Tag: spaceflight

German rocket startup Isar Aerospace gets first American customer

9:28 am

The German rocket startup Isar Aerospace, which hopes to complete the first launch of its Spectrum rocket this year, has signed its first launch contract with an American company, the satellite broker and space tug company Spaceflight.

U.S.-based launch services provider Spaceflight said Jan. 25 it has booked a dedicated launch in 2026 from Isar Aerospace, the German rocket developer aiming to perform the first test flight of its Spectrum vehicle this year. The mission is slated to lift off from Isar’s launchpad in Andøya, Norway, to sun-synchronous orbit (SSO).

Their agreement also includes an option for an additional dedicated launch in 2025, which Isar chief commercial officer Stella Guillen told SpaceNews could also use a launchpad it is developing at the Guiana Space Center near Kourou, French Guiana.

Spaceflight has been scrambling to find rockets for its tugs, since SpaceX announced in March 2022 it would no longer carry them. It signed a deal with Arianespace to fly on its Vega rocket, but launch failures have delayed its launch.

Isar is one of three German rocket startups vying for business. The race to be the first to launch remains very tight.

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Lucy team adds 10th asteroid to the spacecraft’s tour

9:17 am

Lucy's route through the solar system
Lucy’s route through the solar system

The Lucy science team has now added a tenth asteroid to the spacecraft’s tour of the solar system, planning its route so that it will pass within 280 miles on November 1, 2023.

The Lucy mission is already breaking records by planning to visit nine asteroids during its 12-year tour of the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, which orbit the Sun at the same distance as Jupiter. Originally, Lucy was not scheduled to get a close-up view of any asteroids until 2025, when it will fly by the main belt asteroid (52246) Donaldjohanson. However, the Lucy team identified a small, as-yet unnamed asteroid in the inner main belt, designated (152830) 1999 VD57, as a potential new and useful target for the Lucy spacecraft.

The asteroid is about 2,300 feet wide. The primary goal of this visit however will be engineering, testing Lucy’s new method of tracking an object as the spacecraft flies past. On the map to the right the dots along Lucy’s path indicate the asteroids to be visited.

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SpaceX successfully launches a record 56 Starlink satellites

8:54 am

SpaceX early today successfully launched a record 56 Starlink satellites on a single Falcon 9 rocket, which also carried a record mass for the rocket.

The first stage successfully landed on a drone ship in the Atlantic, completing its 9th flight. The fairing halves completed the 6th and 7th flights.

The 2023 launch race:

6 SpaceX
5 China
1 Rocket Lab
1 Japan

American private enterprise now leads China 7 to 5 in the national ranks, and the entire world combined 7 to 6.

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Japan’s H2A rocket successfully launches radar surveillance satellite

8:16 pm

Japan’s space agency JAXA today successfully launched a radar surveillance satellite using its H2A rocket, built by Mitsubishi.

This was Japan’s first launch since December 2021, a gap of more than a year, with no launches in 2022. JAXA hopes to finally launch its unimaginatively named H3 rocket, the replacement for the H2A, on February 12, 2023, after a two year delay because of cracks found in the engines.

The 2023 launch race:

5 China
5 SpaceX
1 Rocket Lab
1 Japan

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A dry lakebed on Mars?

12:37 pm

Evidence of a past lake in a crater on Mars
Click for original image.

Today’s cool image illustrates in some ways the uncertainty of science. The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on December 1, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The science team intriguingly labeled it “Small Candidate Lake Deposit Downstream of Alluvial Fan.” I am not sure what they consider that lake deposit in the full image, so I have focused on the area of stucco-like ground, which resembles bedrock that has been corroded by some water process.

This area is just to the east of the central peaks of an unnamed 25-mile-wide crater in the southern cratered highlands. Many of the craters in this region are believed by scientists to have once harbored lakes formed by run-off from the glaciers that once existed on the craters’ inner rim. In this case it appears this stucco area is the head of an alluvial fan, coming down from the crater’s central peaks. You can see its beginning in this MRO high resolution image of the central peaks, taken in November 2016. As defined geologically,

An aluvial fan is an accumulation of sediments that fans outwards from a concentrated source of sediments, such as a narrow canyon emerging from an escarpment. They are characteristic of mountainous terrain in arid to semiarid climates, but are also found in more humid environments subject to intense rainfall and in areas of modern glaciation.

