Tag: engineering

Astronomers discover 25 more repeating fast radio bursts, doubling the number known

10:18 am

Using a ground-based radio telescope in Canada that scans the northern sky each night, astronomers have discovered another 25 repeating fast radio bursts (FRBs), doubling the number that was previously known.

One surprising aspect of this new research is the discovery that many repeating FRBs are surprisingly inactive, producing under one burst per week during CHIME’s observing time. Pleunis believes that this could be because these FRBS haven’t yet been observed long enough for a second burst to be spotted.

The cause of FRBs still remains unsolved. The knowledge of specific repeating FRBs however will go a long way to figuring out this mystery, because other telescopes will be able to better observe later bursts, knowing when they are expected to occur.

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Engineers extend Voyager-2’s life by tapping into reserve power supply

9:54 am

Engineers have begun using a backup power supply on the Voyager-2 spacecraft — launched in 1977 and presently traveling in interstellar space — in order to extend the life of one of its five instruments one additional year.

To help keep those instruments operating despite a diminishing power supply, the aging spacecraft has begun using a small reservoir of backup power set aside as part of an onboard safety mechanism. The move will enable the mission to postpone shutting down a science instrument until 2026, rather than this year.

The solution is only temporary, as the end of the mission is inevitable as its radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) was only designed to provide power for about a half century (!). As time passes its power supply slowly declines, forcing engineers in recent years to shut down other systems to allow the science instruments to operate. That all the other systems on both Voyager-1 and Voyager-2 remained operational until the end of their RTGs tells us how well these spacecraft were built by their 1970s creators.

Assuming this works, engineers will do the same thing on Voyager-1 sometime next year. In both cases, however, power from the RTGs will likely run out entire sometime in the next 5-10 years, ending the missions.

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SpaceX successfully launched 46 upgraded Starlink satellites

9:15 am

SpaceX early this morning successfully launched 46 upgrades Starlink satellites, launching its Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The first stage successfully completed its thirteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific. The two fairings completed their sixth and seventh flights respectively.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

26 SpaceX (with a Falcon Heavy launch planned later today)
16 China
6 Russia
3 Rocket Lab
3 India

American private enterprise now leads China 29 to 16 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 29 to 28.

I have embedded the live stream of the Falcon Heavy launch below, for those that wish to view it. It is scheduled for a 7:29 pm (Eastern) launch from Cape Canaveral.
» Read more

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Frozen waves of lava on Mars

12:19 pm

Frozen waves of lava on Mars

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on January 15, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows an area where the ground suddenly transitions from a crazy quilt of criss-crossing hollows and ridgelines to a very flat and smooth plain.

The location is at 21 degrees south latitude, so this is in the dry equatorial regions. Though it has a small resemblance to the chaos terrain that is found in many places on Mars, mostly in the mid-latitudes where glaciers are found, the scale here is too small and the ridges and canyons are not as sharply drawn. While chaos terrain usually forms sharply defined large flat-topped mesas with steep cliffs, here the ridges are small and the slopes to the peaked tops are somewhat gentle.
» Read more

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Experimental NASA high altitude balloon circles Antarctica in ten days

10:06 am

Overview map
Click for original image.

An experimental NASA high altitude balloon has successfully circled the continent of Antarctica in only ten days, flying at an average elevation of 107,000 feet.

The overview map to the right, annotated for posting here, shows its flight path so far.

“The balloon is performing exactly the way it was engineered to do, maintaining its shape and flying at a stable altitude despite the heating and cooling of the day-night cycle,” said Debbie Fairbrother, NASA’s Scientific Balloon Program chief. “As we continue to test, validate, and qualify this technology for future flights we’re also performing some cutting-edge science.”

The balloon is flying the Super Pressure Balloon Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT) payload, which has already returned brilliant research images from this flight.

