Tag: engineering

SpaceX launches Space Force GPS satellite

4:37 pm

Capitalism in space: SpaceX tonight successfully launched the GPS satellite that on a previous launch had experienced a launch abort at T-2.

This was a completely new Falcon 9 rocket, with two of its original engines replaced after the company had traced the issue that caused the launch abort. The first stage successfully landed on the drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean, and will fly again on the next GPS launch by SpaceX for the Space Force.

The satellite has been deployed successfully, completing the launch.

The leaders in the 2020 launch race:

27 China
19 SpaceX
12 Russia
4 ULA
4 Europe (Arianespace)
4 Rocket Lab

The U.S. now leads China 30 to 27 in the national rankings.

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Rocket Lab will try to recover 1st stage on next launch

3:04 pm

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab announced today that it will attempt to recover the 1st stage of its Electron rocket on its next launch, using parachutes to slow its descent into the ocean and then fishing from the sea.

On its next mission set for liftoff later this month, Rocket Lab will try to recover the first stage of its Electron small satellite launcher after parachuting into the Pacific Ocean downrange from the company’s privately-run spaceport in New Zealand, officials announced Thursday.

The attempt to retrieve the Electron rocket’s first stage moves Rocket Lab closer to eventually capturing falling boosters in mid-air with a helicopter, then reusing the hardware. The reuse initiative is aimed at increasing Rocket Lab’s flight rate, and could result in cost savings, according to Peter Beck, the company’s founder and CEO.

The flight is presently scheduled for November 15 from New Zealand. It appears the goal with this recovery is not to reuse the 1st stage, but to recover it so they can determine how it fared during re-entry. For re-use they will capture the first stage using a helicopter, before splashdown and is exposed to saltwater.

When they attempt the helicopter capture on an actual launch remains unclear.

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Terraced mesa inside Martian depression

1:14 pm

Terraced mesa inside depression
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on July 1, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a very puzzling terraced mesa inside an enclosed depression or sinkhole (the western half of which can be seen in the full image).

What caused that mesa? A first scan of the image and the data suggests we are looking at sinkage related to the melting of an underground ice table. The latitude here is 34 degrees south, just far enough away from the equator for glacial activity to be possible. Moreover, the small circular depression in the upper right of the image strongly suggests an impact crater into slushy material. The implication is that this depression is the result of the melting or sublimation of underground ice, leaving behind a mesa that is made of solider stuff.

Another possibility is that the terraced mesa is actually the remains of glacial material. In the full image features inside other nearby depressions are terraced also, but are also much more reminiscent of glacial features found in many craters in the mid-latitudes. The depression is also close to the headwaters of Reull Valles, a meandering canyon where many images have shown glacial features (see for example here, here, and here).

These features however could also have nothing to do with water ice.
» Read more

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Bezos sells another $3 billion of Amazon shares

8:54 am

Jeff Bezos continues to accelerate his sale of his Amazon stock, selling another $3 billion this week.

In August, Bezos offloaded more than $3.1 billion of Amazon shares, after selling more than $4.1 billion worth of shares in February. The sales this week bring his total cash out in 2020 to more than $10.2 billion so far, which is a notable jump from 2019, when Bezos sold $2.8 billion worth of shares.

While Bezos had originally said these sales were for financing his space company, Blue Origin, it now appears that the bulk of this new money is aimed at funding environmental political organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Wildlife Fund.

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Overview of China’s lunar sample return mission

8:29 am

Chang'e-5 landing site on Moon

Link here. The Chinese mission, the first to bring back lunar samples since the 1970s, is now set for launch on November 24, 2020.

Chang’e-5 includes a lander, ascender, orbiter and returner. After the spacecraft enters the Moon’s orbit, the lander-and-ascender pair will split off and descend close to Mons Rümker, a 1,300-metre-high volcanic complex in the northern region of Oceanus Procellarum — the vast, dark lava plains visible from Earth. Once the craft has touched down, it will drill up to 2 metres into the ground and extend a robotic arm to scoop up about 2 kilograms of surface material. The material will be stored in the ascender for lift-off.

The descent and ascent will take place over one lunar day, which is equivalent to around 14 Earth days, to avoid the extreme overnight temperatures that could damage electronics, says Clive Neal, a geoscientist at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

…Once the ascender is back in lunar orbit, the samples will be transferred to the returner. This in-flight rendezvous will be complex and “a good rehearsal for future human exploration”, says James Carpenter, a research coordinator for human and robotic exploration at the European Space Agency in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. China plans to send people to the Moon from around 2030.

