Tag: engineering

Ukraine’s aerospace industry in collapse

9:39 am

The Russian government’s takeover of its entire aerospace industry, plus its war in the Ukraine, has caused an 80% crash in Ukraine’s aerospace industry.

The two largest enterprises are the Yuzhnoye Design Bureau and the PA Yuzhmash manufacturing company, which work closely together on Ukrainian launch vehicles. Yuzhmash produces the first stages of the Zenit and Antares boosters and a fourth stage for Europe’s Vega launch vehicle. The company is also involved in the conversion of retired ballistic missiles into Dnepr satellite launchers as part of a joint program with Russia.

However, Russia is phasing out use of the Zenit and Dnepr launchers. Russia is shifting over to using Angara and Soyuz-2.1v, newer rockets the nation produces domestically. Russia is also switching to domestic manufacturers for space components to reduce their dependence on foreign suppliers.

This destruction by Russia of its neighbor’s aerospace industry doesn’t necessarily bode well for Russia’s own aerospace industry. Consolidated as it is into one giant entity, with no competition, it is very likely it will not produce much that is very innovative or creative at a reasonable cost. Russia was better off with the competition.

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LISA Pathfinder’s cubes floating free

9:21 am

More gravitational wave news: LISA Pathfinder’s two gold-platinum 46mm cubes have been released and are now floating free inside their spacecraft.

After a week of further testing, they will stop controlling the cube’s positions with electrostatic force. They will then watch them very precisely with lasers to test whether the equipment is capable of detecting distance shifts small enough for a future version, made up of three such spacecraft, to detect gravitational waves. The idea is that, as a wave rolls by, the cubes will shift positions at slightly different times, just as different beach balls will do so on ocean waves.

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The first geology map of Pluto

10:19 am

Geology map of Pluto

The New Horizons science team has now released the first geology map of a portion of Pluto, seen by the spacecraft during its fly-by last year.

It is definitely worth your while to take a look at the full image, along with the legend explaining the different surface features. Most of the geological terms are merely descriptive, but the careful breakdown still provides a much deeper understanding of what is there.

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A toy replicator for kids!

10:00 am

Mattel is bringing back an old toy, Thingmaker, but the new version will be a 3D printer for kids.

After wirelessly linking the 3D printer to a mobile device running the ThingMaker Design App for iOS or Android, users decide whether they want to create a toy figure or jewelry, with the option to print ready-designed toys, or mix and match from hundreds of parts which can be popped together after printing thanks to ball and socket joints. After designing their creation, users simply push a button to start printing.

Features of the ThingMaker 3D printer which make it more suitable for children than your typical 3D printer include it being simple to use, and having an auto-locking door. This will stay shut until your toy is at a safe temperature and the hot print head has retracted into a recess, so that it can’t burn eager little fingers.

Simplicity is applicable to adults as well. This gives us a hint where all 3D printing is heading.

And though the article describes as a negative the fact that it will routinely take 12 hours for each toy to print, I consider this irrelevant. I would have loved to have this thing as a kid, and would have gladly tried out a new design each day, just for fun. The toys themselves are what is irrelevant, not the creation process.

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The first music video in zero gravity

10:30 am

Update: The music video itself has been pulled from youtube for copyright reasons that I don’t quite understand. However, the making of video is still available, and that will give you a pretty good feel for some of the stuff in the original piece.

I was going to make this an evening pause, but then decided it shouldn’t wait. This music video, by OK-Go, is unique and somewhat historic, as it I think is the first to have been done in zero gravity, using an airplane to fly parabolic arcs. It demonstrates clearly the fantastic and as present almost unimaginable possibilities of dance in weightlessness, as it also might be the first time that professional dancers, the two women, are given a chance to do moves in microgravity.

Be sure to also watch the making of video below the fold. And go here for the story behind the video.


» Read more

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SpaceX loses a launch payload

10:11 am

In the heat of competition: Because of delays, a satellite company has shifted its launch vehicle from SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy to Arianespace’s Ariane 5

The company, ViaSat, still has a contract with SpaceX to use Falcon Heavy to launch later satellites, but they decided they could no longer wait and needed to get the satellite in orbit by 2017, something that SpaceX could no longer guarantee. They had to pay more to fly on Ariane 5, but it appears they were able to negotiate a price break with Arianespace to close the deal.

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The graffiti inside Apollo 11

9:39 am

An effort to create a 3D model of the inside of the Apollo 11 capsule on display at the National Air & Space Museum has revealed previously undocumented notes and scribbles that the astronauts put on the capsule’s walls.

