NASA scientists have released videos of the fire experiment they ran on Orbital ATK’s Cygnus freighter last week after it was unberthed from ISS.
The videos are at the link. They are not as exciting or as interesting as I think everyone imagined. However, they do confirm that the sample burned for 8 minutes.
Be still my heart: Delivery of the service module for NASA’s Orion capsule, being built by the European Space Agency, will be three months late due to engineering modifications.
Nico Dettman, head of ESA’s space transportation department, said the delay is partly a result of the fact that several components could not yet be assessed in the full critical design review and need more time to be integrated into the design. Dettman said another issue forcing the delay resulted from a reassessment by NASA of the stresses the service module needs to be capable of handling in orbit. These “in-orbit load” specifications have recently been tightened. But any design modifications will not affect the service module’s core structure, he said. “If it has an impact, it will be limited to the solar array wings, not the structure – nothing where flight hardware has been manufactured that we will have to touch,” Dettman said. “It’s a late modification, but not too late.”
Note that George Bush proposed Orion in January 2004. The first full up test flight, unmanned, is now scheduled for 2018. Thus, they only had 14 years to build this single capsule and service module.
It took NASA less than five years to build the first Apollo capsule and service module, and less than 8 years to fly seven to the Moon. Damn, it took the Allies less than four years to defeat Germany and Japan in World War II. Yet somehow the big government space programs of NASA and ESA can’t build a single manned capsule in less than 14 years.
Doesn’t anyone but me see something wrong with this picture?
In the heat of competition: Because of leaky o-rings Blue Origin has delayed its next flight of New Shepard to Sunday.
I can still find nothing to indicate the flight time.
In preparation for its October arrival in Mars orbit, the European ExoMars probe has successfully sent back its first images of the red planet.
The image is very fuzzy with a very low resolution, but that is expected considering the distance. What the image demonstrates is that ExoMars’ camera is working as expected.
The NASA fire experiment on Cygnus was successfully ignited on Tuesday.
No video or pictures yet, as far as I can tell. All they say so far is that “Saffire-I has been ignited inside the Orbital ATK Cygnus cargo spacecraft and telemetry indicates a burn of the cotton-fiberglass material blend.”
In the heat of competition: The review of Orbital ATK’s May 31st static fire test of its Antares rocket has caused the company to delay the upgraded rocket’s first launch until August.
Additional information pointed to data on “vibrations” during the Static Fire test that could be deemed as a problem for the vehicle’s avionics. A “fix” was already understood to have been approved.
Orbital ATK, while admitting the launch is slipping from its early July launch date estimate to a date likely to be in the August timeframe, pointed to trajectory evaluations as a specific relation to the launch date deliberations. “Final trajectory shaping work is also currently underway, which is likely to result in an updated launch schedule in the August timeframe,” added Orbital ATK.
They expect to make a decision on launch date in a few weeks.
The LIGO gravitational wave detector has detected its second gravitational wave, thought to come from the merger of two black holes.
The new observation came at 3:38.53 Coordinated Universal Time on 26 December 2015—late on Christmas day at LIGO’s detectors in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington. As in the first event, the detectors sensed an oscillating stretching of space-time, the signal, according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, of massive objects in violent motion. Computer modeling indicated that its source was two black holes spiraling together about 1.4 billion light-years away. (LIGO researchers had seen a weaker signal on 12 October 2015 that may be a third black hole merger.)
Note the last sentence in the quote above. They might have had a third detection, but are uncertain enough to have not claimed it as one.
A robot being tested by Russian engineers ended up on its own on a public street, baffling passersby and traffic.
“The robot was learning automatic movement algorithms on the testing ground, these functions will feature in the latest version of the Promobot.” The co-founder of the robot’s maker, Oleg Kivokurtsev, told ura.ru news agency. “Our engineer drove onto the testing ground and forgot to close the gates. So the robot escaped and went on his little adventure.” Kivokurtsev explained.
The team only noticed their brainchild was missing 45 minutes into the robot’s travel stint and by the time they located it, there was already a crowd of puzzled citizens and the police had arrived.
I have a suspicion that this was not really an accident, but instead a publicity stunt, but have no way to confirm this suspicion.
The competition heats up: SpaceX has successfully put two commecial satellites in orbit. The first stage hit the barge, but the landing was unsuccessful. More details to come.
