Tag: engineering

Starliner lands safely after failed orbital insertion

9:29 pm

Capitalism in space:Boeing’s Starliner capsule successfully landed today in New Mexico, returning to Earth prematurely because of its failure to reach its proper orbit after launch two days ago.

The article quotes extensively from both NASA and Boeing officials touting the many successful achievements of this flight, while trying to minimize the failure that prevented the capsule from docking with ISS properly. And that failure?

The mission elapsed timer issue that cut short Starliner’s planned eight-day mission started before the spacecraft lifted off Friday from Cape Canaveral aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, according to Chilton. “Our spacecraft needs to reach down into the Atlas 5 and figure out what time it is, where the Atlas 5 is in its mission profile, and then we set the clock based on that,” Chilton said in a press conference Saturday. “Somehow we reached in there and grabbed the wrong (number). This doesn’t look like an Atlas problem. This looks like we reached in and grabbed the wrong coefficient.”

“As a result of starting the clock at the wrong time, the spacecraft upon reaching space, she thought she was later in the mission, and, being autonomous, started to behave that way,” Chilton said. “And so it wasn’t in the orbit we expected without the burn and it wasn’t in the attitude expected and was, in fact, adjusting that attitude.”

I read this and find myself appalled. While I agree that overall the mission proved the capsule capable of launching humans to ISS (which is why NASA is considering making the next Starliner mission manned despite this failure), this failure suggests a worrisome lack of quality control at Boeing. I can’t even imagine how the Starliner software could be mis-configured to “grab the wrong number.” This explanation makes no sense, and suggests they are spinning the failure to avoid telling us what they really did wrong.

Either way, I suspect that NASA will approve a manned launch for Starliner’s next orbital flight, but will do so only after dwelling on the problem for at least six months.

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Buried glaciers flowing off of Martian mesa

1:55 pm

Glacial flow off of mesa
Click for full image.

Cool image time! Planetary geologists now think that the mid-latitudes of Mars contain many buried and inactive glaciers, formed several million years ago when the planet’s inclination was more than 50 degrees [pdf], rather than the 25 degrees it is now. At that time the mid-latitudes were actually colder than the poles, and water would sublimate from the poles to the colder mid-latitudes to pile up as snow and glaciers.

With today’s 25 degree inclination those mid-latitude glaciers are inactive, and have been so for several million years. It might even be that Mars’ water is beginning a shift back to the poles, but this is uncertain. If anything the planet is presently in a balance, and won’t start transferring water back to the poles until its inclination drops closer to zero.

The image to the right, taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on September 23, 2019, is of one of those glacial flows, coming off a mesa in a region called Protonilus Mensae, located in the transition zone between the southern highlands and the northern lowland plains where an intermittent ocean might have once existed.

Much of the geology of Protonilus Mensae is chaos terrain, places where the surface has eroded along angled fissures to form many mesas. The overview map below focuses in on the particular mesa where this flow is located. The red boxes indicate all the MRO images taken of this mesa, with the image above indicated by the black dot.
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Starliner launch fails, spacecraft to return to Earth

9:44 am

After being successfully placed in a preliminary orbit by ULA’s Atlas 5 rocket early this morning, Boeing’s Starliner capsule failed to reach its required orbit for docking with ISS when its own rocket engines did not fire properly at the right time.

The orbit it is in is stable, and the spacecraft is undamaged. Engineers now plan to bring it back to Earth on Sunday, landing at White Sands, New Mexico.

It appears some software issue had the capsule fire its own rockets either at the wrong time or for too short a time. The spacecraft was then in the wrong orbit, and needed to use too much fuel to correct this issue, making it impossible to dock with ISS.

More information here:

However, for reasons Boeing engineers do not yet understand, Starliner’s Mission Event Timer clock malfunctioned, causing the vehicle to think it was at a different point in the mission and at a different time in its mission that it actually was.

…This resulted in Starliner’s Reaction Control System thinking the Orbit Insertion Burn was underway and executing a series of burns to keep the vehicle oriented in the insertion burn attitude; however, the Orbit Insertion Burn was not actually occurring.

When mission controllers realized the issue, they sent manual commands to Starliner to perform an Orbit Insertion Burn in a backup window that came roughly eight minutes after the planned maneuver. However, a known and brief gap in NASA satellite communications caused a further delay.