Needell and his team also decided that they would provide access to the lower equipment bay, the area located below the astronauts’ seats, which housed the ship’s navigation sextant, telescope and computer. “No one from the Smithsonian, as far I knew — not as long as I’ve been the curator for 20 years, has ever been below there to document the conditions or any of the aspects of the lower equipment bay,” said Needell. “We’ve been able to sort of see above the seats, but that’s about all.”

So, for the first time, the curators removed from the lower bay the large bag that held the Apollo 11 crew’s pressure garment assemblies — in other words, their spacesuits — as well as several helmet bags and a checklist pocket that command module pilot Michael Collins used while orbiting the moon alone.

And then they saw it, the literal writing on the wall.

They have located at least one post-landing image that shows some of the writing, which indicates that in 1969 no one considered this important enough to note. Then the capsule was put on display, and no one was allowed in it for decades.

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The final search for Philae

8:57 am

This review of the journey of Rosetta’s lander Philae, now dead on the surface of Comet 67P/C-G, includes information about the science’s team upcoming last effort to locate the lander.

The comet’s level of activity is now decreasing, allowing Rosetta to safely and gradually reduce its distance to the comet again,” says Sylvain Lodiot, ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft operations manager. “Eventually we will be able to fly in ‘bound orbits’ again, approaching to within 10–20 km – and even closer in the final stages of the mission – putting us in a position to fly above Abydos close enough to obtain dedicated high-resolution images to finally locate Philae and understand its attitude and orientation.”

“Determining Philae’s location would also allow us to better understand the context of the incredible in situ measurements already collected, enabling us to extract even more valuable science from the data,” says Matt Taylor, ESA’s Rosetta project scientist.

They intend to try to re-establish communications with the lander, but do not have much expectations that it is able to function.

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First direct detection of a gravitational wave

9:45 am

The science team from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) announced today that on September 14, 2015 they made the first direct detection of a gravitational wave, produced by the merging of two distant black holes.

Based on the observed signals, LIGO scientists estimate that the black holes for this event were about 29 and 36 times the mass of the sun, and the event took place 1.3 billion years ago. About three times the mass of the sun was converted into gravitational waves in a fraction of a second — with a peak power output about 50 times that of the whole visible universe. By looking at the time of arrival of the signals — the detector in Livingston recorded the event 7 milliseconds before the detector in Hanford — scientists can say that the source was located in the Southern Hemisphere.

According to general relativity, a pair of black holes orbiting around each other lose energy through the emission of gravitational waves, causing them to gradually approach each other over billions of years, and then much more quickly in the final minutes. During the final fraction of a second, the two black holes collide at nearly half the speed of light and form a single more massive black hole, converting a portion of the combined black holes’ mass to energy, according to Einstein’s formula E=mc2. This energy is emitted as a final strong burst of gravitational waves. These are the gravitational waves that LIGO observed.

Because of the faintness of the wave signal, I suspect that the scientists involved have spent the last four months reviewing their data and the instrument very carefully, to make sure this was not a false detection. That they feel confident enough to make this announcement tells us that they think the detection was real.

Recently ESA launched Lisa Pathfinder, a prototype space-based gravitational wave detector designed to test the technology for building a larger in-space observatory that would be far more sensitive that LIGO. Funding for that larger detector has dried up, Today’s announcement will likely help re-energize that funding effort.

More information here.

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Mold forces Cygnus launch delay

9:23 pm

The discovery of mold in two clothing bags being packed for a Cygnus freighter launch to ISS has caused NASA to delay the launch by at least two weeks.

The source of the mold, a common fungal growth in humid climates like Florida’s, is under investigation by NASA and Lockheed Martin, which prepares NASA cargo for launch aboard two commercial carriers, Orbital ATK and privately owned SpaceX. An Orbital Cygnus cargo ship was more than halfway packed for the launch, scheduled for March 10, when the mold was found during routine inspections and microbial sampling, NASA spokesman Daniel Huot said.

The mold did not present any serious health threat should it have arrived at ISS, but it is definitely preferred to not fly it there if possible.

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SpaceX to reduces chance of first stage recovery on SES-9 launch

10:06 pm

In the heat of competition: Because of SpaceX’s delays in launching the SES-9 communications satellite, the company has modified the launch profile of its Falcon 9 rocket, abandoning a land vertical landing and reducing the odds for a successful barge landing, in order to get the satellite to its proper orbit sooner.

SES will thus be able to generate income from the satellite at about the same time it would have had their launch not been delayed. SpaceX meanwhile will still try to recover the first stage, but will face much more difficult odds.

One industry official familiar with the SES-9 mission said Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX has not abandoned hope of recovering the first stage after a landing on an offshore platform positioned for the mission. But the chances of success are much less given the launch trajectory agreed to with SES to reduce the time to arrival at its operating position.

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A new Japanese X-ray telescope to launch February 12

9:53 am

Third time the charm? Japan will launch on Friday a new X-ray telescope, the third time they have attempted to put this type of observatory into orbit.

