials to big space companies to the bureaucrats at NASA. Isaacman is going to have to propose a new design for the Artemis program that these people will accept.

Artemis without SLS and Orion

Before I propose what Isaacman should do, let’s review what assets he will have available within the Artemis lunar program after cancelling these two boondoggles.
» Read more

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Reanalysis of Webb data discovers more than a hundred very small main-belt asteroids

11:42 am

Portrait of all 138 new asteroids
Click for original image.

Using data from the Webb Space Telescope in an unexpected way, astronomers have discovered 138 asteroids in the main asteroid belt, most of which are the smallest so far detected.

The picture to the right shows all 138 asteroids. The researchers had originally used Webb to study the atmospheres of the exoplanets that orbit the star TRAPPIST-1. They then thought, why not see if their data also showed the existence of asteroids in our own solar system. By blinking between multiple images they might spot the movement of solar system objects moving across the field of view. From the press release:

The team applied this approach to more than 10 000 [Webb] images of the TRAPPIST-1 field, which were originally obtained to search for signs of atmospheres around the system’s inner planets. By chance TRAPPIST-1 is located right on the ecliptic, the plane of the solar system where all planets and most asteroids lie and orbit around the Sun. After processing the images, the researchers were able to spot eight known asteroids in the main belt. They then looked further and discovered 138 new asteroids, all within tens of meters in diameter — the smallest main belt asteroids detected to date. They suspect a few asteroids are on their way to becoming near-Earth objects, while one is likely a Trojan — an asteroid that trails Jupiter.

The data is insufficient for most of these objects to chart their orbits precisely. Based on this one single study, however, it suggests that pointing Webb along the ecliptic in almost any direction will detect more such objects. Do this enough and astronomers might actually be able to get a rough census of the asteroid belt’s population.

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Superheavy to be used on next test flight completes 15-second static fire test

10:04 am

SpaceX has successfully completed a launchpad 15-second static fire test of the 33 engines on the Superheavy booster that will be used on the next test flight (the seventh) of its Starship/Superheavy rocket.

The video at the link is remarkable in that it appears all 33 Raptor-2 engines fired for the entire test with no problems either to the rocket or launchpad, despite producing more thrust in that time than any rocket ever in the history of space exploration.

According to this report, it appears SpaceX is targeting January 11, 2025 for that seventh test flight.

SpaceX has not yet announced a launch date for Starship’s seventh test flight, but the company appears to be eyeing Jan. 11; an email sent by NASA to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration identifies that date as the target. (According to that email, NASA plans to deploy a Gulfstream V jet to observe the upcoming flight.)

This date however has not yet been confirmed by SpaceX. Nor has the FAA indicated it will issue a license. The FAA’s approval will depend on the flight plan SpaceX chooses for the test. If similar to the previous two test flights, then that approval will be fast. If not, the red tape will likely cause several more months of delays.

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AST SpaceMobile’s satellite-to-cell constellation gets its second contract

9:46 am

AST SpaceMobile, which is building a constellation of satellites that act as orbiting cell towers and can provide service where ground-based cell towers are unavailable, has now won its second contract, signing a 10-year deal with Vodafone, a European cell company which provides service there as well as across Africa and the Middle East.

AST’s first contract is with AT&T in the U.S. It already has five satellites in orbit, and plans to begin launching its second generation and larger BlueBird satellites next year, with the goal to begin service in the U.S. first.

All it needs really is an FCC license, which it has applied for but not yet received. Its main competitor, Starlink, has received its FCC license, so expect this red tape to evaporate relatively quickly, especially with the coming change in presidents.

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One of Australia’s proposed spaceports moves

9:37 am

Australia's spaceports
Australia’s spaceports

“I’m from the government and I’m here to help!” Because of its inability to get the proper permissions from a local council, the management of Equatorial Launch Australia (ELA) has abandoned its original spaceport location on the Gove peninsula in the Northwest Territory of Australia and shifted east to a new location on the York peninsula in Queensland.

