Tag: engineering

Martian pseudo-frost terrain

12:20 pm

Martian pseudo-frost terrain
Click for original image.

Cool image time! It is always dangerous to come to any quick conclusions about what you see from pictures from another planet. The photograph to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 19, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows what at first glance looks like a surface similar to frosting seen on window panes on Earth in the winter, where water condensation freezes to form crystalline patterns.

Your first glance would be wrong. This terrain is about 120 miles north of the Martian equator, placing inside the dry equatorial regions where no near-surface ice is known to exist. If this geological feature is formed by the same condensation processes that create ice frost, then it must involve the deposition of some other type of material.

The explanation would also have to account for the change in the terrain, from finely patterned on the right to more crystalline on the left.
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Space Force puts a halt to the use of AI because of security issues

9:09 am

The Space Force has decided to stop using any artificial intelligence computer tools (AI) because of the security risks that presently risk in using them.

The Sept. 29 memorandum, addressed to the Guardian Workforce, the term for Space Force members, pauses the use of any government data on web-based generative AI tools, which can create text, images or other media from simple prompts. The memo says they “are not authorized” for use on government systems unless specifically approved.

Chatbots and tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT have exploded in popularity. They make use of language models that are trained on vast amounts of data to predict and generate new text. Such LLMs have given birth to an entire generation of AI tools that can, for example, search through troves of documents, pull out key details and present them as coherent reports in a variety of linguistic styles.

Generative AI “will undoubtedly revolutionize our workforce and enhance Guardian’s ability to operate at speed,” Lisa Costa, Space Force’s chief technology and innovation officer, said in the memo. But Costa also cited concerns over cybersecurity, data handling and procurement requirements, saying that the adoption of AI and LLMs needs to be “responsible.”

This decision appears very wise. The insane fad in the last year to quickly adopt and even rely on AI has more than baffled me. Why are we in a such rush to let a robot do our for thinking and creative work for us? Have we become so lazy and dependent on computers that we’d rather let them do everything?

It is always dangerous to jump on a fad, without thought. That the Space Force has realized this is excellent news.

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Long delayed and overbudget NASA satellite refueling mission expects more delays and further budget overruns

8:59 am

According to a new inspector general report, a long delayed and significantly overbudget NASA satellite refueling mission, dubbed OSAM-1 and first proposed around 2010, will experience more delays and further budget overruns in order to get it off the ground by 2026, at the earliest.

A NASA plan to robotically repair and refuel satellites in orbit is way behind schedule and well over budget, says NASA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG), with most of the blame falling on space tech contractor Maxar.

Maxar, one of the largest private businesses working on NASA’s On-Orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing mission (OSAM-1), has been involved in the project since 2016, when the space agency’s idea was smaller in scope and known as Restore-L. According to the OIG, Maxar is two years behind schedule on delivering the the project’s spacecraft bus and its Space Infrastructure Dexterous Robot (SPIDER) robotic arm, and it’s unlikely OSAM-1 will come in under its $2.05 billion budget nor meet the December 2026 launch date NASA committed to in 2022. The bus is the main craft framework, and its attached SPIDER will hopefully repair and refuel satellites in orbit, once it all gets off the ground and works.

NASA isn’t without blame for the delays, the OIG said, but Goddard Space Flight Center’s (the NASA facility where the project is being managed) “struggle with development of several key components of the servicing payload” wasn’t the main issue. “We found that project cost increases and schedule delays were primarily due to the poor performance of Maxar … and its inability to provide the spacecraft bus and SPIDER in accordance with contract requirements,” inspectors concluded in their report.

The plan has always been to refuel the Landsat-7 spacecraft in order to demonstrate robotic in-space servicing of satellites. When first proposed, the idea was untested, and the project was intended to get this industry off the ground. Since then however Northrop Grumman’s MEV servicing robot satellite has leap-frogged NASA to twice reactivate two geosynchronous satellites. At the same time, at least a half dozen other private startups have now done robotic rendezvous and docking demos in orbit, and have actual contracts for their own servicing missions.

