Tag: spaceflight

Dust storm in Jezero Crater

10:14 am

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Dust storm in Jezero Crater
Click for original image.

An update today from the science team for the Mars rover Perseverance included the picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here and taken by the rover on August 20, 2024. As the update noted,

It is dust-storm season on Mars! Over the past couple of weeks, as we have been ascending the Jezero Crater rim, our science team has been monitoring rising amounts of dust in the atmosphere. This is expected: Dust activity is typically highest around this time of the Martian year (early Spring in the northern hemisphere). The increased dust has made our views back toward the crater hazier than usual, and provided our atmospheric scientists with a great opportunity to study the way that dust storms form, develop, and spread around the planet.

The yellow lines on the overview map above indicate the approximate direction of the photo. The blue dot marks Perseverance’s present position, with the red dotted line its planned route and the white dotted line its actual travels.

At the moment this dust storm is localized to the region around Jezero Crater, and based on past seasonal dust storms, is not expected to expand to a global storm.

One comment

China lands its X-37B copycat reusable mini-shuttle

9:41 am

China’s state-run press today announced in a short statement that its X-37B copycat reusable mini-shuttle has landed after a 268 day mission.

This was the spacecraft’s third mission since 2020, with the second lasting 276 days and the first two days. All three missions have involved the release of secondary objects, with the last two flights including additional rendezvous maneuvers with one object. It is not clear if that object on this third flight was ever redocked or grabbed by the mini-shuttle for return to Earth. Such a recapture is thought to have occurred on the second flight.

Very little information about these flights has been released by China.

One comment

ESA releases images taken by BepiColombo during Mercury fly-by

9:29 am

Mercury as seen by BepiColombo September 4, 2024
Click for original image.

The European Space Agency (ESA) yesterday released images taken by the BepiColombo probe as it completed its fourth fly-by of Mercury on its long journey to enter orbit around that planet.

The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken four minutes after the closest approach of about 103 miles.

Four minutes after closest approach, a large ‘peak ring basin’ came into BepiColombo’s view. These mysterious craters – created by powerful asteroid or comet impacts and measuring about 130–330 km across – are called peak rings basins after the inner ring of peaks on an otherwise flattish floor.

This large crater is Vivaldi, after the famous Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741). It measures 210 km across, and because BepiColombo saw it so close to the sunrise line, its landscape is beautifully emphasised by shadow. There is a visible gap in the ring of peaks, where more recent lava flows have entered and flooded the crater.

BepiColombo still has two more fly-bys of Mercury to do before entering orbit in November 2026. At that time the spacecraft’s two orbiters, one from Europe and the other from Japan, will separate and take up complementary orbits.

2 comments

NASA requests industry proposals for its canceled satellite refueling demo mission

9:14 am

NASA today issued a request-for-information, asking the commercial aerospace industry for “alternate use” ideas for using the “flight hardware, test facilities, and experienced personnel” of its canceled satellite refueling demo mission, dubbed OSAM.

The request suggests NASA is hoping a private company will pick up the mission at its own cost, thus getting it off NASA’s hands. The agency canceled it because it is almost a decade behind schedule, hundreds of millions of dollars over-budget, and has an absurd workforce of 450 people. The agency is also under pressure from the Senate not to cancel the project, because our idiotic elected officials like to make-believe that funding these make-work projects accomplishes something.

Even if a private company takes on the project, if it does so at its own expense that workforce is certain to be reduced, possibly as much as 90%. No commercial satellite company is going to get saddled with that cost. It will want NASA to pay the bill.

Leave a comment

NASA confirms its giant solar sail is tumbling but doing so as planned

9:04 am

NASA today outlined the testing that its engineers are doing with the deployed 860 square foot Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (AC3), including the planned tumbling that an amateur astronomer detected based on the fluctuating brightness of the sail.

