Tag: spaceflight

India’s first private satellite manufacturing facility opens

10:31 am

Capitalism in space: At a ceremony today that included officials from the government, the private commercial company ANANTH opened India’s first private satellite manufacturing facility.

Located at Karnataka Industrial Area Development Board Aerospace Park, Bengaluru, the new establishment is equipped with clean rooms for spacecraft sub-systems manufacturing and is large enough to cater to four spacecraft simultaneously.

This unveiling is part of India’s effort to transition from a government-built space effort to one run by the private sector. In the past all satellite construction in India was designed, managed, and owned by India’s space agency ISRO. This facility will now take over that function, and do so not only for ISRO but for any private company that wishes to have a satellite built.

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A rock stows away on Perseverance

10:24 am

Perseverance's stowaway
Click for full image.

Since early February the Mars Rover Perseverance has been toting with it a small rock in its front left wheel, as shown in the image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here and taken by the rover’s left hazard avoidance camera on February 6, 2022.

From an update today by the Perseverance science team:

Back on sol 341— that’s over 100 sols ago, in early February— a rock found its way into the rover’s front left wheel, and since hitching a ride, it’s been transported more than 5.3 miles (8.5 km). This rock isn’t doing any damage to the wheel, but throughout its (no doubt bumpy!) journey, it has clung on and made periodic appearances in our left Hazcam images.

You can see the most recent photo of the rock, taken on May 26, 2022, here. It is very clear that the rock’s repeated tumbling inside the wheel well has worn away its sharp edges as well as reduced its overall size. Given enough time its surface could even become somewhat smooth.

As the update notes, when this rock finally drops off it will create a potential mystery for future geologists, who if they are not aware that Perseverance moved it, will wonder how it got where it was, being geologically out-of-place in its new location.

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NASA awards Axiom & Collins Aerospace contracts to build spacesuits

10:07 am

Capitalism in space: NASA yesterday awarded separate contracts to two different companies, Axiom and Collins Aerospace, to build spacesuits for its astronauts, either when they do spacewalks in space or when they are exploring the lunar surface.

The contract enables selected vendors to compete for task orders for missions that will provide a full suite of capabilities for NASA’s spacewalking needs during the period of performance through 2034. The indefinite delivery and indefinite quantity, milestone-based xEVAS contract has a combined maximum potential value of $3.5 billion for all task order awards. The first task orders to be competed under the contract will include the development and services for the first demonstration outside the space station in low-Earth orbit and for the Artemis III lunar landing.

Each partner has invested a significant amount of its own money into development. Partners will own the spacesuits and are encouraged to explore other non-NASA commercial applications for data and technologies they co-develop with NASA.

More information can be found in each companies’ press release, located here (Axiom) and here (Collins).

These commercial contracts replace NASA’s own failed effort to make its own Artemis spacesuits, which spent fourteen years and more than a billion dollars before being abandoned by the agency because wouldn’t be able to deliver anything on time.

The contracts also continue NASA’S transition — as recommended in my 2017 policy paper Capitalism in Space [pdf] — from a failed space contractor to merely being the customer buying products from the commercial sector. The result is we now have a vibrant and ever growing private space sector with products available quickly and cheaply not only for NASA, but for others. The Axiom press release illustrates these facts with this quote:

The Axiom spacesuit is key to the company’s commercial space services. This new NASA contract enables Axiom to build spacesuits that serve the company’s commercial customers and future space station goals while meeting NASA’s ISS and exploration needs.

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SpaceX wins more NASA manned flights to ISS

9:52 am

Capitalism in space: NASA has now announced that it is buying five additional manned missions to ISS from SpaceX, beginning in ’26.

This new contract is in addition to a February ’22 NASA award that purchased three more Dragon flights.

After a thorough review of the long-term capabilities and responses from American industry, NASA’s assessment is that the SpaceX crew transportation system is the only one currently certified to maintain crewed flight to the space station while helping to ensure redundant and backup capabilities through 2030.

The current sole source modification does not preclude NASA from seeking additional contract modifications in the future for additional transportation services as needed.

The press release repeatedly makes it clear that NASA very much wishes to buy tickets on Boeing’s Starliner, but until it is declared operational it must give its business to SpaceX. Once Starliner begins flying, NASA will then buy seats on it and alternate between the two companies. Until then however this new SpaceX contract guarantees NASA enough flight capacity to keep ISS occupied, even if Starliner gets further delayed.