The Chang’e-5 spacecraft will then journey back to Earth, with the lander parachuting toward Siziwang Banner in Inner Mongolia, northern China, probably sometime in early December.

The location, as shown in the image above, is in the northern mid-latitudes of the Moon’s nearside, and is a place where some relatively recent volcanic activity might have occurred, though still in the far past.

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Why Martian mountains are different than on Earth

3:08 pm

A mountain peak on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on August 12, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what to any Earthling’s eye appears to be a somewhat ordinary flat-topped mountain peak with two major flanking ridgelines descending downward to the north and the south, and two minor ridgelines descending to the northwest and southwest.

This peak and its landscape would surely be quite a spectacularly place to visit, should humans ever settle Mars and begin doing sightseeing hikes across its more interesting terrain. I can definitely imagine hiking trails coming up the two minor ridges, with a crest trail traversing the main north-south ridge across the peak.

This is not however a mountain on Earth. It is on Mars, which makes its formation and evolution over time fundamentally different than anything we find on Earth, despite its familiar look.

First, what formed it? Unlike most of Earth’s major mountain chains, the mountains of Mars were not formed by the collision of tectonic plates, squeezing the crust upward. Mars does not have plate tectonics. Most of its mountains formed either from the rise of volcanoes at single hot spots, or from the wearing away of the surrounding terrain to leave behind a peak or mesa.
» Read more

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First fast radio burst detected in Milky Way

10:57 am

Astronomers using both space- and ground-based telescopes have detected for the first time a fast radio burst occurring inside the Milky Way, finding that it came from a magnetar, a pulsar with an extremely powerful magnetic field.

The radio component was discovered by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), a radio telescope located at Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in British Columbia and led by McGill University in Montreal, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Toronto.

A NASA-funded project called Survey for Transient Astronomical Radio Emission 2 (STARE2) also detected the radio burst seen by CHIME. Consisting of a trio of detectors in California and Utah and operated by Caltech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, STARE 2 is led by Bochenek, Shri Kulkarni at Caltech, and Konstantin Belov at JPL. They determined the burst’s energy was comparable to FRBs.

By the time these bursts occurred, astronomers had already been monitoring their source for more than half a day.

Late on April 27, NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory spotted a new round of activity from a magnetar called SGR 1935+2154 (SGR 1935 for short) located in the constellation Vulpecula. It was the object’s most prolific flare-up yet – a storm of rapid-fire X-ray bursts, each lasting less than a second. The storm, which raged for hours, was picked up at various times by Swift, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, and NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), an X-ray telescope mounted on the International Space Station.

Later observations detected X-rays from the same source. While this does not prove that all fast radio bursts come from magnetars, it does prove that at least some do.

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New owners for Vector to revive company

8:30 am

Capitalism in space: The new owners for bankrupt smallsat rocket company Vector have announced that they plan to revive the company.

In their announcement they confirmed that the key problem that killed the original company were engineering issues with its chosen engine design.

One thing they did wrong was the technology the used for their engines. “They had some Achilles’ heels associated with their technical approach. They were trying to use a propellant combination that was untested in the industry,” said Chris Barker, who serves as Vector’s chief rocket scientist. “They were struggling with trying to get performance that they knew they needed for a small launcher to be successful, and ultimately their test program was unsuccessful.”

Vector had been developing engines that used propylene and liquid oxygen propellants. The new Vector plans to instead use engines powered by a more conventional combination of liquid oxygen and refined kerosene, or RP-1, propellants. Barker has been developing such engines since the 1990s for companies such as Space America and Earth to Sky.

The new owners also stated that initially they plan to target the suborbital business field. Their main focus right now is redesigning the Vector-R rocket in conjunction with their engines.

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Russians aim for Dec for fixing ISS leak permanently

8:23 am

The Russians announced yesterday that they plan the full and permanent repair of the small inch-long crack leaking air on ISS to occur in December, after required material is shipped to the station.

According to the official, the crack was the width of a hair and located in a hard-to-reach spot of Zvezda’s shell.

