Tag: spaceflight

Chang’e-4 launch set for December

8:25 am

China has now scheduled the launch of its Chang’e-4 lunar rover/lander, aimed for the first landing on the Moon’s far side, for sometime this coming December.

They will use China’s Long March 3B rocket, not the bigger Long March 5. As is usual for China, many details about the mission remain secret. The exact landing area has not been announced, other than somewhere in the very large South Pole/Aitken Basin area. The exact date has not been announced, other than sometime in December.

Their planned sample return mission, Chang’e-5, is now set for launch in 2019, “should the Long March 5 rocket be proven ready for flight later this year.”

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Landslides on Ceres

9:31 am

Landslides on rim of Occator Crater

Cool image time! With Dawn completing its descent into its final low orbit only about 30 miles above the surface of Ceres, it is beginning to take some very spectacular images. Above is a cropped section from a full image taken on June 9th of the rim of Occator Crater from an altitude of 27 miles. It shows evidence of landslides on the crater’s rim, as well as at least two bright patches. If you click on it you can see the entire picture.

Crater on Ceres

Nor is this the only cool image released As Dawn descended to its new orbit, it took one very cool oblique image of the planet’s horizon. On the right I have cropped a small section out of one such image, taken on May 30th from an altitude of 280 miles. If you click on it you can see the full image, showing numerous other small craters all around it, to the horizon.

Note the bright streaks on the crater walls, suggestive of more landslides as well as seepage of the thought-to-exist brine from below the surface.

For the next year or so, as Dawn winds down its mission, expect a lot more very intriguing pictures of Ceres. I am especially eager to see close-ups of the bright spots at the center of Occator Crater.

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Private company to offer tourist trips to its own facility on ISS

9:00 am

Capitalism in space: The private company Axiom has announced that it will offer tourist trips to its own facility it will add to ISS, and then eventually detach when the station is retired.

Axiom’s timeline has some flex, because it’s not yet clear how long the larger station will keep going, or what the assembly schedule will be for the company’s custom-built habitation module. But a weekend feature about the project in The New York Times cited 2022 as the supposed opening date.

In addition to the 10-day orbital stay, the $55 million would cover a 15-week training experience on Earth. Axiom is targeting space tourists as well as researchers and entrepreneurs who want to develop in-space manufacturing facilities.

Is this doable? Axiom isn’t yet laying out the complete logistical details, but the company will almost certainly rely on the likes of SpaceX and Boeing, which are developing space taxis for NASA’s use. Once those spaceships go into operation, sometime in the 2018-2019 period, there’s likely to be excess transportation capacity that Axiom could buy into.

This is the future of ISS, a privately run hotel. The Russians have announced a similar plan, attaching a module to ISS that will be designed as a hotel room for tourists. I expect others will eventually do the same. Once these profitable operations take hold, I guarantee that ISS will not be retired. There will be vested interests who will apply the right political pressure to keep it in orbit.

Will that be a good thing? It depends. From a taxpayer perspective, it might not be. ISS is very expensive to operate. Privately built and independent stations would be much cheaper, and would not involve any federal subsidy. At the same time, these private stations might not be doable at affordable prices in the near term. Maintaining ISS for these private companies might in this case be a very reasonably use of federal funds. As the profits rise, the companies will eventually be able to afford building their own stations that will serve their needs better than ISS. That will then be the time to retire ISS, when other private and profitable stations are there, ready to replace it.

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New analysis suggests Ceres has more organic molecules than previously estimated

12:11 pm

The uncertainty of science: A new analysis of data from Dawn now suggests that the surface of Ceres has a greater percentage of organic molecules than previously estimated.

To get an initial idea of how abundant those compounds might be, the original research team compared the VIR data from Ceres with laboratory reflectance spectra of organic material formed on Earth. Based on that standard, the researchers concluded that between six and 10 percent of the spectral signature they detected on Ceres could be explained by organic matter.

But for this new research, Kaplan and her colleagues wanted to re-examine those data using a different standard. Instead of relying on Earth rocks to interpret the data, the team turned to an extraterrestrial source: meteorites. Some meteorites — chunks of carbonaceous chondrite that have fallen to Earth after being ejected from primitive asteroids — have been shown to contain organic material that’s slightly different from what’s commonly found on our own planet. And Kaplan’s work shows that the spectral reflectance of the extraterrestrial organics is distinct from that of terrestrial counterparts.

