Tag: spaceflight

Hubble still in safe mode

9:05 am

NASA released a new but relatively terse update on November 1st describing the status of the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been in safe mode since October 25th.

Hubble’s science instruments issued error codes at 1:46 a.m. EDT Oct. 23, indicating the loss of a specific synchronization message. This message provides timing information the instruments use to correctly respond to data requests and commands. The mission team reset the instruments, resuming science operations the following morning.

At 2:38 a.m. EDT, Oct. 25, the science instruments again issued error codes indicating multiple losses of synchronization messages. As a result, the science instruments autonomously entered safe mode states as programmed.

Mission team members are evaluating spacecraft data and system diagrams to better understand the synchronization issue and how to address it. They also are developing and testing procedures to collect additional data from the spacecraft. These activities are expected to take at least one week.

In other words, the engineers presently do not understand the problem, and are working at pinpointing its cause.

This is not a “glitch”. If used properly that word really refers to something that is akin to a short burp in operations. Hubble has been shut down now for ten days, and will remain so for at least one more week. This is a serious problem that remains unsolved.

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China’s Long March 2C rocket places two earth observations satellites in orbit

8:59 am

China today successfully launched two Earth observation satellites using its Long March 2C rocket.

This was China’s 39th successful launch in 2021, breaking China’s previous yearly high of 38 set in 2018.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

39 China
23 SpaceX
18 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman
4 ULA
4 Arianespace (Europe)

China now leads the U.S. 39 to 36 in the national rankings.

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Two skylights into connected Martian lava tube?

3:33 pm

Two skylights into a connected Martian lava tube?
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and annotated to post here, was taken on September 1, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). I have annotated it to note the two apparent skylights that appear aligned along a north-south depression.

The grade is downhill to the north. If you look at the full image you will see that this north-south depression extends for a considerable distance beyond the edges of the cropped image above, with that depression appearing to dissipate to the north into a series of parallel very shallow depressions, almost like the lava had flowed out of the tube and formed branching surface rivulets heading south.

The overview map shows that this tube is on the northern flanks of the volcano Arsia Mons.
» Read more

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UN committee approves UK proposal on developing rules for military space activities

12:05 pm

A large United Nations committee of nations has approved, by a vote of 163 to 8, a United Kingdom proposal, backed by the U.S., to start a working group to develop rules nations must follow in connection with any military actions in space.

The plan for the Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG), which would meet twice in 2022 and 2023 and work on a basis of consensus, was pushed by the United Kingdom and co-sponsored by a number of Western countries including the United States. It passed First Committee with 163 “Yes” to eight “No” votes, and nine abstentions — 13 more votes than last year’s UK-sponsored resolution passed last year by the UN General Assembly soliciting national views on military space threats and how to ameliorate them.

In order to become a reality, the full UN General Assembly now needs to approve the OEWG plan during their session in December, but given the First Committee vote, this is pretty much a foregone conclusion.

According to the announcement by the UN, the opposition was as follows:

The Committee approved — by a recorded vote of 163 in favour to 8 against (China, Cuba, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Iran, Nicaragua, Russian Federation, Syria, Venezuela), with 9 abstentions (Armenia, Belarus, Comoros, Djibouti, India, Israel, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Zimbabwe) — the draft resolution “Reducing space threats through norms, rules and principles of responsible behaviours”.

The Russians further expressed its forceful opposition in TASS, the government’s state-run press.

A detailed explanation of the proposal’s goals can be found here. Overall it appears the UK, with the backing of the United States, wants to begin a dialogue on the use of the military in space, in the hope that some reasonable compromise can be made.

From what I can gather from both articles as well as the UN announcement, I do not see this as good news, even though it was opposed by the authoritarian nations like China, Cuba, North Korea, and Russia. There are a number of clauses in this proposal that were approved that the western capitalist nations of the world opposed.

In the end, I expect these negotiations to produce a treaty not unlike the Outer Space Treaty, whereby most of its mandates make sense but hidden within will be one or two that in the end will be used successfully to squelch individual freedom and private enterprise. Power will be centralized to the governments, not to the citizens, and the rights of future space colonists will be limited significantly. No bill of rights for them!

