Tag: engineering

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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Next Falcon 9 launch date announced

8:51 am

In the heat of competition: SpaceX and SES have announced that they are aiming for a February 24 date for the launch of the SES-9 communications satellite.

This will be the second launch of the upgraded Falcon 9, delayed since December following that rocket’s first launch. That they have scheduled it means they have likely smoothed out the kinks detected on that first flight.

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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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A look inside Comet 67P/C-G

9:53 am

The Rosetta science team has determined that Comet 67P/C-G has no voids or large caverns in its interior, and that its low density is because its dust and water ice have mixed to produce a “fluffy” density.

In a new study, published in this week’s issue of the journal Nature, a team led by Martin Pätzold, from Rheinische Institut für Umweltforschung an der Universität zu Köln, Germany, have shown that Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is also a low-density object, but they have also been able to rule out a cavernous interior. This result is consistent with earlier results from Rosetta’s CONSERT radar experiment showing that the double-lobed comet’s ‘head’ is fairly homogenous on spatial scales of a few tens of metres.

The most reasonable explanation then is that the comet’s porosity must be an intrinsic property of dust particles mixed with the ice that make up the interior. In fact, earlier spacecraft measurements had shown that comet dust is typically not a compacted solid, but rather a ‘fluffy’ aggregate, giving the dust particles high porosity and low density, and Rosetta’s COSIMA and GIADA instruments have shown that the same kinds of dust grains are also found at 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

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February 2, 2016 Batchelor podcast

10:48 pm

Below the fold is Tuesday’s podcast of my appearance on the John Batchelor show. In addition to discussing Falcon Heavy, Ariane 6, and the question of rocket re-usability, I also lambasted the glacially slow pace of NASA’s Orion project, producing four capsules for a mere $17 billion in only 19 years! And speaking of glaciers, I also noted in the science segment the stonewalling at NOAA that prevents scientists from analyzing the rational behind their “adjustments” to their climate data, all of which cool the past and warm the present.
» Read more

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North Korea announces planned satellite launch

10:19 am

North Korea today revealed plans to place a satellite in non-geosynchronous orbit sometime in the next two weeks.

News of the planned launch between Feb. 8 and Feb. 25 drew fresh U.S. calls for tougher U.N. sanctions already under discussion in response to North Korea’s nuclear test. State Department spokesman John Kirby said the United Nations needed to “send the North Koreans a swift, firm message.”

Pyongyang has said it has a sovereign right to pursue a space programme by launching rockets, although the United States and other governments worry that such launches are missile tests in disguise.

It is horrifyingly hilarious to read the bluster put forth by Obama administration officials about this new North Korean effort to develop ICBMs that, as the article says, “could reach the U.S. West Coast.” Besides wanting to send “a swift, firm message,” they call the North Korean launch announcement a “slap in the face”, “another destabilizing provocation,” and “an egregious violation.” They then say they are working “cooperatively and effectively with the Chinese to counter this threat.”

It is laughable, but terrifying at the same time. North Korea, led by the worst kind of power-mad tyrant, is developing the ability to launch nuclear weapons to any place on Earth, and all our leaders can do is whine how mean they are.

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New Shepard launch update

10:49 pm

The competition heats up: Blue Origin expects to do about one launch per month of its New Shepard rocket in the next two years leading up to commercial space tourism flights in 2018.

Reports from the meeting quoted [Blue Origin executive Brett] Alexander as saying there would be a couple of dozen such test flights over the course of the next two years – which works out to an average of one flight per month. Alexander also told the gathering that it’s still too early to announce the ticket price for passenger flights.

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First SLS launch will carry 13 cubesats

10:42 pm

NASA today announced that the first test flight of its giant SLS rocket, more powerful than the Saturn 5 and intended to make human missions beyond Earth orbit possible, will carry 13 cubesats in addition to its Orion capsule.

Because the mission plans on sending the unmanned Orion on an Earth orbit beyond the Moon, these cubesats will have an opportunity to go where no cubesat has gone before.