“What we find is that if we model the Ceres data using extraterrestrial organics, which may be a more appropriate analog than those found on Earth, then we need a lot more organic matter on Ceres to explain the strength of the spectral absorption that we see there,” Kaplan said. “We estimate that as much as 40 to 50 percent of the spectral signal we see on Ceres is explained by organics. That’s a huge difference compared to the six to 10 percent previously reported based on terrestrial organic compounds.”

Please note: Both estimates depend on assumptions that could easily be wrong. Ceres might have less organics, or more, than either estimate. Or somewhere in the middle. These estimates are merely educated guesses.

And remember, organic molecules does not mean life. It only means the molecules use carbon as a component.

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Contact with Opportunity lost

9:33 am

The Opportunity science team has lost contact with Opportunity as it automatically shuts down operations to survive low battery power due to the dust storm.

This does not necessarily mean the rover is dead. Depending on how long this period of low power lasts, the rover could return to life once the dust storm passes. Or not. We can only wait and see.

A press conference today on the dust storm and Opportunity’s status begins at 1:30 Eastern time today.

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The two candidate landing sites for ExoMars2020

12:27 pm

The June release of new images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) included three images of the two candidate landing sites for Europe’s 2020 ExoMars rover mission. All three images provide us as hint at what that rover might see when it arrives a few years from now.

ExoMars 2020 landing sites

The two candidate sites are locations on Mars dubbed Mawrth Vallis and Oxia Palas. The map to the right shows their general location to the east of Mars’s giant volcanoes and giant canyon Valles Marineris. The red splotches indicate the large number of images taken by MRO of these locations, partly to help the ExoMars science team choose which site to pick and partly to study the geology in these Martian locations. As you can see, both candidate sites are in the transition zone between the northern low plains and the southern highlands.

At first glance Mawrth Vallis seems the more spectacular site. Mawrth (Welsh for Mars) is one of the gigantic drainage canyons near Valles Marineris. Though tiny in comparison to Valles Marineris, on Earth it would easily rival the Grand Canyon in size, and in fact is slightly longer (400 miles versus 300 miles). Unlike the Grand Canyon, however, Mawrth Vallis doesn’t appear to have a distinct or obvious rim. This video, produced by the European Space Agency using images from its Mars Express orbiter, gives a sense of the canyon’s terrain as it flies upstream from the northern lowlands to the canyon’s high point in the southern highlands. The highlands on either side of the canyon more resemble the broken geology of Mars’s chaos regions that are found scattered about in this transition zone than the flat generally level Kaibab plateau that surrounds the Grand Canyon.

Mawrth Vallis

The image on the right is a tiny crop from the most recently released MRO image. The full image shows a strip of the upper plateau south of canyon and near its inlet from the southern highlands. This crop reveals a surface that is a wild mixture of colors and complex geology. In fact, in a 2017 MRO image release showing a different place in Mawrth Vallis, the canyon was dubbed a “painted desert.” To quote that release:

The clay-rich terrain surrounding Mawrth Vallis is one of the most scenic regions of Mars, a future interplanetary park. …The origin of these altered layers is the subject of continued debates, perhaps to be resolved by a future rover on the surface. We do know that these layers are very ancient, dating back to a time when the environment of Mars was wetter and more habitable, if there were any inhabitants.

Other MRO images of Mawrth Vallis here and here emphasize this description.

As for Oxia Palas, the other candidate landing site for ExoMars 2020, in the June MRO image release there were two images.
» Read more

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Hayabusa-2 takes first photos of target asteroid Ryugu

8:34 am

On June 10 Hayabusa-2 took its first photos of Ryugu, the asteroid it will reach later this month.

The Sunday photos were taken when Hayabusa2 was about 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) from Ryugu. Last week, JAXA released a few ONC-T images taken on June 6, when the probe was 1,615 miles (2,600 km) from the space rock.

Hayabusa2, which launched in December 2014, is scheduled to arrive at Ryugu on or around June 27. At that time, the probe will begin orbiting the asteroid at an altitude of about 12 miles (20 km), JAXA officials have said.

