Another launch attempt for Starship #11 today

Starship #11 on launchpad, March 28, 2021
Screen capture from LabPadre Nerdle camera live stream,
taken at 10:27 am (Central).

UPDATE: Launch scrubbed because an FAA official was unable to get to the launch site today. Next attempt set for tomorrow.

Gee, launching rockets his hard. For government officials, however, getting on an airplane and arriving on time seems far more difficult.

Original post:
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SpaceX is going to make another launch attempt today with its eleventh Starship prototype. The following live streams are presently available if you wish to watch:

When SpaceX adds its own live stream I will embed it below.

The screen capture on the right shows the status for the launch in that left column. When I captured the image they had only closed the road, which means the launch is still probably two hours away, at the least.

South Korea’s leader announces his nation’s goals in space

The new colonial movement: Moon Jae-in, South Korea’s president since 2017, on March 25th gave his first speech focused on his nation’s goals in space, outlining plans to encourage private enterprise as well as achieving an unmanned mission to the Moon by 2030.

His speech listed three main programs. First, they are developing their own home-built rocket, dubbed the KSLV-2, which they hope to launch on its first orbital test flight by October of this year.

Second, he touted a project to send a probe to the asteroid Apophis in 2029. I described this probe in my November 2020 report on a science conference focused entirely on Apophis. If all goes well, they hope to have the probe fly in formation with the asteroid as it makes its close approach that year.

Third, he committed his nation to landing an unmanned lander on the Moon by the end of this decade. (Sound familiar?)

While much of this was the typical photo-op stuff that politicians love, designed mostly to enhance their public image, Moon did make it clear their goals are also to foster a new private aerospace industry that would compete in the emerging new space market.

Moon underscored the role of the private sector in enhancing Korea’s space development capabilities. To that end, he said, the government will step up efforts to build an “innovative industrial ecosystem that nurtures global space companies such as SpaceX.”

Another issue he put forth was strengthening international competitiveness of made-in-Korea satellite systems, in the lead-up to the introduction of 6G wireless networks, self-driving vehicles, and other products and services enabled or enhanced by satellites.

All-in-all, it is actually surprising that up to now South Korea has not made its presence felt in space. This announcement suggests they now intend to change that.

Bigelow sues NASA for $1 million

The commercial space station company Bigelow Aerospace has now sued NASA for $1 million, claiming that the agency has refused to pay it for work done.

Bigelow Aerospace said it entered into an agreement with NASA on the B330 project in August 2016 to perform and complete a certain long-term pressure leak test on its prototype. The purpose of the test was to demonstrate that the B330 meets NASA’s standards of construction and reliability.

According to the lawsuit, Bigelow Aerospace was required to perform a leak test on its module and “provide certain periodic test reports” to NASA. The reports were scheduled and were required to summarize the results of the test, specifically whether the B330 had met certain standards set by NASA. “Importantly, the Contract contains no requirement that Bigelow Aerospace had to provide NASA with continuous and/or raw” data, the lawsuit alleges.

Bigelow Aerospace said NASA breached its contract with the agency by refusing to pay the full amount to the company. The company said that its damages are in excess of $1 million because it had to hire attorneys to bring the lawsuit forward.

According to the suit, multiple attempts were made between January and February to demand payment. The lawsuit said that NASA’s attorney requested raw test data from Bigelow’s testing carried out under the contract as a prerequisite of being paid the amount owed. “However, this requirement was not a term of the Contract, and was an attempt by NASA to place additional requirements on Bigelow Aerospace that had not been part of the parties’ agreement,” according to the lawsuit.

Until 2016, when Bigelow’s prototype BEAM module was installed on ISS, this company seemed the world’s unmatched leader in the construction of private commercial space station modules. It had already flown two prototypes successfully, and then built BEAM for NASA in only two years for a mere $17 million.

Since then it seems Bigelow has been stalled by Washington politics and some insider maneuvering at NASA. In January 2020 NASA picked Axiom to build the first commercial operational private modules to be attached to ISS, not Bigelow. I wondered then why Bigelow had been bypassed by a company that had never built anything. Noting how Axiom had numerous NASA insiders in its management, many with links to Boeing, I concluded:
» Read more

Baffling ridges on Mars

Baffling ridges on Mars
Click for full image.

