Tag: engineering

Webb’s primary mirror successfully deployed

2:54 pm

Today engineers successfully completed the unfolding of the primary mirror on the James Webb Space Telescope.

The two wings of Webb’s primary mirror had been folded to fit inside the nose cone of an Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket prior to launch. After more than a week of other critical spacecraft deployments, the Webb team began remotely unfolding the hexagonal segments of the primary mirror, the largest ever launched into space. This was a multi-day process, with the first side deployed Jan. 7 and the second Jan. 8.

Mission Operations Center ground control at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore began deploying the second side panel of the mirror at 8:53 a.m. EST. Once it extended and latched into position at 1:17 p.m. EST, the team declared all major deployments successfully completed.

Next step over the next few months will be aligning the primary mirrors 18 segments with each other as well as the secondary mirror. First science images are expected during the summer, but do not be surprised if NASA releases some test images before then, should all be well and it obtains some eye candy.

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Debris in Perseverance core sample equipment

9:07 am

Debris in core sample carousel on Perseverance
Click for full image.

In attempting to store its sixth core sample on Mars last week, engineers discovered that Perseverance could not do so because several small pieces of the core sample had fallen into the equipment and prevented the drilling bit with the core from inserting itself completely into the sample storage carousel.

To understand the issue precisely, the engineers commanded Perseverance to first extract the bit from the carousel so they could get pictures of it.

The extraction took place yesterday (1/6) and data was downlinked early this morning. These most recent downlinked images confirm that inside the bit carousel there are a few pieces of pebble-sized debris. The team is confident that these are fragments of the cored rock that fell out of the sample tube at the time of Coring Bit Dropoff, and that they prevented the bit from seating completely in the bit carousel.

The photo to the right shows that material at the image’s bottom.

It appears this issue was anticipated when the rover was designed giving engineers a way to remove the debris. They plan to do so, but will proceed slowly as this will be the first time it will be attempted on Mars.

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A Martian cliff

1:30 pm

A strange Martian cliff
Click for full image.

Many features on Mars immediately make one think of the Grand Canyon and the stark dramatic geology of the American southwest. Today’s cool image on the right, cropped and reduced to post here, is a typical example. Photographed on September 7, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), it shows a dramatic cliff face that I estimate is about 3,000 feet high.

A closer look, however, almost always shows that this Martian terrain is not like the American southwest at all, but alien in its own way.

At the base of this abrupt cliff the terrain suddenly changes to a series of smooth downward fan-shaped flows. The cliff evokes rough boulders, avalanches, and chaotic erosion. The fans evoke a gentle and organized erosion of small particles like dust or sand. The two processes are completely different, and yet here the former is butted right up against the latter.

The fans also appear to flow out of hollows in the rough cliff, suggesting that somehow as the cliff erodes in chunks those chunks break into sand or dust, find the lowest points, and then flow downward like liquid.

How strange. How Martian. And how truly beautiful.

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Yutu-2 approaches boulder, has now traveled more than 1,000 meters

12:31 pm

Yutu-2's square boulder
Click for original image.

The Chinese state-run press has released some more images from its rover Yutu-2, including a new image of the square-shaped lunar rock that was first identified a month ago. This new image is to the right, cropped and reduced to post here.

In the original image, the rock appeared very square as it was on the horizon and silhouetted by the black sky. As is usual in our emotion- and movie-run society, many began to push wild theories about the rock, proposing it was anything from an alien spacecraft to the monolith from the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The picture confirms what any thoughtful person would have concluded, that it was simply a rock. The available image does not provide a scale, so I cannot tell you whether this is a large boulder, or a small piece of gravel. However, a wider image taken by Yutu-2 shows that the rock is on the edge of a small crater, which suggests the boulder is probably somewhere between three to ten feet across. The rover has completed only about half of its 260-foot journey to it, and won’t reach it until its next lunar day of operations in February.

The same report also revealed that the rover has now traveled just over 1,000 meters on the far side of the Moon, or about 3,280 feet, since it began operations in early 2019.

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China tests space station robot arm

9:49 am

The new colonial movement: The Chinese state-run press yesterday reported that it has successfully used the robot arm on its Tiangong space station to move a Tianzhou freighter from one point to another.

After being unlocked and separated from the space station core module Tianhe, Tianzhou-2 was moved into a predetermined position by the robotic arm. The arm then reversed the maneuvers to bring the spacecraft back to its original position. Tianzhou-2 re-docked with the core module and completed locking.

The test preliminarily verified the feasibility of using the mechanical arm to conduct a space station module transfer, confirmed the effectiveness of relevant technologies, and laid a foundation for the subsequent in-orbit assembly and construction of the country’s space station, said the CMSA [Chinese Manned Space Agency].

The news report did not indicate whether this operation was run from ground control, or by the astronauts on board Tiangong. Either way, it apparently clears the way for the arrival of two more large modules, planned for launch later this year, suggesting that the arm will be used in some manner to position those modules prior to docking.

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Virgin Galactic stock crashes

9:40 am

Capitalism in space: For the first time since Virgin Galactic became a publicly-traded company two years ago, its stock on January 6th dropped below its initial offering price.

On Thursday, stock of the space tourism company fell to as low as $11.30 before rising back to $11.90 by the afternoon. When the company merged with a special purpose acquisition company to go public in 2019, its debut price was $11.75.

In the two years in-between, the price was pumped up to as high as $62, during which the company’s founder, Richard Branson, sold off about 80% of his stock, reducing his holdings from 51% of the company to only 11% and walking away with about $1.25 billion in cash.

Right now the company’s future is very much in question. It has delayed all of its commercial suborbital flights until late this year, if then. Meanwhile, Blue Origin is flying commercial suborbital tourist flights, and the orbital space tourism market is ramping up quite successfully. With no ability to enter that orbital market, Virgin Galactic appears to be at a dead end.