Weather permitting, the balloon can be seen from the ground, especially at sunrise and sunset, as it continues on its globetrotting journey. People can track the real-time location of NASA’s super pressure balloon at this website: https://www.csbf.nasa.gov/map/balloon10/flight728NT.htm

The images have so far been of astronomical objects, such as the Antennae galaxy and the Tarantula nebula. Being so high above the atmosphere, the pictures are sharper than ground-based telescopes and have a much wider field of view.

The press release did not state how long this flight will last, but it did mention a second balloon mission is planned, flying a European cosmic-ray detector.

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NASA announces winners in its annual school manned rover design competition

9:48 am

NASA today announced the winning teams in its annual competition for high schools and colleges to come up with the best new designs for manned rovers capable of operating on other worlds.

The annual engineering competition – one of NASA’s longest standing challenges – held its concluding event Friday, April 21 to Saturday, April 22, at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, near NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

More than 500 students from around the world participated during HERC’s 29th anniversary competition. Student teams represented 16 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, as well as the countries of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, India, Mexico, Peru, and Singapore. Teams were awarded points based on navigating a half-mile obstacle course, conducting mission-specific task challenges, and completing multiple safety and design reviews with NASA engineers.

The first place winners were teams from Escambia High School from Florida and the University of Alabama. NASA also listed winners in a whole range of other categories (“crash and burn”, “pit crew”, “social media”), many of which appear designed simply to make sure everyone got a participation award.

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The inexplicable tail of the asteroid Phaethon is from sodium, not dust

9:39 am

For years astronomers have puzzled over the strange behavior of the asteroid Phaethon, which though rocky would still produce a tail like a comet whenever its orbit took it close to the Sun.

New research by astronomers using several space telescopes designed to study the Sun has determined that this tail is made of sodium, not dust as previously believed, which also suggests that many of the other “comets” these solar telescopes have detected close to the Sun might instead be asteroids like Phaeton.

Hoping to find out what the tail is really made of, Zhang looked for it again during Phaethon’s latest perihelion in 2022. He used the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft — a joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) – which has color filters that can detect sodium and dust. Zhang’s team also searched archival images from STEREO and SOHO, finding the tail during 18 of Phaethon’s close solar approaches between 1997 and 2022.

In SOHO’s observations, the asteroid’s tail appeared bright in the filter that detects sodium, but it did not appear in the filter that detects dust. In addition, the shape of the tail and the way it brightened as Phaethon passed the Sun matched exactly what scientists would expect if it were made of sodium, but not if it were made of dust.

Knowing these new facts, it might make it possible to map the asteroids that orbit very close to the Sun but are hard to detect optically using standard telescopes because of the Sun’s brightness. Instead, astronomers might be able to map them using these solar telescopes.

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NASA awards 12 companies small development contracts with total value $14.5 million

9:28 am

NASA today announced it has awarded twelve different space companies small development contracts, total value $14.5 million, for developing new technologies ranging from new welding techniques to new thermal protection systems to better lunar rover tires.

The companies are also a wide mix, from large well-established giants like Lockheed Martin and Boeing to new startups like Blue Origin and Sierra Space.

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SpaceX leases second launchpad at Vandenberg

9:22 am

SpaceX announced yesterday that it has leased a second launchpad at Vandenberg, taking over the pad that ULA previously leased for use by its Delta family of rockets, now being phased out.

The site will be used to launch “Falcon rockets”, which suggests both the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy. All told, SpaceX now has six launchsites, three at Cape Canaveral, two at Vandenberg, and one at Boca Chica, with the Starship/Superheavy site at Kennedy presently under construction.

The launchpad at Vandenberg, dubbed SLC-6 (pronounced “slick-6”), was originally built to launch the space shuttle, something that never happened. When I got a tour of Vandenberg in 2015 I took some good pictures of it.

It is very likely SpaceX will make major changes, as it did to the shuttle launchsite it took over at Kennedy.

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Rocket engine company Ursa Major raises $100 million in private investment capital

9:06 am

The American rocket engine company Ursa Major recently raised an additional $100 million in private investment capital, on top of the $85 million it raised last year.