Solovyov did not specify the spacecraft that will deliver the sealing materials to the ISS, but the only one scheduled to fly in December is Cargo Dragon, a reusable freight spaceship of US private company SpaceX. The soonest flight of a Russian cargo spacecraft — Progress MS-16 — has been postponed until December 2021.

They also plan a spacewalk in the next two weeks to inspect the exterior of the Zvezda module where the crack is located.

I have yet to see an image of the crack itself. Why none has been made easily available is somewhat puzzling.

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NASA officially expresses concerns about proposed private communications constellation

8:55 am

For what appears to be an unprecedented action, NASA has officially expressed opposition to a proposed private satellite constellation by the company AST & Science.

NASA’s position was released in a comment to the FCC, where the company has requested a communications license to operate its satellites.

At issue are plans put forth by AST & Science, which intends to build a constellation of more than 240 large satellites, essentially deploying “cell towers” in space to provide 4G and possibly 5G broadband connection directly to cell phones on Earth. The company, based in Midland, Texas, calls its constellation “SpaceMobile” and has raised an estimated $120 million.

The space agency felt compelled to comment on AST’s proposal for several reasons. Most notably, the proposed altitude for the SpaceMobile constellation lies near the “A-Train,” a group of 10 Earth-science monitoring satellites operated by NASA and the US Geological Survey, as well as partners in France and Japan. “Historical experience with the A-Train constellation has shown that this particular region of space tends to produce a large number of conjunctions between space objects,” the NASA letter states.

The satellites are also very large. In order to provide service, AST plans to build spacecraft with large phased array antennae—900 square meters. According to NASA, in planning for potential conjunctions with other satellites and debris in this orbit, this would require proscribing a “hard-body radius” of 30 meters, or as much as 10 times larger than other satellites.

Maneuvering around the proposed SpaceMobile constellation would be extraordinarily taxing, NASA said. “For the completed constellation of 243 satellites, one can expect 1,500 mitigation actions per year and perhaps 15,000 planning activities,” the space agency stated. “This would equate to four maneuvers and 40 active planning activities on any given day.”

The company has said it is willing to work with NASA to ease its concerns. For NASA to take this particular step however is most strange, especially considering the size of this constellation, 240 satellites. This number is tiny compared to the multi-thousands being proposed by SpaceX, Amazon, and OneWeb. Their large size footprint certainly could be a factor, but it does seem puzzling for the space agency to pick out this particular constellation for opposition, and none of the others.

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Signal to Voyager-2 confirms upgrade of NASA’s Deep Space Network

8:42 am

After months of downtime in order to install a major and very badly needed upgrade to NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) (the worldwide array of radio dishes used to communicate with planetary probes throughout the solar system) a test command to Voyager-2 beyond the orbit of Pluto was sent, received, and executed successfully this week, proving the upgrade is working.

The call to Voyager 2 was a test of new hardware recently installed on Deep Space Station 43, the only dish in the world that can send commands to Voyager 2. Located in Canberra, Australia, it is part of NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), a collection of radio antennas around the world used primarily to communicate with spacecraft operating beyond the Moon. Since the dish went offline, mission operators have been able to receive health updates and science data from Voyager 2, but they haven’t been able to send commands to the far-flung probe, which has traveled billions of miles from Earth since its 1977 launch.

Among the upgrades to DSS43, as the dish is known, are two new radio transmitters. One of them, which is used to talk with Voyager 2, hasn’t been replaced in over 47 years. Engineers have also upgraded heating and cooling equipment, power supply equipment, and other electronics needed to run the new transmitters.

The successful call to Voyager 2 is just one indication that the dish will be back online in February 2021.

The upgrade has been overdue for years, and is essential to provide sufficient communications capability for the future interplanetary mission presently planned.

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Layered mesa on Mars

2:41 pm

Layered mesa on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on June 24, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a distinctive mesa in a mountainous region in the cratered highlands of Mars, just north of Hellas Basin, the deepest basin on the red planet.

The mesa’s most distinctive feature are its terraced layers, a feature that MRO has found in numerous other places surrounding and inside Hellas Basin (see for example the cool images here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

On Earth the assumption would be that these terraced layers imply different sedimentary layers that erode at different rates, as best illustrated by the Grand Canyon in Arizona. On Mars that assumption is not unreasonable, but unlike Earth, those layers could not have been formed in connection with large ocean bodies creating seafloor layers from the deposit of sealife over centuries. Some other geological process over time formed them, with volcanism, either from volcanoes or impact, being the most likely.
» Read more

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Another movie of OSIRIS-REx’s sample-grab-and-go at Bennu

10:08 am

The OSIRIS-REx science team has released another movie showing the sample-grab-and-go at Bennu, this time from a different camera.