Meanwhile, Russia today announced it has signed an agreement with Zimbabwe to outline their future cooperation in space.

The battle lines are being drawn, but I have little faith in the commitment to freedom and individual rights by those in power in the west.

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Chinese pseudo-private company buys engines for its reusable rocket

10:31 am

The pseudo-private Chinese rocket company, Rocket Pi, has signed a deal with another pseudo-private Chinese company, Jiuzhou Yunjian, to build the engines the former will use in its proposed reusable Darwin-1 rocket.

I call these pseudo-private because — while they both have raised independent Chinese investment capital and are structured and appear to operate as private companies, they remain entirely under the supervision of the Chinese communist government, most especially its military wing. Nothing they do is done without that government’s permission, even if they are launching entirely private payloads.

Nonetheless, both companies are real, and have been proceeding aggressively towards the first launch of Darwin-1 in ’23. There is every reason to expect them to succeed.

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Evidence from nearby white dwarfs suggest rocky exoplanets are alien to Earth

10:15 am

The uncertainty of science: Evidence from 23 white dwarfs, all located less than 650 light years from Earth, suggest that the make-up of rocky exoplanets are likely very alien to Earth, with minerals and chemistry that is found nowhere in our solar system.

They found that these white dwarfs have a much wider range of compositions than any of the inner planets in our solar system, suggesting their planets had a wider variety of rock types. In fact, some of the compositions are so unusual that Putirka and Xu had to create new names (such as “quartz pyroxenites” and “periclase dunites”) to classify the novel rock types that must have existed on those planets.

“While some exoplanets that once orbited polluted white dwarfs appear similar to Earth, most have rock types that are exotic to our solar system,” said Xu. “They have no direct counterparts in the solar system.”

Putirka describes what these new rock types might mean for the rocky worlds they belong to. “Some of the rock types that we see from the white dwarf data would dissolve more water than rocks on Earth and might impact how oceans are developed,” he explained. “Some rock types might melt at much lower temperatures and produce thicker crust than Earth rocks, and some rock types might be weaker, which might facilitate the development of plate tectonics.”

The data from the white dwarfs is believed to be the leftover material of exoplanets that were absorbed by the star, sometime in the far past.

First, this result should not be a surprise. To even think for a second that planets in other solar systems would be similar to the planets in our solar system is unrealistic. Even in our solar system we have found that practically every single body — planets, moons, asteroids, comets — is remarkably unique. Other solar systems are sure to be even more alien.

Second, the result here is somewhat uncertain. The scientists were not gathering data of actual exoplanets, but what is believed to be the remains that had been swallowed by the stars. The scientists then extrapolated backwards to come up with these alien rock types. The result, while very suggestive, must be taken with some skepticism.

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SpaceIL issues contract for construction of Beresheet-2

10:05 am

SpaceIL, the nonprofit that designed Israel’s first lunar mission, Beresheet-1, has now contracted for the construction of Beresheet-2, which instead of being a single large lander will an orbiter and two small landers.

Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) was the prime contractor for Beresheet, the lander it built for the nonprofit organization SpaceIL, one of the competitors of the former Google Lunar X Prize. Beresheet attempted to land on the moon in April 2019, but its main engine shut down prematurely during its descent, causing the spacecraft to crash. A later analysis found that one of two inertial measurement units on the spacecraft shut down during its descent, and the process of restarting it caused resets in the lander’s avionics that caused the engine to shut down.

After some initial uncertainty about its future plans, SpaceIL is moving ahead with a Beresheet 2 mission, and will once again have IAI build the spacecraft.

The article at the link focuses on the new design of Beresheet-2 (two landers and an orbiter), but that is old news, announced back in December 2020. That IAI has begun work however means SpaceIL has obtained the cash to pay it, possibly from the Israeli-UAE deal that was announced on October 20th.

That October 20th announcement did not mention a transfer of funds or Beresheet-2, but when SpaceIL revealed its plans for Beresheet-2 in December 2020, the nonprofit also said it was seeking financial support from the UAE. I suspect that support has come through.