Today’s cool image is one of my “what the heck?” photos. The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here and taken on September 3, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), shows a strange dune field of many parallel long dunes, cross-cut by larger ridges.

Are the larger ridges dunes? Or are they some form of volcanic or tectonic ridge, which is also very typical of this region, called Tempe Terra and located in the transition zone between the southern cratered highlands and the northern lowland plains?

Or are they eskers, ridges frequently found in places that were once covered by glaciers? At 35 degrees north latitude, it would not be surprising to see glacial features here, but as far as I can tell, the full image has no obvious such features.
» Read more

Radar images of Apophis during its March close approach of Earth

Apophis as seen by radar March 9, 2021
Click for full image.

Using two radar dishes, Green Bank in West Virginia and Goldstone in California, astronomers were able to produce radar images of the asteroid Apophis during its most recent close fly-by of Earth on March 10th.

The image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, shows Apophis on March 9th. If you go to the full image you can also see the March 10th and 11th images, which appear to show the asteroid in different orientations as it rotated.

These images represent radar observations of asteroid 99942 Apophis on March 8, 9, and 10, 2021, as it made its last close approach before its 2029 Earth encounter that will see the object pass our planet by less than 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometers). The 70-meter radio antenna at the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex near Barstow, California, and the 100-meter Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia used radar to precisely track Apophis’ motion. At the time of these observations, Apophis was about 10.6 million miles (17 million kilometers) from Earth, and each pixel has a resolution of 127 feet (38.75 meters).

The data obtained has firmly removed any chance Apophis will impact the Earth in the next 100 years. However, it still could hit us late in the 22nd century.

These observations were originally planned to also include data from the Arecibo Observatory, but that telescope was destroyed in December when its instrument platform collapsed. If it had been operational, these radar images would have had much better resolution.

Redwire to go public

Capitalism in space: Redwire, the space company created when it merged with Made in Space in exchange for providing it a large influx of capital, is now going public, merging with another investment capital SPAC.

Redwire, a firm that has acquired several space technology companies in the last year, announced March 25 that it will go public by merging with a special-purpose acquisition corporation (SPAC). Redwire said it will merge with Genesis Park Acquisition Corp., a SPAC that went public in November 2020. The merger will provide Redwire with $170 million in capital, valuing the company at $615 million. The companies expect the deal to close by the end of the second quarter of this year, at which point Redwire will be publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

…Redwire [is] unique among space companies going public through SPACs in that it has both revenues and profits. The company reported $119 million in revenue in 2020, with adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) of $13 million.

This company now joins Momentus, Rocket Lab, Astra, and a number of other new commercial space startups that have recently announced the decision to go public.

Firefly’s 1st Alpha rocket almost ready for launch

Capitalism in space: According to Firefly’s CEO Tom Markusic, the company’s first Alpha rocket almost ready for launch, and should fly this year, with one or two commercial flights to quickly follow.

Alpha is “ready to go,” but two other major issues delayed its launch, Markusic said. The first involved an avionics flight termination system piece from an external vendor (whom Markusic did not name), which had qualification issues that created delays.

Also, Markusic said, “we didn’t put enough focus on the launch site.” Upgrading the United Launch Alliance Delta II facilities Firefly inherited at Vandenberg proved to be “more challenging than anticipated,” he added, but “we’re literally weeks away from being done.”

Based on the interview at the article, it sounds like launch is less than a couple of months away, which is still a delay from their previously announced launch date in March, a date that has now passed.

Starship prototype #11 launch attempt today-SCRUBBED

Starship #11 on launchpad, March 26, 2021
Screen capture from LabPadre Nerdle camera live stream,
taken at 8:30 am (Pacific).

UPDATE: The test flight has been scrubbed for today, March 26th. They have not yet indicated why they scrubbed, or when they will try again.

Original post:
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Though SpaceX has not yet announced whether it will live stream the event, the company is going to attempt a six-mile flight of its eleventh Starship prototype today.

