Tag: spaceflight

Astronomers discover 25 more repeating fast radio bursts, doubling the number known

10:18 am

Using a ground-based radio telescope in Canada that scans the northern sky each night, astronomers have discovered another 25 repeating fast radio bursts (FRBs), doubling the number that was previously known.

One surprising aspect of this new research is the discovery that many repeating FRBs are surprisingly inactive, producing under one burst per week during CHIME’s observing time. Pleunis believes that this could be because these FRBS haven’t yet been observed long enough for a second burst to be spotted.

The cause of FRBs still remains unsolved. The knowledge of specific repeating FRBs however will go a long way to figuring out this mystery, because other telescopes will be able to better observe later bursts, knowing when they are expected to occur.

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SpaceX and Canadian phone company Rogers sign deal

10:04 am

SpaceX and the Canadian phone company Rogers Communications yesterday announced that they have signed an agreement to provide satellite-to-phone communications to customers throughout Canada.

Rogers and SpaceX will offer satellite-to-phone technology in Canada using SpaceX’s Starlink low earth orbit satellites and Rogers national wireless spectrum. The companies plan to start with satellite coverage for SMS text and will eventually provide voice and data across the country’s most remote wilderness, national parks and rural highways that are unconnected today.

This deal makes SpaceX now a direct competitor to OneWeb, as it is apparently structured comparable to how OneWeb operates. Up until now, SpaceX has been almost exclusively marketing to individuals, who connect up to Starlink directly. OneWeb meanwhile provides its service to large ground-based customers who then sell their network — enhanced by OneWeb capabilities — to individuals or small businesses. Because of this difference in approach, the two companies were selling their wares to different markets, making the competition less intense.

SpaceX with this deal is copying OneWeb’s approach almost exactly, which means the competition for satellite internet communications is now going to heat up considerably. For users of the internet, this is the best thing that could happen.

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Engineers extend Voyager-2’s life by tapping into reserve power supply

9:54 am

Engineers have begun using a backup power supply on the Voyager-2 spacecraft — launched in 1977 and presently traveling in interstellar space — in order to extend the life of one of its five instruments one additional year.

To help keep those instruments operating despite a diminishing power supply, the aging spacecraft has begun using a small reservoir of backup power set aside as part of an onboard safety mechanism. The move will enable the mission to postpone shutting down a science instrument until 2026, rather than this year.

The solution is only temporary, as the end of the mission is inevitable as its radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) was only designed to provide power for about a half century (!). As time passes its power supply slowly declines, forcing engineers in recent years to shut down other systems to allow the science instruments to operate. That all the other systems on both Voyager-1 and Voyager-2 remained operational until the end of their RTGs tells us how well these spacecraft were built by their 1970s creators.

Assuming this works, engineers will do the same thing on Voyager-1 sometime next year. In both cases, however, power from the RTGs will likely run out entire sometime in the next 5-10 years, ending the missions.

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SpaceX successfully launched 46 upgraded Starlink satellites

9:15 am

SpaceX early this morning successfully launched 46 upgrades Starlink satellites, launching its Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The first stage successfully completed its thirteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific. The two fairings completed their sixth and seventh flights respectively.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

26 SpaceX (with a Falcon Heavy launch planned later today)
16 China
6 Russia
3 Rocket Lab
3 India

American private enterprise now leads China 29 to 16 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 29 to 28.

I have embedded the live stream of the Falcon Heavy launch below, for those that wish to view it. It is scheduled for a 7:29 pm (Eastern) launch from Cape Canaveral.
» Read more

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Frozen waves of lava on Mars

12:19 pm

Frozen waves of lava on Mars

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on January 15, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows an area where the ground suddenly transitions from a crazy quilt of criss-crossing hollows and ridgelines to a very flat and smooth plain.

The location is at 21 degrees south latitude, so this is in the dry equatorial regions. Though it has a small resemblance to the chaos terrain that is found in many places on Mars, mostly in the mid-latitudes where glaciers are found, the scale here is too small and the ridges and canyons are not as sharply drawn. While chaos terrain usually forms sharply defined large flat-topped mesas with steep cliffs, here the ridges are small and the slopes to the peaked tops are somewhat gentle.
» Read more

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Experimental NASA high altitude balloon circles Antarctica in ten days

10:06 am

Overview map
Click for original image.

An experimental NASA high altitude balloon has successfully circled the continent of Antarctica in only ten days, flying at an average elevation of 107,000 feet.

The overview map to the right, annotated for posting here, shows its flight path so far.

“The balloon is performing exactly the way it was engineered to do, maintaining its shape and flying at a stable altitude despite the heating and cooling of the day-night cycle,” said Debbie Fairbrother, NASA’s Scientific Balloon Program chief. “As we continue to test, validate, and qualify this technology for future flights we’re also performing some cutting-edge science.”

The balloon is flying the Super Pressure Balloon Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT) payload, which has already returned brilliant research images from this flight.