By the time Starliner was finally able to burn its engines and get into a stable orbit, it had burned 25% more propellant than anticipated.

Boeing is certainly not having a good year. First it has had to shut down production on its new 737-Max airplane due to several crashes caused by software issues. Next its SLS rocket for NASA has had endless cost overruns and delays. Now Starliner fails during its first launch.

For ULA, however, the Atlas 5 rocket performed exactly as planned, so this launch gets listed as a success. They have now completed 5 launches this year.

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Megadunes in the giant canyon of Mars’ north polar icecap

1:02 pm

Martian megadunes at the beginning of summer
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken by the high resolution camera of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on September 15, 2019, right at the beginning of summer at the north polar icecap of Mars.

Without a larger context it is very difficult to figure out what this image shows. The image title, “Seasonal Changes of Chasma Boreale Megadunes,” gives us some basic clues. The streaks of black and dark grey are giant dunes, with this image showing their trailing edge. The darkest streaks are likely places where the thin winter mantle of dry ice has begun to sublimate away with the coming of spring, exposing the darker sand dunes below. The surrounding flat white areas are either the permanent water ice of the icecap or the surface of the lowland northern plains that surround that icecap.

The montage below shows a series of monitoring photos, beginning in 2018 during the last Martian summer and continuing through the start and middle of the spring and ending with the photo above. It shows the seasonal evolution of that upper carbon dioxide dry ice mantle, which reveals the darker dunes below as that dry ice mantle sublimates away.
» Read more

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Yutu-2 sets new longevity record for lunar rover

8:53 am

China’s Yutu-2 lunar rover has now set a new longevity record for any rover on the Moon, beating the 10.5 month record set by the Soviet Union’s Lunokhod 1 rover in 1970-1971.

Lunokhod 1 traveled about 6.5 miles, or about 34,000 feet, during its operation. Chinese engineers have been more cautious, moving Yutu-2 only about 1,132 feet in the same time period.

The Chinese rover is still operating, though relatively little data has been released from it. At the moment it has been placed in its hibernation mode as it makes it through its twelfth lunar night.

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Mars 2020 rover takes first and last test drive

8:45 am

Engineers on December 17 gave the Mars 2020 rover its first and last test drive before it is launched in July 2020.

In a 10-plus-hour marathon on Tuesday that demonstrated all the systems working in concert, the rover steered, turned and drove in 3-foot (1-meter) increments over small ramps covered with special static-control mats. Since these systems performed well under Earth’s gravity, engineers expect them to perform well under Mars’ gravity, which is only three-eighths as strong. The rover was also able to gather data with the Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Experiment (RIMFAX).

I have embedded a short video showing a tiny part of that driving test below the fold. This is the last and only time we will ever be able to see the rover move. Once it is on Mars in Jezero Crater there will be no third party cameras to record its travels.
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Rocket Lab begins construction on 2nd New Zealand launchpad

8:28 am

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab has begun construction on a second launchpad at its New Zealand spaceport.

The new pad, known as Launch Complex 1 Pad B, is due for completion in late 2020. Rocket Lab says LC-1B will support increased launch frequency; enable back-to-back missions within days; and ensure that a pad is always ready to support rapid call-up launch. The existing pad at New Zealand’s Launch Complex 1 will be LC-1A.

This new pad will give Rocket Lab three launchpads total, two in New Zealand and one in Virginia, and when all are operational the company says it will be able to launch more than 130 times per year. That’s more launches than the entire world routinely launches.

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Original investors sue Firefly

8:41 am

Capitalism in space: The original investors in Firefly Aerospace, cut out when the company went bankrupt, have filed suit against the reborn company.

A group of original shareholders in the defunct Firefly Space Systems have accused co-founder and CEO Tom Markusic of fraudulently conspiring with Ukrainian billionaire Maxym Polyakov to force the rocket company into bankruptcy in 2017 and reconstitute it under a nearly identical name without giving them any stake in the new venture.

Markusic “betrayed the trust of his original co-founders and investors and committed fraud to cut them out of his aerospace company. Instead of managing the operations of the Original Firefly, a revolutionary rocket company with endless potential, Markusic schemed with…Maxym Polyakov…to rob Plaintiffs of their investments and form a new company called Firefly Aerospace, Inc. (the ‘New Firefly’),” the plaintiffs said in a lawsuit.

