Tag: spaceflight

A really really big landslide on Mars

1:22 pm

A really really big landslide on Mars
Click for original image.

Sometimes the cool geological features I find in the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) image archive are so large they are difficult to present on this webpage. Today is an example. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on March 13, 2024 by the high resolution camera on MRO. It shows the distinct run-out of debris from a landslide that flowed downhill to the north as a single unit of material. Along the way it carved its track in the ground, almost like a ramp.

The full picture however suggested something much more spectacular. In that full image this landslide is merely a small side avalanche to a landslide many times larger. And that high resolution picture only shows what appears to be a small section of that giant slide. Obviously, this required a look at the global mosaic produced by MRO’s context camera to find out how far that avalanche actually extended.
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NASA signs new agreement with ESA to partner on Franklin Mars rover

9:41 am

NASA yesterday signed a new agreement with the European Space Agency (ESA) that confirmed its previous commitment to help land ESA’s Franklin rover on Mars.

With this memorandum of understanding, the NASA Launch Services Program will procure a U.S. commercial launch provider for the Rosalind Franklin rover. The agency will also provide heater units and elements of the propulsion system needed to land on Mars.

Previously NASA had committed $30 million to pay for that launch provider, as yet undetermined. It now wants $49 million for the Franklin mission, with the extra money likely to pay for the new additional equipment outlined in this agreement.

Whether NASA gets this money from Congress however remains unknown. It has not yet been appropriated.

This overall European project has been fraught with problems. It was first designed as a partnership with NASA. Then Obama pulled NASA out in 2012, and ESA switched to a partnership with Russia, which was to provide the rocket and lander. Then in 2022 Russia invaded the Ukraine and Europe broke off all its partnerships with Russia.

Since then ESA has signed a deal with the company Thales Alenia to build the lander.

As these political foibles were going on, the rover also had parachute issues that forced ESA to cancel its original launch date in 2022, using the Russian rocket.

It is likely Congress will approve this additional funding, though it seems to me that Europe should be able to afford paying for its own launch, especially if it is buying that service from the much cheaper U.S. market.

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Russia’s Soyuz-2 rocket launches classified payloads

9:21 am

Russia yesterday placed an unnamed number of classified satellites into orbit, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from its Plesetsk spaceport in the northern part of Russia.

The flight path went north, so the rocket’s four strap-on boosters and lower stages all fell in remote regions or in the Arctic Ocean.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

51 SpaceX
21 China
7 Russia
5 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the world combined in successful launches, 58 to 34. SpaceX by itself still leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 51 to 41.

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NASA versus Isaacman/SpaceX on upgrading Hubble

12:19 pm

Link here. The NPR article is a long detailed look at NASA on-going review of the proposal by billionaire astronaut Jared Isaacman and SpaceX to to do a maintenance mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.

The NPR spin is subtly hostile to the mission, because it would be funded privately and run entirely by private citizens, not the government. Like all modern leftist news outlets, it can only imagine the government capable of doing such things properly.

Reading between the lines, however, what I instead sense is that NASA and the scientific community is generally quite enthusiastic about this proposal, but wants to make sure it not only is done safely but does nothing to harm Hubble in any way, both completely reasonable concerns. While there appear to be some individuals who are opposed for purely political and egotistically reasons — a desire to keep control of this turf no matter what — I don’t see that faction having much influence long term.

Whether this project can go forward I think will be largely determined by the success or failure of Isaacman’s next manned flight, dubbed Polaris Dawn and scheduled for this summer. On it he will attempt the first spacewalk by a private citizen, using SpaceX’s Resilience capsule and EVA spacesuit. If that spacewalk is a success, and he can demonstrate the ability to accomplish some complex tasks during the EVA, it will certainly ease the concerns of many about a follow-up repair mission to Hubble.

If it does proceed, the goal appears to be to attach new gyroscope hardware to the outside of Hubble, rather than replace the failed gyroscopes already in place. Such an approach will be simpler and more in line with the capabilities of a Dragon capsule, compared to the repair work the astronauts did on the space shuttle.

