Tag: science

NASA outlines its expected needs as a space station customer

9:10 am

NASA has now published an updated detailed specification of what it will want to do on the four private space stations being built to replace ISS.

NASA published two white papers Feb. 13 as part of a request for information (RFI) for its Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations effort to support development of commercial stations. The documents provide new details about how NASA expects to work with companies operating those stations and the agency’s needs to conduct research there.

One white paper lists NASA’s anticipated resource needs for those stations, including crew time, power and volume, broken out for each of the major agency programs anticipated to use commercial stations. Companies had been seeking more details about NASA requirements to assist in the planning of their stations.

,,,The second white paper outlines the concept of operations NASA envisions for its use of commercial space stations. The 40-page document described in detail what it expects from such stations in terms of capabilities, resources and operations, as well as what oversight the agency anticipates having.

At the moment NASA has contracts with four different space station companies or partnerships, Axiom, Blue Origin, Nanoracks and Northrop Grumman, each of which is building its own station. Because NASA will initially be the biggest customer for these stations its requirements will help shape those stations significantly, which is why this information is of critical importance for the private companies.

At the same time, NASA is not dictating specific designs. The agency remains the customer, buying time on private facilities that will be owned privately and be free to sell their product to others. Thus, the designs of these stations might not match exactly what NASA desires, since even now there are other customers interested in buying space station time and space.

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“What the heck?!” swirls on Mars

1:33 pm


Click for original image.

Time for another “What the heck?!” image on Mars. The picture to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on January 6, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It is what the science team calls a “terrain sample,” which means it wasn’t taken as part of any specific scientific investigation and requested by a scientist. Instead, it was taken to fill a gap in MRO’s schedule. In order to maintain the camera’s proper temperature it is necessary for it to take regular pictures, and sometimes if there is a gap between requested images the science team picks something almost at random to fill the gap.

Sometimes the picture results in something relatively uninteresting. More often they try to pick something intriguing but not yet of interest to any particular researcher. With today’s cool image they certainly found something intriguing, so much so that I haven’t the faintest idea what is going on here.

Clearly, the tan swirls lie on the higher topology, and could be dust covered. The darker hollows in between could be darker because they are so, or because they are in shadow.
» Read more

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A glacial river on Mars

2:01 pm

A glacial river on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on November 1, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a wonderful example of a glacier-filled canyon on Mars, the ice apparently flowing both along and around mesas as it carves its way downhill.

I think the downhill grade here is to the north, but this could be wrong for the two side canyons on the main canyon’s north side.

Not only is the material in the canyon likely ice, covered with a protective layer of trapped dust and ash that makes the glacier surface look so smooth, the mesa tops are likely impregnated with ice as well. The mesas however have little dust, so the plateaus have a mottled stippled look likely caused by sublimation of that underground ice.

The location of these canyons explains the presence of ice.
» Read more

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Winter finally ends for Ingenuity

9:47 am

According to a detailed update today by Travis Brown, Chief Engineer of the Mars helicopter Ingenuity, the helicopter has now finally exited its difficult winter conditions that began in May 2022 and only ended at the end of January 2023.

One month to the day after the Dec. 24 flight attempt, Ingenuity did something it hadn’t done during the previous 260 sols – it slept “warmly” through the entire night. Data leading up to this event had suggested that such a survival was possible, but 8 long months of winter had tempered the team’s optimism. When Ingenuity’s team reviewed the downlinked data, they found that not only had it started living through the night, but had actually begun to bank power in its batteries. We’ve now seen end-of-sol states of charge in our batteries of more than 90% — an unbelievable number just days earlier. All the above means our sleepy friend has finally awoken from its long winter malaise, just in time to race up the Jezero Crater Delta and provide valuable advanced imaging for Perseverance.

Brown describes in detail their struggle for the past eight months to keep Ingenuity alive. That information is going to be crucial in designing future Mars helicopters, including the ones that will return to Jezero Crater sometime in the next decade to grab the core samples Perseverance has deposited for pick up and return to Earth.

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Intuitive Machines completes merger with SPAC as it goes public

9:02 am

Intuitive Machines, one of a handful of American companies building lunar landers for NASA and others, has completed its merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), thus becoming a publicly traded stock but raising less money than expected in the process.

