Tag: spaceflight

A galaxy with a halo and a stupendous central black hole

9:22 am

A galaxy with a halo and a stupendous black hole
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a survey of galaxies that have what astronomers call active galactic nuclei (AGNs). This galaxy, dubbed IC 4709, is about 240 million light years away.

If IC 4709’s core were just filled with stars, it would not be nearly so bright. Instead it hosts a gargantuan black hole, 65 million times the mass of our Sun. A disc of gas spirals around and eventually into this black hole, with the gas crashing together and heating up as it spins. It reaches such high temperatures that it emits vast quantities of electromagnetic radiation, from infrared to visible to ultraviolet light and beyond — in this case including X-rays. The AGN in IC 4709 is obscured by a lane of dark dust, just visible at the centre of the galaxy in this image, which blocks any optical emission from the nucleus itself.

To get a very vague sense of scale, this supermassive black hole is more than sixteen times more massive than the relatively inactive supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way. This imagery and data from Hubble will help astronomers better understand the interaction between the black hole and its surrounding galaxy.

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Due to thruster problem, the Mercury orbiter BepiColombo will arrive at Mercury almost one year late

9:05 am

The joint ESA and JAXA Mercury mission BepiColombo will now reach its destination eleven months late because its ion electric thrusters are producing less thrust than expected.

The spacecraft is actually made up of two orbiters, one built by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the second built by Japan’s space agency JAXA. During launch and the journey to Mercury each is attached to a third spacecraft called the Mercury Transfer Module (MTM), which has the large electric ion thrusters used for making the mid-course corrections prior to and after each fly-by of the Earth (once), Venus (twice), and Mercury (six) before finally entering orbit around Mercury. It has already completed the Earth, Venus and three Mercury fly-bys.

In April 2024 engineers discovered that during a mid-course correction on April 26st the MTM’s thrusters failed to produce the desired thrust.

Engineers identified unexpected electric currents between MTM’s solar array and the unit responsible for extracting power and distributing it to the rest of the spacecraft. Onboard data imply that this is resulting in less power available for electric propulsion. ESA’s BepiColombo Mission Manager, Santa Martinez explains: “Following months of investigations, we have concluded that MTM’s electric thrusters will remain operating below the minimum thrust required for an insertion into orbit around Mercury in December 2025.”

In order not to lose the mission entirely, the science team has come up with a new trajectory that will have it fly past Mercury on its fourth fly-by on September 4, 2024 only 103 miles above the surface, 22 miles closer than originally planned. This will give it a larger slingshot speed boost to help make up for the under-powered thrusters. It will then make its planned fifth and sixth Mercury fly-bys in December ’24 and January ’25, the adjusted route having it arrive in Mercury orbit eleven months later than planned, in November 2026.

This new plan however means that the pictures taken this week during the Mercury fly-by will provide some nice high resolution details, far better than those produced by the earlier fly-bys.

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Rocket startup ABL lays off a significant number of staff

9:52 am

As a result of a launchpad fire that destroyed its rocket — just before it was going to make the second attempt to achieve orbit — rocket startup ABL has now laid off a significant but unstated number of staff in order to save money.

In a post on LinkedIn Aug. 30, Harry O’Hanley, chief executive of ABL, said the company was laying off an unspecified number of people. He included the email he sent to company staff after an all-hands meeting to discuss the layoffs.

In 2021 the company had raised almost $400 million in private investment capital, but it is possible that the loss of its first two rockets, one mere seconds after launch and the second before the launch could even occur, has possibly caused some investors to pull their money from the company. It is also possible those investors also recognized that the increased red tape imposed on all rocket companies since the FAA instituted its new “streamlined” Part 450 regulatory rules in 2021 was likely going to delay the next ABL launch attempt so much it made investments in the company no longer viable.

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SpaceX resumes launches with a bang!

9:29 am

Within hours of the FAA clearing SpaceX to resume launches, the company did so most emphatically, launching twice in little more than an hour apart from opposite coasts.

First the company placed 20 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral. The first stage completed its eighteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

Then, one hour and five minutes later, the company launched 21 Starlink satellites, the Falcon 9 lifting off from Vandenberg in California. That first stage completed its ninth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

This fast return to flight underlines the unnecessary delay of at least one day in launches caused by the FAA’s red tape. SpaceX had scheduled at least one of these launches the previous night — and was clearly ready to launch — but had to cancel it because the FAA stood in the way.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

86 SpaceX
36 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 101 to 54, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies 86 to 69.