Hayabusa2 will then start prepping for a series of complex, up-close studies of the space rock. If all goes according to plan, over the ensuing 12 months, the spacecraft will deploy three rovers and a lander on Ryugu’s surface, gouge out a small crater using an explosives-bearing impactor, and collect samples from the newly created crater.

The spacecraft will depart Ryugu in November or December 2019, and its collected samples will come back to Earth in a special return capsule in late 2020.

The image suggests that the asteroid is “not significantly elongated.”

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Growing Martian dust storm forces Opportunity to suspend operations

4:37 pm

A growing Martian dust storm has forced the Opportunity science team to suspend science operations and to reconfigure the rover’s operations to increase its chances of surviving the storm.

In a matter of days, the storm had ballooned. It now spans more than 7 million square miles (18 million square kilometers) — an area greater than North America — and includes Opportunity’s current location at Perseverance Valley. More importantly, the swirling dust has raised the atmospheric opacity, or “tau,” in the valley in the past few days. This is comparable to an extremely smoggy day that blots out sunlight. The rover uses solar panels to provide power and to recharge its batteries.

Opportunity’s power levels had dropped significantly by Wednesday, June 6, requiring the rover to shift to minimal operations.

This isn’t Opportunity’s first time hunkering down in bad weather: in 2007, a much larger storm covered the planet. That led to two weeks of minimal operations, including several days with no contact from the rover to save power. The project’s management prepared for the possibility that Opportunity couldn’t balance low levels of power with its energy-intensive survival heaters, which protect its batteries from Mars’ extreme cold. It’s not unlike running a car in the winter so that the cold doesn’t sap its battery charge.There is a risk to the rover if the storm persists for too long and Opportunity gets too cold while waiting for the skies to clear.

In other words, there is a possibility that the rover might not make it through this period of low sunlight. Nonetheless, the rover did send four images down yesterday, though the four images are essentially dust filled, and are likely aimed at the far distance to help gauge the extent of the storm.

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SpaceX outlines plans for major expansion at Kennedy

4:15 pm

Capitalism in space: According to plans outlined in a draft environmental statement, SpaceX is planning a major mission control and new rocket processing facility at the Kennedy Space Center.

It will be an operational monument to Elon Musk’s vision: a towering SpaceX launch control center, a 133,000-square-foot hangar and a rocket garden rising in the heart of Kennedy Space Center.

According to plans detailed in a draft environmental review published recently by KSC, SpaceX will undertake a major expansion of its facilities at the space center sometime in the not-too-distant future. The review says SpaceX is seeking more room and a bigger presence “in its pursuit of a complete local, efficient, and reusable launch vehicle program.” The expansion would enable SpaceX to store and refurbish large numbers of Falcon rocket boosters and nose cones at the operations center down the road from NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building.

The most eye-opening detail in this environmental draft is a statement that this SpaceX facility will be designed to support an expectation of up to 63 launches per year. In the first decade of this century that’s about how many launches the entire world accomplished per year. SpaceX’s ambitions here however are not absurd. They instead hearken to the expected upcoming boom in the entire aerospace, mostly fueled by the lower launch costs that SpaceX forced on the launch industry. SpaceX might manage that many launches, but it will be only a part of the entire booming launch market.

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Northrop Grumman’s first Pegasus launch delayed indefinitely

10:47 pm

The first launch of a Pegasus rocket following the completion of the sale of Orbital ATK to Northrop Grumman has been delayed indefinitely because of “off-nominal data” detected in the rocket.

The payload is a NASA climate research satellite dubbed ICON. The rocket and launch crew were on board the L1011 carrier plane on they way to the Pacific launch area for next week’s launch when they detected the issue and decided to return to California.

This is not the first problem with this particular Pegasus launch.

ICON’s launch has been delayed a year by a pair of concerns with its Pegasus launcher. Engineers wanted more time to inspect the Pegasus rocket motors after they were mishandled during shipment to Vandenberg, officials said. That pushed the launch back from June to December 2017, the next availability in the military-run range at Kwajalein.

Then managers decided to ground the mission to assess the reliability of bolt-cutters used to jettison the Pegasus rocket’s payload fairing and separate the satellite in orbit. Workers installed smaller bolts in the fairing and satellite separation mechanisms, a measure officials said will ensure the cutters do their jobs.