The movie, made up of 189 images taken over three hours by the spacecraft’s navigation camera NavCam-2, can be seen at the link.

In the middle of the sequence, the spacecraft slews, or rotates, so that NavCam 2 looks away from Bennu, toward space. OSIRIS-REx then performs a final slew to point the camera (and the sampling arm) toward the surface again.

As the spacecraft nears site Nightingale, the sampling arm’s shadow comes into view in the lower part of the frame. Shortly after, the sampling head impacts site Nightingale (just outside the camera’s field of view to the upper right) and fires a nitrogen gas bottle, which mobilizes a substantial amount of the sample site’s material. Several seconds later, the spacecraft performs a back-away burn and the sampling arm’s shadow is visible against the disturbed surface material.

The team continues to investigate what caused the extremely dark areas visible in the upper and middle parts of the frame. The upper area could be the edge of the depression created by the sampling arm, a strong shadow cast by material lofted from the surface, or some combination of the two. Similarly, the middle dark region that first appears in the lower left of the image could be a depression caused by one of the spacecraft thrusters as it fired, a shadow caused by lofted material, or a combination of both.

It strikes me that getting post impact images of Nightingale is essential, if at all possible.

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A buried crater on Mars

3:35 pm

Close overview map

The overview map to the left indicates the general terrain surrounded today’s cool image. The white rectangle is the area covered by this image, taken on July 4, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. If you look close you can see that this photograph covers the eastern rim of what looks like an ancient and mostly buried crater on Mars. This unnamed crater is about 17 miles across.
» Read more

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Russian astronaut: Crack on ISS could be from “external impact”

10:48 am

Russian astronaut, Sergei Ryzhikov, today noted that to him the 1-inch crack causing the leak on ISS appeared to have been caused by an “external impact.”

Speaking with Flight Director of the Russian segment of the ISS Vladimir Solovyov, Russian cosmonaut Sergei Ryzhikov said: “If you take a closer look at the picture, there are changes of color in the middle of the crack.”

“We suspect an external impact,” Ryzhikov said adding that the place of the suspected impact should be examined during the crew’s next spacewalk, which is scheduled for November 18.

This conclusion is different than that expressed yesterday by another Russian astronaut, who suggested the crack was from age and wear and tear of the twenty-year-old Zvezda module.

Either way, an inspection of the exterior point of the crack is essential in order to permanently seal it, and that inspection will tell us one way or the other the cause of the crack.

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War between two Spanish space balloon companies

10:35 am

Capitalism in space: A legal battle is developing between two different Spanish high altitude space balloon companies, one that came first, and a second that is being backed by a venture capitalist who had previously worked at the first.

Jose Mariano Lopez Urdiales, an MIT-trained aeronautics engineer who founded Zero 2 Infinity 11 years ago, says Kemel Kharbachi, the now CEO of EOS X Space, worked closely with the company to raise a €1m investment for Zero 2 Infinity. But the funding deal never happened.

Instead, Kharbachi, whose previous experience has focused on tourism and catering, has emerged to build his own rival space balloon business.

It does appear, from the details outlined in the article, that Kharbachi essentially stole the concept and designs from Zero 2 Infinity in order to form his own company.

As these Spanish companies fight it out, a third company in America, Space Perspectives, hopes to begin flying tourists on its stratospheric balloon, dubbed Neptune, by ’24.

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ESA maps out first launch schedule for new rockets

3:19 pm

Capitalism in space? The European Space Agency (ESA) today laid out the development roadmap that will lead to the launch of two new rockets, the Vega-C being built by the Italian company Avio, and the Ariane 6 being built by ArianeGroup.

The Vega-C is a more powerful version of the Vega rocket, aimed at capturing the smaller satellite market. It maiden flight is now scheduled for June ’21.

The Ariane 6 is aimed at replacing the Ariane 5, Europe’s big workhorse rocket, but to do so at a lower cost. Its maiden flight is now set for the second quarter of ’22, a significant delay from the previously announced target date in ’21, which itself was a delay from the original late ’20 launch date.