The following live streams are presently available if you wish to watch:

I will add other live streams as they become available. And if If SpaceX adds its own live stream I will embed it below.

UPDATE: SpaceX has now announced that it will live feed today’s Starship test flight. I will embed that broadcast below, when it goes live.

Ice-filled crater in Mars’ glacier country

Crater filled with ice
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here and taken on January 7, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), provides us a perfect example of the kind of glacial feature that scientists find routinely in the 30 to 60 degree mid-latitude bands on Mars. In this case the crater is in the northern reaches of a chaos region dubbed Nilosyrtis Mensae, the easternmost mensae region of what I dub glacier country on Mars.

When first identified scientists named this concentric crater fill, a purposely vague term that is only descriptive because they then did not know what it was made of, though they had their suspicions that it was buried glacial ice. Since then radar data has routinely confirmed that there is ice in such filled craters, making this particular glacial feature one of the most prevalent in those mid-latitude bands.

You can see a quite similar ice-filled crater, also in Nilosyrtis, in an earlier post from October 2020. While that earlier crater was on the southern edge of Nilosyrtis, today’s crater is about 300 miles almost due north, near the region’s northern fringe. In between are lots of similar glacial features, sometimes in craters, sometimes flowing off the slopes of mesas, and sometimes flow features in the open canyons between.

Mars’ polar ice canyons are young and the source for mid-latitude ice

Mars' north pole icecap
Mars’ north polar ice cap.

Scientists have now proposed that the giant ice canyons seen at the edges of Mars’ polar ice caps are very young and are also the source of the water that sublimates away when the planet’s rotational tilt (its obliquity) is high, to fall as snow in the mid-latitudes where it forms the glaciers and ice sheets we now find there.

The image to the right, reduced to post here, shows the entire north pole ice cape on the left, with its spiral canyons. The two inserts on the bottom show for scale Hawaii’s Big Island and the Grand Canyon. From the release:

“Erosion formed a huge ice canyon system, and that erosion is a source of the long-known mid-latitude mantles on Mars,” said Rodriguez, lead author of “North polar trough formation due to in‑situ erosion as a source of young ice in mid‑latitudinal mantles on Mars” that appears in Nature Scientific Reports.

The troughs are arranged in a vast spiral pattern covering an area the size of Texas. We find that their growth lateral to katabatic wind (wind that carries high-density colder air from a higher elevation down a slope) directions produced widespread simple intersections, from which the highly complex spiral arrangement emerged, Rodriguez said. “The spiral pattern seen in the troughs is basically an erosional byproduct,” he said. “As the pits grow and intersect over a pre-existing dome-shaped polar cap, the spiral pattern emerges.

“It has long been proposed that sublimation of water ice from the north polar cap during high-obliquity cycles was an essential source of the planet’s mid-latitude icy plains. Our finding identifies the troughs as direct evidence of those sublimation phases,” Rodriguez said.

These spiral trough features formed very recently, in geologic terms: between a few million and 50,000 years ago, Rodriguez said.

This hypothesis, if true, is very important in understanding the long term geological history of Mars. The present theory is that when the obliquity rises to as high of 60 degrees, compared to today’s 25 degrees (similar to Earth’s), the mid-latitudes are colder than the poles, and the ice at the poles then migrates to the mid-latitudes. This paper gives us the place at the poles where the icecap shrinks as that ice sublimates away.

Knowing that these polar canyons are young and the source of the mid-latitude ice scientists can now begin to write the geological history of the polar ice caps themselves. They can also use this information to maybe determine whether the caps are presently in a steady state, as now believed, or growing or shrinking.

The youth of these canyons also suggests that any mid-latitude ice from them is also young, and thus more likely pure water unpoisoned by the toxic perchlorates found in many places on the Martian surface. It will thus be easier to obtain pure drinkable water from them.

Layers upon layers of Martian volcanic ash

Layers upon layers of Martian volcanic ash
Click for full image.

Today’s cool image provides I think a hint at the vast amount of time that has passed on Mars, allowing uncounted major events to occur which each lay down a bit of the geological history, a history that is now piled up on the surface so deeply that it will take decades of research to untangle it.