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Falcon Heavy gets another contract

9:50 am

Capitalism in space: With the announcement on October 30th that the Space Force has added a third military Falcon Heavy launch for ’22, the rocket is now scheduled to fly five times next year.

The addition of a third national security mission for Falcon Heavy will make for quite a scheduling challenge for SpaceX’s three-core rocket that also is projected to launch in 2022 a Viasat-3 commercial broadband satellite with an Astranis communications satellite as a secondary payload, as well as NASA’s Psyche planetary science mission.

The Space Force missions USSF-44 and USSF-52 both were scheduled to fly in 2021 but have been delayed by payload readiness and range scheduling issues. No target launch dates have been announced yet although the Space Force said they would happen in 2022. Falcon Heavy rockets lift off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

It increasingly looks like 2022 will be a major record-setting year for rocketry.

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Amazon picks rocket startup ABL to launch 1st two prototype Kuiper satellites

3:59 pm

Capitalism in space: Amazon has chosen the smallsat startup rocket company ABL to launch its first two prototype Kuiper satellites, with that launch targeted for ’22.

KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2 will reach orbit via the RS1, a new rocket developed by California-based ABL Space Systems. Amazon also announced today that it has signed a multi-launch deal with ABL to provide these early Project Kuiper launches.

The 88-foot-tall (27 meters) RS1 is capable of launching 2,975 pounds (1,350 kilograms) of payload to LEO, according to its ABL specifications page. ABL is charging $12 million for each launch of the two-stage rocket. The RS1 has not flown yet, but ABL has said that it aims to conduct a debut launch from Alaska’s Pacific Spaceport Complex before the end of 2021.

Earlier this year, Amazon announced that it had signed a deal with United Launch Alliance (ULA), whose Atlas V rocket will loft operational Project Kuiper craft on nine different launches.

Does anyone notice what rocket company has not won these contracts, even though its owner is also Amazon’s founder and biggest shareholder? That’s right, as far as I can tell, Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket has apparently not won any contracts to launch Amazon’s Kuiper satellites. Notice also that the deal with ULA uses its Atlas-5 rocket, not its new Vulcan rocket, even though ULA wants Vulcan to replace the Atlas-5 beginning in ’22.

Since both New Glenn and Vulcan depend on Blue Origin’s troubled BE-4 rocket engine, these contracts strongly suggest that the engine’s technical problems have not yet been solved, and that neither rocket will be flying in ’22 as both companies have promised.

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Dragon manned launch delayed again

3:48 pm

NASA announced today that the manned launch of four astronatus to ISS on SpaceX’s Endurance spacecraft has been delayed again, pushed back to November 6tth because of a “minor medical issue”.

The agency says one of the astronauts has a “minor medical issue.” The issue is not a medical emergency and not related to COVID-19, according to NASA.

The launch is now set for 11:36 pm (Eastern) that evening.

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Curiosity looks back across the alien landscape of Mars

12:45 pm

Gale Crater, October 31, 2021
Click for image.

Cool image time! The photo above, the first of 21 identical images taken by Curiosity’s right navigation camera, taken at intervals of about thirteen seconds on October 31st, was probably snapped as part of an effort to spot a moving dust devil. At the resolution available to my software, I see nothing when I compare all 21 photos.

What I do see is a remarkably alien landscape. In the distance can be seen the mountains that mark the rim of Gale Crater, 30-plus miles away. On the image’s right edge you can see the rising slope heading up to the peak of Mount Sharp about 13,000 feet higher.

In the center are those blobby mesas that make this terrain look so strange. For the past decade Curiosity has been traveling from the floor of the crater on the picture’s far left to circle around that dark sand dune sea to climb up the mountain slopes in the foreground in front of those mesas.

It is now heading to the right, into the mountains that make up Mount Sharp. Such a view of the floor of Gale Crater will thus be for the next few years more difficult to catch, as the mountains themselves will block the view. Assuming the rover survives long enough, it will have to climb much higher before it can get such an expansive view again.