The article at the link has a lot more information. Read it all.

This is also not the first time Markusic has been sued. He left Virgin Galactic to found Firefly, and was then sued by Branson’s company for stealing proprietary technology. That lawsuit was settled when Markusic agreed to not use that technology in Firefly’s rockets.

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Soyuz rocket launches five satellites for Arianespace

8:30 am

A Russian Soyuz rocket, launching from French Guiana for Arianespace, successfully placed five satellites in orbit early this morning, including CHEOPS, a European space telescope designed to study exoplanets.

Though this was a Russian rocket, I count it as an Arianespace launch as that is the company under which the launch operates. I also realize this is open to debate.

The leaders in the 2019 launch race:

30 China
20 Russia
13 SpaceX
8 Arianespace (Europe)

China still leads the U.S. 30 to 26 in the national rankings.

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Martian impacts and streaks

12:18 pm

Slope-streaked crater on Mars
Click for full image.

In the most recent image download from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), there was the cool image to the right, reduced and cropped to post here, of a crater that appeared to have hundreds and hundreds of slope streaks along its inner slopes.

Slope streaks are quite mysterious. They are found in the equatorial regions as dark (though sometimes light) streaks on steep slopes, appearing throughout the year and slowly fading over time. They also appear to be a geological phenomenon unique to Mars. Nothing on Earth or any other planet appears to correspond.

As such, their nature and cause remains unknown, though there are a bunch of theories, with the most popular being that these are a kind of dust avalanche. They are always found in connection with dust-covered terrain, but they also make no significant topological change to the surface, other than brightness.

The slope streaks in this crater are especially intriguing, because of the number of streaks. In digging further into the MRO archive I found a number of images of this crater and its surrounding terrain. It appears that sometime before 2012 there was a relatively recent impact close to the exterior of the eastern rim of this crater. The image below, taken in 2014 by MRO, shows this impact as the large dark splotch, with the new crater indicated by the arrow..
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SpaceX successfully launches commercial satellite

9:59 pm

Capitalism in space: Using a first stage for the third time, SpaceX today successfully launched a commercial communications satellite while recovering that first stage.

Fun fact: This first stage recovery today was the 47th time that SpaceX has successfully completed a vertical landing.

The leaders in the 2019 launch race:

30 China
20 Russia
13 SpaceX
7 Europe (Arianespace)

China now leads the U.S. in the national rankings 30 to 26.

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Turkey buys machine gun toting drones

9:22 am

Our fascist future: Turkey has purchased shipment of an unspecified number of drones equipped with a machine gun capable of firing as many as 200 rounds.

Made by the country’s own Asisguard, the Songar drone can carry 200 rounds of 5.56 x 45 mm NATO class ammo, and can hit a 15-cm-square (6-inch-square) target from 200 m (650 ft) away with single shots, 15-bullet bursts or a full auto unloading.

The 25-kg (55-lb) drones use a four-armed carbon body design with two coaxially mounted large props on each arm. The automatic machine gun beneath rests in a tilting mount, allowing a remote operator to aim it using controls that would be familiar to anyone who’s used the camera on a DJI Phantom. It carries sufficient battery and powerful enough communications to fly 10 km (6.2 mi) on a mission, it’s GPS and GLONASS stabilized, and it offers twin camera operation for a pilot and gunner if required.

This is not the first or the most sophisticated killing drone ever built. Its simplicity however suggests that it is becoming very easy for governments and the power-hungry individuals who like to run them to obtain technology capable of killing their opposition, in a way that will be untraceable.

I have embedded below the fold a sales video produced by the company. If it doesn’t send chills up your spine you are very divorced from reality.
» Read more

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China launches two more Beidou GPS-type satellites

8:56 am

The new colonial movement: China today used its Long March 3B rocket to launch two more Beidou GPS-type satellites.

With this launch China has successfully matched its predicted number of launches for 2019, a number that it should exceed with several more launches scheduled before the end of the year.

The leaders in the 2019 launch race:

30 China
20 Russia
12 SpaceX
7 Europe (Arianespace)

China now leads the U.S. in the national rankings 30 to 25. These numbers should change later today, as SpaceX has a commercial launch scheduled.