The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on December 23, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the layered nature of the Medusae Fossae Formation, the largest volcanic ash deposit on Mars (about the land area of India) and thought by some to be the source of most of the dust across the entire red planet.
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ESA awards UK’s Orbex 7.45 million euros to fund rocket development

Capitalism in space: The European Space Agency (ESA) has awarded the new United Kingdom smallsat launch company Orbex 7.45 million euros to help fund the development of its Prime rocket.

This will supplement the 4.7 million euros that Orbex has raised from private capital.

The funds from the award will go towards the completion of spaceflight systems in preparation for the first launches of Orbex’s 19-metre ‘microlauncher’ rocket, Prime. €11.25 million of the total funding will be assigned to work undertaken in the UK, in particular the lightweight avionics designed in-house by Orbex in Forres, and the guidance, navigation and control (GNC) software subsystem being designed by Elecnor Deimos, a strategic investor and partner of Orbex. The remaining €900,000 of the total funding package will support the development of the GNC for the orbital phase being developed by Elecnor Deimos for Orbex in Portugal.

If all goes right, Prime will make its first launch from Sutherland, Scotland, in ’22.

The contract award signals the shift at ESA that resembles what happened at NASA in the past decade, moving from designing and building its rockets and spacecraft to buying the product from private companies. While ESA might be providing a large bulk of the capital to develop Prime, it appears ESA is not involving itself heavily in the development itself, leaving that instead to the company.

Scientists: Mars is losing water seasonally through its atmosphere

The uncertainty of science: Two new studies using data Europe’s Trace Gas Orbiter and Mars Express orbiters have found that Mars is losing water seasonally through its atmosphere.

The studies also found that global dust storms accelerate the process.

Anna and colleagues found that water vapour remained confined to below 60 km when Mars was far from the Sun but extended up to 90 km in altitude when Mars was closest to the Sun. Across a full orbit, the distance between the Sun and the Red Planet ranges from 207 million to 249 million km.

Near the Sun, the warmer temperatures and more intensive circulation in the atmosphere prevented water from freezing out at a certain altitude. “Then, the upper atmosphere becomes moistened and saturated with water, explaining why water escape rates speed up during this season – water is carried higher, aiding its escape to space,” adds Anna.

In years when Mars experienced a global dust storm the upper atmosphere became even wetter, accumulating water in excess at altitudes of over 80 km.

But wait, didn’t planetary scientists just announce that Mars hasn’t lost its water through the atmosphere, but instead lost it when it became chemical trapped in the planet’s soil? Yup, they did, but that was a model based on new ground data. This new result is based on atmospheric data.

Or to put it another way, the model was incomplete. While it could be true that a large bulk of Mars’ water is trapped chemically in the ground, that is not proven, only hypothesized. What has been proven, and is now confirmed by these two studies, is that, depending on weather and season, the water of Mars does leak into its upper atmosphere where it can escape into space, never to return.

What remains unknown is how much water escaped into space, and when. Moreover, the ground-based model could still be right, even if it is true that Mars is losing water through its atmosphere. At the moment the data is too incomplete to answer these questions with any certainty.

Meanwhile, this press release once again gives the false impression that the only water left on Mars is at its poles (and in this case, only the south pole). This is not accurate, based on numerous studies finding evidence of buried ice and glaciers everywhere on the planet down to the 30th latitude, in both the north and south hemispheres. Mars might have far less water now than it did billions of years ago, but it still has plenty, and that water is not found only at the poles.

India’s SSLV new smallsat rocket fails during static fire test

According to sources inside India’s space agency ISRO, a static fire test of the first stage of its new Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV) rocket was a failure, and that the planned April inaugural launch will likely be delayed.

“Oscillation was noticed after 60 seconds into the test and nozzle was blown out near the bucket flange where it’s attached with the motor at around 95 seconds”, sources in the Bengaluru-headquartered space agency said. It was supposed to be tested for a total duration of about 110 seconds, officials said.

The Indian Space Research Organisation had targeted to launch the first development flight of SSLV (D1) in April and may now in all probability have to revise this schedule.