Currently orbiting Earth, the spacecraft can be seen with its reflective sails deployed from the ground. As part of the planned deployment sequence, the spacecraft began flying without attitude control just before the deployment of the booms. As a result, it is slowly tumbling as expected. Once the mission team finishes characterizing the booms and sail, they will re-engage the spacecraft’s attitude control system, which will stabilize the spacecraft and stop the tumbling. Engineers will then analyze flight dynamics before initiating maneuvers that will raise and lower the spacecraft’s orbit.

The release adds that NASA has added a feature to its mobile app that will help anyone spot the sail in the night sky.

Leave a comment

Czech government signs deal with Axiom to fly astronaut

8:58 am

The Czech government and the American space station company Axiom have now signed an agreement to fly Czech’s ESA astronaut Aleš Svoboda on a future spaceflight.

No date for the mission has been set, nor is it clear whether it will be an orbital mission or will dock with either ISS or Axiom’s own station once launched. The release also said nothing about a launch vehicle or spacecraft for transporting Svoboda into space, though that vehicle will almost certainly be a Falcon 9 and a Dragon capsule.

Leave a comment

China launches third batch of 10 satellites for proposed Starlink copycat constellation

8:51 am

China early this morning launched the third group of ten satellites for a proposed low-Earth-orbit internet constellation of nearly 6,000 satellites, proposed and built by a Chinese pseudo-company Geespace.

The company was created in 2018 and is backed by the Chinese automaker Geely. The Long March 6 rocket lifted off from China’s Taiyuan spaceport in northeast China. No word on where the rocket’s lower stages crashed.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

88 SpaceX
38 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 103 to 57, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 88 to 72.

Leave a comment

SpaceX completes its second launch today

8:46 pm

SpaceX tonight successfully placed a National Reconnaissance Office surveillance satellite into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.

This was also the second SpaceX launch today. The first stage on this evening’s launch completed its 20th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

88 SpaceX
37 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 103 to 56, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 88 to 71.

Leave a comment

Curiosity takes another look south into Gediz Vallis

2:18 pm

Looking south inside Gediz Vallis

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! As it has been more than a month since I lasted posted a cool landscape image from the Mars rover Curiosity, it seemed time to upload the panorama above, changed not at all to post here and taken by the rover’s right navigation camera on September 4, 2024.

The blue dot on the overview map to the right marks Curiosity’s present position. The yellow lines indicate the approximate direction of the panorama’s view. The red dotted line indicates Curiosity’s planned route, with the white dotted line marking its actual path. After spending most of the last month on a drilling campaign at the southernmost point of its travels, the science team had Curiosity retreat northward, where it will eventually head uphill to the west to swing around that mountain to head south in a parallel canyon.

The panorama looks into the slot canyon Gediz Vallis that Curiosity has been exploring for a little more than a year. The light colored mountains are what the scientists call the sulfate-bearing unit, a region on the higher slopes of Mount Sharp that is likely to have a very alien geology and chemistry, when compared to what is seen on Earth. Mount Sharp itself is beyond these peaks, not visible because it is about 26 miles away and blocked by these lower mountains.

Since landing on Mars a dozen years ago, the rover has traveled 20 miles and climbed about 2,500 feet. Getting to the top of Mount Sharp will therefore probably take more than one or two decades more of travel.

Leave a comment

Mars loses hydrogen at very different rates, depending on the planet’s distance from the Sun

11:37 am

Hubble uv images of Mars atmosphere
Click for original image.

Scientists using data from both the MAVEN Mars Orbiter and the Hubble Space Telescope have determined that the rate in which Mars loses hydrogen and deuterium varies considerably during the Martian year, with the rate going up rapidly when the red planet reaches its closest point to the Sun. The picture to the right, reduced to post here, shows the data from Hubble.

These are far-ultraviolet Hubble images of Mars near its farthest point from the Sun, called aphelion, on December 31, 2017 (top), and near its closest approach to the Sun, called perihelion, on December 19, 2016 (bottom). The atmosphere is clearly brighter and more extended when Mars is close to the Sun.

