On Wednesday New Horizons successfully completed the fourth and last engine burn to change its trajectory to rendezvous with Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 in January 2019.
These were the spacecraft’s longest and most complicated mid-course corrections. They were also achieved at a greater distance from Earth than any previous such maneuver.
On Saturday I had posted a link to a very detailed article that strongly suggested that the alterations to the sea level rise data that scientists at the Colorado Sea Level Research Group were doing were either fraudalent or very very poorly thought out. One of the regular readers of Behind the Black, Edward, posted such a detailed and well-researched analysis of this story that I thought it worthwhile to promote it to the main page. Edward has given me permission to do so and so here it is:
It is reasonable for us to consider the possibility that a fraud is being perpetrated upon us.
1) Explaining data and the differences between the data taken and the data used is basic science; more basic than Science 101, it is middle school science. It is the first thing taught about data reporting in the first science class in which a student is required to collect data. Thus for the Colorado Sea Level Research Group at the University of Colorado to ignore the data discrepancy is a violation of basic science.
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An evening pause: Another video suggested by Phill Oltmann illustrating how engineering has revolutionized the agricultural field. In this case its tomatoes, which I think illustrates quite well why mass produced tomatoes are simply not as good as vine grown tomatoes from your garden. Assuming the tomatoes in this video are not intended for canning, they have to be tough to withstand the harvesting process so that they remain whole for the fruit stand.
Surprise, surprise! It appears that several Senate Democrats and the trial lawyer organizations that back them are objecting to passage of an update to the 2004 Commercial Space Act that would extend the period that companies would be exempt from liability while they experiment with new spacecraft.
Some Democratic members of the House Science Committee opposed those provisions when the committee marked up a version of the bill in May. “This really is quite an indefensible provision,” said Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.) during discussion then regarding the federal jurisdiction clause of the House bill, arguing that the bill is “basically providing the launch industry with complete immunity from any civil action.”
The American Association for Justice, a legal organization formerly known as the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, also spoke out against those sections of the bill in May. “Industries that lobby for immunity from accountability might as well hang up a sign saying they don’t trust themselves to be safe,” Linda Lipsen, chief executive of the association, said in a May 13 statement.
I really hate saying “I told you so!” but more than a decade ago, when the 2004 Commercial Space Act was passed, I opposed it because it gave the federal government far too much regulatory control over this very new and very experimental industry. Many industry people attacked me for doing so, saying that they needed this regulatory framework to raise capital.
Now the industry finds those regulations burdensome and is trying to get them eased, or waived temporarily. Not unexpectedly, there are vested interests in and out of Congress who don’t want those regulations eased. So, instead of focusing their energies on developing new technologies, the industry must instead spend money on lobbying and political dealmaking, which might get them some of what they want but will certainly also come with some political price that will be even more burdensome.
An experimental Air Force rocket, dubbed Super Strypi, failed seconds after launch today.
The rocket is launched from a rail track rather thabn vertically on a launchpad, and is intended to lower the cost significantly. From the video at the link, it appears that the rail track portion of the flight worked fine, but shortly thereafter the rocket lost control.
Posted from Mexico City.
The competition heats up: China today unveiled a one-third scale model of its planned Martian lander/rover, scheduled for launch in 2020.
If they succeed in putting a lander and rover on Mars, China will have clearly demonstrated the capability to do almost anything in space that the United States can do. The competition in the coming decades should thus be most interesting.
Posted from Tucson International Airport.
Promises, promises! Richard Branson today predicted that Virgin Galactic’s second SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane will begin flight tests in February 2016.
Forgive me if I am extremely skeptical. Branson has been making these kinds of promises now for more than a decade, none of which has come even close to coming true. I note this new prediction here merely to point out how bad his past predictions have been. Nowadays, I only believe Virgin Galactic is going to fly after they have do so.
Posted from Tucson International Airport, on the way to Mexico City for a week of sightseeing.
The International Space Station today celebrates the anniversary of the arrival of its first crew and the completion of fifteen years of continuous human activity in space.
The previous record of continuous human occupation, on Mir, was ten years. Hopefully, the record now is permanent and ongoing, and will never have an end.
The competition heats up: Reaction Engines, the British company developing a hybrid air-breathing rocket engine, today received obtained a significant funding boost from a new private partner as well as the British government.
The government has committed $60 million, while BAE has purchased 20% of the company with a commitment of an additional $20 million.
The craft Reaction Engines intends to eventually produce, known as Skylon, depends on the ability to cool an incoming airstream from 1,000 degrees C to minus 150 C almost instantly, at close to 1/100th of a second. That process doubles the technical limits of a jet engine, and would enable the craft to reach extremely fast speeds in Earth’s atmosphere, up to give times the speed of sound, before switching to a rocket engine to reach orbit.
Don’t start buying tickets however. They don’t expect to begin manned test flights for at least a decade
The competition heats up: ULA successfully completed its third Atlas 5 launch in October yesterday.
ULA’s has one more Atlas 5 launch scheduled this year, lifting Orbital ATK’s Cygnus capsule up to ISS on December 3.
Cool image time! The image on the right is the first processed close-up image released from Cassini’s fly-by of Saturn’s moon Enceladus on Wednesday. The resolution is about 50 feet per pixel, taken from about 77 miles away. This surface, in the general area where Enceladus vents lie, reminds me of a thick field of snow that has begun to melt away.