In this case the terrain is now arid, but shows evidence it once was icy wet.
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ISRO about to test land a prototype of India’s own version of the X-37B

9:46 am

ISRO's own X-37B copy

According to S. Somanth, the head of India’s space agency ISRO, it will attempt the first flight on January 28, 2023 of a prototype reusable launch vehicle, similar to the Space Force’s X-37B.

According to ISRO’s website, Saturday’s landing demonstration will involve a “landing experiment (LEX)” in which the RLV will be carried using a helicopter to an altitude of 3-5 km and released at approximately 4-5 km from the runway with a horizontal velocity.

After the release, the RLV glides and navigates toward the runway, and carries out a conventional autonomous landing. This is planned in a defence airfield near Chitradurga in Karnataka.

The graphic to the right shows the flight profile of earlier tests that landed in the ocean. If this runway test is successful, it appears ISRO will next attempt an orbital flight and return.

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Arianespace’s chief condemns the idea of independent private European rocket companies

9:31 am

Stéphane Israël, the head of Arianespace, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) commercial rocket division, yesterday strongly condemned the idea of allowing independent private European rocket companies to develop and compete with his government operation.

“It is not possible to copy-paste the US model,” he said. “It is not possible. The level of space spending in the United States is five times higher than in Europe, and the private capital is not the same. So if the answer is to say let’s do what the US has done, I think we will not manage to do it.”

Moreover, Israël said the European Space Agency must resist supporting microlaunchers to the point where these companies might compete with the existing capabilities.

“A huge mistake would be that this focus on microlaunchers destabilizes Ariane 6 and Vega C—it would be a historic mistake,” he said. “Microlaunchers can be of support to boost innovation. But we should not make any confusion. This launcher will never give autonomous access to space to Europe. They’re on a niche market representing maybe 10 percent of the market, and less than that when it comes to European needs.”

He said this in Brussels at the 15th European Space Conference, where it appears he was trying to convince the ESA to block any competition with Arianespace.

Israël might say this, but not only has his track record in predicting the success of commercial space in the U.S. been bad, other European governments are not taking his advice. Both Germany and the United Kingdom have several rocket startups gearing up for their first launches this year, with others in Spain and France not far behind. Moreover, Israël doesn’t have much to offer in competition. Arianespace’s Vega rocket, intended to be a low cost option, has failed on three of its last eight launches. The Ariane 6 rocket is years behind schedule, and has not yet launched. And both are overpriced and cannot compete, not only with the American rocket startups but with India’s government rockets.

Moreover, those European governments have in recent years been taking control and power away from Israël and Arianespace. Unlike earlier rockets, the Ariane 6 rocket is not controlled or owned by Arianespace. Instead, it belongs to ArianeGroup, the partnership of Airbus and Safran that is building it. Arianespace’s role in operating it will be greatly limited, once it begins flying.

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Roscosmos predicts Russia’s new space station will launch by 2027

9:14 am

Wanna bet? Yuri Borisov, the head of Roscosmos, yesterday predicted that Russia’s new space station, dubbed the Russian Orbital Station, will launched and deployed by 2027.

“We will create sovereign infrastructure for human space flights to low near-Earth orbit. Its key element will be the Russian orbital station whose deployment we have scheduled for 2027,” he said.

The Russian space agency will carry out all the required feasibility studies by Cosmonautics Day celebrated in Russia on April 12, the Roscosmos chief said.

Based on Russia’s track record for the past three decades, this prediction will fail. Since the fall of the Soviet Union Russia’s space industry has consistently made many such predictions, none of which launched on time, with most never launching at all. Yet, that was during a time when Russia’s economy was booming, it was getting lots of revenue from the international markets, and wasn’t saddled with a draining war in the Ukraine. Now, international sanctions limit what it can get from that market, and its oil revenues have declined considerable due to the war. Moreover, the war prevents Russia from obtaining many cutting edge space components it needs for such a project. Replacing these with home-built components will take time.