For Northrop Grumman this isn’t the best way to start its new rocket business, but better a delay than a failed launch.

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Curiosity finds methane fluctuates seasonally in Gale Crater

9:05 am

Seasonal methane on Mars

In its second significant science release yesterday (the first relating to the discovery of organics), the Curiosity science team revealed that they have found over almost three Martian years the amount of methane in the atmosphere appears to fluctuate seasonally. The graph on the right illustrates this change.

[The data] show methane rises from just above 0.2ppb in the northern hemisphere winter to a fraction over 0.6ppb in the summer. The team’s best explanation is that methane is seeping up from underground, perhaps from stored ices, and is then being released when surface soils are warmed.

The team cannot positively identify the origin of the methane, but the researchers think they can close down one particular mechanism for its production. This involves sunlight breaking up carbon-rich (organic) molecules that have fallen to the planet’s surface in meteorites.

The variation in ultraviolet light over the course of the seasons is not big enough to drive the scale of the change seen in the methane concentration, says Dr Webster. “We know the intensity of the Sun and this mechanism should produce only a 20% increase in methane during the summer, but we’re seeing it increase by a factor of three,” he explained.

The change could be caused by either a chemical or a biological process. At this time there is no way to determine which.

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Germany to do partial gravity experiments using Zero-G airplane

8:53 am

In what might be the first human experiments in partial gravity, Germany has hired the Zero-G airplane for a series of flights testing how humans react in such conditions.

In the Partial G Campaign, the pilots fly three special parabolic shapes. So instead of zero-g or microgravity, one quarter, half and three quarters of Earth’s gravity will still be present. Passengers on board will therefore experience one quarter, half or three quarters of their own body weight – depending on the trajectory,” explains Stang.

The goal of these flights is to see what effect partial gravity has on human muscle control.

For humans to be able to move around and interact with their environment, they require finely tuned muscle movements, to walk around or ensure a secure footing, for instance. Under partial gravity, in particular, they must be able to effectively control their muscles via their neural pathways. If we are unable to do so, the risk of stumbling is dramatically increased. This applies to both humans on Earth and astronauts in space. However, partial gravity conditions appear to influence this neuromuscular control in challenging situations, increasing the astronaut’s risk of stumbling. Researchers at the University of Freiburg are investigating why this is so. The results are intended to reduce the risk to astronaut safety during missions to other planets, thereby resolving a fundamental safety issue in human physiological space exploration.

This is better than nothing, but it seems to me to be the least important thing to study in partial gravity. The Apollo astronauts clearly demonstrated that humans can adapt their muscle movements to partial gravity. What we must instead learn is whether partial gravity will eliminate bone loss, loss of cardio-vascular conditioning, spinal changes, balance problems, and the vision damage, all of which have been found to occur in weighlessness.

At the same time, it is probably impossible to study any of these latter issues during a short parabolic vomit comet flight. The Germans are doing what they can. Unfortunately, they might be the only ones doing anything in this area.

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Curiosity finds evidence of complex carbon molecules

11:40 am

In a study released today, the Curiosity science team announced that earlier drill samples revealed evidence of complex organic carbon molecules, the possible remains of past life.

To unlock organic molecules from the samples, the oven baked them to temperatures of between 600°C and 860°C—the range where a known contaminant disappeared—and fed the resulting fumes to a mass spectrometer, which can identify molecules by weight. The team picked up a welter of closely related organic signals reflecting dozens or hundreds of types of small carbon molecules, probably short rings and strands called aromatics and aliphatics, respectively. Only a few of the organic molecules, sulfur-bearing carbon rings called thiophenes, were abundant enough to be detected directly, Eigenbrode says.

The mass patterns looked like those generated on Earth by kerogen, a goopy fossil fuel building block that is found in rocks such as oil shale—a result the team tested by baking and breaking organic molecules in identical instruments on Earth, at Goddard. Kerogen is sometimes found with sulfur, which helps preserve it across billions of years; the Curiosity scientists think the sulfur compounds in their samples also explain the longevity of the Mars compounds.