Regardless, Boeing has once again lost business to SpaceX because its Starliner capsule is not yet ready. In the long run this contract means fewer total flights for Boeing to ISS, which means less profits.

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MAVEN returns to full operation

9:42 am

NASA announced yesterday that engineers have finally completely restored its Mars orbiter MAVEN, after a three month period when the spacecraft was in safe mode due to an attitude control problem.

To fix the problem engineers uploaded new software that allowed the spacecraft to determine its orientation in space not from its onboard inertial units, but from locking onto stars in the sky.

All instruments were healthy and successfully resumed observations; however, the spacecraft was constrained to pointing at the Earth until testing of all-stellar mode was completed, so the instruments were not oriented as they normally would be during science operations. Nevertheless, some limited science was still possible, and MAVEN even observed a coronal mass ejection impact Mars less than two days after the instruments were powered on.

Moreover, for some parts of the year it will still need its inertial units, so a fix for those time periods is still required.

Regardless, MAVEN can now resume acting as a communications relay between the Earth and the rovers on Mars, which for the past year has become its prime mission. While both rovers can communication without that relay, it is often necessary depending on a number of factors, and it also provides redundancy and a greater communications capacity.

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Ursa Major announces new rocket engine to replace what Russia previously provided

9:32 am

Capitalism in space: The new rocket engine company Ursa Major yesterday announced a new more powerful rocket engine, dubbed Arroway, designed to replace rocket engines that Russia had been selling.

Arroway is a 200,000-pound thrust liquid oxygen and methane staged combustion engine that will serve markets including current U.S. national security missions, commercial satellite launches, orbital space stations, and future missions not yet conceived. The reusable Arroway engine is available for order now, slated for initial hot-fire testing in 2023, and delivery in 2025.

Notably, Arroway engines will be one of very few commercially available engines that, when clustered together, can displace the Russian-made RD-180 and RD-181, which are no longer available to U.S. launch companies.

Arroway could replace the RD-181 engines that Northrop Grumman uses on the first stage of its Antares rocket. Both engines are comparable in size. However, with Arroway available no sooner than ’25 it still will leave a gap, since right now the company only has enough stock on hand to launch two more rockets, both of which should launch before ’24.

Arroway is also about half as powerful as Blue Origin’s BE-4 engine, so if ULA wishes to use it in its Vulcan rocket a major redesign would be required.

Either way, Ursa Major is demonstrating here again the value of freedom and competition, as well as the foolishness and negative consequences of Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine. In response to the international sanctions against it, Russia blocked future rocket engine sales to the U.S. Not only did that not get the sanctions lifted, Russia is now losing that U.S. business, as other American companies are stepping up to replace it.

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China launches nine satellites for commercial data constellation

9:16 am

China today used its Long March 2C rocket to launch the first nine satellites in a commercial data collection constellation.

Owned by GeeSpace, a subsidiary of Geely Technology Group, the satellite constellation will be mainly used to research and validate technologies, such as travel services of intelligent connected vehicles, and vehicle/mobile phone and satellite interaction. It will also provide data support for marine environmental protection.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

22 SpaceX
17 China
7 Russia
3 Rocket Lab
3 ULA

The U.S. still leads China 31 to 17 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 31 to 27.

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Curiosity on a steep slope

11:57 am

null
Click for full panorama.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The panorama above, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was compiled from 29 photos taken on May 31, 2022 by the right navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity. It shows the steepness of the slope that the rover ended up parking on yesterday after it completed its drive. As noted in today’s rover update by Abigail Fraeman, Planetary Geologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory:

Curiosity starts the plan parked at an impressive 17˚ pitch (front up) and 17˚ roll (left up) for a total 24˚ tilt. You can get a bit of a sense of the rover’s non-horizontal position by looking at its orientation with respect to the ground in the above Navcam mosaic. Even though this slope is getting close to the limit of what Curiosity can traverse, we don’t think we’ll have any problems unstowing the arm or driving the rest of the way to the top because of the terrain we’re on – nice smooth bedrock with only a thin sand cover is almost the Martian equivalent of a paved road.

On the far right of the image you can also see Curiosity’s tracks. The rover had first approached this slope about 80 feet to the west, then backed off slightly to parallel the slope as it came east and then turned uphill. In the far far distance can be seen the rim of Gale Crater, about about 30 miles away and obscured by the atmosphere’s winter dust.