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Sunspot update: Sun continues its higher than predicted activity

11:57 am

With the beginning of a new month comes my monthly sunspot update, based on NOAA’s most recent monthly graph of sunspot activity. That graph is below, annotated to show the previous solar cycle predictions and thus provide context. It has now been extended from last month to include the Sun’s sunspot activity in October.

Sunspot activity in October continued to be higher than predicted, though the month saw a slight drop from September. Even so, the number of sunspots seen on the Sun’s facing hemisphere in October were the most since August of 2016, when the Sun was ramping down to solar minimum.

» Read more

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An example of good public school education

9:15 am

First rocket launch of the day

Those who are regular readers of this webpage know that I generally have a low opinion of the American public school system, based on ample evidence. It generally fails to educate while working to abuse and indoctrinate young children in ways that are so ugly and inappropriate that often the administrators and teachers involved could actually be charged with child abuse.

Today I am instead going to provide an example of a public school doing right by its students. On Saturday I was invited to watch as an afterschool engineering group, run by John Morris, the Engineering & Mathematics teacher at Casa Grande Union High School in Arizona, went out to launch model rockets that they had built themselves.

The launch to the right was the first of the day. The rest of the post below is image oriented, to give you a feel of what it involved in teaching young high school students how to make and launch small rockets. That activity, while involving relatively simple engineering, provides them the right grounding for learning how to work hard, make sure they do the work right, and learning that failure is really only a step towards success.
» Read more

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Astronomers: If there are artificial Dyson spheres out there, we can detect them

8:55 am

In a preprint science paper published on October 26, 2021, astronomers review the impact a Dyson sphere might have on its central star and conclude that modern astronomical instruments should be able to identify these changes. From the abstract:

The search for signs of extraterrestrial technology, or technosignatures, includes the search for objects which collect starlight for some technological use, such as those composing a Dyson sphere. These searches typically account for a star’s light and some blackbody temperature for the surrounding structure. However, such a structure inevitably returns some light back to the surface of its star, either from direct reflection or thermal re-emission. In this work, we explore how this feedback may affect the structure and evolution of stars, and when such feedback may affect observations. We find that in general this returned light can cause stars to expand and cool. Our MESA models show that this energy is only transported toward a star’s core effectively by convection, so low mass stars are strongly affected, while higher mass stars with radiative exteriors are not. Ultimately, the effect only has significant observational consequences for spheres with very high temperatures (much higher than the often assumed ~300 K) and/or high specular reflectivity. Lastly, we produce color-magnitude diagrams of combined star-Dyson sphere systems for a wide array of possible configurations.

A plain-language description of the paper can be found here, which summarizes this work as follows:

This study shows that Dyson spheres can result in measurable changes to stellar properties. Megastructures have long been confined to science fiction, imagination and certain video games. However, if there are indeed Dyson spheres out there waiting to be found, we could soon be in a position to find them.

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Dragon crew launch to ISS delayed due to weather

10:57 pm

The early morning launch on October 31st of the next manned flight of SpaceX’s Endurance capsule to ISS, has been delayed because of poor weather downrange from the launch site.

The bad weather could have interfered with recovery operations should a launch abort had been necessary and the capsule was forced to land in the Atlantic.

The launch has now been rescheduled for 1:10 am (Eastern) on November 3rd.

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ABL leases space at Port of Los Angeles

2:58 pm

Capitalism in space: The rocket startup ABL has now leased space at the Port of Los Angeles for “spacecraft processing” and cargo shipment.

Included in the five-year lease is a 25,000-square-foot integration and payload processing facility, 20,000-square-foot warehouse space, and a 13,000-square-foot office space. The location, previously occupied by rocket launching ship company Sea Launch, will be used by ABL for a range of operations including vehicle processing, payload integration, and maritime operations supporting the company’s launch facilities around the world.

This deal comes on top of ABL’s announcement earlier this week that it has raised an addition $200 million in investment capital, and is planning its first launch in mid-December.

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Holes in snowy ice on Mars?

1:30 pm

Holes in snowy ice on Mars?
Click for full image.

Cool image time! Today we return to the regions surrounding Milankovic Crater in the high northern latitudes of Mars. The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on June 1, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a spray of impact craters where the bolides apparently landed in relatively soft material. The location itself is about 10 miles to the southeast of the 74-mile-wide crater, and sits within its rim ejecta blanket.