Earth’s kerogen was formed when geologic forces compressed the ancient remains of algae and similar critters. It’s impossible to say whether ancient life explains the martian organics, however. Carbon-rich meteorites contain kerogenlike compounds, and constantly rain down on Mars. Or reactions driven by Mars’s ancient volcanoes could have formed the compounds from primordial carbon dioxide. Monica Grady, a planetary scientist at The Open University in Milton Keynes, U.K., believes the compounds somehow formed on Mars because she thinks it’s highly unlikely that the rover dug into a site where an ancient meteorite fell. She also notes that the signal was found at the base of an ancient lake, a potential catchment for life’s remains. “I suspect it’s geological. I hope it’s biological,” she says.

It must be emphasized once again that they have not found evidence of past life. What they have found are the types of molecules that are often left behind by life, but can also form without the presence of life.

This result, from past drillholes in the Murray Formation, explains however why Curiosity headed back downhill to do its most recent drill test.

Curiosity has one last tool to help the team find out: nine small cups containing a solvent that frees organic compounds bonded in rock, eliminating the need to break them apart—and potentially destroy them—at high temperatures. In December 2016, rover scientists were finally prepared to use one of the cups, but just then the mechanism to extend the rover’s drill stopped working reliably. The rover began exploring an iron-rich ridge, leaving the mudstone behind. In April, after engineers found a way to fix the drill problem, the team made the rare call to go backward, driving back down the ridge to the mudstone to drill its first sample in a year and half. If the oven and mass spectrometer reveal signs of organics in the sample, the team is likely to use a cup. “It’s getting so close I can taste it,” says Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The newest drillhole sample has now entered the mass spectrometer. Stay tuned!

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Movie of Juno’s thirteenth fly-by of Jupiter

10:12 am

Cool image time. Mathematician and software programmer Gerald Eichstädt has released another movie using images from Juno’s thirteenth close fly-by of Jupiter.

I have embedded the movie below the fold. As he notes,

The movie covers two hours of this flyby in 125-fold time lapse, the time from 2018-05-24T04:41:00.000 to 2018-05-24T06:41:00.000. It is based on 27 of the JunoCam images taken during the flyby, and on spacecraft trajectory data provided via SPICE kernel files.

The view begins by looking down at the northern hemisphere, and gets to within 2,200 miles of the giant planet’s cloud tops.

» Read more

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Juno mission extended

3:31 pm

NASA has extended the Juno mission through 2022 in order to complete its planned science.

NASA has approved an update to Juno’s science operations until July 2021. This provides for an additional 41 months in orbit around Jupiter and will enable Juno to achieve its primary science objectives.Juno is in 53-day orbits rather than 14-day orbits as initially planned because of a concern about valves on the spacecraft’s fuel system. This longer orbit means that it will take more time to collect the needed science data.

An independent panel of experts confirmed in April that Juno is on track to achieve its science objectives and is already returning spectacular results.The Juno spacecraft and all instruments are healthy and operating nominally.

NASA has now funded Juno through FY 2022. The end of prime operations is now expected in July 2021, with data analysis and mission close-out activities continuing into 2022.

I will admit that though Juno is clearly learning a great deal about Jupiter, such as this story about lightning there, its larger orbit makes it difficult to track the gas giant cloud structures as they evolve. This is unfortunate.

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More problems for James Webb Space Telescope?

9:45 am

The impending release of an independent NASA review of the state of the James Webb Space Telescope project suggests that the project is faced with additional issues.

NASA is in the process of evaluating the report from the Independent Review Board chaired by Tom Young to assess the status of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Established in March, the Board was due to submit its report on May 31. NASA said today that the Board has completed its work and briefed NASA. The report will be released later this month after NASA determines the impact on cost and schedule.

Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, created the Webb Independent Review Board (WIRB) on March 27, the same day he announced another delay in the telescope’s launch. WIRB held its first meeting the next week.

For many years, JWST appeared to be on track for launch in October 2018 after a 2011 restructuring that followed a series of earlier cost overruns and schedule delays. Congress capped the development cost (not operations) at $8 billion in law. Pursuant to the 2005 NASA Authorization Act, if a program exceeds 30 percent of its baseline estimated cost, NASA must notify Congress and no money may be spent on it after 18 months from the time of that notification unless Congress reauthorizes it.

