Tag: engineering

Mars rover update: September 20, 2016

11:02 am

Opportunity comes first this time because it actually is more interesting.

Opportunity

For the overall context of Opportunity’s travels at Endeavour Crater, see this post, Opportunity’s future travels on Mars.

Having several choices on where to head, the Opportunity science team this week chose took what looks like the most daring route, heading almost due east towards the floor of Endeavour Crater. In fact, a review of their route and the images that the rover continues to take suggests that the panorama I created last week looked almost due east, not to the southeast as I had guessed. I have amended the most recent overhead traverse image, cropped and reduced below, to show what I now think that panorama was showing.
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Update on wildfire at Vandenberg

8:34 am

Despite efforts to be rein it in, the wildfire at Vandenberg continues to burn and spread.

It has grown to include at least 5,000 acres.

The overhead image of the burn area at the link shows three launch sites. The SLC-3E site is ULA’s launchpad for the Atlas 5. The SLC-4E site is SpaceX’s launchpad at Vandenberg. The SLC-6 site was the site originally built for the space shuttle, never used, and has now been redesigned for ULA’s Delta rockets as well as payloads that need to be integrated vertically. For some close-up pictures, see my Vandenberg photo tour from 2015.

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Manned Soyuz launch delayed until November

8:27 am

Roscosmos today confirmed that the short circuit discovered during prelaunch tests will delay the launch of a manned Soyuz to ISS until November.

Though they still have not described the problem in any detail, this article gives some insight:

According to industry sources, the delay was caused by a short circuit, which took place during roll-on of the payload fairing, which protects the spacecraft during its ascent through the atmosphere. The problem was not detected until the vehicle had been rotated back to a vertical position and was being prepared for the second fit check at Site 254 in Baikonur. The situation was complicated by the fact that engineers could not immediately identify the location of the short circuit in the fully assembled spacecraft. Preliminary estimates indicated that such an issue inside the descent module, SA, could require several weeks to fix, however if the problem was in the instrument module, PAO, it could take several months to resolve.

In worst case scenario, mission officials might decide to replace the Soyuz vehicle No. 732, which was affected by the problem, with Vehicle No. 733 originally intended for the Soyuz MS-03 mission. According to the official Russian media, the launch of the Soyuz MS-02 might be postponed until at least the beginning of October.

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Saturn’s wonderful rings

11:50 am

Saturn's rings, and the small moons that shape them

Cool image time! The image on the right, reduced to fit here, is a recent Cassini image, taken July 2, 2016, that shows the rings as well as the moon Pan nestled within the ring’s narrow gap

Pan (17 miles or 28 kilometers across, left of center) holds open the Encke gap and shapes the ever-changing ringlets within the gap (some of which can be seen here). In addition to raising waves in the A and B rings, other moons help shape the F ring, the outer edge of the A ring and open the Keeler gap. This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 8 degrees above the ring plane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 2, 2016.

The image also highlights the incredible and quite magical beauty of Saturn’s rings, which remain to me one of the solar system’s most amazing wonders.

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What is happening with Stratolaunch?

10:36 am

Doug Messier at his website Parabolic Arc today asks some pertinent questions about Stratolaunch and their seeming inability to settle on the rocket that will be launched from the giant plane they are building.

After going through SpaceX and Orbital ATK, the company talked to anyone and everyone with a rocket engine or an idea for one. They must have hit pay dirt with someone. [emphasis in original]

As Messier notes, both SpaceX and Orbital ATK have, in that order, made and then broke their partnership with Stratolaunch. Both companies were supposed to build that rocket, but for unknown reasons decided soon after that they couldn’t do this job. Stratolaunch has since been looking for a third company to build that rocket, but apparently has not found it. This information strongly suggests that the rocket companies found some fundamental engineering or management problems at Stratolaunch that scared them off. These same issues are also making it difficult for Stratolaunch to find a third rocket company.

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Scientists make guess about origins of Pluto’s nitrogen sea

10:08 am

Garbage in, garbage out: Scientists have written a computer model that supposedly tells them how Pluto’s thick heart-shaped glacier packed ocean of nitrogen and carbon monoxide formed.