Moreover, all the private missions have concepts that are far simplier and cheaper than NASA’s. Rather pump fuel into the defunct satellite’s tanks, the MEV simply docks with the satellite using its now useless main engine nozzle, and once attached becomes a service module with its own fuel and engines to orient and move the satellite. The other servicing startups are doing similar things. No need to develop complex robot arms and fueling systems.

In other words, private industry can learn little from this NASA’s mission. By the time it launches the industry will likely be able to run rings around it. It has become a waste of money that should be shut down, now.

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India schedules Gaganyaan launch abort test for October 21st

8:40 am

India’s space agency ISRO has now scheduled the first unmanned launch abort test of its Gaganyaan manned capsule for October 21, 2023.

The test Crew Module (CM), according to the statement, will be akin to the pressurized module that’ll hold crew members during their ascent to space — this version, however, will be unpressurized. It will be launched via a single-stage liquid rocket specifically developed for this mission that will simulate an abort scenario; the true CM, by contrast, will ride atop a 143-foot-tall (43.5-meter) Launch Vehicle Mark-3 (LVM3) rocket with a solid stage, liquid stage and cryogenic stage. The latter recently received human safety certifications, R. Hutton, project director of the Gaganyaan mission, said during a conference last month.

At present ISRO is targeting 2024 for the first manned mission, but that target date remains very uncertain.

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Launch of Psyche asteroid mission delayed by weather

8:36 am

NASA and SpaceX today scrubbed the launch of the Psyche asteroid mission because of poor weather, rescheduling the Falcon Heavy launch to tomorrow, October 13, 2023 at 10:19 am (Eastern).

“For our first backup window, Friday morning, 50% chance for go conditions, with our concerns still being associated with storms in the area, where we have anvil clouds, some thick clouds, which are layered clouds, as well as cumulus clouds we get associated with storms,” Moses explained during the briefing.

“Looking at Saturday morning, a third backup window, there is still about the same probability, about 50% chance of go, and fairly similar conditions here, where there may be some storms around, but we expect most of any storms to be after our morning launch window,” she added.

The launch window for the mission closes on October 25, after which a major mission rescheduling will be required to get the probe to the asteroid Psyche, likely causing a year delay.

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Massive landslide in Martian canyon

1:12 pm

Massive landslide in Martian canyon
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, enhanced, and annotated to post here, was taken on September 5, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The image shows a gigantic landslide collapse on the southern interior wall of a long meandering canyon on Mars dubbed Bahram Vallis. The collapse was what scientists call a mass wasting event, in which the entire section of cliff wall breaks off and moves downward as a large unit. In this case the falling section, a half mile wide and long, got squeezed near the bottom, piling up rather than flowing out into the canyon floor.

At this particular location the canyon is 2.4 miles wide, with cliff walls about 1,700 feet high. Imagine when this piece broke off: In one instance a giant section of mountain about a half mile long fell about a thousand feet. Even in Mars’ thin atmosphere the sound must have been thunderous.
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Astrobotic resumes suborbital test flights of assets purchased from Masten bankruptcy

8:32 am

The startup lunar landing company Astrobotic has resumed flights and testing of the suborbital spacecraft built by the company Masten Space Systems and obtained when that company went bankrupt.

Astrobotic announced Oct. 10 that it completed the first campaign of test flights by Xodiac, a vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing vehicle, since acquiring it and other Masten Space Systems assets last year. Xodiac conducted four flights from Mojave, California, hovering just off the ground to test plume-surface interactions ahead of future lunar landing missions, supporting research by the University of Central Florida.

Xodiac was built several years ago by Masten Space Systems, based in Mojave, and made more than 150 low-altitude flights for a variety of technology demonstration investigations. However, the company filed for bankruptcy in July 2022 and its assets acquired by Astrobotic that September for $4.5 million.

Xodiac is now part of Astobotic’s Propulsion and Test Department, which includes other assets from Masten Space Systems as well as many of its former employees, who say they have picked up where they left off before the bankruptcy.

