Tag: engineering

Rocket Lab revises design of its new Neutron rocket

9:35 am

Rocket Lab has revised the design of its new Neutron rocket, reducing the number of fairing shells from four to two, and shifting the location of the first stages fins.

One of the major changes shown is how the payload fairing operates. In prior concepts, the fairing was comprised of 4 quarters that opened outward to allow second stage and payload separation. The new design shows two halves of the fairing opening. Moving from four to two fairings will provide more reliability for the rocket and fewer moving parts.

Another change is a slight design to the forward strakes (fins) that help steer the rocket back to its landing site. Unlike SpaceX, which uses grid fins, the Neutron rocket will use fins that provide more lift and can return to the launch site from further downrange. The forward fins also appear to have moved further up on the rocket, and the fairing halves size made a bit smaller.

The landing legs have also been redesigned, apparently to more closely match the design used on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.

These are all relatively minor changes, none of which change the fundamental design that calls for the rocket to be almost entirely reusable.

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Contact lost with Voyager 2, hopefully temporarily

9:28 am

New but planned commands to Voyager 2, presently flying beyond the solar system, caused the spacecraft to point its antenna incorrectly so that communications with Earth have been lost.

A series of planned commands sent to NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft on July 21 inadvertently caused the antenna to point 2 degrees away from Earth. As a result, Voyager 2 is currently unable to receive commands or transmit data back to Earth.

Voyager 2 is located almost 12.4 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) from Earth and this change has interrupted communication between Voyager 2 and the ground antennas of the Deep Space Network (DSN). Data being sent by the spacecraft is no longer reaching the DSN, and the spacecraft is not receiving commands from ground controllers.

The spacecraft is also programmed to periodically reset its orientation so that its antenna points to Earth, with the next reset scheduled for October 15th. Engineers hope that at that point contact will be recovered.

If not, this incident will mark the end of the mission, which launched in 1977 and has been functioning for 46 years as it has made close fly-bys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, and then eventually entering interstellar space.

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SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launches another 22 Starlink satellites

9:13 pm

SpaceX tonight successfully put another 22 Starlink satellites into orbit, with its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage completed its fifteenth flight, landing safely on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The two fairing halves completed their second flight.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

50 SpaceX
29 China
9 Russia
6 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 57 to 29, and the entire world combined 57 to 48, with SpaceX by itself leading the entire world (excluding American companies) 50 to 48.

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Endless dunes in the dry Martian equatorial region

1:01 pm

Endless dunes in the dry Martian equatorial region
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 14, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a small section of a vast dune field, 50 miles square, that sits about 225 miles south of the southern foothills of Mars’ biggest volcano, Olympus Mons.

The dunes are probably less than 20 feet high, with that one small hill only slightly higher. Their similar orientation, which extends across the entire 50-mile-square dune field, indicates the direction of the prevailing winds, which I think (but will not swear to it) is from the southeast to the northwest, which also happens to also follow the grade downhill to the northwest.

It is also possible that wind direction is the reverse, and goes uphill to the southwest.
» Read more

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Scientists think they have finally discovered what makes the Sun’s corona so hot

10:31 am

Using data from Europe’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft, scientists now think they have finally pinpointed the process that causes the Sun’s corona — its atmosphere — to be many times hotter than its surface.

For decades, scientists have been struggling to explain why temperatures in the sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, reach mind-boggling temperatures of over 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit (one million degrees Celsius). The sun’s surface has only about 10,000 degrees F (6,000 degrees C), and with the corona farther away from the source of the heat inside the star, the outer atmosphere should, in fact, be cooler.

New observations made by the Europe-led Solar Orbiter spacecraft have now provided hints to what might be behind this mysterious heating. Using images taken by the spacecraft’s Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI), a camera that detects the high-energy extreme ultraviolet light emitted by the sun, scientists have discovered small-scale fast-moving magnetic waves that whirl on the sun’s surface. These fast-oscillating waves produce so much energy, according to latest calculations, that they could explain the coronal heating.

You can read the paper here [pdf]. The results have not yet been confirmed, but if so it will solve one of the space age’s oldest scientific mysteries.