Astro-H, which according to Japanese custom will be renamed upon successful launch, will collect the X-ray spectra for large deep space objects like galaxy clusters. An American scientist, Richard Kelley, has been trying to get this kind of instrument launched since 1984. First his instrument was dropped from Chandra because of cost. Then, two attempts to launch it by Japan failed, one when the rocket failed during launch and the second when the spacecraft itself failed soon after reaching orbit.

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North Korea’s satellite tumbling

9:45 am

U.S. Defense officials stated today that the satellite that North Korea launched on Sunday is now tumbling in orbit and is useless.

Do not take comfort from this failure. North Korea has demonstrated that it can put payloads in orbit. From this achievement it is a very short leap to aiming those payloads to impact any continent on Earth. They might not be able to aim that impact very accurately, but if you want to ignite an atomic bomb somewhere, you don’t have to be very accurate.

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SpaceX promises increase in Falcon 9 launch rate

9:31 am

The competition heats up: Even as SpaceX upgrades its Falcon 9 rocket as a result of tests of the returned first stage, the company said this week that it plans to increase its production and launch rate significantly in 2016.

“We’ve had the luxury in years past of having to build only a few rockets a year,” [Company official Gwynne Shotwell] said, “so we really weren’t in a production mode.” Last year would have been the first to require a high production rate of the rocket, she said, had it not been for the June launch failure that halted flights for nearly six months. “Now we’re in this factory transformation to go from building six or eight a year to about 18 cores a year. By the end of this year we should be at over 30 cores per year,” she said. “So you see the factory start to morph.”

Those changes, she said, include doubling the number of first stages that can be assembled at one time from three to six. The company is also working to accelerate production of the Merlin engines that power the Falcon 9 since, at the higher production rates planned for this year, the company will need to build hundreds of engines a year.

She also said that they hope to reach a cadence of a launch every two to three weeks.

We shall see. While I have confidence in SpaceX’s ultimate ability to achieve these promises, much can change as they ramp up their effort. For example, Shotwell noted that they had hoped to achieve this launch rate in 2015, but were stopped after the June launch failure.

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The floating mountains of Pluto

9:09 am

Pluto's floating mountains

The New Horizons science team has released a new image of Pluto’s smooth heart-shaped area, dubbed Sputnik Planum, focusing this time on the mountains of water ice that pop up through the plain and are apparently floating on the nitrogen sea, having broken off from the shoreline.

Because water ice is less dense than nitrogen-dominated ice, scientists believe these water ice hills are floating in a sea of frozen nitrogen and move over time like icebergs in Earth’s Arctic Ocean. The hills are likely fragments of the rugged uplands that have broken away and are being carried by the nitrogen glaciers into Sputnik Planum. ‘Chains’ of the drifting hills are formed along the flow paths of the glaciers. When the hills enter the cellular terrain of central Sputnik Planum, they become subject to the convective motions of the nitrogen ice, and are pushed to the edges of the cells, where the hills cluster in groups reaching up to 12 miles (20 kilometers) across.

I have significantly cropped the image to show it here. Be sure and check out the full version, because there is a wealth of fascinating details in it.

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China releases images from lunar rover and lander

10:33 am

Yutu on the Moon

China has made available a new batch of very cool images taken by its Chang’e 3 lander and Yutu rover, and Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society has figured out how to view them.

In a recent guest blog post, Quanzhi Ye pointed to the Chinese version of the Planetary Data System, and shared the great news that Chang’e 3 lander data are now public. The website is a little bit difficult to use, but last week I managed to download all of the data from two of the cameras — a total of 35 Gigabytes of data! — and I’ve spent the subsequent week figuring out what’s there and how to handle it.

So, space fans, without further ado, here, for the first time in a format easily accessible to the public, are hundreds and hundreds of science-quality images from the Chang’e 3 lander and Yutu rover. I don’t usually host entire data sets (PDS-formatted and all) but I made an exception in this case because the Chinese website is a bit challenging to use.

The image above is a cropped version of Yutu, taken by the lander. Be sure and go to the link to see the full image as well as others.

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Curiosity moves on, scoop still not working

10:10 am

Curiosity’s science team has finished its work at Namib Dune and has decided to move on, even though they are still analyzing an unspecified issue with the rover’s scoop instrument.

So far, in the week since they first had a problem while sifting sand from the dune, they have not described in any way what the problem is. All they have said is this:

Unfortunately, the CHIMRA behaved in an unexpected way during processing of the third scoop on Sol 1231, which prevented completion of the arm activities planned for last weekend.

The robot arm functions, and they used it yesterday to get some extreme close-ups of the sand, but it appears they cannot use the scoop at this time.

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