Ariane 6 however has not succeeded in cutting costs enough to match its competitor SpaceX, and thus it continues to have trouble attracting customers, even among ESA’s partner nations that it is meant to serve. These issues have led to rumors that ESA is already looking to either significantly upgrade Ariane 6 (before it even flies), or replace it entirely wit a new re usable rocket.

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OSIRIS-REx completes storage of Bennu sample

2:33 pm

OSIRIS-REx has now completed placing its sample from the asteroid Bennu in the Sample Return Capsule that will bring it back to Earth.

On the afternoon of Oct. 28, following the backout check, the mission team sent commands to disconnect the two mechanical parts on the TAGSAM arm that connect the sampler head to the arm. The spacecraft first cut the tube that carried the nitrogen gas that stirred up the sample through the TAGSAM head during sample collection, and then separated the collector head from the TAGSAM arm itself.

That evening, the spacecraft completed the final step of the sample stowage process –closing the SRC. To secure the capsule, the spacecraft closed the lid and then fastened two internal latches. As of late Oct. 28, the sample of Bennu is safely stored and ready for its journey to Earth.

Because they decided it was better to store the sample immediately and not risk losing it, they were unable to do the spin test that would told them how much sample they obtained. For this reason we will not know the amount until the sample capsule is opened here on Earth, after its return on September 24, ’23.

UPDATE: You can watch if short movie of the Sample Return Capsule closing here.

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Hayabusa-2’s impactor shook Ryugu

8:26 am

When Hayabusa-2 fired an impactor into the asteroid Ryugu in order to access subsurface material in a sample grab, it apparently shook the asteroid, shifting boulders and rocks as far as 130 feet away.

The artificial impactor disturbed boulders within a 30m radius from the center of the impact crater- providing important insight into asteroids’ resurfacing processes.

Professor ARAKAWA Masahiko (Graduate School of Science, Kobe University, Japan) and members of the Hayabusa2 mission discovered more than 200 boulders ranging from 30cm to 6m in size, which either newly appeared or moved as a result of the artificial impact crater created by Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2’s Small Carry-on Impactor (SCI) on April 5th, 2019. Some boulders were disturbed even in areas as far as 40m from the crater center. The researchers also discovered that the seismic shaking area, in which the surface boulders were shaken and moved an order of cm by the impact, extended about 30m from the crater center. Hayabusa2 recovered a surface sample at the north point of the SCI crater (TD2), and the thickness of ejecta deposits at this site were estimated to be between 1.0mm to 1.8cm using a Digital Elevation Map (DEM).

This data makes all the more important for OSIRIS-REx to get post-sample-grab images of its Nightingale site, if at all possible.

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OSIRIS-REx engineers successfully place sample collector in return capsule

7:55 am

Stowing OSIRIS-REx's sample from Bennu
Click for full image.

OSIRIS-REx engineers have successfully placed the sample collector head holding the material captured from the asteroid Bennu in the return capsule that will bring it back to Earth.

Yesterday, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission successfully placed the spacecraft’s sample collector head into its Sample Return Capsule (SRC). The first image shows the collector head hovering over the SRC after the Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM) arm moved it into the proper position for capture. The second image shows the collector head secured onto the capture ring in the SRC. Both images were captured by the StowCam camera.

Today, after the head was seated into the SRC’s capture ring, the spacecraft performed a “backout check,” which commanded the TAGSAM arm to back out of the capsule. This maneuver is designed to tug on the collector head and ensure that the latches – which keep the collector head in place – are well secured. Following the test, the mission team received telemetry confirming that the head is properly secured in the SRC.

The next step will be to seal the capsule for return to Earth. However, based on the two images above, the sample is now relatively secure, as the opening where material could escape is now held face down in the capsule.

The spacecraft will head back to Earth in March ’21, with the sample capsule landing on Earth on September 24, 2023. I do not know whether it will be possible in the next six months to get new images of the Nightingale touch-and-go site, but have emailed Erin Morton, head of the communications for the science team, and asked. I will update this post when I hear back from her.

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Russian astronaut: ISS crack could be result of Zvezda module’s age

7:31 am

A Russian astronaut just returned from ISS admitted during a press conference that the recently located crack on the 20-year-old Zvezda module that was the source of the long-term slow leak could be the result of the module’s age.