All told, the company has raised $234 million. Its Hadley engine presently has contracts with rocket startups Astra and Phantom, the hypersonic missile testing company Stratolaunch, and the Air Force. It is also developing two larger engines, the Ripley and the Arroway, the latter designed to replace Russian engines previously used by American companies.

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One instrument on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter ends its mission

9:00 am

Because Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s (MRO) CRISM instrument needed to be cooled to low temperatures to use infrared wavelengths for detecting underground minerals and ice on Mars, and the cryocoolers have run out of coolant, the science team has shut the instrument down.

In order to study infrared light, which is radiated by warm objects and is invisible to the human eye, CRISM relied on cryocoolers to isolate one of its spectrometers from the warmth of the spacecraft. Three cryocoolers were used in succession, and the last completed its lifecycle in 2017.

All the remaining instruments on MRO, including its two cameras, continue to operate nominally.

In its final task, CRISM produced a global map showing water related minerals on Mars, released last year, and a global map showing iron deposits, to be released later this year.

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The breakup of a Martian glacier

11:48 am

The breakup of a Martian glacier
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on January 29, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label a “contact” in the glacier country in the northern mid-latitudes of Mars.

The contact is clearly the region of breakup in the middle of the picture. To the right the surface is whole and very smooth. As we move to the left that surface begins to show cracks and holes until those holes and cracks eliminate that surface entirely, revealing a lower layer that is soft-looking and stippled.

In other words, this is the edge of a glacier, and is the place in which it is breaking up. Unlike Earth glaciers however this breakup process is entirely different.
» Read more

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Hakuto-R1 lands on Moon but ceases communications at touchdown

10:16 am

Lunar map showing Hakuto-R1's landing spot
Hakuto-R1’s planned landing site is in Atlas Crater.

According to the Hakuto-R1 engineering team, the lander provided full data and maintained communications right up until touchdown, but at that point they lost contact with the spacecraft.

The loss of data at landing suggests something went wrong at touchdown. That they were able to maintain contact until then, and the data appeared correct, suggests that the spacecraft descended properly into Atlas Crater, but then touched down on some rough ground that either caused it to topple, or damaged it on contact.

This remains speculation however. We will have to wait for a full update from Ispace.

This was a engineering mission to test the company’s spacecraft design and its ability to operate a lunar mission. The failure at landing means it achieved about 8 to 9 of its 10 milestones. How this final failure will effect its next mission as well as its contract with NASA remains unclear.

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Review of InSight data allows scientists to further refine their model of Mars’ interior

10:04 am

Using archive data from the now defunct InSight Mars lander, especially two seismic detections that came from the planet’s far side, scientists now believe that Mars’ central core is significantly different than Earth’s, being entirely liquid and made up of much lighter materials than expected.

To determine these differences, the team tracked the progression of two distant seismic events on Mars, one caused by a marsquake and the other by a large impact, and detected waves that traveled through the planet’s core. By comparing the time it took those waves to travel through Mars compared to waves that stayed in the mantle, and combining this information with other seismic and geophysical measurements, the team estimated the density and compressibility of the material the waves traveled through. The researchers’ results indicated that Mars most likely has a completely liquid core, unlike Earth’s combination of a liquid outer core and solid inner core.

Additionally, the team inferred details about the core’s chemical composition, such as the surprisingly large amount of light elements (elements with low atomic numbers)—namely sulfur and oxygen—present in Mars’ innermost layer. The team’s findings suggested that a fifth of the core’s weight is made up of those elements. This high percentage differs sharply from the comparatively lesser weight proportion of light elements in Earth’s core, indicating that Mars’ core is far less dense and more compressible than Earth’s core, a difference that points to different conditions of formation for the two planets.

These differences, if confirmed, would certainly affect the way Mars’ surface evolved over the eons, and might help explain its giant volcanoes as well as the planet’s lack of a magnetic field.

The results however remain uncertain, because InSight provided only one seismometer on Mars. To better triangulate the data will require more than one, in the future.