If this station gets built, its launch will likely not happen before 2030.

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Stacked Starship and Superheavy complete first full wet dress rehearsal countdown

9:06 am

SpaceX yesterday successfully completed a full wet dress rehearsal countdown of its stacked Starship prototype #24 and Superheavy prototype #7, fueling both completely and taking the countdown down to T-0.

On this rehearsal however the Superheavy engines were not fired. From two SpaceX tweets:

Starship completed its first full flight-like wet dress rehearsal at Starbase today. This was the first time an integrated Ship and Booster were fully loaded with more than 10 million pounds of propellant

Today’s test will help verify a full launch countdown sequence, as well as the performance of Starship and the orbital pad for flight-like operations

Next step: Another full wet dress rehearsal countdown that includes a short static fire test of all 33 Superheavy Raptor-2 engines. Once that is done successfully, the company will be ready for that first orbital launch.

Meanwhile, SpaceX awaits its launch license from the FAA. I remain pessimistic that it will be issued on a timely manner, as there are clear signs the Biden administration wants to use its power against Musk, whom it now sees as an enemy.

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Classified Chinese test satellite releases second object in orbit

8:55 am

A classified Chinese test satellite, launched on January 8th, apparently released a second object into orbit on January 16th, suggesting the satellite might be doing robotic rendezvous and docking tests, similar to tests by an earlier classified satellite.

China’s Shijian 21 satellite, which launched in 2021, also reached GEO and released a satellite, which was then used for tests. Shijian 21 then proceeded to dock with the defunct Chinese navigation and positioning satellite Beidou-2 G2 and towed it away to an orbit out of the way of the active spacecraft in GEO.

China is clearly attempting to develop the same robotic servicing technologies that commercial companies in the west are beginning to fly.

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Russians successfully test replacement Soyuz capsule for leaks

8:49 am

The next Soyuz capsule to launch to ISS has now been passed its leak tests on the ground as it is being prepared for a February 20th launch.

“At the Baikonur cosmodrome, leak tests of the Soyuz MS-23 transport crewed spacecraft have been completed,” the [Roscosmos press release] said. In the coming days, checks of the propulsion system’s automation equipment, onboard digital computerized system and radio engineering systems will follow. Also, the thermal control system is to be filled with a coolant.

The launch has been moved up one month in order to speed the replacement of the leaking Soyuz presently on ISS.

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Rocket Lab successfully completes first launch from the U.S.

8:35 am

Using its Electron rocket, Rocket Lab yesterday placed three smallsats into orbit, launching for the first time from Wallops Island in Virginia.

The company now has three launchpads, one in Wallops and two in New Zealand. Expect its launch pace in 2023 to ramp up to, at a minimum, once per month.

The 2023 launch race:

5 China
5 SpaceX
1 Rocket Lab

In the national rankings, the U.S. leads China, 6 to 5. No one else has yet launched, though Japan plans a launch today.

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Curiosity’s drill fails for the fourth time to drill into the marker band layer on Mt Sharp

5:11 pm

The fourth attempt yesterday to use Curiosity’s drill to drill into the marker band layer on Mount Sharp once again was unable to drill down deep enough to obtain a sample.

Despite giving it the “old college try,” Curiosity’s attempt to drill into the Marker Band at the “Encanto” site did not reach sampling depth. Because other rocks around the rover look similar to “Encanto” and are likely also too hard to drill, the Science Team decided to convert the plan to a “Touch and Go.”

Although the Science Team is disappointed to leave this Marker Band location without a sample, Curiosity will use MAHLI, APXS, and ChemCam LIBS to analyze the chemistry and texture of the shallow “Encanto” drill hole and tailings, targeting the intriguing light-toned material exposed in the wall of the drill hole. We may see another location in the Marker Band worth sampling in the near future, but even if we don’t, there will certainly be many more exciting drilling opportunities to look forward to as Curiosity continues her climb up Mt. Sharp!