Reflected sunlight from Mars at these wavelengths shows scattering by atmospheric molecules and haze, while the polar ice caps and some surface features are also visible. Hubble and NASA’s MAVEN showed that Martian atmospheric conditions change very quickly. When Mars is close to the Sun, water molecules rise very rapidly through the atmosphere, breaking apart and releasing atoms at high altitudes.

From this data scientists will be better able to map out the overall loss rate of water on Mars over many billions of years.

One comment

China significantly expands its international partners for its planetary program

10:34 am

According to China’s state-run press, it has recently signed cooperative agreements with a significant number of new nations for either its International Lunar Research Station project (ILRS) or other deep space planetary missions.

During the opening ceremony of a two-day space conference held in Tunxi, east China’s Anhui Province on Thursday, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) and its counterpart in Senegal signed an agreement on International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) cooperation.

At the conference, China’s Deep Space Exploration Lab (DSEL) inked memoranda of understanding with 10 institutions from countries including Serbia, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Pakistan, Panama and South Africa. Also among the institutions are the Belt and Road Alliance for Science & Technology, the Foundation for Space Development Africa, and Africa Business Alliance.

Senegal is now the thirteenth nation to join China’s lunar base project, following Azerbaijan, Belarus, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Russia, Serbia, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, and Venezuela. That partnership also includes about eleven academic or governmental bureaucracies.

The agreements involving China’s deep space exploration involve other missions to other planets, with those nations either providing science instruments or some other contribution. That Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates have signed deals suggests there is a rising desire in the west to team up with China because of its general success in space, compared to the problems other nations often experience when dealing with NASA and the U.S. If so, the competition will certainly heat up in the coming years. I hope in this competition that American private enterprise can make up for the failures of our government.

One comment

Amateur astronomer detects changes in the reflective light coming off of NASA’s orbiting solar sail

10:20 am

Observations by amateur astronomer Marco Langbroek of Delft Technical University in the Netherlands has detected significant changes in the reflective light coming off of the giant orbiting solar sail that NASA engineers recently deployed in orbit.

I observed the Solar Sail again in the evening of September 1, 2024, and this time the brightness of the Solar Sail was quite different. As it rose in the south, it became very bright, reaching magnitude 0 (as bright as the brightest stars in the sky). It then faded again, and next displayed a slow brightness variation with multiple bright maxima and very faint minima.

…The brightness seems to indicate a slow cycle of around half a minute. … The brightness variation could be suggestive of a slow tumble or wobble (a gyration around an axis) that must have been initiated after August 29, when it appeared more steady (apart from a brief bright flare, probably due to a favourable sun-sail-observer geometry).

The sail, dubbed the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System, was launched on April 23rd, and after some initial technical issues it was deployed from its small cubesat on August 30th, expanding to 860 square feet.

The changes Langbroek detected have all occurred after that deployment, and suggest one of two things. Either the NASA engineers are testing the sail’s maneuverability, as planned, and thus the sunlight reflecting off it changes, or there is a problem controlling it that NASA has not yet revealed. We will have to wait to find out.

One comment

New questions raised about the rocket startup Relativity

10:06 am

Link here. Apparently Relativity has had a number of problems developing its proposed large Terran-R rocket using the 3D printing technology the company has specialized in.

According to internal documents reviewed by Ars, Relativity had difficulty printing pressure domes for the Terran R rocket. One of the documents references a “large buckling event” with a printed dome. As a result, Relativity seems likely to purchase these pressure domes from a European aerospace company.

The details provided for the status of Terran-R are somewhat vague. There are claims its size has been revised, and that the company is now outsourcing construction of some parts to European vendors, but none of this is described with any specificity. All in all however it does appear the rocket’s first launch is facing a delay from its 2026 targeted launch date. Earlier reports had suggested this, and this new report reinforces that sense.

I still wonder if Relativity might find much greater and more immediate success marketing its sophisticated 3D printing technology to other industries.