Astrobotic has also resumed development work on a larger Masten suborbital spacecraft, Xogdor, also designed to launch and land vertically, but actually reach space.

Because Astrobotic is mostly focused on developing lunar landers, Masten’s technology is perfect for refining that capability for landing on the Moon. It is also ideal should Astrobotic decide to develop a reusable rocket for launch from Earth.

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October 12 Falcon Heavy launch of Psyche probe faces bad weather

10:09 am

At present there is only a 20% chance that the Falcon Heavy launch of NASA’s Psyche asteroid probe will occur on October 12, 2023 at 10:16 am (Eastern) as planned out of Cape Canaveral.

The launch window only extends until October 25, 2023, after which the entire project would have to be redesigned, requiring a significant delay.

SpaceX has become very adept at threading the needle when weather restricts its Starlink launch abilities, but it has less flexibility with Psyche. To increase its chances it has scrubbed a planned Starlink launch this week from Cape Canaveral in order to give the Falcon Heavy launch more launch opportunities.

Regardless, the live stream can be accessed here.

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Aerojet Rocketdyne satellite power units are chronically failing

9:53 am

According to space insurers, problems on power units built by Aerojet Rocketdyne on four different satellites are going to cost the industry about $50 million in claims this year.

According to multiple insurance sources, Yahsat’s Al Yah 3, Avanti Communications’ Hylas 4, and Northrop Grumman’s two Mission Extension Vehicles (MEV-1 and MEV-2) are operating with reduced power to their thrusters following a problem with onboard Power Processing Units (PPUs).

The PPUs from Aerojet Rocketdyne provide the electrical power their thrusters need for station-keeping in geostationary orbit (GEO). One of the sources said Al Yah 3, Hylas 4, and MEV-2 have each lost one of two onboard PPUs since the issue emerged in 2022. The youngest of these spacecraft, MEV-2, launched in 2020.

While the article at the link focuses on the impact to space insurers for these additional claims, what I see are serious quality control problems at Aerojet Rocketdyne, now part of the company L3Harris after a summer acquisition. The new management of L3Harris better aggressively address this, or else it will find its $4.7 billion acquisition a big waste of money.

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Software patch saves Europe’s Euclid space telescope

10:03 am

Engineeers have successfully saved Europe’s new recently launched Euclid space telescope by installing a software patch that fixed the telescope’s inability to orient itself properly for long periods.

Shortly after launching on 1 July, the European space observatory Euclid started performing tiny, unexpected pirouettes. The problem revealed itself during initial tests of the telescope’s automated pointing system. If left unfixed, it could have severely affected Euclid’s science mission and led to gaps in its map of the Universe.

Now the European Space Agency (ESA) says that it has resolved the issue by updating some of the telescope’s software. The problem occurred when the on board pointing system mistook cosmic noise for faint stars in dark patches of sky, and directed the spacecraft to reorient itself in the middle of a shot.

The new software essentially reduces the amount of light that enters the pointing system, so that the noise is no longer detected. This means that observations however will have to be longer to obtain the same data, extending the mission.

Euclid’s goal is a follow-up on Europe’s Gaia mission, to map 1.5 billion galaxies in three dimensions. Gaia did it with the stars in the Milky Way. Euclid is looking deeper, requiring far greater precision and accuracy in pointing.

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Spanish rocket startup successfully completes first suborbital test launch

10:05 pm

The Spanish rocket startup PLD today successfully completed its first suborbital test launch, a short flight of its Miura-1 prototype rocket, lifting off from its spaceport in Spain.

I have embedded video of the launch below, cued to just before launch. Though the plan had been to recover the first stage using parachutes, it is unclear if this occurred or was even attempted. The launch was at night, making recovery difficult or much slower, and because the broadcast was in Spanish there was no translation,

Regardless, the data from this launch will be used by the company to build its orbital rocket, Miura-5.

