Tag: engineering

China launches two smallsats

11:17 am

A Chinese pseudo-company dubbed Galactic Energy today placed two smallsats into orbit, using its solid-fueled Ceres-1 rocket that lifted off from China’s Jiuquan interior spaceport.

This pseudo-company might have gotten investment capital and operate like a private company, but its technology — solid rockets — is utterly derived from missiles, and thus it has done nothing without full control by China’s government. Like all of China’s pseudo-companies, it owns nothing that it sells.

Meanwhile, the rocket’s lower stages crashed somewhere in the interior of China. No word if they landed near habitable areas.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

48 SpaceX (with a launch planned later today. Live stream here.)
28 China
9 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 India

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 55 to 28, and the entire world combined 55 to 47, with SpaceX by itself leading the entire world combined (excluding other American companies) 48 to 47.

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Strings of Martian cones

10:10 am

Strings of Martian cones

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on May 25, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The scientists describe these cones as “longitudinally aligned cones,” but this is puzzling since the alignment runs from the northwest to the south east, not north-south along the longitude.

No matter. The alignment is in itself the mystery, especially because the full image shows many more strings of cones in this area, all running from the northwest to the southeast. The strings also are all curved in the same way, sagging to the southwest as if expressing a wave flowing in that direction.

What could create these strings of cones? The overview map below gives us a hint.
» Read more

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South Korean researchers turn simulated lunar soil into building blocks

8:51 am

Using simulated lunar soil, South Korean researchers have developed the engineering that turns that soil into building blocks shaped as needed.

The researchers first produce simulated moon soil by grinding black volcanic rock from Cheorwon County bordering the North. They then use a microwave to turn the sand-like simulant into solidified blocks. Lee said the team has developed a technique to make blocks by heating the soil in a mold to more than 1,000 degrees Celsius in two to three hours and cooling them. In space, the process could be powered by nuclear energy.

The article at the link also provides a nice summary of the status of South Korea’s entire space effort.

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Viking cemetery found at new Saxavord spaceport in Scotland

8:43 am

Archeologists have discovered a Viking “ritual cremation cemetery” about 4,000 years old near the launch site at the new Saxavord spaceport in Scotland.

The burnt bones were found inside an arc of large granite boulders set into pits in the ground. A small platform of white quartz pebbles was also discovered which may have once been linked to a burial. Quartz is often associated with burial tombs in the prehistoric, and covered the entire outside wall of Newgrange in Ireland.

Test launches at Saxavord are expected to begin in the fall, with the first orbital launch next year. This schedule of course assumes launch licenses can be obtained from the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority.

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Unknown Mars

11:36 am

MRO context camera mosaic
Click for interactive global mosaic.

Cool image time! The picture to the right was created from a global mosaic of all the context camera images taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) since it entered Mars orbit in 2006. It shows an unnamed 17-mile-wide-depression located only about seven miles south of the southern rim of Valles Marineris.

I highlight this particular depression because, despite seventeen years in orbit, MRO’s high resolution camera has at this time still not taken any pictures inside or around it. This is a place on Mars that remains unstudied in detail, in any way, even though its depth is comparable to the Grand Canyon and its features strongly suggest its is a collapse feature, created when the roof over an underground void gave way. If so, it suggests an origin for Valles Marineris that conflicts with present theories.
» Read more

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Hubble image shows several dozen boulders flung from Dimorphos

9:40 am

Boulders drifting from Dimorphos
Click for original image.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have photographed several dozen boulders that were flung off of the asteroid Dimorphos following the impact by the space probe DART. The picture to the right, reduced and brightened to more clearly show those boulders, was taken on December 19, 2022, four months after DART’s impact.

These are among the faintest objects Hubble has ever photographed inside the Solar System. The ejected boulders range in size from 1 meter to 6.7 meters across, based on Hubble photometry. They are drifting away from the asteroid at around a kilometre per hour.