Leave a comment

China targets 2028 for its own Mars sample return mission

9:56 am

According to a report today in China’s state-run press, it now hopes to launch its own Mars sample return mission in 2028, dubbed Tianwen-3.

The report is very vague about the missions design. It notes that it will involve two launches, including “key technologies such as collecting samples on the Martian surface, taking off from the Red Planet, [and] rendezvous on the orbit around Mars.”

Based on China’s overall track record for its planetary program, it is likely that the launch will likely take place somewhat close to this schedule, though a delay of one or two years would not be unreasonable. If so, we are looking at either two or three different projects to bring Mars samples back to Earth at almost the same time.

The first is the NASA/ESA joint Mars sample return mission, which is presently far behind schedule with large cost overruns, all because the mission design has been haphazard and confusing. At the moment it involves an American lander, a European orbiter and return capsule, a Mars launch rocket to be built by Lockheed Martin, and at least one Mars helicopter. None of this however is certain, as NASA is right now asking industry for suggestions for redesigning the mission. It is presently hoping to bring its samples back sometime in the 2030s.

The second is this China mission, which appears to have some of the same planned components, which is not surprising considering China’s habit of copying or stealing other people’s ideas.

A third sample return mission might also be flown, by SpaceX using its Starship spaceship and Superheavy rocket. Both are built with Mars missions specifically in mind. SpaceX has also ready done work locating a preliminary landing zone. If so, it could possible attempt this mission at about the same time, independent of both China or NASA.

Or it might simply offer Starship as part of the redesigned NASA sample return mission. There is also the chance SpaceX would do both.

If I had to bet, I would say SpaceX (on its own) is the most likely to do this first, with China second. If SpaceX teams up with NASA then it will be a close race between NASA and China.

One comment

New Glenn’s 1st stage ocean-landing platform arrives in Florida

9:37 am

Jacklyn docked in Florida
Blue Origin image of Jacklyn platform
docked in Florida. Click for original image.

Blue Origin yesterday released images of the arrival at Port Canaveral in Florida of the landing platform, dubbed Jacklyn, to be used by the first stage of its New Glenn rocket when it returns to Earth.

Jacklyn is 380 feet long and 150 feet wide (116 by 46 meters), according to Space Offshore. It’s named after the mother of Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Blue Origin. (“Jacklyn” is a nickname, however; the ship’s legal moniker is “Landing Platform Vessel #1.)

Jacklyn is a new ship that was specially designed to be a New Glenn landing platform, Space Offshore reports. Construction on the ship began in Romania last year and wrapped up in Brest, France in the last month or so. Jacklyn departed Brest for Florida on Aug. 8.

The first launch of New Glenn is presently scheduled for October 13, 2024, and will carry two Rocket Lab-built Mars Orbiters for NASA. The launch window for these orbiters is only eight days, so there is not much margin in getting ready for that launch. The arrival of the platform in Florida in time for that launch suggests Blue Origin will attempt to land the first stage right from the start.

3 comments

NASA confirms Europa Clipper launch on October 10, 2024 with questionable transistors

9:21 am

NASA yesterday confirmed that it has decided to go ahead with the October 10, 2024 launch of its $5+ billion Europa Clipper mission to Jupiter, despite the installation of transistors on the spacecraft that the agency knows are not properly hardened for that harsh environment.

Those transistors were built by a German company as part of equipment used by the spacecraft’s electrical system. Apparently that company hired a subcontractor to furnish the transistors, which failed to make them to the right specifications. Subsequent testing found that it is quite likely that at least some of the transistors will fail when Europa Clipper reaches Jupiter orbit.

It appears that NASA decided that the issue risk was small enough for the mission to achieve its minimal expected results, and decided the cost of delay and bad publicity replacing the transistors before launch would be worse than the limited science payoff and bad publicity that would take place years hence, when those transistors fail.

Remember this story in in 2030 when Europa Clipper enters Jupiter orbit and begins to experience problems.