The project will not die, Congress will simply extend it with lots more money. That is how big NASA projects really function, to take as long as possible so that they can continue their real goal of providing pork barrel jobs in congressional districts.

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Aerojet Rocketdyne completes first rocket engine for DARPA’s quick launch rocket

9:32 am

Aerojet Rocketdyne has completed assembly of the first rocket engine for DARPA’s quick launch rocket, Phantom Express, being built by Boeing.

[The engine] can fly for 55 missions with servicing only every 10. To speed up turnarounds, the engines will be installed in a hinged nacelle for better access and the entire spacecraft will use an operations procedure similar to those developed for aircraft.

The first AR-22 engines will be used for daily hot-fire tests at Rocketdyne’s Stennis Space Center facility in Mississippi to demonstrate that it can handle multi-mission conditions and that the fast turnarounds are both feasible and practical. In addition, Rocketdyne says that the test information will help spaceplane builder Boeing to improve the Phantom Express ground infrastructure.

Boeing and Aerojet Rocketdyne both have it very sweet. They have gotten DARPA to fund the development of their own low-cost reusable rocket, while other private companies have to go it alone.

Still, it appears that Boeing is leveraging its engineering experience from building the X-37B for the Air Force for this project. Whether the company can expand the rocket’s customer base beyond the Air Force remains unclear.

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Northrop Grumman purchase of Orbital ATK approved

9:24 am

Capitalism in space: Northrop Grumman’s acquisition of Orbital ATK has been approved by the Federal Trade Commission.

With this purchase, the name Orbital ATK will recede into history. This division of Northrop Grumman will now be called Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems. Here at Behind the Black I will simple call it Northrop Grumman.

The FTC ruling carried with it one caveat:

As a condition for the approval of the merger, the company will have to supply solid rocket motors “on a non-discriminatory basis under specified circumstances,” the FTC ruled.

Ensuring competition in the solid rocket motors industry is a key issue for the Defense Department because only two manufacturers remain in the business, Orbital ATK and Aerojet Rocketdyne. The Air Force plans to acquire a new strategic intercontinental ballistic missile, the so-called Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, with Northrop Grumman and Boeing competing for the award. The intent was for both Orbital ATK and Aerojet to supply both prime contractors. The FTC decision requires Northrop Grumman to separate its solid rocket motors business with a firewall so it can continue to support Boeing.

It will be up to the Defense Department to ensure compliance with the firewall mandate.

It is unclear from the press report what this firewall accomplishes. It sounds like there was fear that Northrop Grumman would not have sold its solid rocket boosters to competitor Boeing, but I don’t see that happening. This acquisition was designed to put Northrop Grumman back in the rocket business just as that business is booming. Part of that business is selling solid rockets.

Either way, the company that David Thompson started in the early 1980s to challenge the big space companies, Orbital Sciences, has now completely vanished into one of those big space companies.

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China offers big bucks to attract foreign science talent

9:10 am

Link here. In China’s recent push to build big science facilities, such as the giant radio telescope FAST, it has faced a shortage of qualified homegrown Chinese scientists to run those new facilities.

To solve this problem, China is now offering big bucks to any scientist, even foreigners, willing to move to China.

On 22 May, the Ministry of Science and Technology issued guidelines that encourage science ministries and commissions to consult foreign experts and attract non-Chinese to full-time positions within China. In a striking change, foreign scientists are now allowed to lead public research projects.

In the past decade, China has aimed to build up its scientific capacity by luring back some of the tens of thousands of Chinese scientists working abroad. The latest measures emphasize that non-Chinese talent is also welcome. Drafted in December 2017 but not previously made public, they are “a confirmation of things that have been going on for a while,” says Denis Simon, an expert on China’s science policy at Duke Kunshan University in China, a branch campus of the Durham, North Carolina–based Duke University.