“Twenty years are actually an absolute record for all space stations now. And we see now that something is changing and something requires greater [attention]. Again, if we go back to the leak, the hull is already beginning to give cracks and scratches somewhere, that is, we see the limits [of the ISS structure’s service life],” [cosmonaut Ivan Vagner] said.

The crack has been sealed temporarily, with a more permanent seal put in place after the nearby docking port is cleared and the hatches closed and out of the way.

If Russian astronauts are noticing wear and tear in Zvezda that is bad enough to cause “cracks”, this raises some very serious issues for ISS’s future, as replacing that module on ISS will be complicated and expensive, and at this point no one has even begun planning such an replacement.

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Is this the planned landing site of China’s Mars rover?

7:21 am

The prime landing site for China's Mars rover?

According to this Space News article, a report in the Chinese press, since revised to remove the information, had provided precise coordinates on Mars for the prime candidate landing site for China’s Tianwen-1 rover.

[I]nformation published in an article (in Chinese) in the official China Space News publication following launch in July provides a specific primary landing site. The article reported landing coordinates of 110.318 degrees east longitude and 24.748 degrees north latitude, within the southern portion of Utopia Planitia. Online versions of the article have since been edited to remove the coordinates; however, these remain published by sources citing the article.

The mosaic on the right, made up of two images taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s (MRO) context camera (found here and here) shows this location with the white cross. The white box is the area covered by the only image taken of this area by MRO’s high resolution camera.

As these photos show, this location, in a part of Mars’ northern lowland plains dubbed Utopia Planitia, is generally smooth and flat, making for a relatively safe landing site. At the same time, it has craters and some ridges and hills that could pose issues.

That the coordinates were removed from the Chinese press story suggests that this might be the prime site, but until Tianwen-1 gets into Mars orbit and begins scouting the site with its own high resolution images, they want to reserve judgement. The spacecraft arrives in orbit in February ’21, and they presently plan to land the rover in May. That gives them three months to scout this location as well as a secondary landing site on the other side of Mars, in the Chryse Planitia northern lowlands [pdf], the same region where Viking 1 and Mars Pathfinder landed.

Once they have done this they will be able to refine the location more precisely.

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SpaceX finds clogged valves in several Merlin engines

5:56 am

Capitalism in space: SpaceX has discovered that the problem that caused a recent launch abort of a GPS satellite was a coating that clogged valves in several newer Merlin engines.

Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of build and flight reliability at SpaceX, said teams initially weren’t able to figure out why two of nine engines triggered early-start sensors on Oct. 2, which forced computers to automatically scrub seconds before liftoff. After the engines were removed and shipped to Texas for testing, the anomaly surfaced again when sensors detected higher-than-expected engine chamber pressures.

The cause: a minuscule, almost undetectable amount of “masking lacquer,” which is used to protect engine components and surfaces during the production process. The lacquer is almost like a bright red nail polish. “We found a relief valve – a little line that goes to the relief valve – blocked in the gas generator,” Koenigsmann told reporters Wednesday. “That little red substance was blocking a relief valve that caused it to function a little bit earlier than it was supposed to.”

The gas generators are almost like little rocket engines themselves – they’re used to power a pump that then feeds propellants into the main engine chamber. But the blockage caused certain processes to begin too early.

Once the lacquer was removed the engines functioned perfectly.

The issue was also found in two engines on the new booster that was going to launch astronauts to ISS, which explains why that mission was delayed. The company is swapping out the engines, and is still targeting November 14th for that launch. In addition, NASA wants it to fly at least two missions beforehand to demonstrate the problem is fixed. One will be that GPS satellite, on November 4th. The other could be one of three different payloads on SpaceX’s busy schedule.

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Rocket Lab successfully launches 10 smallsats

9:19 pm

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab today successfully placed ten smallsats into orbit using its Electron rocket, launched from New Zealand.

This was their second successful launch for the company since their launch failure on July 4th. Their next launch should be their first from the U.S., from Wallops Island, Virginia.

The leaders in the 2020 launch race:

27 China
18 SpaceX
12 Russia
4 ULA
4 Europe (Arianespace)
4 Rocket Lab

The U.S. now leads China 29 to 27 in the national rankings.

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Scientists finally map Philae’s full route to its final landing site on Comet 67/C-G

12:53 pm

Philae's journey across Comet 67/C-G
Click for full resolution image.

Using archival data from Rosetta, scientists have finally been able to map out the full route and all impact points made by the lander Philae on its journey to land on the Comet 67P/C-G in November 2014.