The overview map above shows Curiosity’s location with the blue dot. The approximate area covered by the section of the panorama above is indicated by the yellow lines. The red dotted line shows the rover’s original planned route. The white arrows indicate what the scientists have dubbed the “marker horizon,” a distinct layer found in many places on the flanks of Mount Sharp that they are very eager to study up close. The green dot marks the approximate location of a recurring slope lineae, a place where the cliff is seasonally darkened by a streak that appears each spring and then fades.

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Astronomers used Japanese weather satellite to monitor the dimming of Betelgeuse

10:19 am

Belelgeuse as seen by weather satellite
From Figure 1 of the paper. Click for full image and caption.

In a paper published on May 30th, astronomers described how they used the Japanese weather satellite Himawari-8 to monitor the dimming of Betelgeuse that occurred in 2019 and 2020.

“We saw a tweet stating that the moon was in its images,” Daisuke Taniguchi, a Ph.D. student in astronomy at the University of Tokyo and first author of the paper, told Space.com. “I chatted with [third author] Shinsuke Uno on the usage of meteorological satellites for astronomy, found Betelgeuse is in the field of view of Himawari-8 and realized that maybe the Great Dimming of Betelgeuse could be investigated.”

Himawari-8 has been positioned 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) above Earth’s equator since 2015 to study weather and natural disasters (including the eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcano on Jan. 15). Although the satellite is up there to image Earth every 10 minutes, the edges of its images include stars.

Taniguchi and his colleagues were able to see Betelgeuse in images taken throughout Himawari-8’s lifetime and measured its brightness roughly every 1.7 days between January 2017 and June 2021.

The scientists were lucky that the star’s unexpected dimming happened to occur during this time period. The image above is Figure 1 from their paper (which you can read here).

They note that their observations appeared to confirm the theory that the dimming was caused by a dust cloud crossing in front of the star, not the theory that it was caused by a dark spot on the star’s surface. Moreover, their data suggests that dust was relatively close to the star, and could even been created by a burst from the star.

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Blue Origin reschedules next New Shepard flight

9:47 am

Capitalism in space: Blue Origin announced yesterday that it has rescheduled the next New Shepard passenger flight for June 4.

The original launch date of May 20th had been scrubbed because of an unexplained issue with the spacecraft’s “back-up systems.” The company has not provided any further information on what had been wrong, or what had been done to fix it.

This flight will be New Shepard’s fifth passenger flight, and its 21st overall.

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Webb to release first science images July 12th

9:41 am

The science team for the James Webb Space Telescope announced today that the first infrared science images from the telescope will be released on July 12, 2022.

The first images package of materials will highlight the science themes that inspired the mission and will be the focus of its work: the early universe, the evolution of galaxies through time, the lifecycle of stars, and other worlds. All of Webb’s commissioning data – the data taken while aligning the telescope and preparing the instruments – will also be made publicly available.

In many ways this first release will likely mirror the first release of images from the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993, after its serious focus problem had been solved. Then, the science team and NASA picked images for the press conference that, to them, would pass what they called the “grandmother test,” whereby an ordinary person not familiar with space objects would still instantly recognize the object imaged.

The result of that criteria was that some of Hubble’s best ground-breaking first images were not included, such as its first sharp picture of the exploding star Eta Carinae. While the images shown were beautiful, they did not immediately demonstrate what Hubble was going to accomplish. The Eta Carinae picture did however.

Hopefully this time the scientists will be more daring, and have a greater respect for the general public, and include some infrared images that are not familiar to non-scientists. It is such data that is almost always the most exciting.

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Astronomers discover pulsar with slowest rotation rate of any known neutron star

10:05 am

The uncertainty of science: Using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa, astronomers have discovered a pulsar with the slowest rotation rate of any known neutron star, completing each rotation every 76 seconds.

According to the press release:

Neutron stars are extremely dense remnants of supernova explosions of massive stars. Scientists know of about 3,000 of these in our Galaxy. However, the new discovery is unlike anything seen so far. The team think it could belong to the theorised class of ultra-long period magnetars – stars with extremely strong magnetic fields.

From the paper’s abstract:

With a spin period of 75.88 s, a characteristic age of 5.3 Myr and a narrow pulse duty cycle, it is uncertain how its radio emission is generated and challenges our current understanding of how these systems evolve. The radio emission has unique spectro-temporal properties, such as quasi-periodicity and partial nulling, that provide important clues to the emission mechanism. Detecting similar sources is observationally challenging, which implies a larger undetected population. Our discovery establishes the existence of ultra-long-period neutron stars, suggesting a possible connection to the evolution of highly magnetized neutron stars, ultra-long-period magnetars and fast radio bursts.

