Tag: engineering

ESA asks member nations to build lander for Franklin Mars rover

9:47 am

In its most recent request for funding from the member nations of the European Space Agency (ESA), the agency has asked the member nations to finance the design and construction of a new lander for its long delayed Rosalind Franklin Mars rover, replacing the Russian lander that had became unavailable due to sanctions resulting from Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine.

According to the BBC (opens in new tab), ESA will request 360 million euros to kickstart work on the new landing system, with additional funds likely needed in subsequent years. ESA has already spent some 1.3 billion euro on the ExoMars program, which also includes an orbiter that has been studying Mars’ atmosphere and surface since 2017. ESA will put the plan in front of delegates of its 22 member states at a ministerial conference in November.

“We will have to wait if the [member states] decide to go forward with the project,” Parker said. “This concept is now proposed as part of the director general’s package within [ESA’s] exploration program for decision at the ministerial [conference].”

If ESA’s member nations agree to this plan, expect the launch of Franklyn to be delayed further. Based on the normal pace in which ESA functions, that lander will take a minimum of five years to design and build (likely much longer). Though ESA is now targeting ’28 for the launch of Franklin, which was supposed to launch this past summer after a two year delay, this plan likely means it will not get off the ground this decade.

Meanwhile, there are now at least a half dozen private companies building lunar landers that could more quickly (and for less money) get a Franklin Mars lander built for ESA. None are in Europe however, which means ESA would rather have this mission delayed years so that it can funnel money to its own contractors..

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Russia’s Soyuz-2 rocket launches two military satellites

9:37 am

Russia today successfully launched from its Plesetsk spaceport two military satellites using its Soyuz-2 rocket.

Russian sources provided little information but it appears the launch was timed to allow these satellites to come close to an American military satellite.

Today’s launch of Kosmos-2561 and 2562 also seemed to mirror the trajectory of USA-326, with the American satellite passing over the cosmodrome roughly at the time of today’s launch.

If the latest launch is an inspector mission, it is possible that Kosmos-2562 is a subsatellite that was released by 2561 shortly after launch, as previous inspector satellites have done. Kosmos-2542 was believed to have been an inspector satellite, although never confirmed by Russia, and later released Kosmos-2543.

The launch was from the interior of Russia. The Soyuz-2 version launched was one with no side boosters, so that only the expendable core stage crashed in Russia.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

48 SpaceX
45 China
16 Russia
8 Rocket Lab
7 ULA

American private enterprise still leads China 68 to 45, though it now trails the world combined 69 to 68.

The launch of 36 OneWeb satellites by the biggest version of India’s GSLV rocket is right now counting down for a launch shortly. You can watch it here.

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Bedrock layers in Terby Crater on Mars

5:55 pm

Bedrock layers in Terby Crater on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image to end the week! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken by on July 18, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the bedrock layers on one of two very large mesas that jut out into the floor of 108-mile-wide Terby Crater.

I want to focus your eye on the spoon-shaped mesa near the top right of the photo. Note how the layers can be seen on both sides, even though the top of the mesa seems to be concave. This is strange and complex geology, made even more fascinating in that the two mesas almost reach the center of the crater floor. Why are they here? Why were they not flattened during impact, like the rest of the crater floor? Or maybe the original crater floor is the mesa top, but if so, why did the rest of the crater interior get eroded away.

The overview map below provides some context, and helps fill in some details, even if it fails to answer any of these questions.
» Read more

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Astronomers discover an exoplanet with the density of a marshmallow

10:18 am

Using ground-based telescopes to gather more data about an exoplanet discovered by the orbiting TESS telescope, astronomers have found that it has the density of a marshmallow.

The planet orbits a red dwarf star, the most common star in the universe, and is the “fluffiest” yet seen around this type of star.

Red dwarf stars are the smallest and dimmest members of so-called main-sequence stars — stars that convert hydrogen into helium in their cores at a steady rate. Though “cool” compared to stars like our Sun, red dwarf stars can be extremely active and erupt with powerful flares capable of stripping a planet of its atmosphere, making this star system a seemingly inhospitable location to form such a gossamer planet.

Astronomers remain puzzled how such a large fluffy planet could have formed around such a dim small star.

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Rate of micrometeorite impacts on Webb holding as expected

10:10 am

According to this Space.com article, the rate and size of micrometeorite impacts on the main mirror of the Webb Space Telescope has held steady at the rate and size expected, since the first surprisingly large micrometeorite impact in May that slightly dinged one mirror segment.

At this point, JWST has experienced a total of 33 micrometeoroid events, according to Smith’s slides. But the most damaging one came before JWST began science observations; in late May, a particularly large micrometeoroid struck the observatory’s mirror, leaving its mark on one golden hexagon. The team estimates that a strike of that size should occur about once a year, Smith said.

“So we got that at month five,” he said. “We haven’t seen another one yet, so it’s still consistent with the statistics that we expected.”

Smith noted that, at the current impact rate, Webb will still be meeting its five-year performance requirement 10 years into the mission. Scientists estimate that the observatory has enough fuel to operate for 20 years.

Meanwhile, one of Webb’s infrared cameras is not doing spectroscopy as engineers analyze the high levels of friction in a “grating wheel.” At this point it appears they still do not understand the cause of the friction, and thus have not come up with a plan for mitigating it.

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Chandrayaan-3 now scheduled for summer 2023

10:01 am

India’s second attempt to put a rover on the surface of the Moon, Chandrayaan-3, has now been tentatively scheduled for launch in the summer of 2023.

The launch had originally been scheduled for launch in the fall of 2020, but was delayed when India shut down due to the Wuhan panic. Official at ISRO, India’s space agency, had hoped to launch by the summer of 2022, but that proved impossible. They have now delayed the mission a full year.

