Tag: spaceflight

Update on preparations at Boca Chica for next Starship/Superheavy test launch

9:03 am

Link here. The article provides an excellent review of the extensive work SpaceX is doing, especially in repairing and upgrading the Superheavy launch facility.

Overall, SpaceX is moving fast, suggesting that Elon Musk’s prediction that it will be ready technically to launch in August quite believable. I remain doubtful that launch will happen in August, however, as I fully expect the FAA and the Biden administration will not issue a launch license on time, but will delay it.

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Swirls draining into a Martian crater

11:59 am

Swirls draining into a Martian crater
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, sharpened, and annotated to post here, was taken on April 8, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The picture shows a terrain of swirls and terraced mesas. Because the shadows are deceptive, I have annotated the picture to show the actual drainage pattern of those swirls, suggesting that whatever material forms these swirls is not only draining about 200-250 feet down into the low point at the picture’s center, the swirls are also draining toward the small 1,000-foot-wide crater in the upper left. That crater however appears to lie on top of the swirls, which means it came after them.

What are the swirls made of?
» Read more

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Europe’s Ariane-5 rocket completes its last launch

3:30 pm

The Ariane-5 rocket today successfully completed its final launch, lifting off from French Guiana and placing two communications satellites into orbit.

At the moment Europe has no capability of putting anything into orbit. Ariane-5 is retired. Ariane-6, its replacement, is far behind schedule will probably not make its first test flight until next year. The Vega-C rocket is grounded because of a launch failure in December 2022.

This was only the second launch for Europe in 2023, so the the leader board in the 2023 launch race remains the same:

44 SpaceX
24 China
9 Russia
5 Rocket Lab

In successful launches, American private enterprise still leads China 50 to 24 in the national rankings, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world combined, excluding American companies, 44 to 42.

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Alien Mars

11:19 am

Alien Mars
Click for original image.

Today’s cool image illustrates again the alien geology of Mars, often disguised as geological features that at first glance seem familiar. The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on April 9, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Its most distinct feature, the mile-wide double crater in the center bottom, at first appears typical of such craters found on the Moon and elsewhere, suggesting that the bolide that caused it broke in two as it cut through the Martian atmosphere.

This double crater however is not like lunar double craters, in that the shape of both craters is deformed, and the deformation is not quite the same in each. Moreover, the crater does not appear to have an upraised rim or to have thrown out any obvious ejecta. Instead, the two objects hit what looks like soft ground, such as when you drop a pebble into snow.

There’s more.
» Read more

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Curiosity’s most damaged wheel appears to be surviving the rough terrain on Mount Sharp

9:46 am

Curiosity's middle left wheel, from November 2022 to July 2023
For original images go here and here.

In today’s download of images from Curiosity was a set of pictures taken by its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) of the rover’s wheels, as part of the science team’s routine inspection procedures after every 500 meters of travel.

The picture to the right shows what I think is the rover’s left middle wheel, its most heavily damaged, comparing what that wheel looks like now versus what it looked like in November 2022. At that time five of the wheel’s zig-zag grouser treads were broken, three of which are visible in both pictures. The numbers indicate identical wheel treads.

As you can see, after more than seven months of travel across some of the roughest and rockiest ground so far seen on Mars, no more grousers have broken in the new picture. The plus (“+”) signs indicate places where I think some additional metal between the grousers appears to have broken away, but even here the additional damage appears minimal.

Based on past wheel inspections, I expect more images will be taken in the next day or so. We shall see if those pictures indicate any further damage elsewhere. Based on this new picture, however, it appears that the care the science team takes in picking Curiosity’s route, as well as its software (designed to avoid the worst terrain), is continuing to preserve the wheels from further significant damage.

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South Korea: North Korean spy satellite of “no military utility”

8:36 am

Having completed its salvage operations to recover rocket and satellite remains from North Korea’s failed launch on May 31st, the South Korean military today revealed that the satellite had “no military utility as a reconnaissance satellite.”

As expected, it also provided few details to back up that claim:

The JCS [South Korea’s joint chiefs of staff] did not detail the findings through the allies’ analysis of the wreckage nor did it disclose any photos of the retrieved part of the satellite. Last month, a Seoul official struck a cautious note, insinuating that disclosing all the information the military gleaned from the salvage operation would rather benefit the North Korean military.

It is likely true that the North Korea satellite was of limited value, but it is also true that secrecy and disinformation works to the advantage of South Korea’s military. We therefore would be wise to remain skeptical about any of its claims, one way or the other.

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Instrument designed to detect lightning releases first data

9:41 am

Lightning over Europe
Lightning over Europe. Click for original movie.

The first data from the Lightning Imager launched in December 2022 on Europe’s Meteosat weather satellite has now been released, the images compiled into movies showing lightning activity across Europe, Africa, the Middle East and parts of South America.