This drilling difficulty is not a surprise. The marker band is a very distinct flat layer that is seen at about the same elevation on all sides of Mount Sharp. It flatness suggests it is resistant to erosion, which also suggests its material will be hard. The inability of Curiosity’s drill to penetrate it only confirms this.

It also makes getting a drill sample to test even more intriguing. I suspect that the science team is going to try a few more times as it travels forward across the band, as indicated by the red dotted line in the panorama below.
Panorama as of January 17, 2023
Click for full image.

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Jupiter and two of its Moons, as seen by Cassini during 2018 fly-by

4:41 pm

Cool video time! Back in December 2000 the spacecraft Cassini made a fly-by of Jupiter on its way to Saturn, which it then orbited from 2004 to 2017. In 2018 JPL scientist Kevin Gil took the images from that flyby to create a short movie, first showing two of Jupiter’s moons, Io and Europa, as they drifted above the Great Red Spot.

Then, for the second half of the movie Gil used Cassini images taken when in orbit around Saturn to show the moon Titan moving across the rings of Saturn.

I have embedded this short video below. If I had posted this back in 2018, I don’t remember. No matter. It is amazing enough to watch again.

Hat tip BtB’s stringer Jay.
» Read more

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Communications issue shuts down one of Webb’s instruments

8:30 am

The near infrared instrument on the Webb Space Telescope, NIRISS, has been unavailable for science observations for more than a week due to a communications issue.

On Sunday, Jan. 15, the James Webb Space Telescope’s Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) experienced a communications delay within the instrument, causing its flight software to time out. The instrument is currently unavailable for science observations while NASA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) work together to determine and correct the root cause of the delay.

According to the update, the instrument’s hardware, as well as the rest of the telescope, has been unaffected and remains in good condition.

In November the telescope’s mid-infrared instrument MIRI experienced its own problems with one of its “grating wheels” that allows it to some spectroscopy. Since then the instrument has been in use, but it is unclear if the issue was resolved or observations have had to be adjusted to avoid the problem.

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Martian crater with mound of ice? mud? hardened sand?

12:17 pm

Crater with mound
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on October 31, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a small 4,000-foot-wide crater that is practically filled with a smooth, almost perfectly spherical mound, with the rest of the crater interior filled with sand dunes and what appears to be glacial debris.

Is that mound also glacial debris, covered with a layer of dirt and dust to protect it? If so, one wonders how the ice ended up in this shape. There are other craters with similar mounds in this region, all suggesting glacial debris but with the same question. Craters with lots of near surface ice in this region more often have a squishy blobby look.

Is the mound instead possibly mud, expressing the existence of a mud/ice volcano? If so, it shows no central pit or caldera, which is typical of such things.

Is it hardened sand? Martian dust that gets blown into craters generally gets trapped there, building up over time. If so, however, why does it have a smooth almost perfectly rounded shape? The ripple sand dunes surrounding it are more like what you would expect.

The small craters on the mound also tell us that it is hardened and old, no matter what it is made of.
» Read more

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Animation of Jupiter’s clouds

9:19 am

Cool video time! Using a photo taken by Juno during its 2018 fly-by of Jupiter, citizen scientist Thomas Thomopoulos has created a short animation showing the flow of Jupiter’s clouds. He also added some 3D relief by assigning elevation to the image’s greyscale, with lighter regions assigned higher altitudes.

I have embedded the animation below. Run it at the slowest speed for the best effect. It is quite spectacular, though it is also important to note that it is not reality. Thomopoulos is simply giving us a hint of the natural evolution of the cloud structures, both in elevation and in time.

You can see another equally impressive animation by Thomopoulos here of several of Jupiter’s polar storms, using AI technology to smooth out the loop.
» Read more

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First Vulcan rocket arrives at Cape Canaveral

8:50 am

ULA’s first Vulcan rocket has now arrived at Cape Canaveral in preparation for its planned inaugural launch before the end of March.

This first mission for Vucan will fly in a VC2S configuration. “VC” stands for “Vulcan Centaur.” The number, in this case “2,” represents the number of solid rocket boosters needed and the final letter stands for the payload fairing length.