Intuitive Machines said Feb. 13 it had closed its merger with Inflection Point Acquisition Corp., a SPAC that trades on the Nasdaq. The merged company, retaining the Intuitive Machines name, will trade on the Nasdaq starting Feb. 14 under the ticker symbol LUNR.

The companies announced the merger in September 2022, long after the mania surrounding SPACs has cooled both in the space industry and the overall market. Inflection Point had $301 million of cash in trust, and the companies said they had arranged an additional $55 million in investment from the SPAC’s sponsors and a founder of Intuitive Machines, along with $50 million CF Principal Investments LLC, an affiliate of Cantor Fitzgerald & Company. In an investor presentation linked to the merger announcement, the companies anticipated having more than $330 million in cash after transaction expenses.

However, in the Feb. 13 announcement that the merger had closed, the companies announced only $55 million of “committed capital from an affiliate of its sponsor and company founders.”

It appears that many investors in Inflection Point itself (30% of whom had voted against this merger) had pulled their money from the fund, depleting the $301 million that was originally promised. In addition, yesterday’s announcement made no mention of the $50 million that CF had also committed.

Essentially, the company’s future hinges on the success of its first lunar mission, presently scheduled for June. Should it succeed, the company should be able to replace from other investors the funds that it failed to raise in this merger. Should it fail, it is very possible it will go belly up, as it is likely it will find it difficult if not impossible to find further investment capital.

There is of course the possibility that NASA will keep the company afloat with additional funding, but if so it might be a case of throwing good money after bad, something our government is very good at doing.

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Cracked ash-filled Martian terrain

1:31 pm

Cracked ash-filled fissures on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on September 26, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The science team labeled this “Possible Pit,” but other than a small dark stain on the rim of a crater north of the section cropped to the right, I could find nothing that even closely resembled a pit. More likely the scientists were referring to the large circular depression in the top center of this picture. It does not at first glance look like a crater, as it has no obvious rim. In fact, almost none of the circular depressions in this image look like craters, as almost none have uplifted rims.

However, it is not clear what caused these dust-filled fractures as well as the image’s many circular depressions. The location, as indicated by the overview map below, does not really help.
» Read more

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Trio of colliding galaxies

9:32 am

Trio of colliding galaxies
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture above, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released today. From the caption:

Three galaxies stand together just right of centre. They are close enough that they appear to be merging into one. Their shapes are distorted, with strands of gas and dust running between them. Each is emitting a lot of light. Further to the left is an unconnected, dimmer spiral galaxy. The background is dark, with a few smaller, dim and faint galaxies and a couple of stars.

Astronomers estimate the colliding galaxies are about 50,000 light years from each other, which for galaxies is quite close. Eventually gravity will cause all three to merge into a single very large galaxy, its shape distorted by the merger. What that shape will be is one of the things astronomers are trying to figure out. At present their theories for galaxy evolution states that as galaxies grow by absorbing smaller nearby neighbors, they evolve from spirals to ellipticals, giant blobs lacking a distinct obvious structure.

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Terraced serrated layered mesas on Mars

2:34 pm

Terraced mesas on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on November 19, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a collection of terraced mesas covered with dust of a variety of colors.

The bluish colors suggest exposed bedrock, while the different shades of tan suggest areas covered by dust and volcanic ash. That the tan areas are likely dust is strengthened in that it is found between and on these rough mesas, where dunes are also seen. The dust gets blown in but gets trapped there.

The tan colors however could also indicate different types of bedrock, especially because different terraces seem to be of different shades. We will need more data to determine which, or whether this is a combination of all these geological processes.
» Read more

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Curiosity takes high resolution panorama of the canyon it will soon enter

9:40 am

Curiosity looks into Gediz Valles
Click for original image.

Using its high resolution camera, the Curiosity science team has now released a November 2022 panorama looking south into Gediz Vallis, the Martian slot canyon that the rover will be entering in the near future.

The panorama above, cropped and reduced to post here, shows that canyon. The red dotted line indicates Curiosity’s approximate path since the panorama was taken, circling around behind Chenapua.

The mosaic is made up of 18 individual images that were stitched together after being sent to Earth. The color has been adjusted to match lighting conditions as the human eye would see them on Earth.

Not only should you definitely look at the original, at full resolution, but also compare it with the black and white mosaic I posted in December 2022, taken by the rover’s navigation camera looking in the same direction though from a slightly different position. The color definitely underlines the spectacular nature of the landscape.