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New info on Long March 5 launch failures

9:19 am

An article in the English Chinese press today about the upcoming third launch of China’s Long March 5 rocket revealed some new information about the failures of that rocket during its first two test flights.

On its maiden mission in November 2016, the rocket failed to reach the speed required for the early phase of the flight; still, extra booster fuel burned in the final stage lifted its satellite cargo into orbit and allowed China to declare the trip a success.

In the second flight a few months later, though, the main engine died minutes after take-off, and the rocket plunged into the sea.

I have tried to read every iota of information released about the first two launches of the Long March 5 in order to figure out what went wrong during its second launch. At no time however had I ever come across any report that described any launch problems during its first flight. The Chinese always touted that first flight as a complete success, with no problems.

We now learn that the first stage during that first launch was under-powered, a problem that was not dealt with before the second launch, resulting in the complete failure of that second launch.

This is the typical behavior one sees in a government-run top-down program. Rather than bluntly address problems to fix them, even if it means someone will be embarrassed, management acts to protect itself, hiding problems so as to avoid blame. The result is always more failures.

As long as China’s economy is booming and providing its government with lots of cash for its space program, such problems can be papered over and even overcome. The second however that economy begins to falter, the program will stumble, the hidden problems acting like an avalanche to overwhelm everything.

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Vector files for bankruptcy

8:53 am

Capitalism in space: On December 13 the smallsat rocket company Vector officially filed for bankruptcy, a precursor to having its assets sold off.

The company filed a voluntary petition for bankruptcy with the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, the state where the company was incorporated.

…Vector had been one of the leading companies in the small launch vehicle market until August, when the company said that a “significant change in financing” led it to pause operations and lay off nearly all of its more than 150 employees. Jim Cantrell, Vector’s chief executive, also left the company at the time. That announcement came just two days after the company won an Air Force launch contract.

According to industry sources familiar with the company, the August layoffs were triggered when one of the company’s major investors, venture fund Sequoia, withdrew its support for the company because of concerns about how the company was managed. That came as Vector was working on a new funding round, and Sequoia’s decision had a domino effect, causing other investors to back out. Sequoia didn’t respond to a request for comment in August about any role it played in Vector’s problems.

The company is currently being funded through “debtor in possession” financing from Lockheed Martin, according to a resolution by Vector’s board of directors included in the filing. Under a Nov. 20 agreement, Lockheed provided Vector with a $500,000 secured loan and proposed purchasing Vector’s assets associated with a satellite program called GalacticSky for no more than $2.5 million.

While companies sometimes recover from this situation, in this case Vector looks quite dead, for good. A real tragedy, but part of the reality of capitalism. The competition fuels innovation and success, but carries great risk and the real possibility of failure.

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The importance of small telescopes to science and civilization

10:58 am

The main cluster of telescopes, on Mount Lemmon
Largest cluster of telescopes on Mount Lemmon, six visible with three just out of view.

On December 11, 2019 I was kindly given a personal tour by Alan Strauss, director of the Mount Lemmon Sky Center, of the telescopes located on the mountaintops of the Santa Catalina Mountains overlooking Tucson. Strauss runs the educational outreach program for the University of Arizona astronomy department and the Steward Observatory, both of which operate the mountaintop facility.

The telescopes, numbering almost a dozen, are in two groups, two telescopes on the peak of Mount Bigelow and the rest clustered on the higher peak of Mount Lemmon. None are very gigantic by today’s standards, with their primary mirrors ranging in size from 20- to 61-inches. For comparison, the largest operating telescope in the world on the Canary Islands is 409 inches across. Hubble has a 94-inch mirror. And the new giant telescopes under design or being built have mirrors ranging from 842 inches (Giant Magellan) to 1,654 inches (European Extremely Large Telescope).

Thus, the small telescopes in the Santa Catalinas generally don’t make the news. They are considered passe and out-of-date, not capable of doing the kind of cutting edge astronomy that all the coolest astronomers hunger for.

Yet, without them, we likely would not have future astronomers. » Read more

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Maven makes first map of Mars’ high altitude winds

9:11 am

High altitude wind patterns on Mars

Scientists using the Martian orbiter Maven have produced the first global map of the high altitude wind circulation of Mars.

The measurements of winds that were recently mapped above Mars were found at an altitude range of about 140-240 kilometers (85-150 miles) above the planet’s surface.