3 comments

SpaceX launches 21 Starlink satellites

9:06 am

SpaceX this morning successfully placed another 21 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

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

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

87 SpaceX
37 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 102 to 56, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies 87 to 71.

One comment

Arianespace successfully completes the last launch of Avio’s Vega rocket

9:29 pm

Tonight the last launch of the Vega rocket, built by the Italian company Avio and managed by Arianespace, successfully lifted off from French Guiana, placing a European Earth observation satellite into orbit.

The launch was delayed several years because of a failure during a previous launch that required a major redesign of an engine. Further delays took place when Avio literally lost the tanks for the rocket’s upper stage, and had to improvise a solution (which has never been explained fully).

The rocket will now be replaced by the Vega-C, which after several more launches will be entirely owned and managed by Avio, which will market it to satellite customers without any significant participation of the government middleman Arianespace.

This was only the second launch by Europe in 2024, so the leader board of the 2024 launch race does not change.

86 SpaceX
37 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 101 to 56, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies 86 to 71.

Leave a comment

A channel of ice, water, or lava?

12:31 pm

A channel of ice, water, or lava?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 16, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows one small section of a Martian canyon approximate 750 miles long and dubbed Elysium Fossae.

The canyon walls at this spot rise about 3,300 to 3,800 feet from the canyon floor. The canyon itself is thought to be what geologists call a graben, initially formed when the ground was pulled apart to form a large fissure.

That’s what happened at this location, at least to start. This canyon is on the lower western flank of the giant shield volcano Elysium Mons. The cracks, which radiate out outward from the volcano’s caldera, likely formed when pressure from magma below pushed upward, splitting the surface.

That formation process however does not fully explain everything.
» Read more

Leave a comment

European rocket startup Maiaspace to begin tests of upper stage engine in ’25

9:58 am

The European rocket startup Maiaspace, a subsidary of ArianeGroup, has announced it will begin static fire tests of the upper stage engine for its Maia rocket in 2025, with a planned first launch before the end of that year.

The first stage of Maia is intended to be reuseable, and has been under development by ArianeGroup for the European Space Agency (ESA) for years.

The rocket’s first stage will essentially be the Themis reusable booster demonstrator, which is also being developed by ArianeGroup under an ESA contract. Initial hop tests of the Themis demonstrator had been expected to begin this year at the Esrange Space Center in Sweden. However, the first test of the demonstrator is now not expected until 2025. MaiaSpace will, as a result, have very little wiggle room in its schedule if it is to conduct an inaugural launch attempt next year.

Transitioning this first stage to a wholly private operation will certainly speed up its development, but the transition will take time.

Leave a comment

Sierra Space completes acoustic testing of Shooting Star cargo module that will fly on first Dream Chaser launch

9:45 am

Sierra Space today announced that it has successfully completed acoustic testing of the Shooting Star cargo module that will fly on first ISS mission of its Tenacity Dream Chaser mini-shuttle.

During the Direct Field Acoustic Test (DFAN), the test team placed stacks of purpose-built loudspeakers – each one a highly-engineered acoustic device – in 21-ft-tall columns surrounding the spacecraft. Their goal was to test whether the structural elements of Shooting Star could withstand the acoustic environment of a launch on a Vulcan Centaur rocket. Over a four-day period, test engineers blasted the spacecraft with a controlled sound field that was 10,000x higher intensity than the volume of a typical rock concert, recreating the sonic intensity of a launch. Shooting Star withstood acoustic levels greater than 140 dB for several minutes at a time, proving its flight worthiness.

The press release however made no mention as to when the launch will actually take place. Sierra first got the contract to build Dream Chaser in 2016, and was supposed to make its first flight in 2020. That launch has been repeatedly delayed, and is now four years behind schedule. Supposedly it was to take place this year on the second launch of ULA’s Vulcan rocket in the spring of 2024, but was removed from that launch because of delays in preparing Tenacity for launch.

As of today, no new launch date has been announced, and though Sierra says Tenacity will be ready for launch by the end of this year, don’t expect it to happen before 2025.