In fact, all earlier reports had indicated the rover was almost ready. This new delay of a full year suggests that some new issues might have been identified.

The news article at the link also notes that ISRO is now planning two unmanned orbital missions plus four launch abort tests before launching its first manned mission, dubbed Gaganyaan, not two abort tests as previously planned. They are still targeting ’24 for the manned mission.

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InSight status: Barely hanging on

9:50 am

InSight's power status as of October 19, 2022

The science team for the InSight lander on Mars today posted an update on the power the spacecraft’s dust covered solar panels are producing. I have added that data to my on-going graph of these power levels, to the right. From the update:

On October 19, 2022, InSight was generating an average between 275 and 285 watt-hours of energy per Martian day, or sol. The tau, or level of dust cover in the atmosphere, was estimated at 1.5 (typical tau levels outside of dust season range from 0.6-0.7).

The jump in tau level is due to a large dust storm that developed in September more than two thousand miles away in the southern hemisphere. Though it is so far away, that storm put a lot more dust in the atmosphere above InSight, and forced engineers to shut down all but its most essential functions.

That storm is apparently continuing, and might even be growing. If so, the future of InSight is dim indeed. Any further drop in the amount of power it generates daily will likely make it unable to operate at all, and the mission will end.

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Frozen lava flows around Martian hills

5:06 pm

Martian lava flowing around hills
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on August 24, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the westernmost edge of the Athabasca flood lava plain, thought to be the youngest lava flow on Mars, having covered the area of Great Britain in a matter of weeks 600 million years ago.

This image was a captioned feature yesterday by the MRO science team. As they note:

Although you can’t sail a boat on a sea of lava, hills and craters that stick up higher than the lava flow act like barriers. When a boat is driven through the water, there is a bow wave at the front of the boat, and a wake that trails off behind that indicates which way the boat is moving. In a lava flow, when a hill sticks up, the lava piles up on the upstream side (just like a bow wave) and can leave a wake on the downstream side, so we can tell which way the lava was moving against the stationary hill.

As you can see, every hill has a pile of lava on its northeast slopes, and a wake to its southeast. As the main vent of the Athabasca eruption is to the northeast, about 500 miles away (as shown on the overview map below), the flow direction suggested by the wakes fit the general geography.
» Read more

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Hubble spots double tail of debris from DART impact of Dimorphus

11:28 am

Dimorphus double tail
Click for original image.

A series of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the ejecta released when DART crashed into the small 525-foot-wide asteroid Dimorphus has found that debris forming a double tail trailing away from the Sun.

The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on October 11, 2022 by Hubble, and shows those two tails as close parallel debris trails.

Repeated observations from Hubble over the last several weeks have allowed scientists to present a more complete picture of how the system’s debris cloud has evolved over time. The observations show that the ejected material, or “ejecta,” has expanded and faded in brightness as time went on after impact, largely as expected. The twin tail is an unexpected development, although similar behavior is commonly seen in comets and active asteroids. The Hubble observations provide the best-quality image of the double-tail to date.

Following impact, Hubble made 18 observations of the system. Imagery indicates the second tail formed between 2-8 October 2022.

Though observations by telescope will continue for the years to follow, the real punchline to this event will be when the European probe Hera rendezvouses with the Didymous-Dimorphus pair in 2026 to perform several years of very close observations.

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NASA approves use of American spacesuits for spacewalks after investigation

10:14 am

NASA this week gave approval to the resumption of spacewalks on ISS, using its American spacesuits, following its investigation into a March incident where one astronaut’s spacesuit became somewhat water-logged.

The agency has now completed a review of the incident, finding that it was not a leak caused by hardware issues. Instead, the water was condensation caused by high levels of astronaut exertion and the cooling setting on Maurer’s extravehicular mobility unit (EMU) spacesuit, NASA officials said.

Though NASA was somewhat vague about the solution, it appears it has simply told astronauts to adjust the cooling setting of their suits to prevent condensation within the suits.

These American suits are very complicated to use, and very expensive. The agency has contracted out for new suits from private companies, but it will be very instructive to see what SpaceX comes up with for the spacewalk suits it is making for the private commercial manned Polaris Dawn mission in the spring of 2023.

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ESA delays first Ariane-6 launch to late in 2023

10:02 am

The European Space Agency has once again delayed the first Ariane-6 launch, shifting it to the fourth quarter of 2023.

Even so, officials warned that this is merely “a planned date,” and that static fire tests of both the first stage and second stage must first be completed before the launch can go forward.

Ariane-6 was initially supposed to begin launching in 2020, putting it three years behind schedule. Furthermore, it has struggled to obtain customers, as it is entirely expendable and thus expensive and not competitive with SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

Since Ariane-6 is delayed and the Ariane-5 rocket’s has only a few launches left before retirement, ESA officials also noted that it has now been forced to buy two launches from SpaceX.

The launches include the Euclid space telescope and the Hera probe, a follow-up mission to NASA’s DART spacecraft which last month succeeded in altering the path of a moonlet in the first test of a future planetary defence system. “The member states have decided that Euclid and Hera are proposed to be launched on Falcon 9,” ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher told reporters after a meeting of the 22-nation agency’s ministerial council.

The launches will take place in 2023 and 2024 respectively.

The irony is that ESA is probably going to save a lot of money launching with the Falcon 9, rather than its own Ariane-6. In fact, I would not be surprised if the total SpaceX price for both launches equals one Ariane-6 launch. Furthermore, SpaceX gets this business because its own American competitors, ULA and Blue Origin, have also failed to get their new rockets flying on time.

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