2024 is now the second year in a row the U.S. rocket industry has completed more than 100 launches, something it could not do for the first three-quarters of a century after Sputnik, when our precious government used NASA to run our entire space program. Now that freedom and capitalism has managed to wrest some control away from NASA, Americans are finally doing what they would have done in the 1960s, had Congress and President Kennedy not stepped in, first requiring all space exploration be run under a “space program” controlled by NASA, and then passing the Communications Satellite Act in 1962 which forbid Americans from running private profit-oriented launches without government participation.

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FAA gets out of the way

8:54 pm

My heart be still! The FAA today cleared SpaceX to resume launches, after grounding its fleet for two days because a Falcon 9 first stage, flying on its 23rd launch and having successfully placed 21 satellites into orbit, fell over after landing softly on its drone ship in the Atlantic.

The FAA statement was short but to my mind illustrates again the growing effort of the administrative state to require Americans to obtain its permission to do anything at all.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 vehicle may return to flight operations while the overall investigation of the anomaly during (Wednesday’s) mission remains open, provided all other license requirements are met. SpaceX made the return to flight request on Aug. 29 and the FAA gave approval on Aug. 30.

That the FAA even grounded SpaceX for one second, and then required SpaceX to ask permission to fly again, is all unacceptable and a great abuse of power. There was no reason for this grounding at all. Even as the FAA announced it two days ago the agency admitted the failed landing posed no threat to the public. It should have immediately said the company had every right to continue flying.

Even though there are people at the FAA with good intentions, the overall trend there and everywhere within that Washington bureaucracy is to expand its power, to make demands of Americans in every way, and to insist it must be the gatekeeper for any action by any American. Only today for example the FDA declared unilaterally that all retailers now have to obtain photo ID from anyone under thirty who wishes to buy tobacco. It claims it has the right to mandate this based on a legislation passed in 2019, but without question this is a very liberal interpretation of that law, which merely raised the minimum age for buying tobacco from 18 to 21. I am sure it did not give the FDA the outright ability to declare such mandates without any review by anyone.

Power grabs like this are only going to get worse, unless Americans vote in new legislators and support them when they act to neuter these agencies. It remains however strongly doubtful whether most Americans are willing to do this. It would require a love of freedom and the risks it entails to abandon the regulatory state, and right now I don’t think most people have that kind of courage. They have grown used to having a big daddy acting to protect them, and appear willing to accept that gentle tyranny more and more.

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A cliff of ice on Mars

12:56 pm

A cliff of ice on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on April 10, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the southern nose of a large plateau located in the deep south of Mars, at 63 degrees south latitude. This cliff is only about 20-25 feet high, but within that small distance orbital imagery as revealed what appears to be an underground layer of ice. When this photo was released in late June, it came with a short caption, which noted:

On these steep scarps, ice can still be seen on the south facing walls of the scarp towards the end of the Southern Hemisphere’s winter.

Note the white sections on that cliff wall, both inside and outside the color strip. The surrounding orange suggests dust and sand. This photo suggests that during the dark winter underground ice leaches out on these slopes, and is then sublimated away when the Sun returns in the spring. Since the south-facing walls remain in shadow the longest, the ice there lasts the longest, leaving behind these patches we see now.

It is also possible that this is not water ice and there is no underground ice layer. Instead, this might be the last leftover of the dry ice mantle that falls as snow and covers all of the Martian high latitudes during the winter, and then sublimates away come spring.
» Read more

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The battle between a Brazil judge and Starlink/X escalates

9:55 am

After Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court (STF) Justice Alexandre De Moraes froze Starlink bank accounts in Brazil in order to guarantee payments of fines he imposed on X because it refused to obey his commmand to censor some users, Elon Musk has responded defiantly and with force.

Starlink said Thursday that it will challenge De Moraes’ decision regarding the company’s bank accounts. “The order is based on an unfounded determination that Starlink is liable for the fines levied against X. It was issued in secret and without giving Starlink any of the due process guaranteed by the Brazilian Constitution. We intend to address the matter legally,” the company argued.

De Moraes’ deadline to appoint a new legal representative of X ended at 8.07 pm Thursday and, as expected, it was not complied with. In this scenario, the next step would be to suspend the social network in the country, for which there is still no deadline. X said in a statement that it would not comply with the judge’s “illegal decisions” aimed at “censoring“ De Moraes’ ”political opponents.”