The label for the image says this is showing “crater modification,” which suggests that the rimless nature of these craters became so after their creation. This location, at 54 north latitude, is in a region of Mars where scientists have found a lot of evidence of near surface ice. For example, within Mikankovic Crater itself they have identified numerous scarps with clearly seen pure ice layers.

If ice is close to the surface here, then the ground could be like soft snow on Earth, especially because Mars’ lighter gravity would not compress that ice as much. Think about what happens when you toss pebbles into soft snow. They fall through, and leave behind holes not unlike the ones we see in this picture. Later, sunlight would begin to modify the holes so that their edges grow outward, once again exactly as we see here.

The overview map below as always gives some context, which in this case has less to do with Mars but with Elon Musk and Starship.
» Read more

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VC of Joint Chiefs: Not one, not two, but “hundreds” of Chinese hypersonic tests!

9:11 am

If I did not have confirmation of my skepticism about the claims by the military and anonymous sources that China this summer completed a successful hypersonic test flight, I have it now.

Today the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John Hyten, made a speech demanding that the military stop building expensive gold-plated satellites and emulate SpaceX’s methods of frequent testing and quick development.

Hyten has been very correctly pushing for this change in strategy for years. However, in his remarks he said this:

China, he said, has performed “hundreds” of tests of hypersonic weapons in the last five years, compared to nine the United States has performed.

…[He also] implied this morning, but did not state categorically, that China has built and tested what appears to be a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS).

FOBS technology is not new, but Hyten described it “as highly destabilizing.” And China’s reported use of a nuclear-capable hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) as the pointy end of the stick would be a twist. The Soviets deployed a FOBS — which combines a low-flying missile and nuclear warhead that reaches Low Earth Orbit, but does not remain in space for a full turn about the Earth — from 1969 to 1983. China began an effort in the early 1970s, but suffered test failures with its launcher, and gave up. [emphasis mine]

As I say, Hyten’s goals — fast testing, fast development, and not fearing failure — are all correct and laudable. But to suddenly turn a questionable story about a possible single successful Chinese hypersonic test flight, based entirely on anonymous sources, into “hundreds” of flights, strongly confirms to me that the original story was planted by the military to create fear in Congress and the public so that both would eagerly give the military more money.

The result will be that Hyten won’t get what he really wants. His use of exaggeration and possible disinformation will only cause Congress to balloon the military’s budget for new programs, which will then be used to feed the Pentagon’s insatiable appetite for endless and slow-moving test programs that only function as jobs programs, the very thing Hyten rails against.

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Solid dry ice in Moon’s permanently shadowed craters?

10:30 pm

Stable dry ice at Moon's south pole
Click for full figure.

Using eleven years of data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), scientists think they have identified small areas in the Moon’s permanently shadowed interiors of some polar craters where the temperatures are always cold enough for dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) to be stable.

The map to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, is Figure 2 of the paper. It shows the areas at the south pole where stable dry ice is thought possible. The darker blue/purple are colder and thus are expected to have less sublimation. From the abstract:

Carbon-bearing species would be essential for sustained robotic or human presence on the Moon, for use in rocket fuel and biological materials. Various volatiles can be cold-trapped in permanently shadowed craters near the lunar poles. The existence of carbon dioxide cold traps has previously been surmised, but the required temperatures are near the lowest surface temperatures that have been reliably measured. Extensive and improved analysis of 11 years of orbital surface temperature measurements establishes the existence of carbon dioxide cold traps on the Moon, which potentially host high concentrations of solid carbon dioxide. Large CO2 cold traps are rare, however, and the geographic concentration of the resource will have policy implications. [emphasis mine]

The paper also adds in its conclusion that these regions are likely going to be of high value, and will thus likely be prime settlement and mining targets by everyone. As they note, “That this resource is highly concentrated geographically has implications for the governance of the lunar surface.”

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Major solar flare from the Sun

1:15 pm

X-1 solar flare
The flare is the bright spot, center bottom. Click for original image.

