Tag: engineering

Curiosity looks ahead at very rough terrain higher on Mount Sharp

10:00 am

Panorama on Sol 4086, February 3, 2024
Click for full image.

The rough terrain higher on Mount Sharp
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced and enhanced to post here, was taken on February 3, 2024 by the high resolution camera on the Mars rover Curiosity. The area it covers is indicated by the rectangle on the panorama above, which has been cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here. That panorama was created from 46 photos taken by the rover’s right navigation camera on that same day.

Those rough small peaks are higher on Mount Sharp, though far below its summit. The summit itself is not visible, and in fact has never been visible to Curiosity since it landed on Mars in August 2012. The peak is about 26 miles to the south and about 16,000 feet higher up, with much of the mountain in the way.

These small, rough peaks are in an area that the rover will likely never go, as shown in the overview map below.
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China completes two launches yesterday

9:38 am

China successfully completed two launches yesterday from two different spaceports using two different rockets.

First a Long March 2C rocket launched 11 satellites as part of a civilian-based communications constellation, lifting off from it Xichang spaceport in southwest China. No word on where the rocket’s lower stages crashed, all of which use very toxic hypergolic fuels.

Next a Smart Dragon-3 rocket produced by the pseudo-company Landspace placed nine satellties into orbit, lifting off from a barge just off the coast of China. No information at all was released about the nine satellites. Furthermore, China’s state-run press made no mention of Landspace in its report, indicating once again what it thinks of these so-called private companies.

The 2024 launch race:

10 SpaceX
8 China
2 Iran
1 India
1 ULA
1 Japan
1 Rocket Lab

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Sunspot update: The Sun in January acted like solar maximum is here

11:11 am

In my monthly sunspot update at the start of January, I asked in the headline “Are we now in the next solar maximum?”

The Sun’s sunspot activity in January since then has apparently answered that question. NOAA this week posted its monthly update of its graph showing solar sunspot activity on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere, and as I do every month since 2011, I have posted that graph below, with annotations to provide a larger context.
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Collins Aerospace tests its new spacesuit on the Zero Gravity airplane

9:37 am

On January 30, 2024 Collins Aerospace, one of two companies that NASA has contracted to design and build new spacesuits for its future missions, successfully tested its new spacesuit on the Zero Gravity airplane, where it was able to have a person use the suit in short but weightless conditions.

Collins is designing its suit in collaboration with ILC Dover and Oceaneering. Former NASA astronauts, John “Danny” Olivas and Dan Burbank, each donned the suit and performed a series of test objectives while onboard a Zero Gravity plane that’s able to perform parabolic maneuvers to simulate microgravity for short bursts. They were surrounded by several support personnel who were gathering data about the suit performance.

In total, they performed 40 parabolas during the flight. Collins said the primary goals included “evaluation of the suit’s pressure garment system fit and functionality, use of International Space Station tools and interfaces, and reviewed performance of the new Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or EMU, against the current design.”

The two spacesuit contracts (the second is with Axiom) are costing NASA about $335 million total to get the suits designed, built, and certified for use in spacewalks and ground operations on the Moon. Both companies appear on schedule to deliver those suits in less than three years.

Previously, NASA had tried to build new spacesuits on its own, and had spent a billion dollars over fourteen years while building nothing. The contrast in this story between the government and private enterprise should be clarifying to everyone.

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One last engineering test planned for Ingenuity

9:23 am

Engineers plan to do one last engineering test with Ingenuity, slowly rotate its propellers while collecting imagery, likely from both the helicopter and Perseverance.

Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity Project Manager, said that NASA and JPL still aren’t sure what caused the damage to Ingenuity’s blades; it remains unclear whether the helicopter’s power dipped during landing, causing unwanted ground contact, or if it accidentally struck the ground to cause a “brownout.”

Tzanetos added that NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) will slowly rotate the helicopter’s blades and “wiggle” them, or adjust their angle, while collecting video in order to allow the team to determine the extent of Ingenuity’s damage. However, Tzanetos said that no matter what such imaging will show, the dual-rotor drone has flown its last flight and will soon end its mission.

This test will likely not occur until Perseverance gets into a position where it can film the test also. The helicopter’s cameras look downward, so all it will be able to photograph is the shadow of those blades as they move. Perseverance can look directly at it, and if it gets into a position slightly higher than Ingenuity it can get a good viewing angle down at the blades.

At the moment the rover is about a thousand feet to the east, though steadily working its way towards it.

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Japan’s lunar lander shuts down for long lunar night

9:15 am

SLIM's last image
Click for original image.

After two days of post landing operations, engineers for the Japanese lunar lander SLIM have shut it down now as the sun has set at its landing site on the Moon and its solar panel can no longer charge its batteries.

The picture to the right, reduced to post here, was the last image sent back by SLIM before shut down. It looks to the southeast across the width of 885-foot-wide Shioli Crater, the opposite rim the bright ridge in the upper right about a thousand feet away.

The engineers shut the spacecraft down prior to sunset in order to increase the chances that it will survive that very long harsh lunar night and reactivate when the Sun rises in two weeks. They recognized that the odds of this occurring are slim (no pun intended), because the lander was not designed to withstand the night’s cold temperatures, and more important, the solar panel will not get recharged until late in the lunar day, an additional week-plus past sunrise. That long period of inactivity will likely kill it.