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Gale Crater as seen by Curiosity from the heights of Mount Sharp

12:57 pm

Gale Crater as seen by Curiosity from the heights of Mount Sharp
Click for original image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Though Curiosity still lies more than 13,000 feet below the peak of Mount Sharp, in its ten years on Mars it has climbed a considerable distance uphill since leaving the floor of 97-mile-wide Gale Crater, about 2,400 feet. The panorama above, taken today by one of Curiosity’s navigation cameras and rotated and cropped to post here, gives us a good sense of the elevation the rover has gained in that time.

The overview map to the right provides some perspective. Curiosity’s present location is indicated by the blue dot, with the yellow lines indicating the direction of this panorama. Though Curiosity climbed up from that valley on the lower left, none of its route is visible in this picture, as the weaved up from the left and the steepness of the ground hides the lower sections.

The mountain chain in the distance, about 20 to 25 miles away, is the north rim of Gale Crater. Beyond it can faintly be seen other mountains, which form the rim of another smaller crater to the north. The peak of Mount Sharp, about 23 miles to the south and in the opposite direction, forms the wide central peak of Gale Crater, unusual in that it fills much of the crater and rises higher than the crater’s rim, factors which were part of the reason this location was chosen as Curiosity’s landing site.

This picture also allows scientists to get a sense of the dust levels in the Martian atmosphere, which change seasonally depending on dust storm activity. Since it is now summer on Mars, when dust activity is low, the air is relatively clear.

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Astronomers detect baffling blue transient far outside any galaxy

11:32 am

Transient in intergalactic space
Click for original image.

Using a variety of telescopes, astronomers have discovered a baffling short-term object that brightens quickly in blue light and then fades.

What makes this discovery even more baffling is that though other such Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transients (LFBOT) have been discovered, all have been within galaxies, while this new discovery is in intergalactic space, as shown by the red bars in the picture to right, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here. From the caption:

[An LFBOT] shines intensely in blue light and evolves rapidly, reaching peak brightness and fading again in a matter of days, unlike supernovae which take weeks or months to dim. Only a handful of previous LFBOTs have been discovered since 2018. The surprise is that this latest transient, seen in 2023, lies at a large offset from both the barred spiral galaxy at right and the dwarf galaxy to the upper left. Only Hubble could pinpoint its location. And, the results are leaving astronomers even more confounded because all previous LFBOTs have been found in star-forming regions in the spiral arms of galaxies. It’s not clear what astronomical event would trigger such a blast far outside of a galaxy.

The frequent discovery of such short term transients in the past decade is because there are now many telescopes dedicated to making daily surveys of the entire sky. In the past such quick events were always missed.

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ULA’s Atlas-5 rocket launches first two Kuiper satellites

11:16 am

ULA’s Atlas-5 rocket today successfully launched the first two prototype satellites of Amazon’s proposed 3,200-satellite constellation to provide broadband globally in competition with Starlink and OneWeb.

As of posting, the satellites had not yet deployed, with the rocket’s upper stage still firing its engines to bring the rocket to its proper orbit. The live stream unfortunately ended early at this point.

Though the Atlas-5 is being retired, to be replaced by ULA’s still unlaunched Vulcan rocket, about seventeen rockets remain in the company’s launch manifest. All have payloads, so any additional ULA launch contracts must rely on Vulcan.

This was ULA’s third launch in 2023, so it does not change the leader board for the 2023 launch race. The company predicted it would complete ten launches in 2023, a prediction that with less than three months left in the year seems unlikely for it to achieve.

70 SpaceX
45 China
13 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 82 to 45, and leads the entire world combined 82 to 72. SpaceX by itself still trails the rest of the world, excluding American companies, 70 to 72.

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Stoke Space raises $100 million in private investment capital

9:12 am

The rocket startup Stoke Space, which is developing a radically new engine concept for its rockets, has now successfully raised $100 million in private investment capital.

This investment more than doubles the company’s total funding, which now sits at $175 million. The company also announced the official name of its first rocket: Nova.