3 comments

Private company launches small test rocket from privately run sea-based platform

9:30 am

The rocket startup Evolotion Space on August 31, 2024 successfully launched a small test rocket from privately run sea-based platform operated by the Spaceport Company, a startup in itself.

The launch itself did not appear to reach space, but was instead designed to test both the rocket and the sea platform’s operation.

The experiment occurred approximately 30 miles south of Mississippi in the Gulf of Mexico. The test served to validate The Spaceport Company’s sea-based launch equipment and ground support equipment, said the company’s CEO and founder Tom Marotta. “Emerging hypersonic technologies require additional and larger test ranges to accommodate higher cadence testing campaigns,” he said. “With this new commercial facility, we will alleviate the burdens on government ranges and enable at-sea test environments that existing land-based ranges are unable to provide.”

The solid-fueled rocket meanwhile is being developed by Evolution to initially do hypersonic testing for the military.

Leave a comment

NASA asks space industry for proposals on using the shelved Janus probes on mission to Apophis

9:23 am

NASA has now put out a request for proposals from the space industry for refitting the two Janus planetary probes, whose asteroid mission was shelved when its launch as a secondary payload was delayed due to problems with the Psyche primary payload, as a mission to the asteroid Apophis in connection with its April 13, 2029 close approach to the Earth.

NASA has been studying this new mission goal since early 2023, but apparently had failed to come up with a plan. It is now asking the private sector for suggestions on getting it done, including finding the funding for any plans.

3 comments

Russia claims its next unmanned Moon mission, Luna-26, is on schedule

9:09 am

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

According to Russia’s state-run press, its next unmanned Moon mission, Luna-26, is on schedule for a planned launch in 2027, though that press also claims the launch may happen in 2026 instead.

The problem with this claim is that Russia had for years said that this lunar orbiter would launch by 2025. As expected, the mission has not launched on time, as have all of Russia’s 21st century lunar exploration plans. For example, the previous lunar mission, the Luna-25 lunar lander, was originally supposed to land on the Moon in 2021, was not launched until 2023, and ended up crashing on the Moon when the spacecraft did not function properly during a engine burn in lunar orbit.

In the first phase of the so-called China-Russian partnership to explore the Moon, is shown by the 2021 graph to the right, China continues to do all the heavy lifting, and do so pretty much on the schedule predicted. Russian meanwhile continues to do what I predicted back in 2021, get nothing done on time and when launched have problems.

Leave a comment

A frozen Martian splash

11:31 am

A frozen Martian splash
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and enhanced to post here, was taken on July 11, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the southeast quadrant of a three-mile-wide unnamed crater that is surrounded on all sides by a dramatic but frozen splash apron of material, created when this impact occurred.

The rim rises between 200 to 400 feet from the surrounding plains, while the crater floor drops 700 feet to sit below those plains by 300 to 500 feet. In other words, that splash apron contains the material that was thrown up when the bolide drilled into the plain at impact, leaving behind this deep hole.

Why such a dramatic splash apron? Its existence suggests that the ground here was muddy, with a lot of water ice likely present. The location and wider context helps confirm this guess.
» Read more

Leave a comment

Two-lobed asteroid imaged by radar

10:04 am

Two-lobed asteroid
Click for original image.

During the August 18, 2024 first close fly-by of a potentially-dangerous asteroid only discovered back in May, astronomers used the Goldstone dish in California to produce the high resolution radar images shown in the picture to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here.

The images were captured when the asteroid was at a distance of 2.8 million miles (4.6 million kilometers), about 12 times the distance between the Moon and Earth.

Discovered by the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey in Tucson, Arizona, on May 4, the near-Earth asteroid’s shape resembles that of a peanut – with two rounded lobes, one lobe larger than the other. Scientists used the radar images to determine that it is about 980 feet (300 meters) long and that its length is about double its width. Asteroid 2024 JV33 rotates once every seven hours.