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NASA ships a capsule

9:10 am

In what appears to me to be a overwrought attempt to make the minor shipment of one Orion capsule appear to be a major achievement, NASA on Monday transported the next Orion capsule from Louisiana to Florida.

They used the NASA’s Super Guppy cargo plane to do it, even though I suspect that the capsule really isn’t that large and could have likely been shipped by road in a truck for a lot less. The agency also apparently made a big deal about this shipment with the press, which like sheep went along with it.

The pictures here illustrate what I mean. I grant that the Super Guppy is a cool plane, and it is certainly fun to see how it is loaded and flies, but from a cost perspective this seems to be a very expensive way to transport the capsule.

As a result, the impression this all leaves me with is that NASA is really not doing very much with Orion, working at a snail’s pace to stretch out the payments, and thus has to sell every little thing to convince the public that this project is accomplishing a lot.

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Another 5 month slip of first Falcon Heavy launch

9:46 am

In the heat of competition: Amid a slew of SpaceX launch delays in the past month due to the introduction of an upgraded Falcon 9, Elon Musk noted at a student event in Texas on Sunday that the first demo launch of the Falcon Heavy is likely to happen in September, not April as previously announced.

The article is mostly focused on the launch delays of the Falcon 9, which for some of SpaceX’s customers are becoming a financial problem. The company is obviously trying to make sure that further Falcon 9 launches are a success, but the unreliability of its schedule is clearly a reason satellite companies like Eutelsat have signed new contracts with Russia’s ILS or Arianespace. Even with the problems Russia has had with its Proton they have managed a more reliable launch schedule.

Then again, the Proton and Ariane 5 have been around for decades. Their companies aren’t trying to improve them in any way. The delays in SpaceX’s schedule are somewhat understandable in this context. Better to launch slowly with new designs then to have a failure that entirely stops things for months.

Nonetheless, it might be wise for SpaceX to settle on the present Falcon 9 design for awhile, so that they can catch up and make their customers happy. Moreover, the further delay of the Falcon Heavy launch is definitely disappointing.

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An issue with Curiosity’s scoop

10:35 pm

The unit at the end of Curiosity’s robot arm that scoops up sand and processes it through sieves experienced “an anomaly” on January 25, causing a halt in arm operations.

The instrument has been scooping up sand from the sand dune that the rover has been studying recently. So far there has been no details at all about the “anomaly”, so it is unclear how serious the problem is. In the meantime the rover has been using its cameras and other instruments to do other observations.

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Russian Proton rocket successfully launches commercial satellite

10:21 pm

The competition heats up: The Russians successfully put a European commercial communications satellite into orbit today their Proton rocket.

It was the sixth successful Proton launch since their May failure. The key quote from the article however was this:

ILS owner Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center of Moscow has said it would give ILS leeway to reduce prices to work its way back into the regular commercial-launch rotation alongside SpaceX and Europe’s Arianespace. The decline of the Russian ruble against the U.S. dollar has made that task easier as most commercial launch contracts are priced in dollars.

In other words they are going to cut prices to compete, and the falling ruble has given them more leeway to do it.

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Water ice on Pluto’s surface

1:33 pm

The uncertainty of science: An analysis of data from New Horizons suggests that water ice is more widespread on Pluto’s surface than previously believed.

The new map shows exposed water ice to be considerably more widespread across Pluto’s surface than was previously known — an important discovery. But despite its much greater sensitivity, the map still shows little or no water ice in the informally named places called Sputnik Planum (the left or western region of Pluto’s “heart”) and Lowell Regio (far north on the encounter hemisphere). This indicates that at least in these regions, Pluto’s icy bedrock is well hidden beneath a thick blanket of other ices such as methane, nitrogen and carbon monoxide.

As the press release notes, water ice is actually “Pluto’s crustal ‘bedrock'”, so there really is plenty there. It is just buried below a surface of methane, nitrogen, and carbon monoxide “topsoil”.

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