“When we tried to defend ourselves in court, the minister threatened to arrest our legal representative in Brazil. Even after his resignation, he froze all his bank accounts. Our challenges against his manifestly illegal actions were rejected or ignored. Minister Alexandre De Moraes’ colleagues on the Supreme Court are either unable or unwilling to confront him,” X underlined while announcing it would be disclosing the judge’s confidential decisions against the company. X “does not comply with illegal orders in secret,” the company stressed.

“We are absolutely not insisting that other countries have the same free speech laws as the United States. The fundamental issue at stake here is that Justice Alexandre De Moraes is demanding that we violate Brazil’s own laws. We simply won’t do that,” the company added.

Musk has also pointed out that Starlink is an entirely different company than X. Musk has said that since its bank accounts are presently frozen, it will provide its users service for free, since “Many remote schools and hospitals depend on SpaceX’s Starlink.” He however soon expects De Moraes to shut down this service soon as well. He has also called De Moraes an “”an outright criminal” whom he expects to end up behind bars someday for his censorious and illegal rulings.

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NASA names revised crew for next manned Dragon mission to ISS

9:34 am

NASA today named the two astronauts who will fly on the next manned Dragon mission to ISS, to be launched on September 24, 2024 for a six month mission, where they will be joined by the two astronauts who launched on Boeing’s Starliner in June but now will return with them when their Freedom capsule returns in February 2025.

NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov will launch no earlier than Tuesday, Sept. 24, on the agency’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission to the International Space Station. NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson, previously announced as crewmates, are eligible for reassignment on a future mission. Hague and Gorbunov will fly to the space station as commander and mission specialist, respectively, as part of a two-crew member flight aboard a SpaceX Dragon.

The updated crew complement follows NASA’s decision to return the agency’s Boeing Crew Flight Test uncrewed and launch Crew-9 with two unoccupied seats. NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched aboard the Starliner spacecraft in June, will fly home with Hague and Gorbunov in February 2025.

With Starliner now scheduled to return on September 6th and Freedom not arriving until around September 24th, there will be an eighteen day period when Wilmore and Williams will have a limited and more risky lifeboat option on ISS. If an incident should occur that requires station evacuation there is room to squeeze them inside SpaceX’s Endeavour Dragon capsule presently docked there, but they will return without flight suits. Their Dragon flight suits will not arrive until September 24th, on the next Dragon. The suits they used on Starliner will not work on Dragon.

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First New Glenn launch, set for October 13, 2024, only has an 8-day launch window

9:16 am

According to an article from Aviation Week today, in order for Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket to get its payload of two Mars orbiters on their way to Mars it must launch within a very short window lasting only eight days, beginning on the present launch date of October 13, 2024.

The Oct. 13-21 launch window is an ambitious goal. The aft and mid modules of New Glenn’s reusable first stage were recently attached, clearing the path for installation of the vehicle’s seven methane-fueled BE-4 engines, CEO Dave Limp noted in an Aug. 23 update on the X social media site.

A static hot-fire at New Glenn’s Florida launch complex is planned prior to launch. The company did not release the status of the New Glenn upper stage, which is to be powered by a pair of BE-3U engines fueled by liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. A hot-fire of the second stage is also pending.

This launch will be the first ever for New Glenn. To get ready for that tight launch window it appears a great deal of work must be done in the next six weeks, some of which Blue Origin engineers will be doing for the very first time.

If there are any issues and that launch window is missed, the two NASA Escapade orbiters, built by Rocket Lab, will face a two-year delay until the next window to get to Mars re-opens. At that point New Glenn will likely do this launch with a dummy payload, since it needs to get off the ground in order to fulfill other launch contracts, including a 27-launch contract with Amazon for its Kuiper satellite constellation.

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NASA solar sail successfully deploys

9:03 am

After experiencing a technical issue that initially delayed deployment, NASA engineers have now successfully deployed the boom of the 860-square-foot solar sail that had been launched in a cubesat only about four feet in size.

NASA’s Advanced Composite Solar Sail System is now fully deployed in space after a successful test of its sail-hoisting boom system. Mission operators confirmed success at 1:33 p.m. EDT (10:33 a.m. PDT) on Thursday, Aug. 29, after receiving data from the spacecraft. Centrally located aboard the spacecraft are four cameras which captured a panoramic view of the reflective sail and supporting composite booms. High-resolution imagery from these cameras will be available on Wednesday, Sept. 4.