Asteroids formed as contact binaries, once considered the stuff of science fiction, have now been found to be relatively common, comprising about 14% of the near Earth asteroids larger than 700 feet across that have been radar-imaged. The refined orbital data suggests this asteroid might be a dead comet, though that conclusion is unconfirmed. That orbital data also tells us that though this object has the potential of hitting the Earth, it will not do so “for the foreseeable future.”

4 comments

Largest corporate investor in rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg finalized deal to go private

9:12 am

The German company OHB, the largest corporate investor in the German rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg, has finalized its deal with the investment company KKR to go private and delist OHB from the German stock market.

OHB announced in August 2024 the deal where KKR would buy shares not owned by the Fuchs family for 44 euros ($48.70) per share. Under the deal, the Fuchs family will maintain its controlling 65.4% ownership of OHB while KKR owns 28.6%. That combined 94% ownership will allow OHB to delist from the exchange, effectively taking the company private.

It appears that both companies are committed to OHB’s investment in Rocket Factory, and by getting OHB delisted it gives them greater flexibility in doing so. It also appears that Marco Fuchs, the CEO of OHB, had decided in the last few years that for rocket startups being a public company was counter-productive in many ways.

“We saw all these SPACs fail. We see very different valuations out there. So, it’s not a good place to be, in the public market, especially in the core business model of doing space projects,” he said at the Space Tech Expo Europe conference. “It’s not exactly what capital markets appreciate.”

In a sense, this deal appears to be a show of support for Rocket Factory, even though its first launch is seriously delayed due to a recent failed static fire test of its first stage that destroyed the stage.

Leave a comment

That sonar-type sound heard on Starliner’s speakers was simply feedback

9:01 am

In a short post today NASA noted that the mysterious sonar-type sound heard on Starliner’s speakers over the weekend was nothing more than simple feedback caused by an “audio configuration between the space station and Starliner” and that the sound stopped when that configuration was adjusted.

The space station audio system is complex, allowing multiple spacecraft and modules to be interconnected, and it is common to experience noise and feedback. The crew is asked to contact mission control when they hear sounds originating in the comm system. The speaker feedback Wilmore reported has no technical impact to the crew, Starliner, or station operations

In other words, this is not a rare event, and from the beginning was not considered by the astronauts, ground engineers, or NASA management to be a matter of concern. The fix was apparently simple and straightforward, and is part of the work done whenever any new vehicle gets docked and tied into ISS’s systems.

It appears however to have caused many in the news media and in the space world to go nuts simply because it was linked to Starliner and Boeing. This is similar to the recent pattern of assigning all blame to Boeing whenever any Boeing-built plane has technical problems, even if that plane had been purchased by the airline decades earlier and its maintenance was solely the responsibility of the airline for that long.

Boeing is definitely a company in trouble, on many levels. We shouldn’t however look for problems there in the company when they clearly don’t exist.

29 comments

China launches “remote-sensing satellites” test satellites

8:51 am

China today successfully placed a classified “group” of “remote-sensing satellites” into orbit to test “new technologies of low-orbit constellations,” its Long March 4B lifting off from the Xichang spaceport in the southwest of China.

That is all the information that China’s state-run press released. No word was released as to where
in China the lower stages crashed. As to the number of satellites launched, according to this independent site, the launch had nine payloads, which suggests but does not confirm nine satellites.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

86 SpaceX
37 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 101 to 55, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies 86 to 70.

Leave a comment

Sunspot update: The Sun continues to boom!

12:02 pm

It is time for my monthly sunspot update, taking NOAA’s most recent update of its monthly graph tracking the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere and adding my own analysis as well as some additional details to provide the larger context.

During August the Sun continued to confound the experts, with the number of sunspots not only greater than July’s high count. the August count exceeded the numbers from December 2001 (215.5 vs 213.4), the last time the Sun was this active.

None of the predictions by anyone in the solar science community had predicted this level of activity.
» Read more

14 comments
1 … 15 16 17 18 19 … 468