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Astra confirms it is buying Ursa Major rocket engines for its Rocket-4 upper stage

9:55 am

Astra yesterday confirmed that it will be buying Ursa Major’s Hadley rocket engine for the upper stage of its Rocket-4, now tentatively scheduled for a first test launch later this year.

Astra has been tight-lipped about the new upper stage engine that would power its new Rocket 4, with CEO Chris Kemp only telling investors last year that the rocket’s substantially increased payload capacity was thanks in part to engine upgrades. Outsourcing the engine helps clarify how Astra was able to so quickly pivot its plans for Rocket 4, including doubling the launch vehicle’s payload capacity from 300 kilograms to 600 kilograms.

Ursa Major has already sold engines to several rocket companies and the government, including Phantom, Vector, Stratolaunch, and the Air Force. It is also building two different larger engines, Ripley and Arroway, with the latter aimed at replacing the engines Russia provided to ULA and Northrop Grumman.

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China once again outlines its lunar base plans; Russia out? Project delayed?

9:38 am

China/Russian Lunar base roadmap
The original Chinese-Russian lunar base plan, from June 2021.

In outlining today China’s long term plans for establishing a manned lunar base near the south pole of the Moon, the project’s chief designer, Wu Weiren, revealed several changes in the program, almost all of which were indicated by what he did not say than what he did.

The graph to the right was released when this program was first announced in June 2021. At that time the plan was announced as a partnership of China and Russia, and was aiming to begin intermittent manned operations on the Moon in 2036.

According to Wu’s presentation today however, China apparently no longer considers Russia to be a full equal partner. It appears instead that Russia was mentioned as part of Wu’s effort to encourage many other countries to join the project. As reported by China’s state-run press:

During Tuesday’s event, Wu also highlighted the cooperation initiative for countries, organizations, and scientists worldwide to join the construction of the research station. In 2021, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) released a partnership guideline for the International Lunar Research Station.

That the state-run press made no mention of Russia in this description indicates strongly China’s devaluation of Russia’s contribution. This devaluation is not a surprise. As I noted in 2021,

[B]ased on Russia’s recent track record in the past two decades for promised space projects, we have no guarantee they will fly as scheduled, or even fly at all.

Since then Russia invaded the Ukraine and has suffered economically because of it. Its own first contribution to this partnership, Luna-25, has been delayed repeatedly, with its present launch now scheduled for July. It was always obvious that Russia — in its present state — could not match China, nor was it likely it would meet its promised targets.

Wu’s presentation also indicated that the third phase, when intermittent manned operations will begin, has been delayed from 2036 to 2040.

Overall, however, the Chinese plan remains stable and rational, and is likely to be carried out with reasonable success, based on how the country proposed and then achieved construction of its space station. The station was built essentially as described by the plan, with only a delay of a few years.

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Watching live the landing of Hakuto-R1 on the Moon

8:54 am

I have embedded below the live stream of Hakuto-R1’s landing on the Moon, scheduled for today. The original landing time was targeting “approximately” 8:40 (Pacific), but it is now past that. That time might actually have indicated the start of the live stream. The lander is presently out of contact, on the far side of the Moon.

The landing is targeting the floor of Atlas Crater, located in the northeast quadrant of the visible hemisphere of the Moon.

» Read more

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Ingenuity snaps picture of Perseverance during its 51st flight on Mars

11:04 am

Ingenuity's view on 51st flight, April 22, 2023
Click for original image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

On April 22, 2023 the Mars helicopter Ingenuity completed its fifty-first flight on Mars, flying 617 feet west for about 136 seconds at an altitude of about 39 feet. As has been routine for the past dozen or so flights, all these numbers were slightly higher than the flight plan, probably because the helicopter took extra time to find a good landing spot.

The panorama above, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken by Ingenuity about halfway through the flight. Unlike the black and white images that the helicopter takes looking straight down, this color image looks at an oblique angle of 22 degrees below the horizon. The colors are not corrected. The view looks east, looking backwards into Belva Crater. You can see Perseverance on the left, with its tracks cutting across the frame. Belva is filled with ripple dunes.