The wind data has been gathered by the Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer (NGIMS). NGIMS’ original purpose was to determine the structure and composition of the Martian atmosphere by measuring in it the amounts of ions (electrically charged particles) and gases. However, although it was not originally designed to do so, in April 2016, the MAVEN team began using NGIMS to observe horizontal winds. Pausing normal collection of data, scientists on Earth programmed the instrument to nod back and forth so that it could detect the direction of winds along its track.

By combining data from many tracks as MAVEN orbits Mars, scientists slowly built up a map of wind behavior. This led to a startling discovery: the wind patterns actually correlated with the Martian topography below.

They have found that even at this high altitude the winds shift around the high volcanoes of the Tharsis Bulge.

To my eye, the wind pattern seen in the image, taken from the video at the link, is remarkably similar to the global wind patterns found on Venus, forming a widening V-pattern moving from east to west. Though the two are vastly different, the similarity is quite intriguing.

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Rocket Lab opens Wallops Island launchpad

8:55 am

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab yesterday officially cut the ribbon on its first U.S.-based launchpad at Wallops Island, Virginia.

Rocket Lab aims to launch up to 12 missions a year from LC-2 [Wallops], about one a month, once flights begin in 2020. The first mission will launch in spring 2020 to deliver the U.S. Air Force’s Space Test Program 27RM (STP-27RM) mission into orbit. That mission will launch a microsatellite called Monolith to see if small satellites can effectively carry “large aperture” space weather payloads, said Lt. Col. Meagan Thrush, program element monitor for space launch and control for the Air Force, in a news conference here today.

The company has a similar launch rate capability at its New Zealand launch site. Thus, if they have the customers, Rocket Lab now has the ability to launch upwards of 24 times next year.

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New storm spotted at Jupiter’s south pole

8:31 am

New cyclone at Jupiter's south pole
Click for full image.

New images from Juno have revealed the formation of a new Texas-sized cyclone joining the circle of storms around Jupiter’s south pole.

In the infrared Juno image to the right, the new storm is the small bright cyclone in the lower right.

[D]uring Juno’s 22nd science pass [on November 3], a new, smaller cyclone churned to life and joined the fray. “Data from Juno’s Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper [JIRAM] instrument indicates we went from a pentagon of cyclones surrounding one at the center to a hexagonal arrangement,” said Alessandro Mura, a Juno co-investigator at the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome. “This new addition is smaller in stature than its six more established cyclonic brothers: It’s about the size of Texas. Maybe JIRAM data from future flybys will show the cyclone growing to the same size as its neighbors.”

Probing the weather layer down to 30 to 45 miles (50 to 70 kilometers) below Jupiter’s cloud tops, JIRAM captures infrared light emerging from deep inside Jupiter. Its data indicate wind speeds of the new cyclone average 225 mph (362 kph) – comparable to the velocity found in its six more established polar colleagues.

Because of Juno’s orbit we do not get continuous views of the gas giant’s cloud-tops, so we can’t see the moment-by-moment evolution of these storms, which makes it impossible to obtain a full understanding of their formation or disappearance. Even then it will likely take centuries of observations to even begin to get a fuller understanding of the meteorology of Jupiter.

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New Hubble images of Comet 2I/Borisov

12:17 pm

Comet 2I/Borisov taken by Hubble prior to and at its closest approach to Sun
Click for full image.

Scientists today released new images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the interstellar object Comet 2I/Borisov. The image on the left was taken prior to the comet’s closest approach to the Sun, while the image on the right was taken during that closest approach. The vertical smeared object to the left in the earlier image is a galaxy that happened to be in the field of view. The blue color of both images is a false color to bring out details.

“Hubble gives us the best upper limit of the size of comet Borisov’s nucleus, which is the really important part of the comet,” said David Jewitt, a UCLA professor of planetary science and astronomy, whose team has captured the best and sharpest look at this first confirmed interstellar comet. “Surprisingly, our Hubble images show that its nucleus is more than 15 times smaller than earlier investigations suggested it might be. Our Hubble images show that the radius is smaller than half-a-kilometer. Knowing the size is potentially useful for beginning to estimate how common such objects may be in the solar system and our galaxy. Borisov is the first known interstellar comet, and we would like to learn how many others there are.”