On the map to the right the “X” shows the old location, with the new location near the town of Weipa on the west coast of the peninsula. The change was forced on the company when it could not get proper approvals from the Northern Land Council (NLC), which manages the Arnhem Land Aboriginal Land Trust where the original site was located.

In a statement late on Monday, ELA said its most recent attempt to finalise a lease for the expansion of the ASC in October had been unsuccessful, following three other failed attempts in the last 12 months. In each case, it said the NLC had “failed to meet its own specified deadline for the approval of the Head Lease” or “provide any official reason for the delay”, despite pleas from the NT government and the Gumatj Aboriginal Corporation.

Because ELA has a launch contract with a South Korea rocket startup Innospace that intends to launch next year, it decided the switch had to occur now to make sure it could meet its obligations under this launch contract.

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“Thar’s ice in them hills!”

10:13 am

Overview map

Thar's ice in them hills!
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on September 25, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the camera team labels as a “mound in the southern highlands.”

The mound in question sits in the center of the sunken depression, and at the highest resolution shows its top to be cracked and broken, as if something is attempting to break out by pushing up from below.

Everything about this picture screams near-surface ice. The cracked mound suggests ice sublimating into gas, which applies pressure to the surface and thus the cracks. The depression suggest that much of the near-surface ice at this location has already disappeared, causing the ground to sag. All the craters lack upraised rims. If caused by impacts, the ground here was soft enough that the impactor simply sank into the ground. Imagine dropping a rock you’ve heated into snow. It would simply leave a hole.

But there’s more. The white dot in the overview map above marks the location. In the inset, the lighter area surrounding this depression resembles an ice sheet that is slowly sublimating away. There are also other similar depressions in that lighter area. The lighter area also has fewer craters than the darker regions nearby, suggesting that this ice sheet covers the older impacts.

The location is in the southern cratered highlands in a mid-latitude region where many images indicate the existence of layers of ice deep below ground. This picture is more evidence of the same, but it also indicates the presence of ice very close to the surface as well.

The orbital data continues to tell us that Mars is not a dry desert like the Sahara, but an icy desert like Antarctica. There will be plenty of water for future colonists. All they will have to do is stick a shovel in the ground, dig it up, and process it.

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SpaceX launches 23 Starlink satellites

10:34 pm

SpaceX just after midnight (Eastern) tonight successfully launched another 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The first stage completed its second flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

128 SpaceX
59 China
16 Russia
13 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 147 to 91, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 128 to 110.

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Tim McLaughlin – NYC&C Scale Model Railroad

6:01 pm

An evening pause: The view from the front cab during runs of four elevated & subway lines, filmed October 14, 2012.

Hypnotic, and epic in its own way. There are times where it looks and sounds exactly as I remember it, riding on the front car of a NYC subway train, looking out that front window. Nice way to start the weekend.

Hat tip Wayne DeVette.

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Strange flat layers on Mars

12:47 pm

Strange layers on Mars

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on July 16, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what MRO’s camera team labels as “layers near ridge in Argyre Planitia.”

The layers are strange because there is so little topographic difference between them. Though the ground slopes downward from the south to the north, dropping about 1,300 feet, it does so almost smoothly. The layers show relatively little topographic relief.

And what caused the circular shape? Is it evidence of a buried crater? And if so, why so little relief at its rim?

As always, the overview map provides some answers.
» Read more

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Iran launches its Simorgh orbital rocket

11:11 am

Iran today announced it has successfully placed several small payloads into orbit, its Simorgh rocket lifting off from its interior Semnan spaceport.

The Simorgh carried what Iran described as an “orbital propulsion system,” as well as two research systems to a 400-kilometer (250-mile) orbit above the Earth. A system that could change the orbit of a spacecraft would allow Iran to geo-synchronize the orbits of its satellites, a capability Tehran has long sought.

It also carried the Fakhr-1 satellite for Iran’s military, the first time Iran’s civilian program is known to have carried a military payload.

This was Iran’s fourth launch in 2024, doubling the launch record it had set in 2023.

The leader board for the 2024 launch race remains unchanged:

127 SpaceX
59 China
16 Russia
13 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 146 to 91, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 127 to 110.