Simon says foreign scientists are drawn by China’s increased spending on R&D, which is rising twice as fast as its economic growth. Increasingly ambitious big science projects, such as a massive particle accelerator now under study, are a lure as well, says Cao Cong, a science policy specialist at the University of Nottingham Ningbo in China, an affiliate of the U.K. university. The opportunity for foreign scientists to serve as principal investigators for publicly funded programs is a significant new incentive, says Liang Zheng, who studies science and technology policy at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Of course, moving to a nation ruled under totalitarian communist rule has its drawbacks:

Relocating to China comes with challenges. Gibson teaches in English but needs Chinese language help handling administrative matters and grant applications. Restricted access to internet sites such as Google is also a hurdle. “My research and my teaching regularly rely on access to online resources and search platforms [that are] blocked in China, so this is an impediment to my work,” Gibson says. But he has found workarounds. China shut down many virtual private networks, which provide access to blocked overseas sites, but a few remain. “There’s a saying: ‘Everything in China is difficult, but nothing is impossible,’ which I think reflects the situation very accurately,” Gibson says.

I would also expect that any American who makes this move will face significant security problems with the U.S. government upon their return.

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Another intriguing pit on Mars

1:37 pm

pit on Mars

Cool image time! In the June release of images from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, I came across the image on the right, cropped slightly to post here, of a pit in a region dubbed Hephaestus Fossae that is located just at the margin of Mars’s vast northern plains.

Below and to the right is an annotated second image showing the area around this pit. If you click on it you can see the full resolution image, uncropped, and unannotated.

wider view of pit

The scale bar is based on the 25 centimeter per pixel scale provided at the image link. Based on this, this pit is only about ten to fifteen meters across, or 30 to 50 feet wide. The image webpage says the sun was 39 degrees above the horizon, with what they call a sun angle of 51 degrees. Based on these angles, the shadow on the floor of the pit suggests it is about the same depth, 30 to 50 feet.

The shadows suggest overhung walls. This, plus the presence of nearby aligned sinks, strongly suggests that there are extensive underground passages leading away from this pit.

For a caver on Earth to drop into a pit 30 to 50 feet deep is nowadays a trivial thing. You rig a rope (properly), put on your vertical system, and rappel in. When you want to leave you use that same vertical system to climb the rope, using mechanical cams that slide up the rope but will not slide down.

On Mars such a climb would be both easier and harder. The gravity is only one third that of Earth, but the lack of atmosphere means you must wear some form of spacesuit. Moreover, this system is not great for getting large amounts of gear up and down. Usually, people only bring what they can carry in a pack. To use this Martian pit as a habitat will require easier access, preferable by a wheeled vehicle that can drive in.

The pit’s location however is intriguing. The map below shows its location on a global map of Mars. This region is part of the Utopia Basin, the place with the second lowest elevation on Mars.
» Read more

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NASA administrator in talks about commercializing ISS

9:48 am

In a wide-ranging news article today, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine revealed that the agency is in discussions with many private corporations about the possibility of privatizing ISS.

Bridenstine declined to name the companies that have expressed interest in managing the station, and said he was aware that companies may find it “hard to close the business case.” But he said there was still seven years to plan for the future of the station, and with the White House’s budget request “we have forced the conversation.”

Bridenstine’s approach to ISS’s future seems reasonable to me. At some point the federal government needs to face the station’s future, and now is a better time to do it then later.

The article however confirmed my generally meh opinion of Bridenstine. First, he reiterated his born-again new belief in human-caused global warming, a belief that seemed to arrive solely for him to gain the votes to get him confirmed in the Senate.

Second, he said this about LOP-G, NASA’s proposed international space station that would fly in lunar space.

Known as the Lunar Orbiting Platform Gateway, the system would be built by NASA in partnership with industry and its international partners, he said.

“I’ve met with a lot of leaders of space agencies from around the world,” he said. “There is a lot of interest in the Gateway in the lunar outpost because a lot of countries want to have access to the surface of the moon. And this can help them as well and they can help us. It helps expand the partnership that we’ve seen in low Earth orbit with the International Space Station.”

But the first element of the system wouldn’t be launched until 2021 or 2022, he said. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted words illustrate why Bridenstine seems like a lightweight to me. LOP-G might be flying near the Moon, but nothing about it will provide anyone any access to the lunar surface. Not only will it not be operational in any manner for more than a decade, at the soonest, but it doesn’t appear designed to make reaching the lunar surface any easier. Instead, it mostly seems designed to justify SLS and Orion, and provide that boondoggle a mission.