VC2S will use a 51-foot-long Standard payload fairing. Nestled inside will be a few different payloads. This mission will send the first two Kuiper prototype satellites into Low Earth Orbit (LEO), Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander to the Moon and a Celestis Memorial Spaceflight payload into deep space. The remains of several people connected to the original Star Trek series will be launched on what Celestis dubbed the “Enterprise Flight,” including show creator Gene Roddenberry along with actors Nichelle Nichols and Jackson DeForest Kelley.

This first Vulcan launch will also be the first of two flights required by the Pentagon in order to certify Vulcan for military launches. Since ULA already has contracts for seven Vulcan military launches, it very much wants to get these two launches off this year, as soon as possible. According to the article at the link, ULA is thus aiming to fly this year those two test flights, followed quickly by the first military launch.

Whether it can complete three Vulcan launches in 2023 is quite uncertain. For example, it will need to get four more BE-4 engines from Blue Origin for the second and third launches, and there is no indication at this time that Blue Origin is close to delivering.

Then there is the delays and risks involved with this first launch. Though ULA has decades of experience building and launching rockets, the first launch of a rocket almost always experiences delays during testing. We should expect the same with Vulcan.

Assuming this schedule holds, however, this means ULA is targeting 10 launches in 2023, five Atlas-5 launches, two Delta Heavy launches, and three Vulcan launches. That would be the most launches by this company in a year since 2016.

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First launch from Shetland Islands predicted for the fall

8:36 am

According to an official at the SaxaVord spaceport in the Shetland Islands in Scotland, its first orbital satellite launch is now expected before the end of this year.

Scott Hammond, director of operations at SaxaVord spaceport, acknowledged there is often uncertainty around timetables for private space launches. However, he said a recent agreement with a German company, Rocket Factory Augsburg, would see them begin testing their engines in the summer ahead of a launch later in the year.

He told the Press Association: “Probably in July, we’re going to start full stage testing. That will be the full, first stage, nine engines all firing for about three minutes. So that’ll be really, really impressive. I expect about four months or so of that depending on success. And then we’re looking with Rocket Factory to launch towards the end of the year, for the orbital launch.”

I would not bet a lot of money on this schedule. Rocket Factory is a German rocket startup that has never launched before, and the first launch from such startups are routinely delayed months to years. What Hammond is really doing is creating buzz for SaxaVord, even as a rival spaceport in Sutherland, Scotland, is getting built.

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The youngest flood lava on Mars, flowing past a crater

2:07 pm

Crater with lava flow
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced to post here, was taken on December 3, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The title given to this image by the MRO science team is “Upstream Edge of Crater in Athabasca Valles.” The crater itself is a pedestal crater, uplifted from the surrounding terrain because it was more resistant to erosion.

The material to the east of the crater’s rim definitely appears to have flow characteristics, but is it wet mud, glacial ice, or lava?

To figure this out we need as always some context. The latitude, 8 degrees north, immediately eliminates mud or glacial material. This location is in the dry equatorial regions of Mars, where no near surface ice has yet been found. Thus, the flow features are likely hardened lava.

What direction however was the flow? Was it flowing to the north, widening as it moved past the pedestal crater? Or was it to the south, narrowing as it pushed past that crater? To answer this question we need to widen our view.
» Read more

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Ingenuity completes 40th flight

9:52 am

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

As predicted by the Ingenuity engineering team on January 17, 2023, the Mars helicopter yesterday completed its 40th flight, flying approximately 92 seconds and 584 feet to the northwest to place it at the head of the hollow that Perseverance will travel to climb up onto the delta that flowed into Jezero Crater sometime in the past.

The green dot on the overview map to the right shows the helicopter’s position, post flight. The blue dot shows Perseverance’s present position. The red dotted line indicates the rover’s future route.

At the moment, only eleven images have been returned from the flight, and these only show the first 20 seconds of flight. The flight however has been added to the helicopter’s flight log, which shows that Ingenuity actually flew about 23 feet farther and 7 seconds longer than expected. This extra distance was likely because the helicopter needed to find a good landing site, using its upgraded software that allows it to fly over rougher terrain.