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Astronomers chemically map a significant portion of the Milky Way

10:19 am

The chemistry of the Milky Way's nearby spiral arms
Red indicates areas with lots of heavier elements, blue indicates
areas dominated by hydrogen and helium. Click for original image.

Astronomers have now used today’s modern survey telescopes — on Earth and in space — to map the chemistry of a large portion of the Milky Way’s nearby spiral arms, revealing that the arms themselves are rich in heavier elements, indicating greater age and the right materials to produce new stars and solar systems like our own.

If the Milky Way’s spiral arms trigger star births as predicted, then they should be marked by young stars, aka metal-rich stars. Conversely, spaces between the arms should be marked by metal-poor stars.

To confirm this theory, as well as create his overall map of metalicity, Hawkins first looked at our solar system’s galactic backyard, which include stars about 32,000 light years from the sun. In cosmic terms, that represents our stellar neighborhood’s immediate vicinity.

Taking the resultant map, the researcher compared it to others of the same area of the Milky Way created by different techniques, finding that the positions of the spiral arms lined up. And, because he used metalicity to chart the spiral arms, hitherto unseen regions of the Milky Way’s spiral arms showed up in Hawkins’ map. “A big takeaway is that the spiral arms are indeed richer in metals,” Hawkins explained. “This illustrates the value of chemical cartography in identifying the Milky Way’s structure and formation. It has the potential to fully transform our view of the Galaxy.”

You can read the science paper here [pdf]. Based on this initial mapping effort, it appears that it will not be long before a large percentage of our own galaxy will be mapped in this manner.

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FTC will not block the purchase of Aerojet Rocketdyne by L3Harris

10:03 am

How nice of them! The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said yesterday that it will not block the planned purchase of Aerojet Rocketdyne by L3Harris, which the company expects to now complete in mere days.

The deal, if finalized, would place L3Harris on a solid footing to achieve Kubasik’s long-stated goal of positioning the company as the sixth major defense prime.

The forthcoming acquisition has also garnered support from an unlikely source: RTX, the parent company of missiles giant Raytheon. Executives from the company, which rely on Aerojet to deliver crucial parts, have been open in recent weeks that while they don’t love strengthening a competitor, they feel Aerojet is in desperate need of new leadership. “We’ve obviously always been concerned about Aerojet. But I would say some of these things have been magnified by all these external inputs,” Wes Kremer, Raytheon president, told Breaking Defense during last month’s Paris Air Show.

Aerojet has had problems for years, especially because the rocket engines it makes are very expensive. It has failed to garner any market share in the new emerging rocket industry, remaining dependent entirely on very generous government contracts and the older big space contractors. But even here, it lost out to Blue Origin when ULA was looking for engines for its new Vulcan rocket.

It is likely that after this merger, the name Aerojet Rocketdyne will vanish, a sad end to a company whose roots go back to the very beginning of the space age.

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Boeing’s total losses due to Starliner now equal $1.5 billion

9:44 am

According to CNBC, the total losses for Boeing due to its on-going and persistent engineering problems flying its manned Starliner capsule now equal almost $1.5 billion, not $1.1 billion as estimated yesterday.

Since 2014, when NASA awarded Boeing with a nearly $5 billion fixed-price contract to develop Starliner, the company has recorded losses on the program almost every year. The charges total $1.47 billion, according to its annual reports and the company’s most recent quarterly filing.

The annual losses have ranged from $57 million in 2018 to $489 million in 2019.

At this moment, the only way Boeing can make a profit on Starliner is to garner a lot of other tourist customers, outside NASA. The problem is that SpaceX’s already operational fleet of four manned Dragon capsules has captured that market, with a capsule and rocket that has demonstrated remarkable reliability. To convince others to fly on Starliner it will have to fly it a lot beforehand in order to convince others its problems have really been fixed. This will take time and money, which will only add to the red ink.

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OSIRIS-REx completes last major mid-course correction before sending its sample capsule back to Earth

9:38 am

OSIRIS-REx yesterday completed a 63 second engine burn, successfully aiming the spacecraft so that its September 24th drop off of its sample capsule will hit the Earth as planned.