Still, Bridenstine has in the past been generally in favor of commercial space, and that position appears to be benefiting NASA’s commercial crew partners. Prior to Bridenstine’s arrival the decisions of NASA’s safety panel acted to repeatedly delay the launch of the manned capsules being built by SpaceX and Boeing. Now that safety panel seems to have seen the light, and is suddenly more confident in these capsules. I suspect Bridenstine might have had some influence here.

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Russia announces plans to build reusable rocket

9:17 am

I’ll believe it when I see it: Russia announced this week new plans to build a reusable smallsat rocket where the first stage would fly back and land vertically.

According to preliminary estimates, the reusable system will cut the cost of payload delivery by 1.5 or 2 times compared to traditional rockets. Every self-guided booster will be designed to fly 50 missions without replacement of its main engines burning a mix of cryogenic liquid oxygen and liquid methane. The system was expected to be based on mobile launchers and its maiden flight was scheduled for 2022, the FPI press release said.

If this project actually does happen, it will be because there has been a political shift within Russia’s government-run space industry. I suspect this because last week they cancelled plans to build a lightweight but expendable smaller version of Proton. Now they are aiming to build a reusable rocket instead. It appears that they have realized they need to cut their costs to compete, and the expendable Proton wasn’t doing it, while a reusable rocket might.

If this is true, then this is good news for Russia’s space future. At the same time, the slowness at which they have made this shift illustrates the disadvantage of their centralized government-run system. Instead of competition within Russia pushing many different independent companies to move forward quickly, all decisions must be made through political maneuvering within Roscosmos, a process that is always slower and more cumbersome.

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New Horizons awakened to begin preparations for January 1 2019 flyby

9:07 am

The New Horizons engineering team has brought the spacecraft out of hibernation to begin preparations for its January 1 2019 flyby of Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, which they have dubbed Ultima Thule.

New Horizons will begin its approach phase of the MU69 flyby on August 16, 2018, when it will begin imaging MU69 and the area around it to begin acquiring data about the KBO and its surroundings. Also, New Horizons will look for potential debris that could pose a hazard to itself, such as moons or rings.

Should any potential dangers be found, New Horizons has four planned opportunities to make trajectory changes from early October to early December 2018. The backup trajectory has a distance from MU69 of 10,000 kilometers (around 6,200 miles). Using the backup trajectory would lead to less and/or lower-quality science data gathered due to the probe flying by MU69 further away than planned.

The approach phase will last from August 16 to December 24, 2018, after which the core phase will begin.

The core phase begins just one week before the flyby and continues until two days afterward. It contains the flyby and the majority of the data gathering.

Based on this schedule, we should begin to get some interesting pictures of Ultima Thule by the fall.

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China launches weather satellite

9:02 am

The juggernaut of China’s 2018 launch effort marches on, with the launch of a weather satellite today.

The article also notes that China will do at least two more June launches.

In June we can expect at least two other orbital launches from China. From Xichang, a Long March-3B/Y1 will launch of a new pair of navigation satellites and China is also preparing the launch of the PRSS-1 (Pakistan Remote Sensing Satellite) that will take place from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center using a Long March-2C/SMA, together with the PakTES-1 satellite.

The leaders in the 2018 launch standings:

17 China
11 SpaceX
5 Russia
5 ULA

This launch once again puts China in a tie with the U.S. in the national rankings, 17 launches each.

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Smallsat rocket company Firefly gets contract

8:56 am

Capitalism in space: The smallsat rocket company Firefly Aerospace had gotten a six-launch contract from Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL).

Firefly Aerospace, Inc. (Firefly), a developer of orbital launch vehicles for the small to medium satellite market, announced today the execution of a Launch Services Agreement (LSA) with Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) for use of the Firefly Alpha launch vehicle.

“Firefly is pleased to enter into an LSA with SSTL to provide up to six Alpha launches from 2020 through 2022,” said Firefly CEO Dr. Tom Markusic. “The Alpha launch vehicle allows for deployment of SSTL satellites as a primary payload to their preferred orbit, rather than flying as a secondary payload on a larger launch vehicle.”

This company had been driven into bankruptcy by a Virgin Galactic lawsuit. It has now risen from the dead. Its rocket has not yet flown, but that it got a launch contract indicates some confidence in them by Surrey. The company says it will do the first launch late in 2019, and become operational by 2020.

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