Weather permitting, the balloon can be seen from the ground, especially at sunrise and sunset, as it continues on its globetrotting journey. People can track the real-time location of NASA’s super pressure balloon at this website: https://www.csbf.nasa.gov/map/balloon10/flight728NT.htm

The images have so far been of astronomical objects, such as the Antennae galaxy and the Tarantula nebula. Being so high above the atmosphere, the pictures are sharper than ground-based telescopes and have a much wider field of view.

The press release did not state how long this flight will last, but it did mention a second balloon mission is planned, flying a European cosmic-ray detector.

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NASA announces winners in its annual school manned rover design competition

9:48 am

NASA today announced the winning teams in its annual competition for high schools and colleges to come up with the best new designs for manned rovers capable of operating on other worlds.

The annual engineering competition – one of NASA’s longest standing challenges – held its concluding event Friday, April 21 to Saturday, April 22, at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, near NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

More than 500 students from around the world participated during HERC’s 29th anniversary competition. Student teams represented 16 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, as well as the countries of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, India, Mexico, Peru, and Singapore. Teams were awarded points based on navigating a half-mile obstacle course, conducting mission-specific task challenges, and completing multiple safety and design reviews with NASA engineers.

The first place winners were teams from Escambia High School from Florida and the University of Alabama. NASA also listed winners in a whole range of other categories (“crash and burn”, “pit crew”, “social media”), many of which appear designed simply to make sure everyone got a participation award.

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The inexplicable tail of the asteroid Phaethon is from sodium, not dust

9:39 am

For years astronomers have puzzled over the strange behavior of the asteroid Phaethon, which though rocky would still produce a tail like a comet whenever its orbit took it close to the Sun.

New research by astronomers using several space telescopes designed to study the Sun has determined that this tail is made of sodium, not dust as previously believed, which also suggests that many of the other “comets” these solar telescopes have detected close to the Sun might instead be asteroids like Phaeton.

Hoping to find out what the tail is really made of, Zhang looked for it again during Phaethon’s latest perihelion in 2022. He used the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft — a joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) – which has color filters that can detect sodium and dust. Zhang’s team also searched archival images from STEREO and SOHO, finding the tail during 18 of Phaethon’s close solar approaches between 1997 and 2022.

In SOHO’s observations, the asteroid’s tail appeared bright in the filter that detects sodium, but it did not appear in the filter that detects dust. In addition, the shape of the tail and the way it brightened as Phaethon passed the Sun matched exactly what scientists would expect if it were made of sodium, but not if it were made of dust.

Knowing these new facts, it might make it possible to map the asteroids that orbit very close to the Sun but are hard to detect optically using standard telescopes because of the Sun’s brightness. Instead, astronomers might be able to map them using these solar telescopes.

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NASA awards 12 companies small development contracts with total value $14.5 million

9:28 am

NASA today announced it has awarded twelve different space companies small development contracts, total value $14.5 million, for developing new technologies ranging from new welding techniques to new thermal protection systems to better lunar rover tires.

The companies are also a wide mix, from large well-established giants like Lockheed Martin and Boeing to new startups like Blue Origin and Sierra Space.

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SpaceX leases second launchpad at Vandenberg

9:22 am

SpaceX announced yesterday that it has leased a second launchpad at Vandenberg, taking over the pad that ULA previously leased for use by its Delta family of rockets, now being phased out.

The site will be used to launch “Falcon rockets”, which suggests both the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy. All told, SpaceX now has six launchsites, three at Cape Canaveral, two at Vandenberg, and one at Boca Chica, with the Starship/Superheavy site at Kennedy presently under construction.

The launchpad at Vandenberg, dubbed SLC-6 (pronounced “slick-6”), was originally built to launch the space shuttle, something that never happened. When I got a tour of Vandenberg in 2015 I took some good pictures of it.

It is very likely SpaceX will make major changes, as it did to the shuttle launchsite it took over at Kennedy.

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Rocket engine company Ursa Major raises $100 million in private investment capital

9:06 am

The American rocket engine company Ursa Major recently raised an additional $100 million in private investment capital, on top of the $85 million it raised last year.

All told, the company has raised $234 million. Its Hadley engine presently has contracts with rocket startups Astra and Phantom, the hypersonic missile testing company Stratolaunch, and the Air Force. It is also developing two larger engines, the Ripley and the Arroway, the latter designed to replace Russian engines previously used by American companies.

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One instrument on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter ends its mission

9:00 am

Because Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s (MRO) CRISM instrument needed to be cooled to low temperatures to use infrared wavelengths for detecting underground minerals and ice on Mars, and the cryocoolers have run out of coolant, the science team has shut the instrument down.

In order to study infrared light, which is radiated by warm objects and is invisible to the human eye, CRISM relied on cryocoolers to isolate one of its spectrometers from the warmth of the spacecraft. Three cryocoolers were used in succession, and the last completed its lifecycle in 2017.

All the remaining instruments on MRO, including its two cameras, continue to operate nominally.

In its final task, CRISM produced a global map showing water related minerals on Mars, released last year, and a global map showing iron deposits, to be released later this year.

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