[T]o find out how the glaciers formed in the first place, scientists created models that simulated atmospheric circulation on the dwarf planet for the last 50,000 years (a mere 200 orbits around the sun for Pluto). At the beginning of the simulations, the researchers gave Pluto a planet-wide veneer of nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane ices a few millimeters thick; then, the planet’s surface and atmosphere evolved as the icy orb passed through orbit after orbit. If Pluto were a completely smooth sphere, it would have either a permanent swath of nitrogen ice at the equator or seasonal snow caps at its poles. But that’s not what the planet looks like today. When researchers added realistic topography to the model, including the 4-kilometer-deep Sputnik Planum and two other large craters, the basin gradually trapped Pluto’s nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and much of its methane, the researchers report online today in Nature.

While the computer model here can help planetary scientists better understand how Pluto might have evolved, to use it to draw any conclusions about Pluto’s geological history is absurd. Scientist have no idea what Pluto was like 50,000 years ago. Heck, we don’t even know what half the planet looks like now.

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Vandenberg wildfire spreads

9:50 am

The wildfire at Vandenberg Air Force Base that caused the cancellation of Sunday’s Atlas 5 launch has spread and remains out of control.

Zaniboni said the fire is burning north to northwest toward two launch pads — Space Launch Complex-4, the SpaceX launch site, and SLC-3, where base officials scrubbed Sunday’s launch of an Atlas 5 rocket carrying the WorldView 4 satellite. Although the fire did not pose an immediate threat to SLC-3 at the time, Col. Paul Nosek said it required the base to redeploy firefighters from stand-by at the launch site.

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NOAA signs first contract for private weather satellites

9:38 am

The competition heats up: NOAA this week signed its first contracts, totaling just over a million dollars, with two different private cubesat companies.

The small deals—$695,000 to GeoOptics and $370,000 to Spire—come as part of NOAA’s Commercial Weather Data Pilot. The deals will allow the agency to evaluate the quality of the firms’ data for forecasts and warnings, and could be the first step in a broader embrace of commercial satellites. Until now, NOAA has gathered data by building and launching its own expensive weather satellites rather than buying data from private companies.

…Plagued by cost overruns on its own satellites, NOAA has been pressured by Congress to explore commercial weather satellites, which included a mandate for the commercial weather pilot in its 2016 appropriations.

There is no reason NOAA cannot shift from being the maker of satellites to being a customer buying weather data from private satellites, much as NASA has been shifting from being a builder of rockets and spaceships to being a buyer of privately built rockets and spaceships. The shift will create competition and innovation while saving the taxpayer a lot of money.

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New Zealand government okays commercial launches by Rocket Lab

9:29 am

The competition heats up: The New Zealand government has signed an interim contract authorizing commercial launches by the private company Rocket Lab, pending passage of permanent authorizing legislation next year.

Rocket Lab, which operates a private satellite launch site on the Mahia Peninsula between Napier and Gisborne, intends to start launch operations later this year, Minister for Economic Development Steven Joyce said in a statement. The contract is an interim measure, preceding the Outer Space and High Altitude Activities Bill which will be introduced to Parliament this month to provide a regulatory regime for space launches from New Zealand.

The government wants the bill passed into law by mid-2017, Joyce said. In June, New Zealand signed the Technology Safeguards Agreement (TSA) with the United States government, which allows commercial entities, including Rocket Lab, to import launch technology and satellites from the US.

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Atlas 5 launch scrubbed

8:47 am

ULA scrubbed its Atlas 5 commercial launch today after detecting “a small ground side LH2 leak.”

Friday’s launch was proceeding to the final minutes of the countdown, prior to a decision to standdown due to a small ground side LH2 leak resulting in an ice ball forming on an umbilical. ULA CEO Tory Bruno noted this was outside of ULA’s historic experience, thus resulting in a scrub – for at least 24 hours – to resolve.

Later, a ULA source noted the next attempt would be Sunday, in order to allow time to replace a Fill and Drain (F&D) valve that was deemed to be the problem during Friday’s attempt.

I must say I am intrigued by the language used by Bruno here, especially coming so soon after SpaceX’s somewhat unprecedented launchpad explosion September 1st.

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Rosetta’s last days

10:36 am

The Rosetta team has released a detailed description of what will be happening in the last two weeks of the spacecraft’s mission, leading up to its landing on the comet’s surface on September 30.

Their description of the difficulty of planning maneuvers based on the complex asymmetrical gravitational field of the two-lobed comet nucleus is especially interesting.