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NASA awards launch contract to Blue Origin’s unlaunched New Glenn rocket

9:09 am

NASA yesterday awarded Blue Origin the launch contract for its smallsat ESCAPADE Mars orbiter mission, set to launch in late 2024.

ESCAPADE will launch on Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket from Space Launch Complex-36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Launch is targeted for late 2024. Blue Origin is one of 13 companies NASA selected for VADR contracts in 2022. NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, manages the VADR contracts. As part of VADR, the fixed-price indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts have a five-year ordering period with a maximum total value of $300 million across all contracts.

NASA’s VADR program is designed to give contracts to higher risk contractors to help those launch companies develop their rockets. Since New Glenn is years behind schedule and as-yet unlaunched, this contract is an attempt to help change that. Note however that it is fixed price, and does not set a deadline for Blue Origin to launch.

ESCAPADE will actually be two orbiters designed to study the faint artifacts of Mars’ magnetosphere left over from its past.

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Curiosity scientists find evidence of lake water higher on Mount Sharp than expected

10:14 am

Panorama as of January 17, 2023
Curiosity’s view of the marker band on January 17, 2023, the red dotted line the planned future route. Click for full image.

The science team for the Mars rover Curiosity today revealed that the marker band layer where the rover present sits shows some of the best evidence of liquid water and waves yet seen on Mount Sharp, and it has been found much higher on the mountain than expected.

Having climbed nearly a half-mile above the mountain’s base, Curiosity has found these rippled rock textures preserved in what’s nicknamed the “Marker Band” – a thin layer of dark rock that stands out from the rest of Mount Sharp. This rock layer is so hard that Curiosity hasn’t been able to drill a sample from it despite several attempts. It’s not the first time Mars has been unwilling to share a sample: Lower down the mountain, on “Vera Rubin Ridge,” Curiosity had to try three times before finding a spot soft enough to drill.

Scientists will be looking for softer rock in the week ahead.

As Curiosity climbs the mountain it transitions onto new younger layers of rock. Based on Curiosity’s earlier data lower down the mountain, scientists had assumed it had gone from layers that had been under a past lake to layers that were at the lake’s shoreline to layers where only running water once flowed. They had thought the marker layer and other higher layers would only show evidence of running water. Instead, in the marker layer they have once again found evidence of an ancient lake.

This quote by Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist, sums things up nicely: “Mars’ ancient climate had a wonderful complexity to it, much like Earth’s.”

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UAE engineers shift Al-Amal’s orbit to do fly-bys of Mars moon Deimos

9:53 am

Engineers from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) yesterday revealed that they are in the process of changing the orbit of their Al-Amal Mars orbiter so that it will be able to do several close fly-bys of the Martian moon Deimos.

Two of the three required manoeuvres have already been made, allowing it to reach a new orbit between 20,000km and 43,000km with a 25-degree incline towards the planet. “Previously, we didn’t have any reason to move the orbit,” Ms Al Matroushi said. “But now we’re exploring a new adventure and science mission.”

Engineers are using the probe’s three main science instruments to capture images and data of the moon. These include an exploration imager ― a high-resolution camera ― to photograph the moon, and the infrared and ultraviolet spectrometers to measure its temperature and observe its thermophysical properties, including its regolith, or dust.

The first Deimos fly-by took place in late January, and as the probe moves to its closest approach to the moon, it will take high-resolution images.

Eventually Al-Amal will dip as close as 60 miles of Deimos.

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Astronomers find ring around distant dwarf planet Quaoar

9:22 am

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers have confirmed the existence of an uneven ring encircling the dwarf planet Quaoar, orbiting far enough from the planet that, according to present theories, the ring should have quickly coalesced into a small Moon.

At 1,110 km (690 miles) in diameter Quaoar is one of the largest objects known in the outer solar system. Its single moon, named Weywot, spans about 160 km and was discovered in Hubble images in 2007. But the first signs of material around Quaoar didn’t come until 2018; even then, evidence was insufficient to call it a ring, says Morgado. He began studying Quaoar in 2020 with the European Space Agency’s CHEOPS space telescope, originally designed to find and characterize exoplanets. Rather than looking for exoplanet transits, Morgado used CHEOPS to observe stellar occultations, when Quaoar passed in front of distant stars and momentarily blocked their light.