The next step will be to test the sail’s ability to maneuver in space, including raising and lowering its orbit using the pressure of sunlight, just like sailboats use the wind.

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NASA awards Intuitive Machines a new lunar lander contract

8:55 am

NASA yesterday announced that it has awarded Intuitive Machines a new lunar lander contract for $116.9 million to carry six NASA/ESA payloads to the surface of the Moon.

The announcement stated that the landing will be in the south pole region of the Moon, but did not reveal the specific location. Of the six science packages, the most important is a European Space Agency-led drill that will obtain samples from as much as three feet down and then analyze them.

The contract calls for a 2027 landing, and will be the fourth targeting the south pole region, following Intuitive Machines first attempted landing there early this year that landed but then tipped over, preventing its science instruments from functioning as planned.

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Starliner to return unmanned on September 6

8:44 am

NASA today announced that Starliner will undock from ISS on September 6, 2024 at about 6:00 PM (Eastern) and will then land six hours later at White Sands in New Mexico.

The announcement touts Starliner’s ability to fly autonomously, but based on what we know this is really not something to brag about. All Dragons do this routinely whether they are manned or not. Starliner required an upload of software to reconfirgure it for this, since it had originally been configured for a manned return and apparently that original software was not designed for an unmanned return.

In other words, the spacecraft as presently designed doesn’t have the ability to switch from autonomous to manned in a simple manner.

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Changing Martian slope streaks

12:27 pm

Changing slope streaks on Mars
Click here, here, and here for original images.

Overview map

Time for some cool images from Mars taken over a dozen years! The three pictures above were taken, from left to right, in 2012, 2020, and 2024 and show the same exact Martian terrain. The first two pictures were photographed by the lower resolution context camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The rightmost picture was taken on May 20, 2024 by MRO’s high resolution camera.

The white dot on the overview map to the right marks the location, in the middle of the vast lava flood plains found between Mars’ giant volcanos and north of the Medusae Fossae Formation, the largest volcanic ash deposit on Mars. The 1,200-foot-high mesa pictured above, its peak indicated by the red dot, is part of a group of such mesas that either represent the peaks of a mountain range now mostly buried by lava, or volcanic vents pushed up when those eruptions were occurring more than a billion years ago.

The focus of these pictures however is not volcanism, but the numerous slope streaks seen on the mesa slopes. Note how the 2012 earliest streaks are still visible in 2024, but have faded. Note also how there appears to have been no new streaks since 2020.

Slope streaks are a geological feature unique to Mars that at the moment remain unexplained. At first glance they appear to be a landslide of some kind, but years of orbital study has shown they do not change the topography at all, they never have debris piles at their base, and the streaks even sometimes actually flow up and over small rises in the slopes. They occur randomly throughout the year, and as seen above, over time fade.

Recent research has suggested their formation is related to dust avalanches triggered by dust storms, conclusions that are strengthened by the fact that slope streaks are generally found on dusty slopes, which in this case makes sense as the location is in the dry Martian tropics. That these dust avalanches do not change the topography at all, merely staining it, while sometimes actually flowing up and over rises, illustrates how Mars’ one-third gravity and thin, cold atmosphere makes things happen that are impossible on Earth.

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Has the FAA grounded SpaceX?

9:59 am

The FAA statement yesterday seemed quite clear — that the agency was grounding all SpaceX launches until the investigation into the failed landing of a Falcon 9 first stage was completed. That clarity was further accepted by numerous news organizations today, all of which clearly described in their reporting the FAA’s action as a grounding of further SpaceX launches for an unspecified amount of time, from days to weeks. (See here, here, and here for just a few examples.)

Nonetheless, there are strong indications that the FAA’s grounding will be very short. For example, though no dates are presently firm, SpaceX continues to list at least two Starlink launches as well as the Polaris Dawn private manned mission as targeting launches over the next few days, with one Starlink launch still aiming for a 10:18 pm (Pacific) launch tonight from Vandenberg. That liftoff might be tentative, but that SpaceX is still pushing for that launch date suggests it is trying to pressure the FAA to back off.

And SpaceX has good reason to expect that pressure to work. The FAA has already admitted there were no public safety issues from the first stage failure. In the past it has allowed launches to proceed under that condition, even if the investigation was on-going. SpaceX is almost certainly making this point known to the FAA, if its managers don’t know it already. We will find out I think by the end of today.