The funding round was led by Industrious Ventures with participation from the University of Michigan, Sparta Group, Long Journey, and others. Existing investors Breakthrough Energy, YCombinator, Point72 Ventures, NFX, MaC Ventures, Toyota Ventures, and In-Q-Tel also participated. This latest funding round is evidence of strong demand for Stoke’s services, its growing success, and the confidence of investors in its future. As part of this round of fundraising Steve Angel, Chairman of the Board, Linde plc, will join Stoke’s Board of Directors. Angel is also the former CEO of Linde and a member of the Board of Directors of GE.

The company says it will use this money to develop the rocket’s first stage engines, which will follow the same ring nozzle design of its upper stage, a prototype of which it successfully test flew on a short hop last month. Under that design, the engine doesn’t have one central nozzle, but instead the thrust is funnelled out of a ring of tiny nozzles that circle the stage’s outer perimeter. The company believes this design will allow it to return its upper stage safely from orbit for re-use.

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Distorted Martian craters

11:09 am

Overview map

Distorted Martian craters
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on March 15, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The white dot on the overview map above marks the location, on the west end of the 2,000-mile-long northern mid-latitude strip I label glacier country because almost every image suggests the presence of ice and glaciers.

Where this crater is located the terrain is shifting from mesas and criss-crossing canyons to the northern lowland plains. Thus, the features that suggest the presence of ice shift from glacial in nature (flowing down hollows and cliffsides or within canyons) to that of a near-surface ice sheet, which acts to distort impact craters and leave large splash aprons around them.

The straight depression cutting into the crater near the center top that is also aligned with craters to the southwest suggests that these craters are either sinkholes into a void created by a fault line, or the impacts all occurred at the same time, as the asteroid broke up while cutting through the Martian atmosphere.

Either could be true. The data is insufficient to determine which.

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Satellite data shows this year’s ozone hole one of the biggest on record

9:53 am

The uncertainty of science: New data from Europe’s Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite has determined that the ozone hole this year over the south pole was one of the biggest on record.

The hole, which is what scientists call an ‘ozone depleting area,’ reached a size of 26 million sq km on 16 September 2023. This is roughly three times the size of Brazil.

The size of the ozone hole fluctuates on a regular basis. From August to October, the ozone hole increases in size – reaching a maximum between mid-September and mid-October. When temperatures high up in the stratosphere start to rise in the southern hemisphere, the ozone depletion slows, the polar vortex weakens and finally breaks down, and by the end of December ozone levels return to normal.

Despite the claims of scientists that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were creating the hole, requiring their ban in refrigerators, air conditioning, and aerosol sprays in 1987, the arrival of the ozone hole each year is actually a normal seasonal occurance caused by the interaction of the Earth’s tilt and the impact of solar radiation on the upper atmosphere. More interaction, and oxygen molecules break-up into ozone. Less interaction, and there is less ozone.

Thus, despite the ban of these products now for almost forty years, the size of the ozone hole continues to fluctuate significantly from year to year, for reasons that are not yet understood entirely. Some scientists attribute this year’s large size to a volcanic eruption in 2022, but this is merely a theory, not yet proved.

It also must be noted that when the ban was imposed in 1987, we only had data of the ozone hole going back a decade or so. Environmentalists posited then that the hole hadn’t existed before CFCs, but they really hadn’t known that. It will likely take a century of research to really get a good idea of the hole’s normal behavior from year to year. We might find that there was no reason to ban CFCs, that the hole is a natural seasonal occurance like snow in winter and heat in summer.

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A nearby active galaxy, viewed head on by Hubble

9:39 am

Active galaxy
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and is the third of a seven-day celebration of galaxies by the Hubble science team. Previous images in the series can be found here. From the caption for this particular image:

At the center of NGC 6951 lies a supermassive black hole surrounded by a ring of stars, gas, and dust about 3,700 light-years across. This “circumnuclear ring” is between 1 and 1.5 billion years old and has been forming stars for most of that time. Scientists hypothesize that interstellar gas flows through the dense, starry bar of the galaxy to the circumnuclear ring, which supplies new material for star formation. Up to 40 percent of the mass in the ring comes from relatively new stars that are less than 100 million years old. Spiral lanes of dust, shown in dark orange, connect the center of the galaxy to its outer regions, contributing more material for future star formation.