The full video of the entire launch is embedded below the fold. One interesting part includes a view from inside the first stage looking back at the second stage at separate, followed with images from the first stage on its way back to Earth..
After almost a year exploring Marathon Valley, an east-west cut through the western rim of Endeavour Crater, the Mars rover Opportunity is about to head out and south, following the outside of the crater’s rim.
For a rover that was only supposed to last 90 days, Opportunity has now traveled more than 26.5 miles in its 12 years of operation on the Martian surface.
A deal struck today by Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) will allow ULA to buy 18 more Russian engines for its Atlas 5, instead of the limit of nine that McCain had previously demanded.
The deal also includes a deadline of 2022, after which no more Russian engines can be purchased, even if some of the 18 have not yet been bought.
The competition heats up: SpaceX will attempt another commercial launch on Wednesday morning, this time putting two satellites into orbit.
They will once again try to land the first stage in what they say are difficult circumstances. They are also picking up the launch pace, with this the second commercial launch in less than three weeks. It will also be their sixth launch of the year, matching what they did in each of the last two years, with more than half the year to go.
The competition heats up: China announced plans today to send its next lunar lander, Chang’e 4, to the Moon’s farside south pole in 2018.
The lander of Chang’e-4 will be equipped with descent and terrain cameras, and the rover will be equipped with a panoramic camera, he said. Like China’s first lunar rover Yutu, or Jade Rabbit, carried by Chang’e-3, the rover of Chang’e-4 will carry subsurface penetrating radar to detect the near surface structure of the moon, and an infrared spectrometer to analyze the chemical composition of lunar samples.
But unlike Chang’e-3, the new lander will be equipped with an important scientific payload especially designed for the far side of the moon: a low-frequency radio spectrometer. “Since the far side of the moon is shielded from electromagnetic interference from the Earth, it’s an ideal place to research the space environment and solar bursts, and the probe can ‘listen’ to the deeper reaches of the cosmos,” Liu said.
The U.S. had been in the lead in the land rush to gain dominance in the possibly water-rich lunar south pole. We apparently have lost this lead with decision of President Obama and Congress to focus elsewhere, either the asteroids or Mars.
After four years of southwest travel to skirt a large dune field at the base of Mount Sharp, Curiosity has finally turned due south to aim directly up the mountain.
“Now that we’ve skirted our way around the dunes and crossed the plateau, we’ve turned south to climb the mountain head-on,” said Curiosity Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. “Since landing, we’ve been aiming for this gap in the terrain and this left turn. It’s a great moment for the mission.”
During Rosetta’s recent close approaches to Comet 67P/C-G scientists were able to confirm the presence of two noble gases, krypton and xenon.
Rosetta had already detected argon, which makes three of the six noble gases.
<An evening pause: Hat tip Edward Thelen.
A fire in space: Orbital ATK’s Cygnus capsule is scheduled to leave ISS on Tuesday, when shortly thereafter it will begin a controlled fire experiment.
“Saffire-I provides a new way to study a realistic fire on a spacecraft. This hasn’t been possible in the past because the risks for performing such studies on crewed spacecraft are too high. Instruments on the returning Cygnus will measure flame growth, oxygen use and more. Results could determine microgravity flammability limits for several spacecraft materials, help to validate NASA’s material selection criteria, and help scientists understand how microgravity and limited oxygen affect flame size. The investigation is crucial for the safety of current and future space missions. – See more at: http://www.space.com/17933-nasa-television-webcasts-live-space-tv.html#sthash.2DjFjJqY.dpuf
The departure is scheduled for 9 am (eastern), and will aired live by NASA.
5 Unintended Consequences of Windows 10 Upgradegate
The bottom line: Microsoft’s culture has always been that of an immoral bully who has no ethics, even when they created good software (which was not often). Why anyone would continue to rely on them baffles me completely.
Cool image time! The picture below, taken by Cassini in April, looks down at Saturn’s vast rings and shows a disruption in Saturn’s outermost F ring, likely caused by an interaction of objects within the ring.
The competition heats up: Blue Origin’s fourth test flight of its New Shepard suborbital spacecraft will take place this Friday, and will be webcast live.
No time announced yet, but the place to see it will be the Blue Origin website.