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Hubble takes a different look at quasar 3C 273

10:25 am

Hubble's different views of 3C 273
Click for original image.

One of the most studied objects in the sky is the quasar 3C 273, located about 2.5 billion light years away and the first quasar ever to be identified, in 1963. What makes it especially interesting is the 300,000-light-year-long jet that shoots out from it.

Astronomers have now used the Hubble Space Telescope to take a different view of 3C 273, using the telescope’s coronograph to block the central bright light so that the surrounding dimmer features can be seen. The two images to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here, show what this new image (bottom) reveals when compared to an earlier Hubble image (top).

The new Hubble views of the environment around the quasar show a lot of “weird things,” according to Bin Ren of the Côte d’Azur Observatory and Université Côte d’Azur in Nice, France. “We’ve got a few blobs of different sizes, and a mysterious L-shaped filamentary structure. This is all within 16,000 light-years of the black hole.”

Some of the objects could be small satellite galaxies falling into the black hole, and so they could offer the materials that will accrete onto the central supermassive black hole, powering the bright lighthouse.

What makes this observation even more outstanding is that the image was produced by using Hubble’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) as the coronograph to block the bright center of 3C 273. This improvisation of STIS has been done many times before, but it remains a great example of clever thinking by the astronomers who use Hubble.

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Japan’s space agency admits first launch of its new Epsilon-S rocket will be delayed

10:01 am

Japan’s space agency JAXA yesterday admitted that the first launch of its new Epsilon-S rocket — intended to be cheaper and competitive with the new rockets being developed worldwide — will be delayed because of the explosion that occurred during a static fire test on November 26, 2024.

The news reports in the Japanese press don’t provide much information. It appears the investigation into the explosion is still on-going, and that the cause of the failure has not yet been identified. Because of this, JAXA has been forced to cancel the planned March 2025 date for Epsilon-S’s inaugural flight.

JAXA should get out of the business of building rockets, as its track record is really horrible. The Japanese government has already told it to do so, but it is clearly dragging its feet, not wanting to give up the turf it has controlled for decades.

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Why Orion’s heat shield problems give Jared Isaacman the perfect justification to cancel all of SLS/Orion

9:43 am

Orion's damage heat shield
Damage to Orion heat shield caused during re-entry in 2022,
including “cavities resulting from the loss of large chunks”

In yesterday’s press conference announcing new delays in NASA’s next two SLS/Orion Artemis missions to the Moon, agency officials were remarkably terse in providing details on why large chunks of Orion’s heat shield material broke off during its return to Earth in 2022 during the first Artemis mission. That damage, shown to the right, is one of the main reasons for the newly announced launch delays.

All they really said was that the damage was caused during re-entry, the atmosphere causing more stress than expected on the heat shield.

Today NASA finally released a more detailed explanation.

Engineers determined as Orion was returning from its uncrewed mission around the Moon, gases generated inside the heat shield’s ablative outer material called Avcoat were not able to vent and dissipate as expected. This allowed pressure to build up and cracking to occur, causing some charred material to break off in several locations.

…During Artemis I, engineers used the skip guidance entry technique to return Orion to Earth. … Using this maneuver, Orion dipped into the upper part of Earth’s atmosphere and used atmospheric drag to slow down. Orion then used the aerodynamic lift of the capsule to skip back out of the atmosphere, then reenter for final descent under parachutes to splashdown.

[Ground testing during the investigation showed] that during the period between dips into the atmosphere, heating rates decreased, and thermal energy accumulated inside the heat shield’s Avcoat material. This led to the accumulation of gases that are part of the expected ablation process. Because the Avcoat did not have “permeability,” internal pressure built up, and led to cracking and uneven shedding of the outer layer.

In other words, instead of ablating off in small layers, the gas build-up caused the Avcoat to break off in large chunks, with the breakage tending to occur at the seams between sections of the heat shield.
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Europe’s Vega-C rocket returns to flight after being grounded for more than two years

3:47 pm

Europe’s Vega-C rocket, built by the Italian company Avio but presently still managed by the European Space Agency’s commercial arm Arianespace, today successfully completed its first launch in two years, lifting off from French Guiana carrying a European Earth observation satellite. As of posting the satellite had not yet been deployed.