Even if the FAA backs down, that it even attempted any grounding in this situation was an egregious abuse of its regulatory power. There was no rational reason for it to even hint at doing so, even based on its own regulations as well as its statutory authority. If the goal was to do its job and not to harass SpaceX and Elon Musk, it would have immediately announced that no grounding was required because no issues of public safety were involved in the failure. Instead, it pushed its power, forcing SpaceX to push back.

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Lockheed Martin testing its own inflatable module design

9:40 am

Lockheed Martin recently successfully completed a test of its own inflatable module design, conceived in this case not as a full-scale module but as an airlock for ingress and egress from a space station.

In the Aug. 14 test, the inflatable airlock design was put through multiple, gas-in/gas-out cycles — essentially inflations and deflations with enough nitrogen gas to pressurize the airlock to the point it becomes as rigid as steel — to assess the extent to which its Vectran material strains over time, a process called creep. Knowing how creep affects a Vectran structure will allow Lockheed Martin to properly assess its operational life potential. Test engineers here have also put subscale softgoods habitat designs to the test, purposely bursting them to spotlight their robust nature and determine their pressure thresholds.

With the addition of Lockheed Martin, there are now at least four companies building inflatable modules for sale to space station companies. Sierra Space has the most developed module design, but a company in India recently announced it will build and sell its own. In addition, an American startup dubbed Max Space is building its own test module and hopes to launch next year.

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NASA leans toward launching Europa Clipper as scheduled, despite transistor issue

9:26 am

Though the final decision will be made in early September, NASA revealed today in a short post that management is leaning towards launching the multi-billion Europa Clipper mission as scheduled on October 10, 2024, despite a very recently discovered transistor issue where the transistors were not properly hardened in construction for the harsh radiation environment surrounding Jupiter.

The next major milestone for Clipper is Key Decision Point E on Monday, Sept. 9, in which the agency will decide whether the project is ready to proceed to launch and mission operations. NASA will provide more information at a mission overview and media briefing targeted for that same week.

The Europa Clipper mission team recently conducted extensive testing and analysis of transistors that help control the flow of electricity on the spacecraft. Analysis of the results suggests the transistors can support the baseline mission. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted sentence suggests NASA officials have weighed the option between launching on time with a limited ability to do science once at Jupiter versus delaying the launch years to fix the transistors, and are now favoring the former option. The cost of delay would be high and long, and NASA officials might believe the bad press for that option would be much greater than a mission that only achieves its bare minimum results. For example, to admit publicly that NASA installed transistors that were not space-hardened when that necessity has been known about since the 1960s would be as embarrassing to the agency as it was for Boeing when it discovered it had installed flammable tape in its Starliner capsule. NASA management might be leaning to letting a flawed multi-billion dollar project launch, knowing its capabilities are quite limited, in order to avoid that embarrassment.

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Chinese pseudo-company launches six satellites from off-shore barge

9:12 am

The Chinese pseudo-company Galactic Energy today completed a launch of six satellites, its Ceres-1 rocket lifting off from a barge off the coast of northeast China.

China’s state-run press once again illustrated how fake these pseudo companies are, in that it made no mention of the company in its official report, stating simply that the launch was completed by “China.” The companies might raise investment capital funds and sign contracts and make profits, but in the end they only do what they are told to do by the Chinese communists, and at any point those communists can confiscate the company for the government’s own purposes.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

84 SpaceX
36 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 99 to 54, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies 84 to 69.

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FAA grounds SpaceX because of first stage landing failure early today

1:36 pm


“Great business you got there! Really be
a shame if something happened to it!”

They’re coming for you next: Once again the FAA has expanded its harassment of SpaceX by now grounding the company from any further launches while it “investigates” the failed landing of a Falcon 9 first stage last night. The FAA statement is as follows:

“The FAA is aware an anomaly occurred during the SpaceX Starlink Group 8-6 mission that launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on August 28,” the FAA said Wednesday in a statement. “The incident involved the failure of the Falcon 9 booster rocket while landing on a droneship at sea. No public injuries or public property damage have been reported. The FAA is requiring an investigation.”

The FAA’s actions against SpaceX since Biden became president have consistently been unprecedented and biased against the company. » Read more

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Evidence of Martian near-surface ice in an unusual location

11:48 am

Evidence of Martian near-surface ice in an unusual location
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 27, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled merely as a terrain sample, it was likely taken not as part of any specific research request, but to fill a gap in the camera’s picture-taking schedule so as to maintain its proper temperature.