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The only rocket stage recovered during the 1960s space race returns to Florida

9:00 am

A section of the Gemini 5 Titan rocket first stage that was recovered by chance right after its launch on August 21, 1965 has now been moved from storage in Alabama to be put on display at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Museum.

The artifact, which encompasses the upper portion of the Titan II rocket’s first stage, flew with the vehicle from Launch Complex 19 at Cape Kennedy (today Cape Canaveral) in Florida for the first two and a half minutes of flight, reaching about 50 miles high (80 kilometers) before its two-nozzle engine exhausted its propellant supply. Unlike most rockets, which jettison their first stage before firing their second stage engine(s), Gemini-Titan “fired in the hole,” igniting the upper stage before separating from the first.

The Titan II first stage then plunged back to Earth, impacting the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Bermuda with no plans for its recovery. It was only by happenstance that a U.S. Air Force plane spotted the segment floating in the water, which led to a U.S. Navy destroyer, the U.S.S. Du Pont, hauling it out of the ocean and back to shore.

Whether the surviving segment, which housed the booster’s oxidizer tank, tore apart from its fuel tank and engine section during the tumble back to Earth or on contact with the ocean is unknown. The lower section of the stage presumably sank to the seafloor.

Until the shuttle started flying in 1981, this booster section was the only first stage recovered from any American rocket launch. The rocket itself had lifted Gordon Cooper and Pete Conrad into orbit, where they spent a then record eight days, proving humans could survive in space long enough to get to and from the Moon.

Lots of pictures at the link. More pictures here.

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Investment in space dropped 58% in 2022

8:49 am

According to a new report by Space Capital, a New York venture capital firm, overall investment in space dropped 58% in 2022, dropping from the $47.4 billion peak in 2021 to $20.1 billion in 2022.

Space Capital, a New York-based venture capital firm, published its Space Investment Quarterly Jan. 19 for the fourth quarter of 2022. The report notes that early-stage startups fared better than later-stage and growth companies.

One exception was SpaceX, which raised $2 billion in 2022, or 32 percent of the total 2022 private investment in space infrastructure. SpaceX was also in the minority because it raised capital in both 2021 and 2022. Only 38 percent of the space infrastructure companies that raised capital in 2021 sought additional funding in 2022.

Essentially, if you remove SpaceX from the picture, major investment in space startups largely came to a halt in 2022. Furthermore, the report states that it also expects further investment in 2023 to be parsimonious. Apparently the venture capital community has realized how risky many of these space startups are (as seen by the loss of stock value for companies like Virgin Galactic, Astra, and Virgin Orbit), and is becoming more careful where it puts its money.

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Lucy team suspends efforts to complete deployment of unlatched solar panel

8:25 pm

Lucy's planned route
Lucy’s planned route to explore the Trojan asteroids

The Lucy science team has decided to suspend its efforts to complete the deployment of the unlatched solar panel that failed to fully open shortly after launch, having determined that little can be accomplished while the spacecraft is so far from the Sun.

A series of activities in 2022 succeeded in further deploying the array, placing it into a tensioned, but unlatched, state. Using engineering models calibrated by spacecraft data, the team estimates that the solar array is over 98% deployed, and it is strong enough to withstand the stresses of Lucy’s 12-year mission. The team’s confidence in the stability of the solar array was affirmed by its behavior during the close flyby of the Earth on Oct. 16, 2022, when the spacecraft flew within 243 miles (392 km) of the Earth, through the Earth’s upper atmosphere. The solar array is producing the expected level of power at the present solar range and is expected to have enough capability to perform the baseline mission with margin.

The team elected to suspend deployment attempts after the attempt on Dec. 13, 2022, produced only small movement in the solar array. Ground-based testing indicated that the deployment attempts were most productive while the spacecraft was warmer, closer to the Sun. As the spacecraft is currently 123 million miles (197 million km) from the Sun (1.3 times farther from the Sun than the Earth) and moving away at 20,000 mph (35,000 km/hr), the team does not expect further deployment attempts to be beneficial under present conditions.