Fixing the problem and repeating the test will likely delay the first launch by six months at least.

SSLV is being designed by ISRO to compete against companies like Rocket Lab in the emerging smallsat market and is thus much cheaper and faster to assemble and launch.

Ingenuity to fly on Mars no earlier than April 8th

NASA and the Perseverance engineering team announced yesterday their specific plans for the first flights oft he Ingenuity helicopter, setting the flight date as no earlier than April 8th.

They are presently driving Perseverance to its “airfield,” a 33×33 foot area. The deployment then will take six days, because there are a number of steps involved to position and place the helicopter on the ground properly.

Once the team is ready to attempt the first flight, Perseverance will receive and relay to Ingenuity the final flight instructions from JPL mission controllers. Several factors will determine the precise time for the flight, including modeling of local wind patterns plus measurements taken by the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) aboard Perseverance. Ingenuity will run its rotors to 2,537 rpm and, if all final self-checks look good, lift off. After climbing at a rate of about 3 feet per second (1 meter per second), the helicopter will hover at 10 feet (3 meters) above the surface for up to 30 seconds. Then, the Mars Helicopter will descend and touch back down on the Martian surface.

Several hours after the first flight has occurred, Perseverance will downlink Ingenuity’s first set of engineering data and, possibly, images and video from the rover’s Navigation Cameras and Mastcam-Z. From the data downlinked that first evening after the flight, the Mars Helicopter team expect to be able to determine if their first attempt to fly at Mars was a success.

The data from this first attempt will determine what they do next.

UPDATE: Below the fold is an illustration of that planned first flight, showing that they hope to send the rover toward the north, take some images, and then fly it back to its airfield, with a second landing site option at the far end of its flight.
» Read more

SpaceX successfully launches another 60 Starlink satellites

SpaceX early today successfully used its Falcon 9 rocket to place another 60 Starlink satellites into orbit, bringing that constellation to over 1,300 satellites.

The first stage landed successfully, for the sixth time. Both fairing halves were also reused, and their recovery method has now been simplified:

SpaceX has recently appeared to adjust its fairing recovery strategy. The ships previously dedicated to fairing catch attempts, GO Ms. Chief and GO Ms. Tree, have been stripped of their nets and arms, a possible sign that dry fairing recoveries will no longer be attempted. Post-splashdown recovery has proven to be fairly successful, as recent missions frequently use fairing halves that have flown once if not multiple times before.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

9 SpaceX
6 China
4 Russia
2 Rocket Lab

Counting all launches, the U.S. now leads China 13 to 6 in the national rankings.

Twisted and tilted bedrock in Martian crater

tilted strata in Martin Crater
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated cropped, and reduced to post here, is only a small example of the strangely tilted and twisted strata in the central peak region of 38-mile-wide Martin Crater on Mars. The full image shows more.

The picture was taken on January 12, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The section I’ve cropped out shows a series of stratified strata that are are not only significantly tipped from the horizontal, but have also been bent and deformed.

The crater itself is located about 260 miles south of Valles Marineris, as shown on the overview map below.
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Perseverance dumps debris shield in preparation for Ingenuity deployment

Dumped debris shield under Perseverance
Click for full image.

On March 21st the Perseverance engineering team released the debris shield that had been attached to the bottom of the rover to protect the Ingenuity helicopter during its journey to Mars, and thus began the deployment process for releasing the helicopter itself.

The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, shows that debris shield on the ground. The rover will next drive away from this spot and find the flat area where the helicopter will be placed on the ground for its April flight.

Yutu-2 & Chang’e-4 complete 28th lunar day on Moon

The new colonial movement: China’s lunar rover Yutu-2 and its lander Chang’e-4 have successfully completed their 28th lunar day on the far side of the Moon, and have been placed in hibernation for the long lunar night.

According to this article from China’s state-run press, Yutu-2 has now traveled 683 meters (2,241 feet) since its landing. In the past two lunar days the rover has traveled about 180 feet, continuing its journey to the northwest away from Chang’e-5. Their pace continues to be about 80 to 100 feet per lunar day.