Essentially, a pulsar with this length rotation was not expected, and its existence throws a wrench into present theories about their formation and evolution. That its existence might provide a link between neutron stars, magnetars, and the as-yet unexplained fast radio bursts, however, is very intriguing.

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Rogozin: Russia’s first lunar lander in decades to launch by end of September

9:54 am

The landing area for Luna-25

The new colonial movement: Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russia’s Roscosmos space corporation, revealed yesterday that it is now targeting the end of September for the launch of Luna-25, the first Russian lunar lander to the Moon since Luna-24 in 1976.

The Russians hope to land the rover near 60-mile-wide Boguslawsky crater, located about 550 miles from the Moon’s south pole. The map to the right, figure 1 from a 2018 paper, provides the reasoning for picking this location.

The Luna–Glob mission [the title for the entire Russian program of future lunar probes] is designed for investigations in the polar regions of the Moon and targeted primarily on testing a new generation of technologies for landing a descent module. In this regard, the choice of scientific tasks of this mission is rather subordinate. Further realization of our lunar program, inclusive of the Luna–Resource mission with an extended complex of scientific tasks, and subsequently, a new generation of lunar rovers and modules for lunar subsurface sampling and return to the Earth, depends on the results of the present mission [Luna-25]. …The detailed photo geological analysis of the surface in the Luna–Glob mission landing sector (70°–85° S, 0°–60° E) using high-resolution images and topographic data made it possible to select the definite landing site. This site (the eastern landing ellipse, 73.9° S, 43.9° E) on the Boguslawsky floor represents a higher scientific priority and also provides relatively safe landing conditions.

The Russians have been attempting to launch this Luna-Glob program for almost a quarter of a century. Hopefully the first launch will finally happen this year.

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FAA once again delays approval for launching Starship from Boca Chica

8:46 am

Capitalism in space: The FAA today announced that it is once again delaying release of its environmental reassessment of SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility in Texas, setting a new release date only two weeks hence.

The FAA intended to release the Final PEA on May 31, 2022. The FAA now plans to release the Final PEA on June 13, 2022 to account for ongoing interagency consultations. A notice will be sent to individuals and organizations on the project distribution list when the Final PEA is available.

The previous five delays had each been month-long. This two week delay strongly suggests that the bureaucrats are getting close to a final agreement. Whether that means SpaceX will receive an approval, which is what the initial draft had suggested back in December, or be blocked, we shall have to see. A statement SpaceX CEO Gwynne Shotwell in mid-May that the company would be ready to launch Starship by June suggests it will be an approval.

I have been predicting since December that the month-by-month delays would continue until after the November election. I will be quite happy if that prediction ends up wrong.

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The new satellite industry, energized by freedom

12:30 pm

Liberty enlightening the world
Liberty enlightening the world, both on it and in space.

Last week SpaceX successfully completed its 22nd launch in 2022, sending 59 smallsats into orbit with its Falcon 9 rocket.

In the past few decades, the launch of a smallsat would generally have not merited much further coverage. These satellites, almost always based on the 10-centimeter (or 4-inch) square cubesat design, had generally been short term objects built almost always by university students not so much to do space research as to simply learn how to build satellites and learn how they operated in orbit.

This has now all changed, fueled both by the immense drop in launch costs generated by the competition between the new rockets built by SpaceX and the new emerging smallsat rocket companies (Rocket Lab, Virgin Orbit, and Astra) and by the improved capabilities of miniaturized components. Cubesats can now do far more despite being tiny, and they can be launched for much less money.

The result has been wonderfully illustrated by the satellites launched last week on that Falcon 9. Below is a short list of the press releases in the past few days, announcing the successful activation of these satellites:
» Read more

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Boeing picks company to manufacture flight suits for passengers on Starliner

10:19 am

Dover's spacesuits
ILC Dover’s spacesuits.

Capitalism in space: On May 26th ILC Dover announced it has been chosen by Boeing as one of two companies to manufacture flight suits for passengers on Starliner.