The picture however shows features that help confirm earlier research into the near-surface ice believed to permeate Mars’ middle latitudes. The knobby flat terrain both inside and outside of the crater resembles what scientists have labeled “brain terrain”, an as-yet unexplained geological feature unique to Mars and usually associated with near-surface ice and the glacial features found above 30 degrees latitude.

This 1.4-mile-wide unnamed crater is located at 40 degrees north latitude, so expecting near-surface ice or glacial features here is not unreasonable. The location however is different for other reasons, that make this data more intriguing.
» Read more

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Musk: Starlink will be made available to all cell phones in emergencies

9:34 am

Elon Musk has announced that SpaceX will make its Starlink internet constellation available to anyone with a cell phone should they need it during an emergency in remote areas.

The SpaceX CEO made the comments in an X post as the company, in partnership with T-Mobile, currently seeks approval from the Federal Communications Commission to operate its direct-to-cellular Starlink technology commercially. SpaceX says the satellite-based service would provide supplemental cell coverage to Americans from space that would close mobile “dead zones.” Cellular service providers AT&T and Verizon have raised concerns about the technology, including that it would disrupt their own mobile networks.

In a letter to the FCC on Friday, SpaceX said the service would connect first responders in a variety of environments and would be able to send wireless emergency alerts to everyone — not just T-Mobile customers — in places where there is no earth-based cellular coverage.

While this offer is morally correct, it is also good politics, as it acts as icing on the cake to encourage the FCC to approve that T-Moble license request. At the moment the technical details for making the proposal happen remain murky, but SpaceX’s willingness to offer this emergency service at no charge, something its competitors have apparently not, cannot hurt it in its negotiations with the FCC.

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SpaceX launches 21 Starlink satellites but loses first stage at landing

8:44 am

SpaceX last night successfully placed 21 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in the early morning hours.

The first stage however fell over on its drone ship in the Atlantic after landing. This was its 23rd flight, which would have been a record reuse of a Falcon 9 booster had it landed successfully. Because of this failure, SpaceX rescheduled another Starlink launch, delaying it one day until August 30, 2024, as engineers assessed the stage data to determine the cause of the problem. From the video is appears that one leg on the far side, out of sight, either failed to deploy or collapsed after landing.

To be clear, SpaceX anticipates only a one day delay in all its launches because of this issue.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

84 SpaceX
35 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 99 to 53, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies 84 to 68.

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Manned Polaris Dawn launch delayed due to weather

9:13 pm

SpaceX tonight scrubbed the launch of Jared Isaacman’s manned Polaris Dawn orbital mission due to poor weather predicted in the splashdown zones off the coast of Florida when the mission would have ended.

The flight has tentatively set now for August 30, 2024, but that remains a very preliminary date.

SpaceX however is not sitting on its hands while it waits for good weather for this manned mission. Tonight it has two Starlink launches scheduled a little more than an hour apart, one from Cape Canaveral in Florida followed by the second from Vandenberg in California. If the first launch is successful its Falcon 9 first stage will set a new record, flying for its 23rd time.

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NASA IG: NASA’s effort to build new SLS mobile launcher is an epic disaster

12:20 pm

SLS's two mobile launchers, costing $1 billion
NASA’s bloated SLS mobile launchers

According to a new report [pdf] from NASA’s inspector general, both NASA and its contractor Bechtel have allowed the cost and schedule for the new larger SLS mobile launcher (ML-2) (on the right in the graphic) to go completely out of control, with the first launch on that platform to be delayed again until 2029.

NASA projects the ML-2 will cost over three times more than planned. In 2019, NASA estimated the entire ML-2 project from design through construction would cost under $500 million with construction completed and the ML-2 delivered to NASA by March 2023. In December 2023, NASA estimated the ML-2 project would cost $1.5 billion, including $1.3 billion for the Bechtel contract and $168 million for other project costs, with delivery of the launcher to NASA in November 2026. In June 2024, NASA established the Agency Baseline Commitment (ABC)—the cost and schedule baseline committed to Congress against which a project is measured—for a ML-2 project cost of $1.8 billion and a delivery date of September 2027. Even with the establishment of the ABC, NASA intends to keep Bechtel accountable to the cost and schedule agreed to in December 2023.

Despite the Agency’s increased cost projections, our analysis indicates costs could be even higher due in part to the significant amount of construction work that remains. Specifically, our projections indicate the total cost could reach $2.7 billion by the time Bechtel delivers the ML-2 to NASA. With the time NASA requires after delivery to prepare the launcher, we project the ML-2 will not be ready to support a launch until spring 2029, surpassing the planned September2028 Artemis IV launch date.