The rocket was first grounded when its upper stage failed during a December 2022 launch. The investigation pinpointed the problem as the design of the stage’s engine nozzle. However, the first redesign also failed, requiring a second redesign.

This was the eighth launch worldwide in the past 48 hours, the most ever accomplished in such a short time. All told, five nations completed launches (United States 3, China 2, India 1, Russia 1, Europe 1) from eight different spaceports, with all three American launches completed by SpaceX.

Because this was only the third launch by Europe this year, the leader board for the 2024 launch race remains unchanged:

127 SpaceX
59 China
16 Russia
13 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 146 to 90, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 127 to 109.

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Union official accuses Boeing of more unsafe practices

10:44 am

According Craig Garriott, a union representative at Boeing’s satellite-manufacturing facility in Los Angeles, Boeing’s management has been allowing numerous safety violations to go unfixed in order to focus on profits and fast production.

Acquired by Boeing in 2000, the satellite manufacturing facility has long been considered one of Boeing’s more stable business units. It relies in part on a union workforce that Garriott said is responsible for constructing and testing satellites and their component parts.

“This is perhaps the most technical group of hourly people that you’ll probably find on this planet,” said Garriott, who estimated he’s raised between 300 and 400 safety violations over the past year. Those complaints, he said, range from obstructed fire extinguishers and fire alarms to concerns over heavy machinery blocking exits and trapping workers in certain parts of the factory.

In October, union workers filed a complaint with the Occupational Health and Safety Administration that, according to Garriott, highlighted unsafe conditions on the factory floor. Another technician at the facility, who spoke to CBS News on the condition he remain anonymous to protect his job, said safety had become “an afterthought” and quality had “degraded” over the past five to six years.

It is important to recognize that Garriott’s complaints might simply be the typical tactic of a union representative during or before contract negotiations. There are rumors Boeing plans to sell off its space subsidiaries, which would include this satellite division. Garriott might simply be putting public pressure on the company in order to give himself a better negotiation position if such a sale takes place.

It is also quite possible, based on Boeing’s recent very poor track record in quality control, that everything Garriott says here is also true.

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Sierra Space signs deal using its Dream Chaser mini-shuttles for in-space manufacturing

10:33 am

Sierra Space's family of planned LIFE modules
Sierra Space’s family of planned LIFE modules. Click for original

Sierra Space has now signed agreements with two different startups, Astral Materials and Space Forge, to use its Dream Chaser mini-shuttles for in-space manufacturing.

Astral Materials leverages the microgravity environment of space to grow ultra-high quality semiconductor crystals for advanced chip technologies. Space Forge harnesses free flying manufacturing facilities to produce next-generation materials for commercial industries, national security and research.

Up to now, Sierra’s only customer has been NASA, which wants to use Tenacity, the first Dream Chaser mini-shuttle, to hauling cargo to and from ISS. These new deals illustrate that there are other profit opportunities for the company’s reusable shuttle outside of government. As the startup Varda has already demonstrated with its own returnable capsule, there is money to be made manufacturing products in weightlessness that cannot be produced in the gravity of Earth.

The press release however has one additional tidbit that is intriguing. Sierra is a partner in the Blue Origin-led Orbital Reef commercial space station. It also appears to be the only partner that is actually building anything for that station, specifically its LIFE inflatable modules. The press release mentions that both these agreements include options for Astral and Space Forge to provide “input on Sierra Space’s future space stations.” That this press release does not refer to Orbital Reef here suggests once again that Sierra Space is somewhat dissatisfied with the output of its Blue Origin partner, and is thus creating options for it to build its own space station using those LIFE modules (shown above), should Blue Origin not deliver.

At a minimum, Astral and Space Forge will certainly be interested in doing manufacturing within those LIFE modules, should they end up being part of Orbital Reef.

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