The Boeing AES [Ascent/Entry Suit] is based off ILC Dover’s commercial Launch, Entry, and Abort suit, SOL™. ILC Dover worked with Boeing to tailor SOL for the Starliner spacecraft to provide protection for astronauts during the most critical phases of spaceflight, including launch, docking, re-entry and landing. With over 50 years of spacesuit experience, the AES suit was designed to provide maximum mobility to operate, enter and exit the spacecraft, as well as provide protection for astronauts in case of an emergency.

The black spacesuit on the left in the picture is Dover’s SOL suit, which it is adapting for Boeing. The white suit is the spacewalk suit it has made for NASA for use on ISS, which I also think is the same spacesuit that has for now almost a decade had repeated problems with water leaking into the helmet.

In other words, big space Boeing has hired another big space company to build its Starliner flight suits. I hope ILC Dover does a better job with the AES suit then it has with its EVA suit.

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Egypt to create a “space city” for space research and development

10:02 am

The new colonial movement: Mohamed al-Qousy, the head of Egypt’s space agency, announced yesterday that by the end of this year it will open a 123-acre site devoted to space research and commercial space business.

Qousy explained that the space city will contain 23 buildings to serve space activities, including a space academy, a research center, a center for the assembly of satellites, and a museum in the form of tourism in addition to the African Space Agency.

The agency aims to develop and transfer space science and technology into Egypt to build satellites and launch them from Egyptian territories.

It is not clear how much of this facility will be government-run, or privately owned. It appears most will be run by the government.

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India’s press: End the endless launch delays at ISRO

9:55 am

The new colonial movement: An op-ed yesterday in one of India’s major news outlets demanded that its space agency ISRO end the launch delays that have now gone for more than two years since the beginning of the Wuhan panic, and get a number of military satellites into orbit.

The details are not really that important. What this op-ed suggests is that India’s press, and possibly its public, is now beginning to lose patience with ISRO’S reluctance to resume launches. It also suggests their own fear of the Wuhan flu has subsided.

The bottom line is that India has lost a lot of business in the past two years by its refusal to launch, especially in the smallsat market, and the only chance it has to regain that business is to resume launches, with a vengence.

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China begins preparing Long March 5B for launch of next space station module

9:47 am

The new colonial movement: The Long March 5B rocket that will launch in July the next large module for China’s Tiangong space station, dubbed Wentian, has arrived at the launch site.

China’s Long March-5B Y3 rocket, which will launch lab module Wentian for the country’s space station, arrived on Sunday at the launch site in the southern island province of Hainan. The rocket, along with the Wentian lab module already transported to the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site, will be assembled and tested at the launch site, announced the China Manned Space Agency. [emphasis mine]

In all past launches of the Long March-5B the core first stage has crashed to Earth in an uncontrolled manner because its engine could not be restarted after it shut down. The highlighted “Y3” added to the rocket’s name above suggests China might have fixed this. Previous Long March-5B rockets used YF-77 engines. Adding Y3 to the name — which generally follows China’s system for naming its engines — could mean they will now be able to control the core stage’s de-orbit. This speculation is further strengthened by a previous report that China was testing a new engine for the core stage that implied it was restartable.

If so, China will avoid the kind of bad press it received with previous Long March 5B launches. It will also put it back in compliance with the Outer Space Treaty, which it violated with each past core stage crash.

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Environmentalists sue local Boca Chica officials for closing beaches for SpaceX

9:27 am

Muskhate: The Sierra Club and other environmental groups have now sued a variety of local Boca Chica government agencies for periodically closing the beaches during hazardous SpaceX operations.

The Sierra Club, the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas and non-profit Save RGV have joined together in a lawsuit against the Texas General Land Office, Texas land commissioner George P. Bush and Cameron County in Texas for closing Boca Chica Beach periodically for SpaceX operations during Starship tests, the Sierra Club stated May 5. The Boca Chica beach is near SpaceX’s Starbase facility, where it is building Starship rocket prototypes and their massive Super Heavy boosters.

“Restricting access to a public beach, as the defendants have done, violates the Texas constitution,” the Sierra Club said in a statement. None of the allegations have been proven in court, and the statement does not name SpaceX among the entities pursued in the lawsuit.

These are the same groups that have been lobbying government officials for the past few years to shut SpaceX down. They claim that a change to the state’s laws allowing these closures that was passed in 2013 violates the state’s constitution, and want the courts to agree.