The Sun today unleashed an X1-class solar flare, one of the more powerful seen since the ramp up to solar maximum began at the start of 2020.

More information here, with this quote:

The blast also hurled a CME [coronal mass ejection] into space. Coronagraph images are not yet available, but evidence for a CME is already pursuasive [sic]. The USAF reports strong Type II and Type IV radio emissions generated by a CME plowing through the sun’s atmosphere. In addition, energetic particles accelerated at the leading edge of a CME have already reached Earth.

When will the CME itself arrive? Assuming that it is Earth directed, probably on Oct. 30th or 31st. Fresh data from SOHO coronagraphs will allow a more precise forecast, so stay tuned.

During the flare, a pulse of X-rays and extreme UV radiation ionized the top of Earth’s atmosphere, causing a strong shortwave radio blackout centered on South America:

Aviators, mariners, and ham radio operators on the daylit side of Earth may have noticed strange propagation effects at frequencies below 30 MHz.

While this flare is unlikely to cause any significant disturbances to orbiting or Earth-based technology, the flare was emitted by a large sunspot that is still active, can still flare again, and is well positioned on the Sun to send more material and radiation Earthward.

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New results about Jupiter published from Juno

1:01 pm

Three new papers published today in the journals Science and the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets reveal in more detail the depth of Jupiter’s storms and clouds, using a variety of different sensors and techniques.

The papers can be found here, here, and here.

Juno’s microwave radiometer (MWR) allows mission scientists to peer beneath Jupiter’s cloud tops and probe the structure of its numerous vortex storms. The most famous of these storms is the iconic anticyclone known as the Great Red Spot. Wider than Earth, this crimson vortex has intrigued scientists since its discovery almost two centuries ago.

The new results show that the cyclones are warmer on top, with lower atmospheric densities, while they are colder at the bottom, with higher densities. Anticyclones, which rotate in the opposite direction, are colder at the top but warmer at the bottom.

The findings also indicate these storms are far taller than expected, with some extending 60 miles (100 kilometers) below the cloud tops and others, including the Great Red Spot, extending over 200 miles (350 kilometers). This surprise discovery demonstrates that the vortices cover regions beyond those where water condenses and clouds form, below the depth where sunlight warms the atmosphere.

The height and size of the Great Red Spot means the concentration of atmospheric mass within the storm potentially could be detectable by instruments studying Jupiter’s gravity field. Two close Juno flybys over Jupiter’s most famous spot provided the opportunity to search for the storm’s gravity signature and complement the MWR results on its depth.

With Juno traveling low over Jupiter’s cloud deck at about 130,000 mph (209,000 kph) Juno scientists were able to measure velocity changes as small 0.01 millimeter per second using a NASA’s Deep Space Network tracking antenna, from a distance of more than 400 million miles (650 million kilometers). This enabled the team to constrain the depth of the Great Red Spot to about 300 miles (500 kilometers) below the cloud tops.

The data from these two techniques confirms that the base of the Great Red Spot is somewhere between 200 to 300 miles below the cloud tops, much deeper than most of the other storms, though even those storms are deeper than expected.

Another paper published earlier in Geophysical Research Letters looked at the storms in Jupiter’s polar regions, and found their polygonal arrangement around the poles appears stable and caused by a balanced push between these surrounding storms, trying to move to the poles, and the storms at the poles pushing back.

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Today’s blacklisted American: ULA fires leader of protest against its COVID shot mandate

11:16 am

The religious banned at ULA
The religious banned at ULA

They’re coming for you next: The rocket company United Launch Alliance (ULA) yesterday fired Hunter Creger, the man who organized public protests against its COVID shot mandate.

Creger, a Laser Weld Technician at ULA, reported for his day shift at the rocket parts manufacturing plant on Wednesday for the first time this week. On Monday and Tuesday, Creger organized a protest with other employees to raise their voices in unison over the company’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate.

