Tag: spaceflight

Australian industrial space park threatened with shut down

10:03 am

With the loss of government funds caused by decisions of the new Labor government in Australia, a space-centered industrial park proposed for Adelaide Airport is threatened with shut down.

The previous government was going to contribute about $20 million to build a shared facility, and this had encouraged a number of space manufacturers to add their own $26 million. With the loss of that $20 million from the government two of those companies have now backed out.

The article also notes a number of other space-related areas where government funding is being cut off. All this appears to be the result of the change in government, and the decision of the new Labor government to end such subsidies.

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Extremely Large Telescope in Chile marks halfway point in construction

9:51 am

The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) has now celebrated the halfway point in its construction, with completion targeting 2028 when its 39-meter mirror will make it by far the largest telescope in the world.

The 39-meter diameter, or 127 feet or 1,535 inches, is about four times larger than the largest telescope that presently exists, the 10-meter telescope in the Canary Islands. By the time ELT begins operations however the 21-meter Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) in Chile should also be in operation.

Sadly, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) in Hawaii will likely not exist, even though it had intended to begin construction before ELT and GMT and be operational now. Leftist opponents in Hawaii have shut construction down now for almost eight years, with little signs of it ever proceeding.

Not that any of this really matters. In the near term, ground-based astronomy on Earth is going to become increasingly impractical and insufficient, first because of the difficulties of making good observations though the atmosphere and the tens of thousands of satellites expected in the coming decades, and second because new space-based astronomy is going to make it all obsolete. All it will take will be to launch one 8-meter telescope on Starship and ELT will become the equivalent of a buggy whip.

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New Viasat geosynchronous communications satellite in trouble

9:31 am

Launched in April, a new geosynchronous communications satellite for the company Viasat is in trouble, with “an unexpected event” occurring during the deployment of its antenna reflector.

Shares of Viasat fell as much as 36% in early trading Thursday, putting it on track for its biggest one-day loss since going public in December 1996. Viasat did not disclose the identity of the reflector’s manufacturer in its release. Dankberg said his company is “working closely” with the manufacturer to resolve the problem. A Viasat spokesperson confirmed to CNBC that the manufacturer is a top aerospace and defense company – but noted that it is not Boeing, which built the 702MP+ bus that is the spacecraft’s structure and power.

The company is under severe competitive pressure from the Starlink and OneWeb satellite constellations. This loss could be crippling, even if it obtains a full insurance payment of $420 million.

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July 12, 2023 Quick space links

4:28 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

  • China unveils proposed plan for first manned lunar mission before 2030

    • The plan calls for separate rockets, one for the manned ascent/descent Earth capsule, and the second for the lunar lander/ascent spacecraft. The two will rendezvous and dock in lunar orbit. This is all engineering by powerpoint at this point, though based on China’s track record I’d give it more credence than most of NASA’s recent promises.

 

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More sightseeing in Valles Marineris on Mars

3:01 pm

More sightseeing on a mesa in Valles Marineris
Click for original image.

The opportunity to see more mind-blowing examples of spectacular views on Mars compels me to post another great view of a mesatop within Valles Marineris, the biggest known canyon in the solar system. The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on May 14, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows an 800-foot-high mesa with two points at its end, the cliff wall below highlighted by numerous layers, many alternating between light and dark material.

The erosion features on the top of the mesa suggests some flow down its middle and into the gap between its two end points. This is the dry equatorial region of Mars, so no near surface water is presently found. In the far past maybe ice, or theorized catastrophic floods of water, caused this erosion.
» Read more

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Amidst the mountains on Mount Sharp on Mars

10:17 am

Panorama from Curiosity, July 12, 2023
Click for higher resolution. Original images can be found here, here, and here.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

The panorama above, created from three images, was taken by Curiosity on July 12, 2023 using its right navigation camera. It looks south in the direction that the science team eventually plans to send the rover, as indicated by the red dotted line on both the panorama and the overview map to the right. The yellow lines on the overview map indicate approximately the area covered by the panorama. Kukenan’s peak rises about 500 feet above the rover, and I guarantee there will be many planetary geologists that are going to study the pictures of its many layers for many years.

At present however Curiosity is heading west, away from that planned route, to visit the small craters about 500 feet away. For almost all of the rover’s decade-long journey in Gale Crater, it has seen relatively few craters, and since it left the floor of the crater and began its climb up the flanks of Mount Sharp three years ago, it has seen none.

Inspecting the floors and surrounding ejecta of these small craters will give the scientists a look at materials that are presently below the surface. While it is likely that material will be of geological layers Curiosity has already traveled over lower down the mountain, it is also possible there will be surprises. The scientists decided they couldn’t pass up this opportunity to find out.

Why have there been so few craters in Gale Crater? Though Mars is hardly as active as Earth, its geological history is almost as dynamic. The surface of Gale has been reshaped by the processes that created Mount Sharp, processes that destroyed craters from early in Mars’ history. The craters the rover is about to see are almost certainly relatively young.

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The Earth and Moon, as seen by Mars Express in Mars orbit

9:21 am

The Earth and Moon, as seen from Mars
Click to see four image movie.

The science team for Europe’s Mars Express orbiter recently turned the spacecraft’s camera upward to capture a sequence of four images of the Earth with the Moon circling around it.

The images were taken at 14:08, 03:10 and 19:49 UTC on 15, 21, 27 May 2023 respectively, and at 15:00 UTC on 2 June 2023. This covers a bit more than half of the Moon’s monthly motion around the Earth. The distance between Earth and Mars varied from 279 186 624 km to 301 016 265 km during this time. The image resolution is about 2570 km per pixel.