Of course, we all know these organizations really have no interest in keeping the beaches open for public use. What they really want is to shut down SpaceX in Boca Chica, because that company is actually doing something exciting and innovative while bringing billions of investment capital to the Rio Grand Valley, including tens of thousands of new jobs. (The group called “Save RGV” is especially ironic and dishonest, since RGV stands for Rio Grand Valley. If their effort succeeded, they would not save RGV, but destroy it. All those jobs and billions would vanish, leaving the area as depressed and as poor as it has been now for decades.)

These groups also wish to destroy Elon Musk, because he has recently made it clear that he no longer is a knee-jerk supporter of all leftist causes.

Nor will their effort cease should they lose this case in court. They will do what environmental groups have done now for decades, find another minor legal issue and sue again, and again, and again, and again.

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MAVEN out of operation since February

5:48 pm

The American Mars orbiter MAVEN has been unable to do any science observations since February 22, 2022 because its attitude control system has not been functioning properly, according to a NASA update only released on May 18th, almost two months later.

In the weeks that followed, NASA managed to revive MAVEN from safe mode, but in a limited capacity. The orbiter is in a stable orbit with its primary antenna pointed at Earth to maintain high-rate communications with its flight control team. “In this configuration, however, MAVEN cannot perform communications relays for other spacecraft on Mars and is performing only limited science observations,” NASA officials wrote in the update (opens in new tab). “The mission team began science instrument recovery on April 20.” The orbiter normally serves as a communication relay for NASA’s Curiosity rover and Perseverance rover on Mars to beam the latest images and research from the Martian surface to Earth.

Though it can still do its own observations, MAVEN’s main task at this time is to act as a communications relay for the rovers on Mars. This issue prevents that task.

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Flaky Martian rock

11:41 am

Flaky Martian rock
Click for full image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, reduced and enhanced to post here, was taken on May 15, 2022 (sol 3474) by the high resolution camera on the Mars rover Curiosity, and shows a rock that was near the rover at that time that I estimate to be around three to four feet long.

This picture was taken the same day Curiosity also took a panorama and close-up images of a row of teeth-like boulders that sat a short distance in front of the rover. Those rocks, much larger than the one to the right, had numerous large flakes protruding from their sides.

This smaller rock has even more such flakes, all much smaller and clearly more delicate.

The overview map to the right shows Curiosity’s present position with the blue dot. The yellow dot marks where it was when it took this photograph. The red dotted line shows the rover’s original planned route. The white arrows indicate what the scientists have dubbed the “marker horizon,” a distinct layer found in many places on the flanks of Mount Sharp that they are very eager to study up close.

The green dot marks the approximate location of a recurring slope lineae, a place where the cliff is seasonally darkened by a streak that appears each spring and then fades.

The two orange dotted lines are my guesses for the two possible routes the rover will take from here to get back to its planned route, abandoned in mid-April when the Greenheugh Pediment was found too rough for Curiosity’s wheels. Though science team has not published a new route, the direction traveled in recent weeks suggests these are the possibilities. If I had to choose, I would favor the east route, as it bypasses more completely the pediment with its rough terrain.

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Did SpaceX’s Endeavour capsule have issues with its heat shield during its most recent return to Earth?

9:43 am

According to a May 23rd Space Explored article based on anonymous sources, the heat shield on SpaceX’s Endeavour capsule experienced “dangerously excessive wear upon reentry” because of a propellant leak.

Hypergolic propellant made its way into the Crew Dragon Endeavour’s heat shield, according to sources at SpaceX and NASA who spoke with Space Explored. This hypergolic propellant is used by the Crew Dragon in its Draco engines – hypergolic means that the two parts spontaneously combust upon contact. It is believed that this hypergolic propellant impacted the integrity of the heatshield, causing dangerously excessive wear upon reentry.

NASA however has now bluntly denied these claims:

“The data associated with Dragon’s recent crew reentries was normal — the system performed as designed without dispute. There has not been a hypergol leak during the return of a crewed Dragon mission nor any contamination with the heat shield causing excessive wear,” the NASA statement reads, in part.

“SpaceX and NASA perform a full engineering review of the heat shield’s thermal protection system following each return, including prior to the launch of the Crew-4 mission currently at the International Space Station,” the NASA statement continues. “The heat shield composite structure (structure below the tile) was re-flown per normal planning and refurbishment processes. The thermal protection system on the primary heat shield for Crew-4 was new, as it has been for all human spaceflight missions.”