All that was known previously was the location of the first contact, that there had been another impact following the rebound, and the location of the final landing site where Philae came to rest after two hours and where it was found towards the end of the Rosetta mission in 2016 . “Now we finally know the exact place where Philae touched down on the comet for the second time. This will allow us to fully reconstruct the lander’s trajectory and derive important scientific results from the telemetry data as well as measurements from some of the instruments operating during the landing process,” explains Jean-Baptiste Vincent from the DLR Institute of Planetary Research, who was involved in the research published today.

…Analysis of the data revealed that Philae had spent almost two full minutes – not unusual in this very low gravity environment – at the second surface contact point, making at least four different surface contacts as the lander ‘ploughed’ through the rugged landscape. A particularly remarkable imprint, which became visible in the images, was made when the top of Philae sank 25 centimetres into the ice at the side of an open crevice, leaving visible traces of the sample drill and the lander’s top. The peaks in the magnetic field data resulting from the boom movement show that Philae took three seconds to make this particular ‘dent’.

This new data about this particular impact has helped the scientists determine a great deal about the comet’s make-up and density, finding that it is extremely fluffy.

The parameters of surface contact showed that this ancient, 4.5-billion-year-old mixture of ice and dust is extraordinarily soft – it is fluffier than the froth on a cappuccino, the foam in a bathtub or the whitecaps of waves meeting the coast.

They also found that the interior has many voids comprising 75% of the interior, with the “boulders” between having the density of Styrofoam.

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NASA and ESA ink Lunar Gateway deal

9:09 am

NASA yesterday announced that it has signed a deal with the European Space Agency (ESA) outlining their partnership in building the Lunar Gateway space station in orbit around the Moon.

Under this agreement, ESA will contribute habitation and refueling modules, along with enhanced lunar communications, to the Gateway. The refueling module also will include crew observation windows. In addition to providing the hardware, ESA will be responsible for operations of the Gateway elements it provides. ESA also provides two additional European Service Modules (ESMs) for NASA’s Orion spacecraft. These ESMs will propel and power Orion in space on future Artemis missions and provide air and water for its crew.

For some reason NASA’s press release makes no mention of what ESA gets from the deal. From this news report:

[ESA] said it will receive “three flight opportunities for European astronauts to travel to and work on the Gateway” as part of the agreement.

I also note that there is no mention of the Artemis Accords in this agreement. As far as I can tell, right now the only ESA member who has signed on is the United Kingdom, and I am not sure of the UK’s status in the ESA considering their exit from the European Union. The two are different political deals, but exiting one might affect the other.

The Trump administration has said repeatedly that it will only partner in its lunar ambitions with countries that sign the accords. However, at this moment Congress has simply not funded those ambitions, so NASA needs partners to get things built. Moreover, Orion is a space capsule (costing about $18 billion and taking 20 years to build) that does not have a service module to provide it air and water. Europe provides that, and had only agreed to build two.

It might be that NASA has traded the accords away to get Europe’s help for both Gateway and Orion. This deal, announced now, might also be an effort by NASA (and Europe) to lobby Congress to fork up the cash.

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Analyzing the evolving “small” storms in Jupiter’s atmosphere

12:09 pm

The vortices in Jupiter's polar regions
Click for full image.

The cool image to the right is another Juno photo of Jupiter enhanced by citizen scientist Gerald Eichstädt. This time Eichstädt also did some analysis of the motions and interactions of many vortices found in the northern polar regions of Jupiter. The image to the right has been cropped and reduced to post here, with the state of Arizona, about 400 by 300 miles in size, added for scale. There is more annotation in the full image.

As Eichstädt writes:

Large vortices in an atmosphere layer of a rotating planet can be roughly split into two classes, cyclonic and anticyclonic vortices.

Based on this rough classification, two interacting vortices can either be of the same or of opposite sign. Tightly interacting vortices of opposite sign tend to mutually propel each other, hence the whole pair, if they are of similar strength and size.

Tightly interacting vortex pairs of the same sign tend to merge. More distant like-signed vortex pairs may essentially repel each other. Interacting vortices tend to create filaments, some of which may split into fragments and further collapse into streets of small eddies.

He also notes that in future orbits Juno will provide closer views of this stormy region, as with the orbit the closest point shifts northward.

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