Tag: spaceflight

Al-Amal snaps first close-up images of Martian moon Deimos

9:10 am

Deimos with Mars in the background
Click for full movie.

During its first close fly-by of the Martian moon Deimos on March 10, 2023, the United Arab Emirates Mars orbiter Al-Amal (“Hope” in English) obtained the first close-up images of the moon.

The picture to the right show Deimos with Mars in the background. The full set of images, compiled into a movie, can be seen by clicking on the image.

The results were outlined by science lead Hessa Al Matroushi at a conference today.

During the 10 March fly-by, the mission team used all three onboard instruments to take readings spanning from the infrared to the extreme ultraviolet. The relatively flat spectrum the scientists saw is suggestive of the type of material seen on Mars’s surface, rather than the carbon-rich rock often found in asteroids, suggesting that Deimos was formed from the same material the planet. “If there were carbon or organics, we would see spikes in specific wavelengths,” she says.

These results probably put an end to the theory that Mars’ moons came from the asteroid belt. Instead, they either formed when the planet did, or were thrown free and settled into orbit after a very large impact, such as the ones that created either the Hellas or Argyre basins, both of which happened several billion years ago and thus provide ample time for the space environment to smooth the moon’s surface and add some craters.

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Update on lunar orbiter CAPSTONE

1:58 pm

Link here. The update comes from Advanced Space, the commercial company tasked by NASA with operating the orbiter, whose main goal its to test operations in the type of orbit around the Moon that NASA plans to put its Lunar Gateway space station, dubbed a Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO).

Thus far, since performing the NRHO insertion maneuver on November 13th, 2022, the spacecraft has spent 154 days operating in the NRHO completing 23 NRHO revolutions. During this time, the mission team has maintained knowledge of the spacecraft state well within the mission requirements using ground-based navigation tools and tracking measurements collected by the Deep Space Network including DSS-17 which is an affiliated site at Morehead State University in Kentucky. This navigation information has continued to support the design and execution of required maneuvers to maintain the orbit.

Minimum maneuver size constraints have been sequentially reduced as the combined mission operations teams at Advanced Space, Terran Orbital, and Stellar Exploration continue to mitigate issues with a thruster valve. Since entering the NRHO the spacecraft has executed six Orbit Maintenance Maneuvers (OMM) using approximately 1.8 m/s of fuel. Although the mission plan was originally to do a maneuver every NRHO (approximately once a week), the higher burn threshold has reduced the number of maneuvers performed while also demonstrating the robustness of the stationkeeping strategy utilized by the mission which is the same strategy planned for the Lunar Gateway.

CAPSTONE’s primary mission ends in May, but it will continue on an extended mission for twelve more months.

Though CAPSTONE has provided NASA important orbital data for maintaining Lunar Gateway in lunar orbit, the orbiter’s biggest achievement is its commercial nature. NASA hired Terran Orbital to build it, Rocket Lab to launch it, and Advanced Space to operate it. There was relatively little government participation. Moreover, this privately-run project has demonstrated that an inexpensive smallsat can quickly accomplish the same things that once only big expensive satellites attempted.

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India’s PSLV rocket successfully launches two Singapore satellites

1:46 pm

India’s PSLV rocket today successfully put two Singapore satellites into orbit, one a radar satellite and the other a large cubesat testing smallsat communication technologies.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

25 SpaceX
16 China
6 Russia
3 Rocket Lab
3 India

American private enterprise still leads China 28 to 16 in the national rankings, and is tied at 28 with the entire world combined.

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Starship/Superheavy did not explode!

1:41 pm

Starship/Superheavy at T+4:02, just after the self-destruct command was issued
Starship/Superheavy at T+4:02, just after the self-destruct command
was issued

In the past twenty-four hours we have another wonderful demonstration of the utter bankruptcy of the American press in the manner in which it has decided to describe yesterday’s first test launch of Starship/Superheavy. Here are just a few headline examples:

Every single one of those headlines implies that the explosion was the launch’s failure. If you read the linked articles you find that many repeat that implication in their reports.

None are correct. » Read more

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The strange terrain in the basement of Mars

12:22 pm

Strange terrain inside Hellas Basin
Click for original image.

I’ve posted numerous cool images about the weird and alien terrain found routinely in what is Mars’ death valley, Hellas Basin. Today is no different. The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 23, 2023 to fill a gap in the schedule of the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Thus, it isn’t linked to any particular research, and its target was chosen by the camera science team almost at random.

What it shows is a strangely striated plain interspersed with rounded mesas and partly buried craters. The shape of the striations suggests that they were formed from wind blowing consistently from the north. This hypothesis is reinforced by the material that seems piled up at the base of the two bottom mesas, as if it was blown there.

Is ice or lava however?
» Read more

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India’s Modi government releases its new space policy

10:10 am

After some hints in the past month that the not-yet-released new space policy of the Modi government of India would favor commercial space over the government agencies that have run India’s space program from inception, the newly released space policy [pdf] confirms those hints.

Essentially, the policy transfers power from India’s space agency ISRO — which has always controlled all Indian launches and space development — to other government agencies, which in turn are tasked not to develop new space projects but to “ensure a level playing field for the utilization of all facilities created using public expenditure, by prioritizing their use among Government entities and [private companies].”

The policy is unlike any government document I have ever read from India. It is short, direct, clearly written, and to the point. It clearly takes control of space from ISRO and gives supervisory control to two new agencies, the Indian National Space Promotion & Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACEe) and NewSpace India Limited (NSIL), both of which are tasked to encourage the development of an independent private commercial space industry.