The blue streak is the dust tail that has streamed off of Dimorphos since the impact, pushed away from the sun by the solar wind.

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The possibility of more than one exoplanet sharing the same orbit

9:27 am

PDS 70, as seen by ALMA
The Trojan debris clouds around PDS 70, as seen by ALMA

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers have detected evidence that suggests the possibility of more than one exoplanet sharing the same orbit around PDS 70, a star 400 light years away.

This young star is known to host two giant, Jupiter-like planets, PDS 70b and PDS 70c. By analysing archival ALMA observations of this system, the team spotted a cloud of debris at the location in PDS 70b’s orbit where Trojans are expected to exist.

Trojans occupy the so-called Lagrangian zones, two extended regions in a planet’s orbit where the combined gravitational pull of the star and the planet can trap material. Studying these two regions of PDS 70b’s orbit, astronomers detected a faint signal from one of them, indicating that a cloud of debris with a mass up to roughly two times that of our Moon might reside there.

The press release — as well as most news reports — touts the possibility that they have found a second planet in this orbit. They have not, and are likely not going to. As noted above, the data indicates the presence of “a cloud of debris”, which is most likely a clustering of Trojan asteroids, just as the more than 12,000 asteroids we see in the two Trojan points in Jupiter’s orbit.

Nonetheless, this is the first detection of what appears to be a Trojan clustering in the accretion disk of a young star.

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NOAA pays smallsat company PlanetiQ $60 million for its weather data

9:12 am

Capitalism in space: NOAA today awarded the smallsat company PlanetiQ a $60 million contract to provide the agency weather data from the company’s planned constellation of 20 satellites.

At present two satellites are in orbit, with more scheduled for launch in 2024. The satellites use data obtained in orbit from the different GPS-type satellite constellations to determine the atmosphere’s temperature, pressure, humidity and electron density.

In 2018 NOAA had awarded PlanetiQ and two other commercial companies, Spire and GeoOptics, small developmental contracts. This appears to be the first full contract, and continues NOAA’s very slow shift from building its own weather satellites to buying data from commercial satellites built by private companies. The agency has resisted this change, but since it can’t get its own satellites built and launched on budget or on time, it is increasingly being forced to do so.

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ISRO successfully tests propulsion system of Gaganyaan’s service module

8:56 am

India’s space agency ISRO revealed today that it has successfully completed the second phase of static fire engine tests of the complete propulsion system to be used by the service module of its Gaganyaan’s manned space capsule.

The first hot test of the Phase-2 test series demonstrated the integrated performance of the Gaganyaan Service Module Propulsion System. The test, conducted for a duration of 250 seconds, involved LAM engines firing in continuous mode, along with RCS thrusters, adhering to the test profile.

As part of the Phase-1 test series of SM SDM, ISRO had previously conducted five hot tests, totalling a duration of 2750 seconds. The earlier phase involved five 440 N LAM engines and eight 100 N RCS thrusters. For the Phase-2 test series, the current configuration includes the full configuration of five 440 N LAM engines and sixteen 100 N RCS thrusters.

ISRO had been hoping to launch the first manned mission in ’24, but that target date remains very uncertain.

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SpaceX launches 15 more Starlink satellites into orbit

9:20 pm

SpaceX tonight successfully launched fifteen more Starlink satellites into orbit, lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The first stage completed its tenth flight, landing successfully on a drone ship in the Pacific. Both fairings successfully completed their sixth flight.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

48 SpaceX
26 China (with a launch also planned for tonight)
9 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 India

American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 55 to 26, and the entire world combined 55 to 45, with SpaceX by itself leading the entire world combined (excluding other American companies) 48 to 45.

An additional note: This was the 100th successful orbital launch in 2023. In the history of space rocketry, reaching 100 launches in a year was generally considered an indication of an active launch year. Now the global rocket industry accomplishes it in just over half the year. Last year set a record with 179 launches. There is now an outside chance of breaking that, topping 200 launches in 2023.

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