This galaxy, located about 78 million light years away, has also seen six different supernovae in the past quarter century. Compare that with the Milky Way, which has not seen a supernova now in more than four hundred years.

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Northrop Grumman abandons its own proposed space station; partners with Voyager’s Starlab

9:25 am

Northrop Grumman today officially confirmed rumors from earlier this week: It is abandoning construction of its own proposed space station and will instead join Voyager Space’s Starlab station project, using an upgraded version of its Cygnus freighter to be the station’s cargo ferry.

As part of this new partnership, Northrop will provide cargo services to Starlab for up to five years. The upgrades will allow Cygnus to dock directly to a station port, rather than rendezvous and get berthed using a robot arm. This upgrade will also make Cygnus a more saleable product for providing cargo to other stations as well, as they come on line.

Northrop Grumman was one of four proposed private space stations projects that won NASA contracts, Axiom in 2020 and the other three in December 2021, with its award fixed at $125.6 million, of which $36.6 million has been paid to the company for meeting specific development milestones. NASA is now going to distribute the rest of that award among the remaining projects after some renegotiations.

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China to expand Tiangong space station

9:10 am

Tiangong-2 station after expansion

The new colonial movement: At the 47th International Astronautical Congress in Baku, Chinese officials yesterday revealed that they intend to expand their Tiangong space station, almost doubling it in size.

The graphic to the right illustrates this, with the proposed new modules in magenta at the top.

“We will build a 180 tons, six-module assembly in the future,” Zhang said. Tiangong currently has three modules, each with a mass of around 22 tons.

A multi-functional expansion module with six docking ports will first be launched in the coming years to allow this expansion. This will dock at the forward port of the Tianhe core module. Full size modules can then be added to Tiangong. SpaceNews understands that the timeline for such launches is around four years from now. An expanded Tiangong would be just over a third of the mass of the roughly 450-metric-ton International Space Station (ISS).

The officials also said that they plan to add additional inflatable modules to the existing part of the station, as well as attachment points allowing for external experiments exposed to the environment of space.

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SpaceX successfully launches 22 Starlink satellites

10:57 pm

SpaceX tonight successfully launched another 22 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage completed its eighth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

70 SpaceX
45 China
13 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 81 to 45, and the entire world combined 81 to 72. SpaceX by itself trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) by only 70 to 72.

SpaceX this year has now matched the record number of launches set by the U.S. in a single year that lasted from 1966 until last year. And it has done this with the year only 3/4s complete. Its goal of hundred launches this year is still well within reach.

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China launches classified remote sensing satellite

8:57 pm

Using its Long March 2D rocket, fueled by toxic hypergolic fuels, China today launched another classified remote sensing satellite from its Xichang spaceport in the southwest of China.

No word where the rocket’s lower stages crashed inside China, or whether they landed near habitable areas.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

69 SpaceX
45 China
13 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 80 to 45, and the entire world combined 80 to 72. SpaceX by itself trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) by only 69 to 72.

SpaceX however has another Starlink launch scheduled to lift off shortly. The good live stream can be found here, using no distracting announcers while also using SpaceX’s own X feed.

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Enigmatic terrain amid camera problems on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

11:47 am

Enigmatic terrain amid MRO camera problems
Click for original image.

Today’s cool image not only shows us some puzzling lava terrain on Mars, it highlights the continuing camera problems on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) that began last month and now appear to be permanent.

The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 29, 2023 by the high resolution camera on MRO. The black strip through the middle of the picture highlights MRO’s ongoing problem, as described by the science team in its monthly download of new MRO high resolution pictures:

The electronics unit for CCD RED4 started to fail in August 2023 and we have not been acquiring images [data] in this central swath of the images. The processing pipelines will be updated to fill this gap with the IR10 data for some products. The 3-color coverage is now reduced in width.