The spacecraft will do another Earth fly-by on December 12, 2024, which will send it to the Trojans on the left side of the map above. Before that Lucy will do a mid-course correction in February 2024, at which time the engineers will reassess whether to try again to latch the panel, when Lucy is closer to Earth and thus also closer to the Sun.

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Machete Mesa on Mars

12:41 pm

Machete Mesa on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on November 30, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a variety of ridges in a region of Mars called Arabia Terra, which is also the largest transition zone between the Martian southern cratered highlands and the northern lowland plains.

While this picture illustrates some nice geological facts about Mars (see below), I post it simply because of the dramatic sharpness of the ridge on top of the mesa, which I guess is several hundred feet high, but only a few feet across, at most, at its peak. A hike along this ridgeline would be a truly thrilling experience, one that the future human settlers on Mars will almost certainly find irresistible. Put this location on your planned tourist maps of Mars. It will likely be an oft-visited site.
» Read more

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Geotail mission finally ends after 30 years

9:18 am

Though initially planned as a four year mission, the Geotail probe — designed to study the Earth’s magnetosphere — finally failed on June 28, 2022 after 30 years of operation.

With an elongated orbit, Geotail sailed through the invisible boundaries of the magnetosphere, gathering data on the physical process at play there to help understand how the flow of energy and particles from the Sun reach Earth. Geotail made many scientific breakthroughs, including helping scientists understand how quickly material from the Sun passes into the magnetosphere, the physical processes at play at the magnetosphere’s boundary, and identifying oxygen, silicon, sodium, and aluminum in the lunar atmosphere.

The mission also helped identify the location of a process called magnetic reconnection, which is a major conveyor of material and energy from the Sun into the magnetosphere and one of the instigators of the aurora. This discovery laid the way for the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, or MMS, which launched in 2015.

Though it failed in June, engineers worked until November attempting to recover the spacecraft. When those efforts failed, NASA officially ended the mission.

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ABL completes investigation of January 10th launch failure

9:13 am

ABL yesterday released the results of its investigation into the January 10th launch failure of its RS1 rocket.

Just over ten seconds after launch the rocket suffered “a complete loss of power,” its engines shut down, and it came crashing back to Earth about 60 feet to the east of the launch pad. The resulting explosion and fire damaged and destroyed significant equipment, including a nearby “fabric hanger.” The report then goes on to describe the cause:
» Read more

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SpaceX completes first Starlink launch of 2023

8:53 am

Using a new first stage, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched 51Starlink satellites into orbit this morning from Vandenberg Space Force Base, the first Starlink launch of 2023.

The first stage successfully landed on a drone ship in the Pacific.

At present, SpaceX and China are tied for the lead in the 2023 launch race, each having completed 5 launches so far this year. No one else has launched as yet.

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Astronauts complete Soyuz seat liner installation inside Endurance

9:31 pm

Astronauts today completed the installation of Frank Rubio’s Soyuz seat liner inside the Dragon capsule Endurance so that he can return to Earth should an emergency requiring evacuation occur on ISS.

On Jan. 17, NASA Flight Engineer Josh Cassada, with assistance from NASA Flight Engineer Nicole Mann, worked inside the SpaceX Dragon Endurance crew ship collecting tools and readying the spacecraft for a seat liner move. The seat liner move, completed today, Jan. 18, ensures NASA Flight Engineer Frank Rubio will be able to return to Earth in the unlikely event of an emergency evacuation from the International Space Station. Rubio originally launched to the station with cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin aboard the Soyuz MS-22 crew ship on Sept. 21, 2022. The change allows for increased crew protection by reducing the heat load inside the MS-22 spacecraft for Prokopyev and Petelin in case of an emergency return to Earth.

It would be fascinating to get more details about the work that was done to install this Soyuz seat liner in Endurance. Clearly some improvisation was required.

Regardless, this work is only temporary, since Rubio’s seat liner will be shifted again into the replacement Soyuz scheduled to arrive in mid-February.

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January 18, 2023 Quick space links

5:03 pm

Courtesy of Jay, BtB’s intrepid stringer.

 

 

 

 

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