The blue dot on the overview map to the right marks Perseverance’s present position. The green dot marks Ingenuity’s take-off point, with the green line indicating the approximate flight path.

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The climb into Gediz Vallis

10:21 am

Panorama on Sol 3808, April 24, 2023
Click for original image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

After three months traversing the geological layer that the scientists have dubbed the Marker Band, Curiosity has now climbed higher, passing what I dubbed the Hill of Pillows on the west so that it is now in a position to return to its planned route up Mount Sharp, as indicated by the red dotted line in the overview map to the right and the panorama above.

The panorama, cropped, reduced, and annotated to post here, was created on April 24, 2023 using 31 images from the rover’s right navigation camera. The yellow lines on the overview map indicate approximately the area covered, with the blue dot marking Curiosity’s present position.

For scale, the top of Kukenan is about 5,200 feet above Curiosity, while the top of Chenapua is only about 115 feet higher. The white flanks are about 3,200 feet above Kukenan, and are about 4 to 5 miles away.

Looking back, the rim of Gale Crater on the far left of the panorama is about 20 miles away.

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Al-Amal snaps first close-up images of Martian moon Deimos

9:10 am

Deimos with Mars in the background
Click for full movie.

During its first close fly-by of the Martian moon Deimos on March 10, 2023, the United Arab Emirates Mars orbiter Al-Amal (“Hope” in English) obtained the first close-up images of the moon.

The picture to the right show Deimos with Mars in the background. The full set of images, compiled into a movie, can be seen by clicking on the image.

The results were outlined by science lead Hessa Al Matroushi at a conference today.

During the 10 March fly-by, the mission team used all three onboard instruments to take readings spanning from the infrared to the extreme ultraviolet. The relatively flat spectrum the scientists saw is suggestive of the type of material seen on Mars’s surface, rather than the carbon-rich rock often found in asteroids, suggesting that Deimos was formed from the same material the planet. “If there were carbon or organics, we would see spikes in specific wavelengths,” she says.

These results probably put an end to the theory that Mars’ moons came from the asteroid belt. Instead, they either formed when the planet did, or were thrown free and settled into orbit after a very large impact, such as the ones that created either the Hellas or Argyre basins, both of which happened several billion years ago and thus provide ample time for the space environment to smooth the moon’s surface and add some craters.

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Update on lunar orbiter CAPSTONE

1:58 pm

Link here. The update comes from Advanced Space, the commercial company tasked by NASA with operating the orbiter, whose main goal its to test operations in the type of orbit around the Moon that NASA plans to put its Lunar Gateway space station, dubbed a Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO).

Thus far, since performing the NRHO insertion maneuver on November 13th, 2022, the spacecraft has spent 154 days operating in the NRHO completing 23 NRHO revolutions. During this time, the mission team has maintained knowledge of the spacecraft state well within the mission requirements using ground-based navigation tools and tracking measurements collected by the Deep Space Network including DSS-17 which is an affiliated site at Morehead State University in Kentucky. This navigation information has continued to support the design and execution of required maneuvers to maintain the orbit.

Minimum maneuver size constraints have been sequentially reduced as the combined mission operations teams at Advanced Space, Terran Orbital, and Stellar Exploration continue to mitigate issues with a thruster valve. Since entering the NRHO the spacecraft has executed six Orbit Maintenance Maneuvers (OMM) using approximately 1.8 m/s of fuel. Although the mission plan was originally to do a maneuver every NRHO (approximately once a week), the higher burn threshold has reduced the number of maneuvers performed while also demonstrating the robustness of the stationkeeping strategy utilized by the mission which is the same strategy planned for the Lunar Gateway.

CAPSTONE’s primary mission ends in May, but it will continue on an extended mission for twelve more months.

Though CAPSTONE has provided NASA important orbital data for maintaining Lunar Gateway in lunar orbit, the orbiter’s biggest achievement is its commercial nature. NASA hired Terran Orbital to build it, Rocket Lab to launch it, and Advanced Space to operate it. There was relatively little government participation. Moreover, this privately-run project has demonstrated that an inexpensive smallsat can quickly accomplish the same things that once only big expensive satellites attempted.