This quote actually makes things sounder better than they are. Bechtel’s original contract was for $383 million, which means the IG’s present final estimate of $2.7 billion is more than seven times higher. The contract was awarded in 2019 and was supposed to be completed by 2023, in four years. Instead, at best it will take Bechtel a decade to complete the job.

The IG notes that this contact was cost-plus, and considers this the main cause of these cost overruns. It also notes that NASA has had the option to convert the contract to fixed-price, but has chosen not to do so.

Possibly the most damning aspect of the IG report is its conclusion, which essentially admits that nothing can be done to fix this problem.
» Read more

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Webb finds six exoplanets, all flying in interstellar space without a star

11:11 am

Astronomers using the Webb Space Telescope have discovered six different planets ranging in mass 5 to 10 times that of Jupiter, all unattached to any star or solar system.

The most intriguing of the starless objects is also the lightest, having an estimated mass of five Jupiters (about 1,600 Earths). The presence of a dusty disk means the object almost certainly formed like a star, as space dust generally spins around a central object in the early stages of star formation, said Langeveld, a postdoctoral researcher in Jayawardhana’s group.

All of these starless planets likely formed like this one, coalescing like a star does but unlike a star never having enough mass to ignite.

The astronomers are next going to attempt to detect the atmosphere’s of these rogue exoplanets, though it is not clear exactly how they will do this unless one of the exoplanets just happened to transit across a more distant star, something that simply does not happen very often.

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D-Orbit newest orbital tug deploys four smallsats

10:24 am

The Italian orbital tug company D-Orbit has now successfully deployed four smallsats from its newest tug, having been launched on August 16, 2024 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

The tug still has one more satellite to deploy, after which it will remain in orbit as it also carries four additional customer “hosted” payloads that are using the tug itself as their service module.

This is D-Orbit’s second demo mission, the first flying in 2023. It also appears be completely successful, which puts this company in an excellent position to garner future contracts from many small satellite companies. It is also a partner in a $256 million Italian project to test in-orbit robotic satellite repair.

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ABL completes investigation into launchpad fire in July

10:12 am

The rocket startup ABL yesterday released the results of its investigation into launchpad fire in July that destroyed its RS1 rocket during a static fire test prior to an orbital test launch.

In a statement, ABL Space Systems said it ignited the E2 engines in the first stage of the RS1 rocket in the test, but aborted the test after just half a second because of a low pressure reading in one engine that the company said was caused by a faulty pressure sensor. The engines shut down, but a fire then broke out under the base of the vehicle, fed by fuel leaks from two engines. That fire was contained but could not be extinguished by either water or inert gas systems, and the company started offloading kerosene and liquid oxygen propellants from the vehicle.

The launch pad the company uses at Kodiak does not have its own water supply, with the company instead using mobile tanks that ran out of water 11 and a half minutes after ignition. That caused the fire to spread “and a progressive loss of pad systems,” the company stated, including the inability to continue detanking the rocket and eventually telemetry from the rocket.

ABL’s first launch attempt of this rocket in January 2023 failed when the first stages shut down immediately after lift-off and the rocket crashed on the launchpad. It completed its investigation of that failure in October 2023 and was ready for its second launch attempt this summer when the fire described above occurred.

The company has raised several hundred million dollars, with its chief investor being Lockheed Martin, which has also signed a contract for as many as 58 RS1 launches. It increasingly appears those launches might very well go to other providers.

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Firefly delivers its first Blue Ghost lunar lander for final environmental testing

9:58 am

Blue Ghost in clean room
Blue Ghost in clean room

Firefly this week completed the integration of the ten customer payloads onto its first Blue Ghost lunar lander and shipped the lander to JPL in California for final environmental testing before its planned launch before the end of this year.

Following final testing, Firefly’s Blue Ghost will ship to Cape Canaveral, Florida, ahead of its launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket scheduled for Q4 2024. Blue Ghost will then begin its transit to the Moon, including approximately a month in Earth orbit and two weeks in lunar orbit. This approach provides ample time to conduct robust health checks on each subsystem and begin payload operations during transit.

Blue Ghost will then land in Mare Crisium, a basin in the northeast quadrant on the Moon’s near side, before deploying and operating 10 instruments for a lunar day (14 Earth days) and more than 5 hours into the lunar night.