A visit to Cydonia on Mars

Strange geology in Cydonia on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The Cydonia region on Mars, located at around 30-40 degrees north latitude in the northern lowland plains just beyond the transition zone up to the southern cratered highlands, is well known to many on Earth because it was here that the Viking-1 orbiter took a picture of a mesa that, because of the sun angle, made its shadows resemble a face. Thus was born the “Face on Mars” that consumed the shallow-minded among us — and thus the culture, media, and Hollywood — absurdly for decades, until Mars Global Surveyor took the first high resolution image and proved without doubt what was really obvious from the beginning, that it was nothing more than a mesa.

Cydonia however remains a very intriguing region of Mars, mostly because it is home to a lot of strange geology, as shown by the photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here. Taken on January 16, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), it shows some of that strange and inexplicable geology.

While Cydonia is inside that 30-60 degree latitude band where MRO has imaged numerous glacial-type features, I do not know if many such features have been found there. Except for the pits and depressions in the photo’s lower right — which suggest decay in an ice sheet — little else at first glance in the picture clearly invokes any of the obvious glacial features one comes to expect. There appear to be what might be lobate flows in the image’s center going from the west to the east, but if they are glacial, they are so decayed to as leave much doubt.

The overview image below shows where Cydonia is on Mars, and helps explain partly what is found here.
» Read more

Another Starhip update: Static fire test today for #11

Link here. If the static fire goes well, the test flight for Starship prototype #11 should occur in the next few days, possibly as soon as tomorrow.

The article at the link also reviews the possible testing schedule for future prototypes. The next Starship prototype being prepared for flight, #15, will likely not fly next. Instead, it appears that SpaceX is gearing up to first begin tanking tests on its first Super Heavy prototype.

All could change of course depending on tests and flights and construction.

Clouds over Gale Crater

Clouds over Gale Crater
Click for full image.

Cool image time! In today’s download of new images from Curiosity was a large number looking at the sky. by one of the rover’s navigation cameras. As noted in the science team’s most recent update, their aim was to “watch for clouds in the sky at twilight.”

They were apparently very successful. The picture to the right, reduced to post here, is one example. The other pictures show these clouds and other clouds as they change over time.

I don’t have much more to add, other than to say it is quite breath-taking to be able to sit here on Earth and routinely gaze at the weather on Mars.

UPDATE: I do have one more thing to say. If you have any skills at programming and want to figure out how to process the raw images from Curiosity and Perseverance to bring out their color, you might find the video at this link of interest: How Can You Color Process Mars Rover’s Images In DaVinci Resolve?

I am not a computer programming geek, so some of its details went over my head. Nonetheless, it opened a window into the photo-engineering used to turn the rovers’ black-and-white digital data into color.

Hat tip to Patrick Inhofer, who calls himself the photon wrangler at MixingLight.com.

Glynn Lunney, R.I.P

NASA flight director Glynn Lunney has passed away at the age of 84.

He not only was one of the flight directors in Houston that helped get astronauts to the Moon in 1969, he was also instrumental in getting the crew of Apollo 13 back home when their service module failed in 1970.

Lunney and his team were just about to come on console for the evening shift on April 13, 1970, when the Apollo 13 crew radioed, “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

“For me, I felt that the Black Team shift immediately after the explosion and for the next 14 hours was the best piece of operations work I ever did or could hope to do,” Lunney said in his oral history. “It posed a continuous demand for the best decisions often without hard data and mostly on the basis of judgment, in the face of the most severe in-flight emergency faced thus far in manned spaceflight.”

“We built a quarter-million mile space highway, paved by one decision, one choice, and one innovation at a time — repeated constantly over almost four days to bring the crew safely home. This space highway guided the crippled ship back to planet Earth, where people from all continents were bonded in support of these three explorers-in-peril,” he said. “It was an inspiring and emotional feeling, reminding us once again of our common humanity. I have always been so very proud to have been part of this Apollo 13 team, delivering our best when it was really needed.”

He had been part of NASA when it was young (as he was) and honest and dedicated to accomplishing its goals fast and efficiently and — most significantly — with courage. May he rest in peace.

