Awaiting contact from China’s rover as lunar day arrives.
The sun started coming up over the weekend, so if Yutu is to come back to life, it must do it soon.
Did you ever get the feeling of deja-vu? On Monday Richard Branson claimed that Virgin Galactic will fly its first space tourists this year.
I am all for his success, but I must admit I am becoming skeptical. Branson said exactly the same thing in May 2013, except then he was claiming that the first tourist flight would occur before the end of 2013. It didn’t happen.
There are too many rumors about the engine troubles with SpaceShipTwo to allow me to accept Branson’s claims any longer at face value.
Engineers have finally pinpointed the problem, a damaged seal assembly, that has been stalling the giant drilling machine Bertha in Seattle.
The drill machine is still under warranty, and engineers from its manufacturer are on the way to deal with the problem.
Curiosity has successfully crossed its first sand dune.
The competition heats up: Russia considers building a heavy-lift rocket, even as it completes the design and construction of its new Angara commercial rocket family.
The headline of the article focuses on the heavy-lift rocket, but the meat of the article is its details on Angara, which is expected to make its first launch in 2014.
For a variety of reasons, SpaceX and NASA have agreed to delay the next Dragon cargo mission a few weeks to no early than March 16.
It looks like it was a combination of minor issues that, when piled up, called for a delay.
Scientists have found that bumblebees have the capability of flying at altitudes higher than the top of Mount Everest.
In a study published today in Biology Letters, two zoologists, Michael Dillon, now at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, and Robert Dudley of the University of California, Berkeley, tested whether bumblebees’ vertical range was limited by aerodynamics and physiology. Working in the mountains of Sichuan, China, the duo caught five male bumblebees (Bombus impetuosus) foraging at 3,250 meters and placed them in a plexiglas chamber. Once the bees began to fly upwards, the pressure inside the chamber was reduced using a hand pump to simulate altitude increases in 500-meter intervals. All five bees could hover at air pressures equivalent to elevations of 7,400 meters; three could fly above 8,000 meters; and two got to above 9,000 meters.
If you read the entire article, you will notice that it completely ignores the false urban legend that bumblebees are aerodynamically unsound and shouldn’t be able to fly. Scientists have known for decades that it is false, but for some reason it keeps getting repeated.
The public battle between Virgin Galactic and the author of a new biography of Richard Branson that raises serious doubts about the company.
Bottom line: The facts still suggest strongly that the company is having serious problems with SpaceShipTwo’s engines.
The legs for Falcon 9’s first stage.
They might make their first flight on the next supply mission to ISS, now scheduled for no earlier than March 1.
After resuming drilling in Seattle — and only going four feet — Bertha has been stopped again.
High temperatures near the machine’s cutting face prompted contractors to stop mining after the drill advanced a total of 4 feet in test runs Tuesday and Wednesday. And that ended Bertha’s attempt to resume mining after an eight-week layoff.
The earlier stoppage remains unexplained. They found some concrete chunks and steel pipe sections in the way, but nothing that could have explained why the drill was blocked. Now the high temperatures pose a more significant problem, as they suggest there is something technical wrong with the giant drill.
Curiosity snaps a picture of its planned upcoming travel route.
A new harvest of vegetables in space!
Notice that this research is a partnership of the Russians and an American university. NASA is not included. When I wrote about this subject for Air & Space a few years ago, the American researcher explained that there was too much bureaucracy working with NASA. Moreover, the Russians were much more knowledgeable about crop research in space, as they had been doing it for decades already on their Salyut and Mir stations.
What life has been like for one engineer who works at SpaceX.
Key quote:
According to Pearce, the best and the worst things about working for Musk are actually the same. “He doesn’t feel the need to make reasonable requests,” Pearce says. “The whole idea of SpaceX is not reasonable. The idea that a dot-com millionaire could take [US] $100 million and start a rocket company that within 13 years would be taking supplies to the International Space Station, that’s on track to take crew to the International Space Station — that’s not reasonable.”
But SpaceX did it.
To reduce wheel damage engineers are considering sending Curiosity on an smoother route up Mount Sharp.
In addition, they are inspecting the wheels more often and are planning operations whereby not all six wheels are operating at the same time.
The competition heats up: The head of Russia’s space agency is in Vostochny to review the construction of Russia’s new spaceport there.
For me, the last eight months have been very interesting when it comes to medical treatment. I have had my left hand rebuilt to eliminate chronic pain, I had my heart inspected to make sure it was working properly, and this week I had the retina in my right eye re-attached using some very clever engineering.
For once, this essay will not be about the politics of medicine and the disaster of Obamacare, which is still ongoing. Instead, I will outline how freedom and human creativity has now made possible a whole range of modern medical techniques that are either improving the quality of life for patients or literally saving their lives.
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The reactivation of Rosetta continues, with no serious issues so far.
The National Science Foundation wants to get rid of some of its older big telescopes, and you can buy them!
We are not talking small here. The biggest is the Green Bank Radio Telescope in West Virginia, which though only fourteen years old is unable to compete scientificially with the new large radio telescope arrays. In truth, when it was mostly built to satisfy the pork ambitions of the late Democratic Senator Robert Byrd.