Now Morgado has extended his work, working with others to observe Quaoar’s stellar occultations using other telescopes. The team first predicted a few occultations and recorded them. Then, after those observations hinted at a ring, the researchers went back through previous occultation records. “We saw the ring in nine different regions, from observations taken between 2018 and 2021,” Morgado explains.

In Nature, the team reports the presence of a ring 4,100 kilometers from the center of Quaoar, far beyond its classical Roche limit of 1,780 km. Morgado says the ring is dense and irregular. “It has a very thin region about 5 km wide and also a large region about 300 km wide, depending on which part of the ring was probed,” he notes. If the material could all be collected into a single moon, it would be about 10 km in diameter, less than a tenth of Weywot’s size.

According to astronomers, they would expect such a ring at that distance to coalesce in just a matter of decades. Either their theories of the Roche limit are incorrect, or the creation of this ring is very very recent, caused by the collusion of two objects that were orbiting Quaoar.

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Update on CAPSTONE in lunar orbit

8:58 pm

Link here. The key takeaway is that this commercial privately built and operated lunar smallsat is doing what it was designed to do, even as its operators continue to overcome periodic technical problems.

For example, beginning January 26th the spacecraft stopped receiving commands from ground controllers. The problem solved itself when on February 6th “an automatic command-loss timer rebooted” the spacecraft. Meanwhile,

CAPSTONE has completed more than 12 orbits in its near-rectilinear halo orbit – the same orbit [that will be used by Lunar] Gateway – surpassing one of the mission’s objectives to achieve at least six orbits. The mission team has performed two orbit maintenance maneuvers in this time. These maneuvers were originally scheduled to happen once per orbit, but the mission team was able to reduce the frequency while maintaining the correct orbit. This reduces risk and complexity for the mission and informs plans for future spacecraft flying in this orbit, like Gateway.

Essentially, mission controllers are figuring out the best and most efficient methods for eventually maintaining Lunar Gateway’s orbit around the Moon, when it gets there.

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Engineers struggle to salvage Lunar Flashlight cubesat

8:52 pm

Because of thruster failures shortly after its December 11, 2022, NASA’s technology test lunar orbiter cubesat Lunar Flashlight has been unable to reach its planned orbit around the Moon.

Instead, first engineers have attempted an improvisation with the one thruster that had not initially failed, and when that did not work are now hoping to instead use the Earth’s gravity to shift its present path so that it will periodically fly over the Moon’s south pole, when it could possible still use its lasers reflectometer to gather data in the permanently shadowed craters there.

[Other than the thrusters, t]he rest of the CubeSat’s onboard systems are fully functional, and the mission recently successfully tested its four-laser reflectometer. This mini-instrument is the first of its kind and is designed and calibrated to seek out surface ice inside the permanently shadowed craters at the Moon’s South Pole.

As a engineering test satellite, everything that has happened has been to the good, as it has allowed these engineers to push this cutting edge cubesat technology to the limit.

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Dormant volcanic vent on Mars

12:36 pm

Dormant volcanic vent on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on November 19, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the science team labels “Intersecting Fissures.”

These fissures stand out distinctly on this terrain. If you look at an MRO context camera image, showing a wider view, you can see that the surrounding plain is relatively featureless, with few craters. Except for some strange and inexplicable dark streaks close by to the east, some mottled but flat terrain to the north, and a long but very faint similar east-west fissure to the south, this runelike fissure is the only major topological feature for miles around.

That context camera image also shows that this fissure sits on top of a very faint bulge, with hints that material had flowed downhill from the fissure’s western and southern outlets. Located very close to the equator, it is unlikely that any of those flow features are glacial, and in fact they do not have that appearance in the context camera picture. Instead, they have the look of Martian lava, fast-moving and far less viscous than Earth-lava, and thus able to cover large areas much more quickly.

Thus, all the evidence says that this feature is a dormant volcanic vent, sitting on a flood lava plain. And the overview map below cements this conclusion.
» Read more

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The landing sites for two upcoming lunar landers

9:51 am

Map of Moon's south pole
Click for interactive map.

The approximate landing sites for two different lunar landers have now been revealed.