To the right is the June 2nd image, cropped and enhanced to post there. The Earth is the larger spot to the left. The picture gives a sense of what the Earth-Moon double planet system looks like from Mars. Unlike all other planets, where the size difference between planet and moon is great, the Earth/Moon system is comprised of a Moon quite large in comparison to its central planet.

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ISRO completes launch rehearsal for Chandrayaan-3’s launch on July 14th

9:10 am


Click for interactive map.

India’s space agency ISRO yesterday completed a full launch dress rehearsal of its Launch Vehicle Mark-3 rocket (LV-M3), in preparation for its July 14, 2023 launch that will put Chandrayaan-3 on its way to the Moon, India’s second attempt to soft land on another world.

More information here. The spacecraft will not reach the Moon until mid-August, and if all goes as planned, the lander Vikram will attempt its landing on August 23rd. If successful, the Pragyan rover will roll off the lander and begin exploration lasting about two weeks, or one lunar day. It is not designed to survive the long lunar night.

The LV-M3 rocket is simply the most powerful variation of India’s Geosynchronous Launch Vehicle (GSLV) rocket, capable of putting large payloads into space or sending probes to other planets.

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Blue Origin BE-4 rocket engine explodes during test

4:03 pm

This failure has been kept very quiet, but on June 11, 2023 during a static fire engine test of a Blue Origin BE-4 rocket engine, it exploded 10 seconds into the test.

During a firing on June 30 at a West Texas facility of Jeff Bezos’ space company, a BE-4 engine detonated about 10 seconds into the test, according to several people familiar with the matter. Those people described having seen video of a dramatic explosion that destroyed the engine and heavily damaged the test stand infrastructure. The people spoke to CNBC on the condition of anonymity to discuss nonpublic matters.

The engine that exploded was expected to finish testing in July. It was then scheduled to ship to Blue Origin’s customer United Launch Alliance for use on ULA’s second Vulcan rocket launch, those people said.

The story is based on anonymous sources, but if true it means another serious setback for both ULA’s Vulcan rocket and Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. Vulcan has the BE-4 engines it needs to launch its first Vulcan, but it might feel forced to delay that launch until it receives the analysis of this failed test.

It also means that even after more than a decade of development, Blue Origin has still not worked out all the kinks in its BE-4 engine. This inability does not speak well for the company. Are they not testing enough? Are they not questioning their designs enough?

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All UN climate models vastly over-estimate warming in the U.S.

2:28 pm

climate models vs observations

According to a direct comparison between actual data and the three-dozen climate models used by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the models all overestimate the warming that has happened, sometimes by ridiculous amounts.

The graph to the right shows “the 50-year area-averaged temperature trend during 1973-2022 for the 12-state corn belt as observed with the official NOAA homogenized surface temperature product (blue bar) versus the same metric from 36 CMIP6 climate models [red bars].”

This story isn’t new, and in fact to me has become somewhat boring because the results are always the same. The computer models that global warming climate scientists have pushed at us for decades have been consistently wrong. They routinely have over-predicted the amount of warming. Since such models are expressly designed to provide us reliable predictions, and these models are not reliable or correct, I find it absurd to pay any attention to them.

At the same time, this repeated and continuing failure needs to be mentioned periodically, because politicians and climate warming activists (I repeat myself) continue to ignore this failure as they wave these models around like red flags that must to be obeyed. Not only should these models be ignored, our governments and science community should stop funding these people. Their work is a failure. They don’t deserve further grants.

Let me add one more important note: The observations show an increase of about 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit per decade. This increase is almost a rounding number, considering the amount of random fluctuations that is routinely seen in the global climate temperature. Even if the trend was extended for a century (something that is not guaranteed at all), the increase would still be only two degrees, hardly a worry.

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A Martian crater with a very weird rim

1:07 pm

A Martian crater with a very weird rim
Click for original image.

In looking through new images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), I sometimes stumble some very strange things, with today’s cool image an example. The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on May 7, 2023 by MRO’s high resolution camera, and shows the western half of a two-mile-wide crater with a very weird rim, almost as if a person had decided he wanted to reshape it with a filigree pattern.

Though only two-miles wide, this crater actually has been named Johnstown. I suspect this is because of its strange rim, prompting a research effort and the need to provide it a name. Why the rim has this repeating pattern of gaps, however, is beyond my pay grade to explain, and I have been unable to track down any research papers about it. The nearby surrounding surface suggests vaguely the possibility that this is a caldera, not an impact crater, but even so why would the rim of the caldera have these regular breaks?
» Read more

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Zhurong found Mars drier than expected and less eroded than the Moon

10:43 am

According to a new paper, Chinese scientists using data from their Zhurong Mars rover have found little or no evidence of water in the immediate underground, while also finding the surface less eroded than the surface on the Moon.

A layer of regolith covers the surface of Mars, which is the result of geologic processes that occurred over millions to billions of years. Compared to the observations from satellites, the Zhurong rover of China’s first Mars mission (Tianwen-1) had a closer look at the properties of the regolith layer in the explored region within southern Utopia Planitia. There is evidence that the exposed materials might be related to aqueous activities. Local landforms on the surface suggest the possible presence of buried volatiles, like water ice. The radar instrument (RoPeR) on board the rover can expose subsurface structures and the dielectric properties of the regolith layer at high-resolution, to assess their composition. The loss tangent results suggest that water ice is not the main component of the local martian regolith at some depth. The scattering distribution of radar profile along the traveling path and heterogeneous subsurface features show more diverse surface processes and weaker space weathering effects on Mars than those on the airless Moon.

Since Zhurong landed in the equatorial regions, its data about the lack of water simply confirmed other data from orbit and from other rovers/landers. Though there are features even here that suggest the presence of water, that water made those features a long time ago, and is now gone.

The data suggesting the regolith is less eroded than the Moon, however, is a surprise, and counter-intuitive.

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