Such a flat out denial by NASA strongly suggests that the anonymous sources relied on by Space Explored are not reliable, and got their facts wrong. While NASA will often try to hide or spin any issues to make them seem less worrisome, it has almost never denied the existence of a serious problem, when it was revealed that such a problem had occurred.

I know to say this sounds paranoid, but this story also suggests this claim might be part of the growing effort within the federal bureaucracy and the press to attack SpaceX, because of its new irrational hostility to Elon Musk because he supports achievement and free speech.

At the same time, SpaceX has recently had to discard and replace a Dragon heat shield planned for a future mission because of discovered “manufacturing defect” during normal preflight testing. This confirmed story, combined with the unconfirmed and questionable story above, suggests SpaceX needs to take a closer look at the Dragon heat shield design.

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Astroscale to deorbit OneWeb satellites, funded by the European Space Agency

9:23 am

Capitalism in space: Astroscale has obtained OneWeb as a major customer for its system to safely deorbit its defunct satellites, with the work partly funded by the European Space Agency (ESA). From the ESA press release:

There are currently two options for removing end-of-life OneWeb satellites from their orbits at the end of their predicted five to six years of service. Each has been allocated enough fuel to be able to actively deorbit at the end of its useful lifetime. But, in case of failure, each has also been built with either a magnetic or a grappling fixture [designed by Astroscale], so that a servicer spacecraft could collect and actively deorbit the satellite.

The servicer spacecraft that Astroscale will build and test is called “ELSA-M” and is planned for launch in 2024. The servicer spacecraft will be the first “space sweeper” capable of removing multiple defunct satellites from their orbits in a single mission.

Following this demonstration, Astroscale will offer a commercial service for clients that operate satellite constellations in low Earth orbit, providing the technology and capability to make in-orbit servicing part of routine satellite operations by 2030.

Apparently, the ESA will pay Astroscale a little less than $16 million to install its grappling fixture on OneWeb’s satellites as well as build and fly the test ELSA-M mission. Once that flight proves the technology by removing several satellites, OneWeb will be expected to pay for Astroscale’s services, as will any other satellite customers.

This deal gives Astroscale a significant leg up on any other junk removal companies, as it getting its grappling fixture in space on many satellites. If that fixture should become standard, it will allow Astroscale to become the dominate satellite junk removal company, at least for the near future.

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Engineers rethinking Ingenuity operations to keep it alive through the winter

9:07 am

The engineering team operating the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars have now determined that the cold oncoming winter temperatures on Mars are causing its systems to shut down during the night — at the edge of their designed temperature limits — and then reboot each morning, thus resetting its clock to the wrong time.

The result has been that the helicopter’s future is now definitely threatened. To address the cold winter temperatures and possibly keep Ingenuity alive, the engineers have come up with the following plan. First, they have focused on downloading from the helicopter all the remaining data still on-board, in case it shuts down permanently.

After all critical logs are transferred, the team will proceed with a recommissioning phase during which we will reestablish Ingenuity’s flight-readiness given our ongoing overnight cold-cycling. Like during the technology demonstration phase, we will perform a high-speed spin before proceeding to flight. Should Ingenuity receive a clean bill of health, we would be ready to execute a short sortie to the southwest in Flight 29. This flight will improve our radio link for approximately the next four to six months while Perseverance samples at the river delta.

In the meantime, the Ingenuity flight software team will be preparing a series of upgrades to enable advanced navigation features. These new capabilities will help Ingenuity ascend the river delta and continue its missions as a forward scout for Perseverance past winter.

All this effort will carry much greater risk, especially because Ingenuity is now operating far beyond its original planned capabilities, and the worst and coldest winter temperatures are yet to come. For the next three months or so the amount of sunlight available will be insufficient to power it as planned, and thus it will face a possibility of permanent failure almost every day. That 29th flight is thus likely critical to survival.

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First test flight of Momentus’s orbital tug has issues

8:49 am

Capitalism in space: According to a short press release from the company, tirst test flight of Momentus’s orbital tug — launched on a Falcon 9 on May 25th, has communications issues.

We have established two-way contact with the Vigoride Orbital Transfer Vehicle, and as is often the case with a new spacecraft, have had some initial anomalies. We are using an unplanned frequency as we work through this and are applying for a Special Temporary Authority (STA) with the FCC to address that in order to help command the vehicle back to nominal configuration. Our engineering and operations team is working to address the anomalies.

No further details have so far been released.