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India’s PSLV rocket successfully launches two Singapore satellites

1:46 pm

India’s PSLV rocket today successfully put two Singapore satellites into orbit, one a radar satellite and the other a large cubesat testing smallsat communication technologies.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

25 SpaceX
16 China
6 Russia
3 Rocket Lab
3 India

American private enterprise still leads China 28 to 16 in the national rankings, and is tied at 28 with the entire world combined.

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The view from the racecar of the Le Mans race course, as seen in 1968

6:01 pm

An evening pause: From the youtube page:

This amazing piece of ground breaking onboard footage allows us to ride onboard one of the Gulf sponsored JWA Ford GT40s for a lap of the Le Mans circuit in 1968. This early onboard coverage was such a big deal, Stirling Moss does the narration. Its cool to see the Le Mans circuit as it was, without chicanes and with primitive safety features.

Hat tip Tom Biggar.

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Starship/Superheavy did not explode!

1:41 pm

Starship/Superheavy at T+4:02, just after the self-destruct command was issued
Starship/Superheavy at T+4:02, just after the self-destruct command
was issued

In the past twenty-four hours we have another wonderful demonstration of the utter bankruptcy of the American press in the manner in which it has decided to describe yesterday’s first test launch of Starship/Superheavy. Here are just a few headline examples:

Every single one of those headlines implies that the explosion was the launch’s failure. If you read the linked articles you find that many repeat that implication in their reports.

None are correct. » Read more

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India’s Modi government releases its new space policy

10:10 am

After some hints in the past month that the not-yet-released new space policy of the Modi government of India would favor commercial space over the government agencies that have run India’s space program from inception, the newly released space policy [pdf] confirms those hints.

Essentially, the policy transfers power from India’s space agency ISRO — which has always controlled all Indian launches and space development — to other government agencies, which in turn are tasked not to develop new space projects but to “ensure a level playing field for the utilization of all facilities created using public expenditure, by prioritizing their use among Government entities and [private companies].”

The policy is unlike any government document I have ever read from India. It is short, direct, clearly written, and to the point. It clearly takes control of space from ISRO and gives supervisory control to two new agencies, the Indian National Space Promotion & Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACEe) and NewSpace India Limited (NSIL), both of which are tasked to encourage the development of an independent private commercial space industry.

The policy is of course not perfect, as the power of the government bureaucracy in India is deep and wide. ISRO still has the task of developing new space technologies, such as India’s human spaceflight program. Whether it will be required to slowly become a customer of commercial resources rather then being the builder of its own we shall have to wait and see. NSIL in turn has been given ISRO’s past commercial responsibilities — such as launching rockets for profit — so that that the government bureaucracy can still compete with the private sector for market share.

All in all, however, it appears that the Modi government wishes to mimic the changes that have occurred in the U.S., transitioning from a government-run space program to a privately owned space industry from which the government buys what it needs (as outlined in my 2017 policy paper Capitalism in Space).

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Scientists predict solar maximum to arrive one year early

9:39 am

The scientists whose prediction of a more active upcoming solar maximum that has so far turned out more accurate than the consensus prediction have now updated their prediction, lowering it somewhat but also predicting the maximum will occur one year early, in 2024 instead of 2025.

The team’s finalized forecast for the current cycle expects it to peak in late 2024, one year earlier than NASA and NOAA had predicted. The cycle, the team thinks, will reach about 185 monthly sunspots during its maximum and thus be somewhat milder than what the team originally forecasted. This peak intensity will place this cycle at about the average compared to the historical record.

In other words, now that we are about halfway to maximum, they have concluded that while NOAA’s prediction was too low, their prediction was too high. They have now adjusted their expectations to be closer to what they now think will happen.

A short solar cycle however has historically corresponded to much higher sunspot activity. If this new prediction is correct (a short cycle with a mild maximum), it will mean that the Sun is still behaving in ways that the solar science community does not understand, or can predict.