Since the fly-by got within 30 miles, even higher resolution images should follow.
The competition heats up: Satellite maker Eutelsat has signed a seven year multi-launch deal with International Launch Services (ILS) using the Proton rocket.
The ILS press release does not state how many launches this contract covers, which makes me suspect that ILS was forced due to competition with SpaceX to give Eutelsat a great deal of flexibility about which launcher it uses with each satellite down the road. The ILS release even admits this. ““With their selection of ILS Proton for this Multi-Launch Agreement Eutelsat has made a clear statement that flexibility and schedule assurance are key discriminators.”
This is still a good thing for the Russians, as it insures them a share in the launch market for almost the next decade.
Cool image time! The first images from Cassini’s close flyby of Saturn’s moon Enceladus on Wednesday have started to arrive.
None have yet been processed, though the press release above provided a distant view of the moon’s plumes as the spacecraft approached. The image on the right, showing the moon itself, is one of the flyby I pulled off from the raw image website. Expect some interesting views to appear there throughout the day, with a more detailed press release tomorrow.
Despite an inability to move, China’s rover Yutu has now set the longevity operational record for rover on the Moon.
Yutu was deployed and landed on the moon via China’s Chang’e-3 lunar probe in 2013, staying longer than the Soviet Union’s 1970 moon rover Lunokhod 1, which spent 11 months on the moon. Its operations have streamed live through Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging site, and its Weibo account has nearly 600,000 followers.
Yutu experienced a mechanical control abnormality in 2014, but it was revived within a month and, though it is unable to move, it continues to collect data, send and receive signals, and record images and video.
New Horizons has successfully completed the third of four engine burns required to adjust its course to fly past Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 in 2019.
This burn lasted 30 minutes, and having exceeding the second burn on Sunday is now the longest engine burn that New Horizons has done since launch.
With images expected in the next day or two, scientists have confirmed that Cassini survived without damage its close flyby through Enceladus’s plumes on Wednesday.
The uncertainty of science: Unexpectedly scientists using Rosetta data have discovered oxygen in the coma of Comet 67P/C-G.
It was not immediately clear where the oxygen came from. The team discovered that water and oxygen were often found together — an indication that similar processes released both molecules. But Bieler and his colleagues ruled out many scenarios in which oxygen arises as a by-product when energetic particles such as photons and electrons split apart water. Instead, the researchers argue that the oxygen is a remnant from when 67P formed billions of years ago, a process that may have trapped the gas in small grains of ice and rock that coalesced to create the comet’s solid core.
But many models of the early Solar System rule this out because most oxygen tends to pair off with hydrogen. Given this affinity, it is tricky to adjust models of the early Solar System to allow for the survival of gaseous O2, says Mike A’Hearn, an astronomer at the University of Maryland in College Park and a co-investigator on Alice. But he adds that it may be possible with the right chemical abundances and temperature conditions.
Using both ground-based and Rosetta observations scientists have now measured when the comet reached its peak brightness as well as how much material it lost during this orbit’s closest approach to the Sun.
Based on Rosetta’s pre-perihelion measurements that indicate the dust:gas ratio was approximately 4 , that means roughly 80% of the material being lost is dust, with the rest dominated by water, CO, and CO2 ices. (Note: at the time of that blog post an estimate of 3 was made for perihelion, but the actual data has yet to be analysed.) In any case, using 3 and 4 respectively, the total mass loss rate at its peak is likely in the range of about 100,000–115,000 tonnes per day.
Of course, that’s not a huge amount compared to the comet’s overall mass of around 10 billion tonnes. But nevertheless, a very simple calculation reveals that if, for example, the comet lost that much mass continuously for 100 days, it would correspond to roughly 0.4-0.5 metres of its surface being removed in that time.
In other words, the surface lost about 1.5 feet during close approach.
Peak brightness occurred near the end of August, and has been declining since.
The competition heats up: The completion of Russia’s much delayed ten-year space policy plan, originally planned for last year and then planned for November, has likely been delayed again.
The program was supposed to be submitted to the government for approval late last year, but the collapse of the ruble, ongoing launch failures and related mishaps, leadership shakeups at the federal space agency, and an industry-wide reform plan have all conspired to delay the final draft. A draft was expected this summer, but in March a senior Roscosmos official was quoted by the TASS news agency as saying that the proposal had already been significantly altered, and “looks completely different” than it did when originally completed in 2014. The biggest change to the draft was the level of funding dedicated to Russian space exploration over the 10-year period from 2016 to 2025, which was reduced by 10 percent between drafts to 3.4 trillion rubles ($52.5 billion).
Just like the Soviet era’s many repeated five-year plans, expect the goals of this policy statement, once announced, to fail repeatedly. They will have some initial success, but in the end this top-down government program, like NASA’s SLS, will have more to do with creating non-productive jobs than actually building spaceships and rockets.
The competition heats up: In its effort to improve its efficiency and lower costs, ULA shuffled and reduced the size of its executive team.
All these changes are under the leadership of the company’s CEO Tory Bruno, who took over in 2014 with the goal of cutting what company charges for a launch while speeding up its launch prep times. The effort to launch three Atlas 5s in this month is clearly the result of this policy.