The picture shows the failure of this electronics unit. The color strip is now only about half as wide as normal, with the other half the black strip with no data. As the problem first appeared in July, and remains unresolved, it probably is permanent. Though MRO’s high resolution camera can still produce images, they will be less useful, their center strip blank.

This failure should not be a surprise. In fact, it is remarkable that so little has gone wrong with MRO considering its age. The spacecraft was launched in 2005, entered Mars orbit in 2006, and has been working non-stop now for about seventeen years. Moreover, it was built in the early 2000s, making it almost a quarter century old at this point. How much longer it can survive is an open question, but a lifespan of twenty years is usually the limit for most spacecraft. The Hubble Space Telescope however gives us hope MRO can last longer, as Hubble has now been in orbit for 33 years, and continues to operate.

Despite this data loss, the picture still shows some intriguing and puzzling geology
» Read more

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Japan’s space agency JAXA studying new reusuable rocket concepts

9:50 am

Even as it struggles to complete the first launch of its H3 hydrogen-fueled expendable rocket, Japan’s space agency JAXA has begun study work on new reusuable rocket concepts, working with its long-time rocket partner Mitsubishi.

Few details were released, but it appears they are studying a replacement for the H3, possibly using methane fuel rather than hydrogen (which is very difficult and expensive to handle), that would be ready for launch in the 2030s.

Meanwhile, the H3 remains grounded after its March 2023 launch failure, when its upper stage engine failed to ignite. No new launch date has been set. Because Japan has no more H2A rockets left, and its smaller Epsilon rocket is also grounded due to launch and test problems, JAXA right now has no capability to launch anything.

Japan’s policy towards space was changed this year to encourage the development of independent, privately owned rockets, but this transition from government-run to commercial has barely begun, and might not go anywhere based on this new study. It appears both JAXA and Mitsubishi are fighting to hold onto their turf.

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Axiom partners with clothing fashion company Prada on its spacesuit design

9:33 am

Capitalism in space: The commercial space station company Axiom is now partnering with the Italian fashion company Prada to create its lunar spacesuits, being developed under a $228.5 million NASA contract.

Prada will assist Axiom in working on the outer layer of its spacesuit, which has to protect the suit’s inner layers from the space environment, including lunar dust, without hindering its mobility. “When it comes to the design side of that piece of it makes a lot of sense because Prada has a lot of experience in the design, the look and feel,” Suffredini said. “More importantly, there’s these technological challenges to try to overcome as well.”

The article at the first link emphasizes Prada’s experience with high tech fabrics, including composites, but this deal is inspired as much by good public relations. Both companies get some good publicity by this deal.

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NASA awards small study contract to orbital tug company Starfish Space

9:24 am

Capitalism in space: NASA has awarded a small three-month study contract to the U.S. orbital tug company Starfish Space, to consider using its Otter orbital tug to rendezvous and inspect defunct orbital debris.

The award amount was not released, suggesting this is a very small contract designed simply to see if the company’s technology warrants a larger contract.

Some of those features — including Starfish’s Cetacean relative navigation software and its Cephalopod autonomous guidance software — could be tested sometime in the next few months on the company’s Otter Pup prototype spacecraft, which was sent into orbit in June but was forced into an unfortunate spin during deployment. Starfish stabilized the spin in August and is currently making sure that all of Otter Pup’s systems are in working order for future tests.

NASA’s follow-up contract, awarded through the space agency’s Small Business Innovation Research program, or SBIR, calls for Starfish to assess the feasibility of using its full-scale Otter satellite servicing vehicle to rendezvous with large pieces of space debris and inspect them.

This contract is comparable in goals to the one NASA issued to Astroscale earlier this week, though much smaller.

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Nova-C ready for launch in mid-November

9:15 am

The Moon's south pole, with Nova-C landing site indicated
Click for interactive map.