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Ariane-6 finally wins more launch contracts

9:29 am

Arianespace today announced a new slew of launch contracts, including two for its mostly Italian-built Vega rocket family and four for its Ariane family of rockets.

The latter launch contract is significant as those four launches, putting eight more Galileo GPS-type satellites in orbit for the European Union over the next three years, will all be launched by Arianespace’s new Ariane-6 rocket, built and owned by the commercial company ArianeGroup.

The significance is twofold. First, Ariane-6 has struggled to get launch customers because its launch cost is far higher than SpaceX’s, to a point that the low number of contracts weren’t paying for the cost of development. This new contract overcomes that difficulty by adding four more launches.

Second, the nature of all of Ariane-6’s contracts underscore the difficulties it is having. Before the arrival of SpaceX’s mostly reusable and very inexpensive Falcon 9 rocket, Arianespace held 50% of the market share for commercial launch contracts, using its Ariane-5 rocket. Those customers have mostly vanished, however, switching to SpaceX. Ariane-6 was conceived — by the government-run European Space Agency — as a newer cheaper rocket that would recapture some of that market. All of its launch contracts, both old and new, demonstrate that it is failing to do so, however. Its only customers so far are coming from European government entities, who are required to use Ariane-6 as part of their partnership in the European Union and the European Space Agency. No private concern, inside or outside Europe, seems interested in using Ariane-6. It just costs too much.

For Europe to compete in the new commercial launch market it needs to build better rockets. And to do this it needs to release its rocket industry from the control of government.

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Ice-filled crater on the Martian north polar ice cap

2:15 pm

Ice-filled crater on the Martian north pole ice cap
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on September 18, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and shows a very distinct impact crater on top of the layered deposits of ice mixed with dirt that form the bottom layers as well as surround the visible north pole ice cap on Mars.

I purposely cropped the high resolution image so that the crater is off center to show the dark streaks that appear to blow away from the crater to the northwest, west, and southwest. This asymmetric pattern suggests the wind direction at this location generally flows to the west, but the pattern might also be caused by lighting effects. The location is at 82 degrees north latitude, and the Sun was only 31 degrees high when the picture was taken, causing long shadows. Also, in the full image, you can see a whole strip of similarly oriented streaks, suggesting that these are slope streaks descending a slope going downhill to the northwest.

The overview map below also provides important information about this location.
» Read more

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More Spaceport America corruption allegations flung about in New Mexico

10:58 am

New allegations of corruption and lawbreaking against Michelle Lujan Grisham, the Democrat Party governor of New Mexico, were revealed in a lawsuit filed this week by the former chief financial officer of Spaceport America, Zach DeGregorio.

Zach DeGregorio, the former Chief Financial Officer of Spaceport America, alleges that one of Grisham’s political appointees, Alicia Keyes, encouraged him to falsify an economic impact study. He also alleges that Keyes mishandled a bond refinancing for the purpose of defrauding the state. When DeGregorio attempted to report the wrongdoing, he claimed, he was threatened with investigations and a firing.

…The lawsuit also alleges that Spaceport America’s chief client, Virgin Galactic, and its CEO, Richard Branson, bribed Lujan Grisham in exchange for “essential business” status during COVID-19 shutdowns. The governor’s office met with Virgin Galactic shortly before Grisham “ma[d]e changes to the NM Spaceport Authority board,” “ma[d]e staffing changes at the NM Spaceport Authority,” and “made operational changes at the NM Spaceport Authority that benefited Virgin Galactic at the expense of other customers and the NM taxpayers,” according to the lawsuit.

You can read the actual filing here [pdf].

DeGregorio resigned in 2020 after filing an earlier complaint alleging that the CEO of Spaceport America, Daniel Hicks, had broken several laws in operating the spaceport. In the new lawsuit DeGregorio also alleges that Hicks tried to illegally access his email account to read private emails concerning these allegations.

Spaceport America was established a previous Democratic Party governor, Bill Richardson, based on Richard Branson’s false promises that Virgin Galactic would soon be flying hundreds of tourist flights yearly, thus attracting other space-related business to New Mexico. Since then all the state has gotten from the spaceport is expenses, almost no business, and a lot of scandal. This story is not the first, and I suspect it will not be the last, especially if Virgin Galactic goes bankrupt in the next few years (something I personally expect).

What Spaceport America will likely not get is actual business. It can’t work for orbital flights, being in the interior, and there isn’t enough orbital runway business to sustain it, especially since there are thousands of other runways to choose from.

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Space Force wants to pay commercial space to remove space junk

9:30 am

Capitalism in space: In a video released today, the Space Force announced a new program, dubbed Orbital Prime, that asks commercial companies to bid on a new test program for removing space junk.

More info here.

The initial solicitation, due by February 17th, asks for proposals capable of achieving the ability to rendezvous, dock and service a piece of space junk, either by “repairing, repositioning, refueling, deorbiting, reusing or recycling” it. The solicitation is aiming for orbital test flights in no more than two to four years.

This approach by the military is excellent news, and continues the transition by the space-related agencies of federal government from trying to design and build everything itself to acting merely as a customer and buying what it needs from the private sector.

There are a number of companies who have already launched robots capable of doing exactly this, including Northrop Grumman and Astroscale. By taking this customer approach, the military will likely not only get a junk removal capability sooner, it will do so for far less cost.

It would also seem that the Russian anti-satellite test that produced thousands of pieces of orbital junk that now threatens ISS and a number of military satellites also helped prompt this announcement. The military has clearly recognized that it needs the capability to remove space junk now. It cannot afford to follow its past behavior of taking forever to accomplish such tasks.

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