While the animations are a first initial result from the Lightning Imager, the Meteosat Third Generation Imager is currently undergoing its commissioning phase during which the instruments are calibrated and the data is validated. Data from the Lightning Imager will be available for operational use in early-2024 at an increased sensitivity.

You can see all the movies here. The lightning is found almost exclusively over land. In fact, you can see the lightning in one storm vanish as the storm drifts out into the Mediterranean.

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SpaceX and FAA seek dismissal of lawsuit against Starship at Boca Chica

9:01 am

Both the FAA and SpaceX have now submitted their response to the lawsuit filed by the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and other environmental and leftist political groups, requesting a dismissal of their lawsuit demanding no more launches at Boca Chica until the federal government completes a new environmental impact statement.

In a filing Friday, the FAA said the groups lack legal standing for their claims against the agency that granted a launch license to SpaceX’s Starship rocket program. Separately, a SpaceX filing said the first Starship launch on April 20 provided no cause for the FAA to conduct a new environmental assessment, a process that could halt further test launches for years. “For the foregoing reasons, defendants request that the court dismiss the complaint in its entirety,” Todd Kim, assistant attorney general for the environment and natural resources division of the U.S. Department of Justice, wrote in the filing in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.

In a sane world, this lawsuit would have been thrown out of court almost instantly. There is no evidence the test launch of Starship/Superheavy caused any environmental damage. Furthermore, launches from Cape Canaveral for the past seven decades have proven this fact repeatedly.

We no longer live in a sane world. There is no guarantee the court will rule in favor of the FAA or SpaceX.

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Parker completes 16th orbit of the Sun

8:53 am

On June 22, 2023 the Parker Solar Probe completed its 16th close approach to the Sun, passing within 5.3 million miles of the solar surface while moving at 364,610 miles per hour.

The mission team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, noted the close approach was preceded by a small trajectory correction maneuver (TCM) on June 7 —​ the first course correction since March 2022. Mission Design and Navigation Manager​ Yanping Guo of APL said TCMs are performed periodically to ensure that the​ spacecraft remains on course, and the latest maneuver kept Parker on track to hit the “aim point” for the mission’s sixth Venus flyby on Aug. 21. ​

With each perihelion now, Parker sets new records of speed. No human spacecraft has ever flown so fast.

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A Martian volcanic ash field covering an ancient lava flow

12:38 pm

A Martian volcanic ash field covering an ancient lava flow
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on April 16, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows in the center an ancient tongue of lava flow that is surrounded by thick dust fields on the north and the south.

The arrow indicates the downhill grade. It also shows the direction of the prevailing winds, downhill to sculpt the volcanic ash into long streamers of parallel grooves, with obvious eddies forming around bits of older lava that still stick up through the ash. On the lava flow can also be seen one small volcano cone, on the picture’s right edge, suggesting that either during this flow or after it hardened magma bubbled up from below.

The location is fascinating, and in fact puts this picture into its much more spectacular context.
» Read more

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A spiral galaxy as seen by Hubble

9:40 am

A spiral galaxy as seen by Hubble
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken as part of a research project to use the Hubble Space Telescope to photograph galaxies where supernovae had recently occurred. From the caption:

UGC 11860 lies around 184 million light-years away in the constellation Pegasus, and its untroubled appearance can be deceiving; this galaxy recently played host to an almost unimaginably energetic stellar explosion.

A supernova explosion — the catastrophically violent end of a massive star’s life — was detected in UGC 11860 in 2014 by a robotic telescope dedicated to scouring the skies for transient astronomical phenomena; astronomical objects which are only visible for a short period of time. Two different teams of astronomers used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 to search through the aftermath and unpick the lingering remnants of this vast cosmic explosion.

This Hubble image once again illustrates the vastness of the universe. Note that every single dot surrounding UGC 11860 in this picture is another far more distant galaxy. As much as UGC 11860 is in our local intergalactic neighborhood, it is still so distant that this field of view is small enough that it contains no stars.

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ISRO aborts first static fire test of prototype of a new upper stage rocket engine

8:51 am

According to India’s space agency ISRO, on July 1st engineers were forced to abort the first static fire test of prototype of a new upper stage rocket engine, planned to last 4.5 seconds but stopped after 1.9 seconds.

The test proceeded as predicted till 1.9 s validating the ignition and subsequent performance of PHTA [Power Head Test Article]. At 2.0 s, an unanticipated spike in the turbine pressure and subsequent loss of turbine-speed was observed. As a precautionary step, the test was terminated. Analysis under progress would offer further understanding before proceeding with further hot-tests for longer duration.

This was not a test of a real rocket engine, but an engineering test prototype, designed “to validate the integrated performance of the critical subsystems such as the gas generator, turbo pumps, pre-burner and control components.” That the test showed issues without exploding is actually very good news. Engineers still have the prototype to quickly figure out what went wrong and fix it.

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