The mandate requires the federal workers at the plant to be vaccinated by Friday, October 29, or face termination. Creger asked his supervisors if the suspension is related to his role in the protests. He said they would not clarify that, but he has his own suspicions. “Even after all of this, after walking me out of the facility for my role that I played in the protest, at the root of all of this is because I’m a Catholic and that’s why they fired me. They denied my religious accommodation. That’s what started this whole thing.” [emphasis mine]

According to the story, more than two hundred employees filed for a religious exemption to the mandate. All were denied.
» Read more

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One last look at a Martian mountaintop

9:14 am

Siccar Point
For the original images go here and here.

The image above is a mosaic made from two Curiosity navigation photos taken on October 23, 2021 and combined, cropped, and reduced to post here. It shows the top 30 feet or so of Siccar Point, the spectacular outcrop that I have featured several times previously.

Curiosity has now traveled past this outcrop, so that this view above is no longer visible to the rover. I post it now as a farewell image of what I think is the most breath-taking feature yet seen by any planetary lander — manned or unmanned — since the first set down on the Moon in the mid-1960s. It also illustrates with great clarity the alien nature of Mars. Those delicate overhanging rocks would not be possible on Earth, with a gravity about two and a half times heavier than Mars.

Note too that I have not enhanced the contrast or brightness. I think the twilight light here actually gives us a sense of the real brightness of a clear Martian day. Because the Sun is much farther away, even at high noon it provides much less illumination than on Earth. A bright day on Mars to our Earth-adapted eyes will always feel like dusk.

Meanwhile the science team is quickly pushing the rover south, to get…

…closer to the area we are targeting for our next drill campaign. This drive should leave us with bedrock in the workspace for additional contact science on the weekend. This terrain continues to be very challenging, with large boulders, sharp rocks that are wheel hazards, and sand ripples, like the terrain shown in the image. These drives take a while to plan to make sure we are avoiding all the hazards while getting to where science wants to go. Our paths end up looking a little “drunk” as we weave our way around obstacles.

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Astra’s 4th attempt to reach orbit now scheduled for early November

8:47 am

Capitalism in space: The new smallsat rocket company Astra has revealed that it will make its fourth attempt to reach orbit with a launch window opening on November 5th.

That this launch could take place only a little over two months since Astra’s last attempt, which failed, speaks well of the company. They have very quickly fixed the fuel line issues that caused that August 28th failure and then moved immediately to fly again.

Moreover, the company’s overall pace of launch is excellent. This will be their fourth launch attempt since September 2020, less than fourteen months, suggesting that when they finally succeed and begin operational launches they will also keep their promise of frequent and rapid launches.

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Starliner delays have cost Boeing another $185 million

10:02 pm

Capitalism in space: Boeing today announced that it has had to taken another $185 million charge out of its earnings, in addition to the $410 million previously deducted, in order to cover the problems and delays in developing its Starliner manned capsule.

When Boeing took the original earnings charge, it said it did so because it committed to redo the uncrewed flight test at no expense to NASA, a point a Boeing executive reaffirmed at the Oct. 19 briefing. “There’s no additional charges that will be going to the government for this. This is something that The Boeing Company will make sure we’ve got covered as we get this vehicle prepared,” said John Vollmer, vice president and program manager for Boeing’s commercial crew program.

These costs are beginning to pile up. Boeing has got to get this capsule fixed and flying, not only to begin bringing in some income but to show the world that it can do this right.

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Russia launches Progress freighter to ISS

9:54 pm

Using its Soyuz-2 rocket, Russia today successfully launched a Progress freighter to ISS, carrying more than 5,000 pounds of cargo.

The freighter is scheduled to dock with ISS Friday evening at 9:34 pm (Eastern). It will dock with the port on the 20-year-old Zvezda module, which has remained unused for the past six months because of concerns that the docking and undocking at the port was causing stress fractures in the sections of Zvezda closest to the port. The Russians have decided to do this docking for the express purpose of studying its impact on the module.

The Progress MS-18 spacecraft will link up with the rear docking port on Zvezda. With the help of cosmonauts on the station, Russian engineers have traced a small air leak on the station to the transfer compartment leading to Zvezda’s rear port. The compartment has been sealed from the rest of the space station since the departure of a previous Progress spacecraft from the rear docking port in April. But cosmonauts will re-open the compartment to unload cargo delivered by the Progress MS-18 spacecraft.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

38 China
23 SpaceX
18 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman
4 ULA
4 Arianespace (Europe)

China remains ahead of the U.S. 38 to 36 in the national rankings.