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Arianespace launches 5 satellites with Vega rocket

12:06 am

The competition heats up: Arianespace today used its Vega rocket to launch 5 commercial satellites from its spaceport in French Guiana.

Designated Flight VV07, the mission was Vega’s seventh since beginning operations in 2012 (all seven of which were successful), and it further demonstrated the capabilities of a light-lift vehicle that completes Arianespace’s launcher family – joining the company’s medium-lift Soyuz and heavyweight Ariane 5 in reliable side-by-side operations from the Spaceport in French Guiana. Vega is provided to Arianespace by Italy’s ELV S.P.A., which is the industrial prime contractor.

Tonight’s success also marked the first time since entering its commercial phase that Vega carried passengers on a single launch for two customers/users that are from outside the European market: Terra Bella is a Google company and the four SkySat satellites are its initial payloads entrusted to Arianespace; while PerúSAT-1 was orbited under a turnkey agreement between Airbus Defence and Space and Peru’s CONIDA national space agency.

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Saturn in all its glory

3:31 pm

Saturn

Cool image time. The Cassini science team have released a beautiful full-color image of Saturn, shown cropped on the right, as well as a movie, both produced from images taken in April.

This view shows Saturn’s northern hemisphere in 2016, as that part of the planet nears its northern hemisphere summer solstice in May 2017. Saturn’s year is nearly 30 Earth years long, and during its long time there, Cassini has observed winter and spring in the north, and summer and fall in the south. The spacecraft will complete its mission just after northern summer solstice, having observed long-term changes in the planet’s winds, temperatures, clouds and chemistry.

Cassini scanned across the planet and its rings on April 25, 2016, capturing three sets of red, green and blue images to cover this entire scene showing the planet and the main rings. The images were obtained using Cassini’s wide-angle camera at a distance of approximately 1.9 million miles (3 million kilometers) from Saturn and at an elevation of about 30 degrees above the ring plane. The view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from a sun-Saturn-spacecraft angle, or phase angle, of 55 degrees. Image scale on Saturn is about 111 miles (178 kilometers) per pixel.

The exposures used to make this mosaic were obtained just prior to the beginning of a 44-hour movie sequence.

The only real tragedy here is that the Cassini mission is ending soon. When it does, it will be decades, at a minimum, before we have another spacecraft in orbit around Saturn and capable of giving us this view.

Update: NASA today issued a press release detailing what will happen during Cassini’s final year at Saturn, including 22 plunges between Saturn and its rings!

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Hubble captures on-going comet break-up

10:47 am

animation of comet debris

Cool image time! The animation to the right, taken over three days by the Hubble Space Telescope, cropped and reduced to fit here, shows the debris flying away from Comet 332P/Ikeya-Murakami. It also shows a new piece of debris close to the comet on the lower left.

The research team calculated that the comet probably shed material over several months, between October and December 2015. Jewitt suggests that even some of the ejected pieces have themselves fallen to bits in a kind of cascading fragmentation. “Our analysis shows that the smaller fragments are not as abundant as one might expect based on the number of bigger chunks,” he said. “This is suggestive that they’re being depleted even in the few months since they were launched from the primary body. We think these little guys have a short lifetime.”

Hubble’s sharp vision also spied a chunk of material close to the comet, which may be the first salvo of another outburst. The remnant from still another flare-up, which may have occurred in 2012, is also visible. The fragment may be as large as Comet 332P, suggesting the comet split in two. But the icy remnant wasn’t spotted until Dec. 31, 2015, by the Pan-STARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) telescope in Hawaii, in work supported by the Near-Earth Object Observations program in NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office. That discovery prompted Jewitt and colleagues to request Hubble time to look at the comet in detail. Around the same time, astronomers around the world began to notice a cloudy patch of material near the comet – which Hubble later resolved into the 25 pieces.

The scientists think they actually “may be seeing a comet fragmenting itself into oblivion.”

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Charon’s red polar region explained?

12:43 pm

Scientists, using data from New Horizons as well as new computer models, think they have come up with an explanation for the red polar region of Pluto’s moon Charon.

As they detail this week in the international scientific journal Nature, Charon’s polar coloring comes from Pluto itself – as methane gas that escapes from Pluto’s atmosphere and becomes “trapped” by the moon’s gravity and freezes to the cold, icy surface at Charon’s pole. This is followed by chemical processing by ultraviolet light from the sun that transforms the methane into heavier hydrocarbons and eventually into reddish organic materials called tholins.