The map to the right, with the south pole indicated by the white cross, shows both, plus the planned landing site for Russia’s Luna-25 lander, presently targeting a summer ’23 launch. The green dot marks Luna-25’s landing site, inside Boguslawsky Crater.

The red dot marks the landing site in for India’s Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander/rover, now tentatively scheduled for launch by the end of ’23. This mission will put a small rover on the surface, and is essentially a redo of the failed Chandrayaan-2 mission from 2019.

The yellow dot in Malapert-A crater is now the likely landing site for Intuitive Machines Nova-C lander. This site is a change from the spacecraft’s original landing site in Oceanus Procellarum (where Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander is now going). In making this change, the launch of Nova-C also slipped to late June 2023, from the previously announced launch date of early 2023.

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Perseverance and Ingenuity begin the journey up onto Jezero Crater’s delta

11:17 am

Perseverance's view ahead, February 7, 2023
To see the original images, go here and here.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

After two years of detailed exploration on the floor of Jezero crater, the rover Perseverance and its Mars helicopter scout Ingenuity have finally begun the climb up onto the delta that in eons past flowed into Jezero Crater.

The panorama above was created from two Perseverance images taken by its right navigation camera on February 7, 2023 (Sol 699) (here and here), looking forward and uphill. On the overview map to the right the blue dot marks Perseverance’s location, with the yellow lines indicating the approximate area covered by this mosaic. The red dotted line in both images indicate approximately the rover’s eventually path.

Ingenuity’s present position is marked by the green dot. This is where the helicopter landed after completing its 42nd flight on February 4, 2023. Planned to fly 823 feet for 137 seconds, Ingenuity actually flew a slightly shorter distance, 814 feet, in that length of time. The difference is probably the result of Ingenuity’s need to find a good landing spot, and the one it found was slightly closer to its take-off point.

The flight however took the helicopter uphill, scouting the terrain that Perseverance plans to drive. While there is no terrain here that is much of a challenge for the rover, having the helicopter’s ground images in advance allows its operators to plan longer drives, as those images will help tell them what obstacles to avoid and route to choose.

The green oval indicates the area that Perseverance has left its first ten core samples for later pickup and return to Earth.

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Space Force to do major cleanup of diesel fuel spill on Hawaiian mountaintop

9:36 am

Space Force officials yesterday announced that it will to do major cleanup of the diesel fuel spill that occurred on the top of the mountain Haleakala on the Hawaiian island of Maui last week.

The plan is to remove about 200 cubic yards of fuel-tainted soil, test the base of the dig, and then determine if more soil has to be removed.

The official making this announcement apologized repeatedly for the spill, so much so it was almost as if he was on his face on the ground, kow-towing. It of course made no difference. The leftist race-baiters in Hawaii made it clear where they stood on the matter.

On Friday, the Hawaiian rights group Kākoʻo Haleakalā called for the removal of all telescopes from the peak of Haleakala. The military “showcased their incompetence and lack of human decency when they allowed more than 700 gallons of diesel fuel to be spilled atop Haleakalā,” the group said in a statement.

“This is just the most recent example of how U.S. imperialism and military hegemony is protected in the Pacific while Hawaiians are ignored and our ʻāina is violated,” the statement said, using the Hawaiian term for land.

Let me translate: “We hate whites and America, and we want you out of Hawaii, now. And if you don’t go, we want you to cede all control to us, so that we treat you as the inferior beings we consider you to be.”

Note too that this group’s agenda is identical to the agenda of the race-baiters on the Big Island who are blocking construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope and are forcing the removal of telescopes there.

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A Martian slope streak caused by a dust devil?

12:25 pm

A Martian slope streak caused by a dust devil?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped, sharpened, and enhanced to post here, was taken on January 5, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the interior slope of an unnamed 9-mile-wide crater, located just south of the Martian equator.

On that slope are several slope streaks, their dark color suggesting they are relatively recent. Also on that slope is the track of a dust devil that traversed that across slope. The track and the top of one of those streaks match, suggesting the dust devil might have caused the streak.

Did it? Maybe. This image was certainly taken to try to find out. Right now scientists do not know what causes slope streaks, a phenomenon unique to Mars. Though they look like avalanches, they do not change the topography at all, and sometimes flow over rises. If anything, they appear to be a stain on the surface, caused by some unknown process.
» Read more

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