More information on the problems with China’s lunar rover Yutu.
It appears that the rover was not responding properly to commands from the ground and thus did not prep itself properly for going into hibernation for the long lunar night.
Something is wrong with China’s lunar rover.
The link above is exceedingly short, one sentence, and describes the problem as an “abnormity” which makes no sense, so there is as yet no clear idea what the issue is.
A longer report is here, but it doesn’t add much, other than the “abnormality” is related to “mechanical control.”
The competition heats up: Sierra Nevada has now set November 2016 as the date for its first orbital flight of Dream Chaser.
The flight will be unmanned, followed by a manned mission the next year.
It ain’t an accident, they were brought there by Cygnus as part of an experiment to see how an ant colony adapts to weightlessness.
In celebration of the tenth anniversary of Opportunity’s landing on Mars, the journal Science has published a special section of the newest findings from Mars.
The main conclusion of all this research is that Mars was once potentially habitable, though there is no evidence so far to show that anything actually inhabited it. The data obtained however is now giving scientists clues on the best places to look for the remains of that ancient life, should it exist.
The competition heats up: Virgin Galactic today announced the successful testing of their own new rocket engine.
Virgin Galactic, the world’s first commercial spaceline, announced today that it has reached a significant milestone in the testing of a new family of liquid rocket engines for LauncherOne, the company’s small satellite launch vehicle. As part of a rapid development program, Virgin Galactic has now hot-fired both a 3,500 lbf thrust rocket engine and a 47,500 lbf thrust rocket engine, called the “NewtonOne” and “NewtonTwo” respectively. Further, the NewtonOne engine has successfully completed a full-mission duty cycle on the test stand, firing for the five-minute duration expected of the upper stage engine on a typical flight to orbit. These tests are being conducted on two new state-of-the-art test stands that the team designed, assembled and installed internally. [emphasis mine]
Though they say that these engines are for their orbital rocket, not SpaceShipTwo, I find it interesting that their development was in-house, not by Scaled Composites which has so far been building everything for Virgin Galactic. Moreover, note the highlighted words, “rapid development program.” Though you should never be leisurely about this stuff in order to compete, giving this particular title to this engine program suggests they are in a particular hurry to develop it.
Both factoids suggest again that they are not happy with the performance of the hybrid engines Scaled Composites built for them, under their direction, and are now working hard to replace them.
A look at China’s plans to develop a heavy-lift rocket.
A new study outlines the problems British researchers had in their 2012 attempt to drill down into a buried Antarctic lake.
The project had been under development for ten years, and yet:
According to the paper, problems started when the boiler that was intended to melt large quantities of snow to provide hot water for the drill failed to work properly because of short-circuiting in its control panel. More severe problems followed. The two parallel drills — one to drill the main borehole to reach the lake, and one to create a reservoir cavity to recirculate drilling water — ran too slowly. Other failures, including of components designed to ensure vertical drilling, exacerbated the problems.
“The drilling was essentially undertaken blindly,” says Siegert. Probably because one or both holes were not drilled vertically, the cavity failed to link with the main borehole. Water also leaked into the cavity drill and froze the hose in the drill hole. Attempts to remove the hose failed, so it had to be cut. At that point, and with not enough fuel left to reach the lake, Siegert gave up.
Seems to me that these problems — some very basic engineering design errors — are a good example of some basic incompetence. If I was providing financial backing to this project I would probably demand that a lot of people be fired before I would give them anymore money.
The report also has this interesting detail which confirms the doubts about the Russian drilling effort:
In 2012, Russian scientists broke into Lake Vostok, by far the largest of Antarctica’s hidden lakes, using a kerosene-fuelled drill. But their samples are spoiled with drill fluid and the bacteria they contain are probably contaminant species.
Penn State’s Google Lunar X Prize team has now launched a kickstarter campaign to fund its effort.
Because of a computer reboot, Rosetta’s revival from hibernation came 18 minutes late.
[Rosetta] woke yesterday as planned, to the relief of ESA scientists – but the signal it sent home to confirm it was awake reached Earth late, fraying the nerves of some mission controllers in the meantime. Due to call at 1745 GMT, Rosetta did not announce its revival until 1818. Fifteen minutes could be explained because the spacecraft’s computer checked the on-board clock only every quarter of an hour. The additional 18 minutes, however, was a mystery.
Now, the telemetry has shown that soon after Rosetta’s first revival sequence had started, the on-board computer automatically rebooted and the sequence started again, causing 18 minutes of delay.
It seems all is well now, though the engineers plan to spend some time pinpointing the cause of the reboot.
A donut-sized rock suddenly appears in front of the Mars rover Opportunity.
NASA announced the discovery of the rock at an event at Caltech in Pasadena this past Thursday night, dubbing the rock “Pinnacle Island.” “It’s about the size of a jelly doughnut,” NASA Mars Exploration Rover lead scientist Steve Squyres told Discovery News. “It was a total surprise, we were like ‘wait a second, that wasn’t there before, it can’t be right. Oh my god! It wasn’t there before!’ We were absolutely startled.”