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SLS next dress rehearsal countdown scheduled for June 19th

8:44 am

NASA has now scheduled the next dress rehearsal countdown for its SLS rocket for around June 19th, with the rocket beginning its trip to the launch site on June 6th.

It appears the issues that prevented the completion of the dress rehearsal in April have all been addressed:

While inside the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), teams completed several major objectives, including assessing the liquid hydrogen system leak at the tail service mast umbilical, replacing the interim cryogenic propulsion stage (ICPS) gaseous helium system check valve and support hardware, and modifying the ICPS umbilical purge boots. The addition of hazardous gas detectors above the upper stage allows for additional visibility into any potential leaks during cryogenic operations.

Other than the rollout on June 6th, all future dates remain flexible, depending on what happens step-by-step.

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A high mountain inside Valles Marineris

6:12 pm

A high mountain inside Valles Marineris
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped, reduced, and annotated to post here, was taken on January 4, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the flat top of a mountain inside Candor Chasma, one of the side canyons of the solar system’s largest canyon, Valles Marineris.

The image was taken when the sun was about 32 degrees above the horizon, to the west, and thus apparently low enough to put the flat top mostly in shadow.

What is most spectacular about this photo is the sense of scale it portrays once you know the overall context. Note the many layered slope to the west. That slope will continue downward far beyond the left edge of this image, dropping for dozens of miles and about 13,000 feet. The overview map below makes this clearer.
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Part 2 of Elon Musk’s most recent tour of Starbase

10:37 am

Looking up from the bottom of the tower
Looking up from the bottom of the tower

Looking down from the top of the tower
Looking down from the top of the tower

Tim Dodd of Everyday Astronaut has now posted part two of his long and most recent tour of Starbase at Boca Chica with Elon Musk. This section is 33 minutes long, and takes us to the top of the new orbital launch tower that SpaceX will use to launch Starship and Superheavy, as well as eventually catch Superheavy upon its return.

Part 1 can be viewed here.

The two images to the right are screen captures from today’s tour.

I have embedded Part 2 below. It has the following interesting take-aways:

  • Musk: “At SpaceX, we specialize in converting the impossible into late.”
  • Musk and his engineers spent several minutes describing in detail how the tower’s chopsticks will work in conjunction with Superheavy as it comes down and the chopsticks grab it.
  • Musk also provided some details about the Starlink-2 satellites, explaining that it is impractical to launch them on Falcon 9, and thus Starship must become operational to fly them.
  • The tour not only stopped near the top of the tower to get a close look at the attachment points for the chopsticks, it went to the tower’s top, at 469 feet in the air, 106 feet taller than the Saturn-5 rocket.
  • In discussing how the economy is not zero sum, Musk revealed why he is at heart a conservative, and is slowly finding this out. That he still leaves out that forgotten word that makes this all possible, freedom, shows his journey is not quite complete.
  • Musk also added his thoughts on the importance of making human civilization multi-planetary. For him, it is really a question of survival.

» Read more

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Spaceflight’s Sherpa-AC tug successfully deploys satellites

9:49 am

Sherpa-AC

Capitalism in space: Spaceflight’s first orbital tug, dubbed Sherpa-AC and launched on SpaceX’s May 25th smallsat Falcon 9 mission, has successfully deployed its satellites as planned.

Spaceflight successfully delivered all five customer payloads, including two hosted payloads on the Sherpa OTV [Orbital Transfer Vehicle, or tug], to their desired orbital destinations.

The Transporter 5 mission marks Spaceflight’s 51st launch, its sixth in 2022, and the first launch of the Sherpa-AC OTV model. Sherpa-AC, named for its “Attitude Control” capabilities, augments Spaceflight’s base free-flying Sherpa with key functionality including a flight computer, attitude knowledge and control, and more, making it ideal for servicing hosted payloads on orbit.

Organizations on Spaceflight’s Transporter 5 mission include Xona Space’s Huginn mission, NearSpace Launch Inc.’s TROOP-3, MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Agile Micro Sat, and Missile Defense Agency’s CNCE Block 2.

The picture above, reduced to post here, shows Sherpa-AC as launched. According to Spaceflight’s webpage, Sherpa-AC can act either as the service module for a smallsat, providing power, attitude control, and communications, or as a tug, bringing the cubesat to its desired orbit and then deploying it. On this flight three cubesats were deployed, and two remain attached, using Sherpa-AC as their service module.

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