Volcanic badlands on Mars

Volcanic badlands on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on January 29, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a particularly ugly region of rough terrain located about 900 miles to the southwest of the giant volcano Arsia Mons, the southernmost of the chain of three giant volcanoes between Olympus Mons and Valles Marineris. The picture sits inside the floor of a very old and degraded 185-mile-wide crater dubbed Koval’sky.

The section I cropped out was picked at random, because the entire full image looked like this. Though only a handful of images have been taken of the floor of Koval’sky Crater by MRO’s high resolution camera, all show similar rough terrain. In June 2017 the MRO science team posted one of those few such photos with the following caption:
» Read more

Update on SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster

Capitalism in space: According to this update on SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster, the first prototype is now stacked as two complete tank sections that only need to be welded together.

While a good amount of work still remains to weld the two halves together and connect their preinstalled plumbing and avionics runs, those tasks are largely marginal and will tweak the massive steel tower that’s now firmly in one piece. Comprised of 36 of the steel rings also used to assemble Starships, the first Super Heavy prototype – serial number BN1 – will stand roughly 67 meters (220 ft) tall from the top of its uppermost ring to the tail of its soon-to-be-installed Raptor engines.

At that height, Super Heavy BN1 is just 3 meters (~10 ft) shorter than an entire two-stage Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy rocket – the second and third tallest operational rockets today. Of course, Super Heavy is just a booster and SpaceX says the rocket will stand at least 120m (~395 ft) tall with a Starship upper stage and spacecraft installed on top, easily making it the tallest (and likely heaviest) launch vehicle ever assembled.

The report also adds SpaceX’s confirmation that this prototype will never fly, but will be used solely for ground tests. It is the second prototype that will do the first short test hops, hopefully sometime this summer.

SpaceX & NASA agree to better coordinate their satellite constellations to avoid collisions

NASA announced yesterday that it has signed an agreement with SpaceX to better coordinate and share information about their their satellite constellations in order to avoid collisions and launch conflicts.

SpaceX has agreed its Starlink satellites will autonomously or manually maneuver to ensure the missions of NASA science satellites and other assets can operate uninterrupted from a collision avoidance perspective. Unless otherwise informed by SpaceX, NASA has agreed to not maneuver its assets in the event of a potential conjunction to ensure the parties do not inadvertently maneuver into one another.

Makes great sense. Not only will this help avoid damage to satellites from both entities, it commits NASA’s support of SpaceX’s Starlink.

NASA confident Webb will launch in October

In a briefing held yesterday, NASA officials — in summarizing the status of the James Webb Space Telescope — stated they were presently confident that its launch will take place in October this year, as presently planned.

[Eric Smith, JWST program scientist> said the program is dealing with one new technical issue. Two communications transponders suffered separate problems during testing in January. Engineers have tracked down the problems with the two units and started repairs this week. “Those boxes will be back in time for us to make our planned shipping date,” he said.

That issue, he acknowledged, will use some of the remaining schedule margin. “The plan right now is that we’ll get them back in time so that we don’t have to use all of it,” he said. “That’s the main thing that we’re watching regarding the margin.”

If launched in October, Webb will only be a decade behind schedule and a mere 20 times over budget, having been initially proposed to launch in 2011 for a cost of $500 million. Instead, it will cost about $10 billion.

The article also notes that the Biden administration might change the telescope’s name because Webb as a bureaucrat early in his career apparently publicly opposed homosexual rights. Such opinions can no longer be allowed, and anyone who has them must be blackballed as quickly as possible.

No matter. Webb was merely NASA’s administrator through almost its entire first decade, leading the agency in its triumph over the Soviets in the race to the Moon. Such achievements cannot be honored as they illustrate the past greatness of America. Moreover, Webb was a white man, and this makes him totally unqualified to receive any laurels. Today’s modern America hates itself and all white men.

The article also notes a variety of issues that will cause more delays of the new big astronomy boondoggle at NASA, the Roman Space Telescope. They say its launch will likely be delayed to 2026 because of the Wuhan flu panic. I predict this is only a foretaste. Expect many more delays and budget overruns, probably pushing its launch into the 2030s.

But no matter. What is really important is that this new boondoggle is named for a woman!

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