Once launched, Firefly will become the third American company, after Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines, to build a privately owned lunar lander and attempt a lunar landing. Since the other two companies were not entirely successful in their landing attempts, Firefly has the chance to be the first to succeed.

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SpaceX blasts its satellite competitors for lobbying the government to shut down Starlink/T-Mobile partnership

9:45 am

SpaceX on August 22, 2024 responded harshly to the effort by its satellite competitors to get the FCC to shut down the planned partneship of Starlink and T-Mobile, whereby Starlink will fill the gaps in T-Mobile’s coverage.

You can read SpaceX’s letter here. Its language however is quite blunt:

While the petitions from AT&T, Verizon, DISH/EchoStar, and Omnispace lack technical basis or legal merit, their game is clear. AT&T and Verizon seek to hamstring their competitor T-Mobile by talking out of both sides of their mouths, on one hand demanding without technical support that T-Mobile and SpaceX operate at unnecessarily low power levels that will force Americans to sacrifice service, while giving their own partner AST a free pass. AT&T goes so far as to claim to have conducted a secret study it refuses to show the Commission to support suppressing SpaceX’s out-of-band emissions to an interference-protection level ten times below the limit sufficient to protect terrestrial networks, while allowing its partner AST to exceed that limit.

DISH/EchoStar repeats its demand to siphon proprietary information from SpaceX to aid its own flailing ambitions, while stoutly refusing SpaceX’s repeated requests to engage in actual good faith coordination the way a company with actual technical concerns would.

And although it still has no commercial satellite service anywhere in the world, Omnispace continues to make unfounded claims of prospective harmful interference to prop up a decade-old spectrum play that it fears will lose financial value if American consumers can enjoy ubiquitous mobile connectivity using the PCS G Block downlink.

Fortunately, none of these unfounded arguments present any reasonable basis to delay swift grant of SpaceX’s request to bring ubiquitous mobile connectivity to American consumers.

The FCC has not yet responded to any of these demand letters. Nor has it yet issued the waiver SpaceX had requested in June 2024 allowing its Starlink system to operate beyond its licensed radio frequencies in order to facilitate cell surface with T-Mobile.

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NASA reveals technical problem during solar sail deployment of test mission

9:32 am

NASA today revealed that a technical problem occurred during the deployment of a demonstration solar sail mission launched in April on Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket.

Upon an initial attempt to unfurl, the solar sail paused when an onboard power monitor detected higher than expected motor currents. Communications, power, and attitude control for the spacecraft all remain normal while mission managers work to understand and resolve the cause of the interruption by analyzing data from the spacecraft.

The goal had been test the boom deployment of a 860 square foot sail from a cubesat only about 4 feet in size.

The concept of the solar sail is simple: Use the pressure produced by sunlight to maneuver and fly controlled throughout the solar system. The idea has been tested successfully several times, with the Japanese IKAROS test solar sail and the Planetary Society’s Lightsail-2 the most successful. Sadly almost all other attempts to test this idea have had technical problems of one kind or another.

Ironically, one test solar sail proved that such a deployment from a cubesat could be done very cheaply, unlike NASA’s effort above. Brown University students in 2023 used cheap off-the-shelf parts to launch a smallsat sail that successfully deployed and was then used to lower the satellite’s orbit in order to de-orbit it more quickly. Total cost, $10,000. And it worked.

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A real whirlpool in space

9:52 am

A real whirlpool in space
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture above, cropped to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a survey of nearby galaxies that have what astronomers call an Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), because the supermassive black hole at the center is devouring nearby material at a great rate and thus producing high energy emissions as it does so.

Many active galaxies are known to astronomers at vast distances from Earth, thanks to the great brightness of their nuclei highlighting them next to other, dimmer galaxies. At 128 million light-years from Earth, UGC 3478 is positively neighbourly to us. The data used to make this image comes from a Hubble survey of nearby powerful AGNs found in relatively high-energy X-rays, like this one, which it is hoped can help astronomers to understand how the galaxies interact with the supermassive black holes at their hearts.

The bottom line is that this spiral galaxy literally is a whirlpool, the entire galaxy spiralling down into that massive black hole in its center. One cannot help wondering why such galaxies don’t end up eventually getting completely swallowed by that black hole.

Or maybe they do, and we don’t see such things because all that is left is a supermassive black hole that emits no light or energy at all, a dark silent ghost traveling between the galaxies unseen and undetectable.

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