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Curiosity marches on into the mountains

1:09 pm

Curiosity marches onward to Maria Gordon Notch
Click for full image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map

With the end of the solar conjunction in the first half of October, blocking communications with Mars because the Sun was in the way, Curiosity has resumed its travels. It has moved past the spectacular outcrop I have highlighted previously, an outcrop the science team has labeled Siccar Point.

They are now moving south at the base of the cliff to the west, the top of which is a plateau they call the Greenheugh Pediment, heading for a gap where the rover will be able to turn right and head up onto that pediment. The red dotted line on the overview map to the right shows this route, which corresponds to the red dotted line on the photo above.

I estimate the cliffs on both sides of Maria Gordon Notch are about 100 feet high. The notch itself I estimate is about 750 feet away. At the pace Curiosity has been traveling across this rough ground, it could probably reach it in about two to three weeks. However, I expect the science team will stop at least once along the way to do more detailed science work, so that journey might take a month or slightly more.

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Poland becomes thirteenth nation to sign Artemis Accords

9:37 am

The new colonial movement: Poland yesterday announced that it has signed the U.S.-led Artemis Accords.

In brief comments at the ceremony, [Polish Space Agency (POLSA) President Grzegorz Wrochna] said he saw the Artemis Accords as a first step toward greater cooperation with the United States. He noted that while Poland is a member of the European Space Agency, Polish space companies are looking to expand their business outside Europe. “They want to reach for new markets, especially the U.S. market,” he said. “They want to participate in missions of other agencies, especially NASA. We would like to open the door for them, and I believe this is the first step.”

The full list of signatories at this moment: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Poland, South Korea, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Ukraine, and the United States.

While the accords — introduced by the Trump administration — are cleverly written to appear to endorse the mandates of the Outer Space Treaty, they are also written to bluntly minimize that treaty’s hostility to private property. With each new signatory, the ability to overturn that treaty’s limitations preventing legal protection to private property in space grows, as it binds a growing number of nations in an alliance to do so.

Not surprisingly, Russia and China have said they oppose the Artemis Accords. Both of these nations do not want legal protections in space to private citizens or companies. Instead, they wish that power to reside with them, or with the United Nations.

Whether the strategy behind the Artemis Accords will work however remains unclear. That strategy requires the U.S. to maintain its strong support for private property in space. Any wavering of that support will weaken the ability of this new Artemis alliance to overturn the Outer Space Treaty’s provisions that make private ownership of territory in space impossible.

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China’s Kuaizhou-1A solid rocket successfully launches a remote sensing satellite

9:15 am

China’s Kuaizhou-1A smallsat solid rocket today successfully launched a commercial remote sensing satellite.

This launch, the 38th successful launch this year by China, ties its previous high in 2018. The country had two additional launches this year, but those were failures.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

38 China
23 SpaceX
17 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman
4 ULA
4 Arianespace (Europe)

China now leads the U.S. 38 to 36 in the national rankings.

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Russian engineers to dock next Progress to Zvezda to test it

8:25 am

Russian engineers have decided that they will dock the next Progress freighter flying to ISS and scheduled to launch tomorrow to the Zvezda module in order to find out if the stress of that docking will cause more cracks in the module’s aft section.

Scheduled for launch in early hours of October 28, 2021, the Progress MS-18 cargo ship will be on a two-day trip to the International Space Station, aiming to dock at the aft port of the Zvezda Service Module, ISS. That particular docking mechanism was unoccupied for half a year, because it is connected to the rest of the outpost via the PrK transfer compartment, which had been leaking air despite all efforts to seal tiny cracks in its walls. Progress MS-18 should confirm that the PrK chamber could be used safely.

This is not crazy, it actually makes a great deal of sense. The engineers need to know if a docking results in more cracks. If so, it will confirm the cause and also provide them the data they need to prevent such things on future manned space vessels.

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