Preliminary tracking data indicates OSIRIS-REx changed its velocity, which includes speed and direction, by 1.3 miles, or 2 kilometers, per hour. It’s a tiny but critical shift; without course adjustments like this one the spacecraft would not get close enough to Earth on Sept. 24 to drop off its sample of asteroid Bennu. The spacecraft is currently 24 million miles, or 38.6 million kilometers, from Earth, traveling at about 22,000 miles, or about 35,000 kilometers, per hour.

In the two weeks prior to that drop-off the spacecraft will do two more short burns to refine its aim so that the sample capsule will land precisely as planned on the Defense Department’s Utah Test and Training Range near Salt Lake City.

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Giant glaciers in the northern Martian mid-latitudes

12:57 pm

Overview map

Giant glaciers in the northern Martian mid-latitudes
Click for original image.

It is time for two cool images! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 10, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and is one of two glaciers imaged by MRO in May that are among a whole series of glaciers flowing down the south wall of the same mesa.

The red dot in the inset and on the overview map above marks the location of the picture to the right. The white dot marks the location of the May 27, 2023 picture, which can be seen here.

The unnamed 10,000-foot-high mesa from which these glaciers flow, located in the middle of the 2,000-mile-long northern mid-latitude strip I dub glacier glacier country, is about 41 miles long and 18 miles wide at its widest point. The glacier to the right falls about 6,000 feet in about four miles, making the grade steep, ranging from 15 to 23 degrees. That steepness explains the split in the glacier, as it flowed around a huge piece of higher bedrock in the middle of this descending hollow.

Both images provide further evidence of the dominance of glaciers in this mid-latitude region. While the glaciers are all covered with dust and debris to protect the ice, and are also thought at present to all be inactive, they also all suggest a very dynamic Martian geological and climate history, one that will likely come alive again as the planet’s rotational tilt naturally shifts back and forth from its present 25 degree tilt to 11 to 60 degrees.

The glaciers also show us again that Mars is not a dry desert, but above 30 degrees latitude it is an icy desert much like Antarctica. Colonists will have no trouble finding water.

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Optical image of accretion disk around baby star, taken by ground-based VLT

10:59 am

Stellar accretion disk
Click for original image.

Scientists today released an optical image of the accretion disk that surrounds a baby star about 5,000 light years away, taken by ground-based Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile and enhanced by data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), also in Chile.

That image, reduced to post here, is to the right. The bright blue spot in the center is the main star, with the smaller dot to the lower left a companion star. From the press release:

The VLT observations probe the surface of the dusty material around the star, while ALMA can peer deeper into its structure. “With ALMA, it became apparent that the spiral arms are undergoing fragmentation, resulting in the formation of clumps with masses akin to those of planets,” says Zurlo.

Astronomers believe that giant planets form either by ‘core accretion’, when dust grains come together, or by ‘gravitational instability’, when large fragments of the material around a star contract and collapse. While researchers have previously found evidence for the first of these scenarios, support for the latter has been scant.

This data suggests that the latter is being observed, the first time gravitational instability has been identified as it is happening. You can read the scientist’s research paper here [pdf].

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Infrared Webb image of a binary baby star system and its surrounding jets and nebula

10:47 am

Webb infrared image of HH 46/47
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The infrared picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Webb Space Telescope of the jets and nebula of the Herbig–Haro object dubbed HH 46/47, thought to contain a pair of baby stars under formation.

The most striking details are the two-sided lobes that fan out from the actively forming central stars, represented in fiery orange. Much of this material was shot out from those stars as they repeatedly ingest and eject the gas and dust that immediately surround them over thousands of years.

When material from more recent ejections runs into older material, it changes the shape of these lobes. This activity is like a large fountain being turned on and off in rapid, but random succession, leading to billowing patterns in the pool below it. Some jets send out more material and others launch at faster speeds. Why? It’s likely related to how much material fell onto the stars at a particular point in time.­­­

The stars’ more recent ejections appear in a thread-like blue. They run just below the red horizontal diffraction spike at 2 o’clock. Along the right side, these ejections make clearer wavy patterns. They are disconnected at points, and end in a remarkable uneven light purple circle in the thickest orange area. Lighter blue, curly lines also emerge on the left, near the central stars, but are sometimes overshadowed by the bright red diffraction spike.

To see optical images of HH 46/47 as well as some further background, go here. It is one of the most studied HH objects, which is why it was given priority in Webb’s early observation schedule.

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