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AST SpaceMobile makes deal with ATT to use its cell-to-satellite constellation

11:59 am

AST SpaceMobile, which launched in 2022 its first satellite for direct cellphone-to-satellite communications and has been successfully testing it since, has now signed a deal with ATT, which wants to use the company’s planned constellation of five such satellites, scheduled for launch this summer.

Nor is this the only satellite company launching such satellites. SpaceX has already launched several dozen Starlink satellites adapted for direct cell-to-satellite service. In addition, it appears that all the companies making smart phones are adding features to their phones that would allow this capability in the future.

Once operational, these satellites will act as orbiting cell towers, and will thus eliminate most of the dead zones in all the populated regions on Earth.

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Earth-sized exoplanet discovered orbiting dwarf star 55 light years away

10:49 am

Using a number of ground-based telescopes worldwide, astronomers have discovered an Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting what the scientists label an “ultra-cool” dwarf star only about 55 light years away.

You can read the paper here.

Though Earth-sized, this exoplanet is not habitable. It orbits the star every 17 hours and is believed to be tidally locked, with one side always facing the star. More important, though this red dwarf star has likely existed for many tens of billions of years and will continue for many tens of billions of years into the future, the star is too dim and lacking in the kind of resources needed for life. It also drenches the planet with bursts of radiation, which is also believed to have stripped the planet of an atmosphere.

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Private satellite snaps picture of ISS in orbit

10:37 am

ISS as seen by HEO Robotics satellite
Click for original image.

One of the satellites in the commercial satellite constellation run by the Australian company HEO Robotics to monitor objects in space successfully took a picture of ISS this week as it zipped by only 43 miles away.

That picture is to the right, reduced to post here. The relative speeds between the satellite and ISS was about 3.7 miles a second. The station’s main truss, which holds up its solar panels and heat radiators, is the vertical structure going from upper left to lower right. The habitable modules cross this at right angles, with what appears to be the Russian section on the right with a Soyuz or Progress docked to the port at the end. A Dragon capsule can be seen at the opposite end, docked to the American section on the left.

The company’s satellites have previously provided imagery of other objects in orbit, including the ERS-2 satellite just before it was de-orbited as well as China’s Tiangong-3 space station during its assembly.

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Potentially serious problem on BepiColombo Mercury mission

10:14 am

According to the European Space Agency (ESA), engineers have discovered what could be a potentially serious problem on BepiColombo mission that is presently on its way to Mercury.

The solar arrays and electric propulsion system on the Mercury Transfer Module are used to generate thrust during the spacecraft’s complex journey from Earth to Mercury.

However, on 26 April, as BepiColombo was scheduled to begin its next manoeuvre, the Transfer Module failed to deliver enough electrical power to the spacecraft’s thrusters.

A combined team from ESA and the mission’s industrial partners set to work the moment the issue was identified. By 7 May, they had restored BepiColombo’s thrust to approximately 90% of its previous level. However, the Transfer Module’s available power is still lower than it should be, and so full thrust cannot yet be restored.

The press release implies that this issue won’t prevent the spacecraft from entering orbit around Mercury as scheduled in December 2025, but one wonders how that could be if it doesn’t have sufficient power to do the proper course correction during its last major flyby of Mercury in September 2024. If it misses its precise route in ’24 it could miss Mercury entirely in ’25.

Engineers are analyzing the situation to see what can be done to get it to Mercury, while also trying to figure out what caused this power problem in the first place in order to fix it.

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Congress passes new authorization bill for FAA that includes short extension of “learning period”

10:05 am

The new FAA authorization bill that that House approved yesterday and was passed previously by the Senate includes a short extension to the end of the year of the so-called “learning period” that is supposed to restrict the agency’s ability to regulate the new commercial space industry.

That limitation was first established in 2004 with a time period of eight years. It has been extended numerous times since then. The most recent extensions however have been very short, suggesting Congress (mostly from the Democrat side of the aile) wants to soon eliminate it. Whether that happens when it comes up for extension again at the end of 2024 will depend greatly on which party is in control after the election.