No matter. The spacecraft’s main goal was to prove the ability of its landing system to land softly within a small target zone. It did so, even if it had an engine issue that caused it to land upside down. This new engineering will make it possible to send unmanned and manned landers to places on other planets that previously were impossible.

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A soft but dim spiral

10:51 am

A soft but dim spiral
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a survey of nearby galaxies in which supernovae had previously been detected.

This softly luminous galaxy — lying in the constellation Hercules, about 110 million light-years from Earth — seems outshone by the sparkling foreground stars that surround it. The type II supernova which took place in this galaxy in 2019, while no longer visible in this image, definitely outshone the galaxy at the time!

What amazes me about this somewhat dim spiral galaxy is its beautiful structure, its two spiral arms coiling outward in perfect symmetry. And yet, we are looking at a object that is almost entirely empty space, hundreds of thousands of light years across. Somehow the almost infinitesimal force of gravity at those distances is still able to shape the arms, and the spirals.

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Another exoplanet found in habitable zone

9:55 am

Astronomers using both space- and ground-based telescopes have confirmed the existence of another rocky exoplanet inside the habitable zone of its star.

The star is a red dwarf 137 light years away. The exoplanet, dubbed TOI-175 b, is estimated to be larger than Earth, with a diameter 1.5 times that of our home planet. It orbits its star every nineteen days. Even more intriguing, the data suggests this star has a second exoplanet even better positioned in the habitable zone that would be the smallest habitable-zone exoplanet so far found, about the size of Earth.

The second planet however is not yet confirmed.

This discovery is no longer very unique. In the past few years astronomers have discovered a plethora of Earth-sized exoplanets, many in the habitable zone.

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Japan and India team up for unmanned lunar lander mission

9:42 am

Japan and India are now partnering to put a lander/rover on the Moon in 2025, dubbed LUPEX.

Set tentatively for 2025, LUPEX will be launched on JAXA’s H3 launcher, with a 350-kg rover developed by the Japanese agency. ISRO is developing the lander. The instruments will be on the lander and the rover. Initial feasibility studies and the lander’s configuration have been completed. The rover will sample the soil with a driller and the samples will be analysed using equipment on the rover,

Unlike the previously successful lunar landers from both countries (India’s Chandrayaan-3 and Japan’s SLIM), LUPEX is being designed to survive the 14-day-long lunar night, with a mission that is aiming to last three to six months.

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Update on Jared Isaacman’s upcoming Polaris Dawn manned mission

9:37 am

Link here. Bottom line is that they still hope to launch on a five day orbital mission in SpaceX’s Resilience Dragon capsule later this year, during which they will do the first privately funded non-government spacewalk.

Developing new spacworthy spacesuits remains the biggest task before the mission can fly.

In a series of social media updates on Friday and Saturday, Isaacman answered some questions from the public about the progression of the suit development and the mission overall. He stated that over the past week, they “spent a lot of time pressurized in the EVA suits working contingencies.”

Isaacman clarified as well that, unlike missions to the International Space Station chartered by either NASA or Axiom Space, the crew members of the Polaris Dawn mission won’t launch and land while wearing IVA suits. He said because they are limited with space on this flight, they will only have their EVA suits.

No launch date has yet been set.

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Voyager signs SpaceX’s Starship to launch its Starlab space station

3:23 pm

Voyager Space, one of three commercial space stations being built in partnership with NASA, has awarded SpaceX the launch contract for putting its Starlab space station into orbit, using that company’s Superheavy/Starship rocket.

The companies did not disclose terms of the agreement or a projected launch date, although a spokesperson for Starlab Space said the company was confident that Starlab would be launched before the decommissioning of the International Space Station, currently scheduled for 2030.

Voyager is building Starlab in a joint partnership with Airbus and Northrop Grumman. The design is relatively simple though large (one main module and a service module), which makes Starship an excellent method for getting it into orbit.

SpaceX now has deals to launch two different space stations using Starship. The second is with the private company Vast, which is building its station completely independent from NASA. Starship also has won launch contracts from two different private citizens, as well as NASA.

It appears that Musk’s instincts were right on the money when he decided to build this rocket, even though when he proposed it there did not seem to be any customers for it.

Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.

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Have these Martian dunes changed in sixteen years?

1:57 pm

Comparing two MRO images taken 16 years apart
Click here and here for the original images.

Overview map

Cool image time! The two pictures above, both rotated, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to match and to post here, were taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) sixteen years apart. The first, on the left, was taken on February 23, 2007, while the second, on the right, was taken on November 1, 2023.

What drew me to both images was the label for the second: “Dune Change in Arabia Region Crater.” To find out if this image had revealed any changes in the dunes I went back and found the earliest MRO picture of this location, and sized and enhanced the dunes in both to match.

Do you see any changes? I don’t. However, that really means nothing. These are not the highest resolution versions that MRO obtains, and a very careful comparison of those best images might detect more subtle changes than our eyes can perceive in the versions above. Also, there might be brightness changes that require careful software analysis.

The white dot on the overview map to the right marks the location, in Arabia Terra, the largest transition region on Mars between the northern lowland plains and the southern cratered highlands. The inset shows the half filled crater in which these dunes sit. The grayed area on the floor of the crater marks the entire dune field, extending eastward to the crater rim from this one spot, indicated by the black dot.

It is likely that the dust is blown into this crater and gets trapped there. Whether the dunes move or change is not clear, though if they do the changes are small, even after almost two decades. Instead, the two pictures suggest these dunes have hardened into a form of sandstone, that can be eroded over time by the wind, but only very very slowly.

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