The first image was taken from a distance of 203 million miles, while the second was taken from 185 million miles. Expect more images in late December, when the comet makes its closest approach to Earth at a distance of 180 million miles.

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OSIRIS-REx team picks primary sample site

12:03 pm

Four candidate landing sites
Click for full image.

The OSIRIS-REx science team has picked the site they have dubbed Nightingale as the primary landing site where they will attempt to obtain a sample from the asteroid Bennu in the summer of 2020. The back-up site is Osprey at the equator.

I have embedded the replay of the NASA live stream of the press event below the fold. The first 21 minutes of the video are an overview of the mission, leading up to the announcement by Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx’s principal investigator. He notes then that the site “does have some hazards” but they chose it for its “scientific value.” While its higher latitude location has some advantages, it also makes it more difficult for landing. The one large boulder there, which Lauretta calls “Mt Doom,” also carries risk for the touch-and-go operations.

The back-up site, Osprey, is on the equator with less hazards, but will present more problems obtaining the tiny-sized particles the sample grab equipment was designed to get.

Not that this matters, but if I have been in a betting pool I would have won, since Nightingale has been my guess for which site they’d pick since early November.
» Read more

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Buyer of Stratolaunch revealed though unconfirmed

8:43 am

A news story today at Geekwire has revealed, based on business filings in Washington and California, the new owner of the company Stratolaunch.

Filings with regulators in California and Washington show that a new LLC business, also called Stratolaunch, was incorporated in late October, at Stratolaunch’s existing offices in Seattle and Mojave, Calif. The new Stratolaunch’s executive vice president is named as Michael Palmer, Cerberus’ managing director.

Private-equity firms typically replace existing managers as a prelude to realigning businesses they buy, which can involve firing, automation and offshoring. However, it appears that Jean Floyd, Stratolaunch’s president and CEO since 2015, remains in his roles for now.

It appears the new owners, who did not confirm the Geekwire story, are now marketing the huge Roc airplane as a launch platform for hypersonic test flights rather than orbital satellites.

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New Shepard completes another test flight

11:09 am

Capitalism in space: Blue Origin today successfully completed its sixth unmanned test flight (a new record) of its third New Shepard reusable suborbital spacecraft, the twelfth flight total and the ninth to carry commercial payloads.

The capsule reached an altitude of about 342,000 feet elevation.

Blue Origin’s success here is commendable. I just wish their launch pace was faster. At the pace they are setting I am beginning to think that SpaceX will be flying people to the Moon on Starship before Blue Origin flies its first commercial tourist suborbital flight.

I have embedded the video of the flight below the fold.
» Read more

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A new map of the water ice on Mars

9:45 am

Annotated water ice map of Mars
Click for full resolution image.

In a new science paper planetary scientists have produced a new global map of the water ice of Mars, based on data from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Mars Odyssey.

The image above is a lower resolution version of that map, annotated by me. The black areas are regions covered with a thicker layer of dust, so no good data was obtained. As you go from red to green to blue to purple the ice is thought to be closer to the surface, with the depth as small as an inch in the dark purple areas. The white rectangular represents the region best for human settlement, as it has ice near the surface and is at lower latitudes.

The red box indicates the location in Arcadia Planitia that is SpaceX’s candidate landing zone for Starship. Based on this new water ice map it appears that SpaceX has chosen very well. And the scientists who wrote this paper agree, as noted in the press release: “A large portion of a region called Arcadia Planitia is the most tempting target in the northern hemisphere.”

The map also confirms the existence of the 30 to 60 degree latitude bands where scientists believe a lot of buried glaciers exist. Both bands are both very evident in this new map.

To provide some further context, below is a global map of Mars labeled to show its major geographic features as well as the locations of all previous and upcoming landers/rovers, rearranged to match the water ice map above.
» Read more

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Russia and India launch satellites

8:18 am

Two launches since yesterday. First, Russia used its Soyuz-2 rocket to place another GPS-type Glonass satellite into orbit. This was Russia’s 20th successful launch in 2019, the first time that country has hit that number since 2015.

Then India used its PSLV rocket to launch a military radar reconnaissance satellite.

The leaders in the 2019 launch race:

29 China
20 Russia
12 SpaceX
7 Europe (Arianespace)
6 Rocket Lab
6 India

China remains the leader in the national rankings, 29 to 25 over the U.S.

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