It really doesn’t matter. Everything the FAA has been doing in the past three years suggests this learning period no longer exists anyway. The agency has been demanding every new American company or rocket or spacecraft meet much higher regulatory requirements, which appears to have slowed significantly the development of those new companies, rockets, or spacecraft in the past two years.

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Lithuania signs Artemis Accords

9:54 am

Lithuania yesterday became the 40th nation to sign the Artemis Accords, joining the American alliance for exploring the solar system.

The alliance now includes these nations: Angola, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Columbia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Poland, Romania, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, the United States and Uruguay.

The press release for this announcement differed slightly from the last few, all of which emphasized how the accords were designed to “reinforce” the Outer Space Treaty, the exact opposite of its original goals, which was to build an alliance of nations focused on getting around or eliminating the restrictions of the Outer Space Treaty on private property in space. Today the press release was more vague:

NASA, along with the Department of State and seven other nations, established the Artemis Accords in 2020 to lay out a set of principles grounded in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and three related space treaties. With the commitment of now 40 nations, the accords community will facilitate a long-term and peaceful presence of deep space exploration for the benefit of humanity.

Does this mean the Biden administration is going to return to the accords’ original goal? I doubt it. I think instead they decided they needed to be less obvious about their new intentions, which increasingly appears to be to use this alliance to foster globalist international cooperation aimed at keeping all power and legal control in the hands of the governments themselves.

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Juno looks down at Jupiter

9:50 am

Jupiter as seen by Juno on May 12, 2024
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, reduced, and annotated to post here, was taken on May 12, 2024 by the camera on the Jupiter orbiter Juno during its most recent close-fly of the gas giant, its sixty-first since it arrived in 2016. The picture was snapped when Juno was about 34,674 miles away from Jupiter as it flew over the northern hemisphere.

Citizen scientist Thomas Thomopoulos then took that raw image and enhanced and enlarged it to bring out the storm details. You can see the distinct bands that cut across Jupiter’s equatorial and mid-latitudes. The reddish band is where the Great Red Spot is located, though that spot is not seen in this picture.

As we move north those bands slowly transition into the chaotic storms of the polar regions, which also circle the pole but do not form bands.

For scale I have added a circle that approximates the Earth’s size in comparison to Jupiter. You will notice that some of those polar storms are as big if not bigger than the Earth itself. To think we presently have any real understanding of the processes that create Jupiter’s climate and weather systems is to be arrogant beyond belief.

Fortunately, the scientists who study Jupiter are not that arrogant, though they often can’t admit it and are forced to sound otherwise when ignorant journalists and NASA managers demand more answers from them then are possible. The scientists understand that what makes pictures like this intriguing is not what it tells us but the amount of ignorance it reveals. To get funding for future research however sometimes requires they sound more knowledgeable than they are.

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The aurora as seen looking down from space

9:12 am

The aurora over the U.S. on May 11, 2024
Click for original image.

NOAA on May 13, 2024 released a set of eight images taken by its fleet of JPSS weather satellites, showing the strong Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights that were activated over the May 11th weekend due to several very strong solar flares on the Sun and sent a geomagnetic storm at the Earth.

One of those images, reduced to post here, is to the right. You can see the eastern coast of the United States, outlined by city lights, with a band of aurora cutting across the northern half and reaching south below the Great Lakes. The other seven images are available at the link above.

The geomagnetic storm was the strongest produced by the Sun in more than two decades, since 2003. That storm occurred during solar maximum, as did the May 11th this past weekend. However, the Sun experienced another solar maximum in-between, in 2014, which produced few such storms, and none as strong.

I want to add that despite the screams of panic prior to the arrival of this storm, its arrival produced only minor disturbances in the world’s electrical grid, and in fact was proof positive that the many decades of work that electrical companies have devoted to protecting the grid from such storms has paid off. It is very unlikely any major storm from the Sun can harm that grid in the future, unless of course we get lazy and stop maintaining it.

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