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A spray of small impacts melting Martian ice?

11:01 am

A spray of small impacts melting Martian ice?

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on March 2, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and was taken not as part of any specific research request but by the MRO science team to fill a gap in its schedule while also maintaining the camera’s temperature. Sometimes these somewhat random times show nothing of interest. Sometimes they are fascinating, as in this case.

The photo shows what appear to be a spray of small impacts on an easily melted surface. Imagine spraying hot molten lava on a sheet of ice. Instead of creating a crater with an upraised rim, on impact each droplet would quickly melt a hole.

Did these small impacts all occur at the same time? My guess is yes, based on the overview map below.
» Read more

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ULA delays first launch of Vulcan to June at the earliest

8:11 am

Peregrine landing site

An official from Astrobotics confirmed this week that an explosion during testing of the Centaur upper stage of its new Vulcan rocket will delay that rocket’s first launch for at least one to two months, from May to June or July.

On March 29, Tory Bruno, the CEO of Colorado-based spacecraft makers United Launch Alliance LLC, announced on his personal Twitter account that ULA’s Vulcan Centaur V rocket had experienced “an anomaly,” which preceded a tweet he shared on April 13 that showed a video of an explosion that occurred outside of a testing rig that housed the ULA rocket. He alluded to a hydrogen-related leak as being a possible culprit and in response the next day to other replies, Bruno said in a tweet that “June/July” will be the next earliest estimated launch timeline.

That timeline is the same one that John Thornton, CEO of North Side-based Astrobotic, shared during a speech as part of a kickoff event for the Aviation and Robotics Summit in the Strip District on Tuesday.

The main payload on that Vulcan inaugural launch is Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander, carrying several NASA science instruments to the Gruithusien Domes region on the Moon, as indicated by the white dot on the picture above.

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Rocket Lab to reuse previously flown engine on upcoming launch

7:59 am

Rocket Lab engineers, having tested a previously flown Rutherford engine numerous times after recovering it from a launch in May 2022, have now approved that engine for reflight, and are inserting into their Electron rocket assembly line for launch sometime in the third quarter of this year.

The company also revealed that it has now completely abandoned the use of a helicopter in first stage recovery, and will instead pick up all first stages after they have splashed down in the ocean.

Extensive analysis of returned stages shows that Electron withstands an ocean splashdown and engineers expect future complete stages to pass qualification and acceptance testing for re-flight with minimal refurbishment. As a result, Rocket Lab is moving forward with marine operations as the primary method of recovering Electron for re-flight. This is expected to take the number of Electron missions suitable for recovery from around 50% to between 60-70% of missions due to fewer weather constraints faced by marine recovery vs mid-air capture, while also reducing costs associated with helicopter operations.

Rocket Lab will assess the opportunities for flying a complete pre-flown first stage booster following the launch of the pre-flown Rutherford engine in the third quarter this year.

Rocket Lab is presently the only operational American company besides SpaceX that is aggressively pursuing reuse of its rocket. ULA says it wishes to recover and reuse the engines of its still-unflown Vulcan rocket, but development of this concept has been very slow. Many other new companies claim their rockets will be reusable, but none has yet even launched.

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North Korea claims it is about to launch a spy satellite

7:49 am

According to statements by North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un published in its state-run press, that country is only weeks away from launching a spy satellite into orbit.

[S]ome observers said the North may attempt to launch the satellite ahead of President Yoon Suk Yeol’s upcoming state visit to the U.S. later this month. “There is a high possibility that North Korea may attempt a launch around April 23-24, on the basis that weather conditions are favorable, to show off that it has the upper hand on the Korean Peninsula issue by putting it on the table during the South Korea-U.S. summit,” Yang Mu-jin, president of the University of North Korean Studies, said.

Some observers, however, projected that it will take a few more months for the North to put the satellite into orbit given the time needed for technical preparations.

North Korea has completed two previous orbital launches, using its solid-fueled rocket missile technology. It is presently unclear if this new launch will use the same, or fly something new.

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