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Charles Bolden poo-poos private space

12:33 pm

In remarks at a conference yesterday NASA administrator Charles Bolden expressed his distrust and lack of confidence in the ability of private companies to build large heavy lift rockets.

“If you talk about launch vehicles, we believe our responsibility to the nation is to take care of things that normal people cannot do, or don’t want to do, like large launch vehicles,” Bolden said. “I’m not a big fan of commercial investment in large launch vehicles just yet.”

…Despite the demonstrable efforts by both SpaceX and Blue Origin, Bolden nonetheless said that “normal people” cannot, or do not want to, develop large launch vehicles. What the administrator appears to be asserting here is that NASA is more special, or better, than those in the private sector when it comes to building rockets.

The article at the link notes the strangeness of Bolden’s remarks, especially since NASA itself has failed, despite repeated efforts, to build its own new rocket since the 1970s. The author also notes the high cost of SLS, though the numbers he cites — $13 billion to develop and build SLS — is actually about half the real cost, which will be about $25 billion to build two SLS rockets.

Bolden here illustrates the old way of doing things. He will be gone soon, however, and a new way will replace him, private, competitive, innovative, and fast moving, everything that NASA has not been in the past four decades.

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Russian ISS crews to be reduced beginning in spring 2017

12:20 pm

Russia today made it official: Beginning in the spring of 2017 their crews to ISS will be reduced from 3 to 2, and will remain reduced until they launch their next ISS module.

“In case the endorsed schedule is observed and the MLM gets into operation in December 2017, the curtailment will affect only one Russian crew,” the source said. “Otherwise the practice of curtailment will continue until the commissioning of the module.”

The Russian state space corporation Roscosmos has to downsize the ISS mission crew as the number of Progress cargo ships launched to the ISS annually will be reduced to three from four at present in the wake of NASA’s refusal to continue using the Progresses and to change over to new U.S. cargo carriers instead, the source said, adding that three Progresses a year is not enough to support three cosmonauts working at the ISS permanently.

The finances will get even more squeezed when the U.S. no longer needs them to launch its astronauts.

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ESA/Airbus Safran deal finalized

12:10 pm

The competition heats up: The European Space Agency today gave its final approval to the deal that will have Airbus Safran Launchers design, build, and essentially own the new Ariane 6 rocket that ESA hopes to use to compete in the launch market in the 2020s.

This deal essentially closes the book on Arianespace. Though it officially still exists, it will be Airbus Safran that will be running the show in the future.

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SpaceX explosion will not effect its Air Force certification

12:02 pm

The competition heats up: An Air Force official today said that, based on its ongoing experience with SpaceX during the investigation of its September 1 Falcon 9 launchpad explosion, they do not expect any change in SpaceX’s certification that allows it to bid on Air Force satellite contracts.

The Air Force official also noted that the damage to the launchpad was “moderate” and was “definitely repairable.”

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ULA announces new plan to speed up launches

11:54 am

The competition heats up: ULA today announced a new system for shortening the time from a customer’s initial launch contract to the actual launch of their payload.

The priorities of all of our customers include ensuring their spacecraft launches on schedule, securing the soonest possible manifest date and completing the mission with 100 percent success,” said Tory Bruno, ULA CEO and president. “To address these priorities, we have been working on this offering for more than a year, which allows our customers to launch in as few as three months from placing their order.”

It is very clear that this new system was inspired by the competition with SpaceX. It is also pretty obvious that they are making the announcement now in the hope they can grab some of SpaceX’s customers who are once again faced with delays because of the September 1 Falcon 9 launchpad explosion. It is also likely that SpaceX is pushing to get its next launch off by November in an effort to beat back ULA’s effort here.

Ain’t competition wonderful? It is so good, it will even get us to the stars.

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SpaceX aims for November launch

11:44 am

The competition heats up: Despite the admitted difficulty of its investigation into its September 1 Falcon 9 launchpad explosion, SpaceX today said that they are aiming to resume launches as soon as November.

“We’re anticipating getting back to flight — being down for about three months — and getting back to flight in the November time frame,” Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell said Tuesday at an event in Paris. “We’ll obviously take another look at the rocket, focus on the ground systems.”

They have not said yet what payload they will launch, though it is clear that first launch will not be the Falcon Heavy demo launch, which has now been rescheduled for the 1st quarter fo 2017.

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