Capitalism in space: The commercial lunar lander company Intuitive Machines yesterday unveiled its now ready-for-launch Nova-C lander, set for launch on a Falcon 9 rocket during a six-day launch window beginning on November 16, 2023.

Steve Altemus, chief executive of Intuitive Machines, estimated the odds of success at “upwards of 65% to 75%,” higher than the historical average. That’s based, he said, on the experience the company has built up with key technologies on the lander, such as precision landing and its propulsion system.

It is also based on lessons learned from those failed missions. “Each one of those things that we witnessed in terms of anomalies that caused the failures of those missions, we have internalized,” he said. “Therefore, I think our odds are higher.”

If successful, Nova-C will land closer to the Moon’s south pole than any previous lander, as shown on the map to the right, and will function like India’s Pragyan rover for one lunar day, about two weeks. It will also land right next to a crater with a permanently shadowed interior, though it will have no way to travel into it. The company also two more lunar lander contracts with NASA, with the second Nova-C mission scheduled for 2024, and a third not yet scheduled.

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Sunspot update: Activity rises in September but not significantly

11:15 am

Another month has passed, and it is once again time to post my annotated graph of NOAA’s monthly update of its graph that tracks the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. The new graph is posted below, with several additional details to provide some larger context.

Last month we saw a drastic drop in August of sunspot activity, suggesting that the next maximum might possibly have been reached, though many months earlier than predicted. This month’s graph below, which shows an increase in activity in September but still well below the highs seen in June and July, strengthens that conclusion.
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FAA issues new revised regulations for private commercial manned space

9:48 am

The FAA on September 28, 2023 issued new revised safety regulations for the emerging private commercial manned space industry, updating the regulations first put forth in 2014.

The recommendations, which are the first since 2014, cover the gamut across design, manufacturing, and operations, and are based on lessons learned during the NASA Commercial Crew program, as well as recent commercial space fights, the FAA said Friday. “AST [the FAA office that handles commercial space] is issuing Version 2 of this document because significant progress has been made in the commercial human space flight industry since 2014, the year Version 1 was issued.”

These new recommendations were worked out by a committee that included many of the private companies that now fly space passengers, such as SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, and Boeing. Thus, the changes likely make some sense.

At the same time, it seems the effort to regulate has accelerated since Joe Biden became president. Under Trump there was a concerted effort to limit the impact of new regulations on this new space industry. Under Biden, it appears new regulations arrive almost weekly, and as a result there appears to be a significant slow down in development by new space companies.

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Northrop Grumman cancelling its NASA space station project?

9:22 am

According to anonymous sources, Northrop Grumman — one of four company partnerships chosen by NASA to build private commercial space stations to replace ISS — is considering cancelling its project for NASA.

At the International Astronautical Congress meeting this week in Azerbaijan, sources report that there is widespread speculation that one of these four companies, Northrop Grumman, is dropping out of the competition. Northrop’s plan had been to leverage its successful Cygnus spacecraft design to build a free-flying space station.

However, Northrop no longer plans to do so. Rather, it will join the venture backed by Voyager Space, which is partnering with Europe-based Airbus to develop a commercial space station. It’s likely that Northrop would provide cargo transportation services, with Cygnus as part of the team. Officials from Voyager and Northrop Grumman declined to comment on the change in strategy, which could be announced soon.

The original four were Axiom, Voyager Space (then called Nanoracks), Northrop Grumman, and Blue Origin. By teaming up with Voyager Space the number would drop to three, with Northrop simply providing freighter service to Voyager’s station.

Nor is this the only rumored change to these station projects. Last week sources suggested that the partnership between Blue Origin and Sierra Space was breaking up. If so, it remains unclear how that would effect its project for NASA.

These changes to the four proposed NASA stations would leave only Axiom’s space station unchanged and on its original course. Meanwhile, another company, Vast, is developing its own independent station, and SpaceX is considering developing a space station version of Starship.

All these shifts and changes are not to be unexpected, nor are they really bad news. They simply indicate the uncertain nature of any new product, even if that product is as unconventional as a private space station.

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