The policy is of course not perfect, as the power of the government bureaucracy in India is deep and wide. ISRO still has the task of developing new space technologies, such as India’s human spaceflight program. Whether it will be required to slowly become a customer of commercial resources rather then being the builder of its own we shall have to wait and see. NSIL in turn has been given ISRO’s past commercial responsibilities — such as launching rockets for profit — so that that the government bureaucracy can still compete with the private sector for market share.

All in all, however, it appears that the Modi government wishes to mimic the changes that have occurred in the U.S., transitioning from a government-run space program to a privately owned space industry from which the government buys what it needs (as outlined in my 2017 policy paper Capitalism in Space).

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Scientists predict solar maximum to arrive one year early

9:39 am

The scientists whose prediction of a more active upcoming solar maximum that has so far turned out more accurate than the consensus prediction have now updated their prediction, lowering it somewhat but also predicting the maximum will occur one year early, in 2024 instead of 2025.

The team’s finalized forecast for the current cycle expects it to peak in late 2024, one year earlier than NASA and NOAA had predicted. The cycle, the team thinks, will reach about 185 monthly sunspots during its maximum and thus be somewhat milder than what the team originally forecasted. This peak intensity will place this cycle at about the average compared to the historical record.

In other words, now that we are about halfway to maximum, they have concluded that while NOAA’s prediction was too low, their prediction was too high. They have now adjusted their expectations to be closer to what they now think will happen.

A short solar cycle however has historically corresponded to much higher sunspot activity. If this new prediction is correct (a short cycle with a mild maximum), it will mean that the Sun is still behaving in ways that the solar science community does not understand, or can predict.

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A spray of small impacts melting Martian ice?

11:01 am

A spray of small impacts melting Martian ice?

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on March 2, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and was taken not as part of any specific research request but by the MRO science team to fill a gap in its schedule while also maintaining the camera’s temperature. Sometimes these somewhat random times show nothing of interest. Sometimes they are fascinating, as in this case.

The photo shows what appear to be a spray of small impacts on an easily melted surface. Imagine spraying hot molten lava on a sheet of ice. Instead of creating a crater with an upraised rim, on impact each droplet would quickly melt a hole.

Did these small impacts all occur at the same time? My guess is yes, based on the overview map below.
» Read more

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New research expands lethal zone around supernovae

9:58 am

According to data collected from a number of orbiting space X-ray telescopes, astronomers now believe that the lethal zone for nearby habitable planets when a supernova explodes is much larger than previously thought, as great as almost 200 light years.

The calculations in this latest study are based on X-ray observations of 31 supernovae and their aftermath mostly obtained from Chandra, NASA’s Swift and NuSTAR missions, and ESA’s (European Space Agency’s) XMM-Newton. The analysis of these observations shows that there can be lethal consequences from supernovae interacting with their surroundings, for planets located as much as about 160 light-years away. “If a torrent of X-rays sweeps over a nearby planet, the radiation would severely alter the planet’s atmospheric chemistry,” said Ian Brunton of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who led the study. “For an Earth-like planet, this process could wipe out a significant portion of ozone, which ultimately protects life from the dangerous ultraviolet radiation of its host star.”

You can read the paper here [pdf], which includes a figure that suggests in certain circumstances the lethal zone can be 200 light years across. As the scientists note:

Perhaps the most interesting results are the distances at which the X-ray emission can impose lethal effects on an Earth-like biosphere. This larger range of influence has consequences for the Galactic habitable zone, such as the harmful implications for recently discovered exoplanets that would be susceptible to nearby [supernovae].

In other words, this data suggests the galaxy is far less hospitable to the development of life. It takes a lot of time for life to evolve, billions of years, and during that time a solar system traveling through the galaxy has now a much higher chance of passing too close to a supernova explosion.

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ULA delays first launch of Vulcan to June at the earliest

8:11 am

Peregrine landing site

An official from Astrobotics confirmed this week that an explosion during testing of the Centaur upper stage of its new Vulcan rocket will delay that rocket’s first launch for at least one to two months, from May to June or July.

On March 29, Tory Bruno, the CEO of Colorado-based spacecraft makers United Launch Alliance LLC, announced on his personal Twitter account that ULA’s Vulcan Centaur V rocket had experienced “an anomaly,” which preceded a tweet he shared on April 13 that showed a video of an explosion that occurred outside of a testing rig that housed the ULA rocket. He alluded to a hydrogen-related leak as being a possible culprit and in response the next day to other replies, Bruno said in a tweet that “June/July” will be the next earliest estimated launch timeline.

That timeline is the same one that John Thornton, CEO of North Side-based Astrobotic, shared during a speech as part of a kickoff event for the Aviation and Robotics Summit in the Strip District on Tuesday.

The main payload on that Vulcan inaugural launch is Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander, carrying several NASA science instruments to the Gruithusien Domes region on the Moon, as indicated by the white dot on the picture above.

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Rocket Lab to reuse previously flown engine on upcoming launch

7:59 am

Rocket Lab engineers, having tested a previously flown Rutherford engine numerous times after recovering it from a launch in May 2022, have now approved that engine for reflight, and are inserting into their Electron rocket assembly line for launch sometime in the third quarter of this year.

The company also revealed that it has now completely abandoned the use of a helicopter in first stage recovery, and will instead pick up all first stages after they have splashed down in the ocean.

Extensive analysis of returned stages shows that Electron withstands an ocean splashdown and engineers expect future complete stages to pass qualification and acceptance testing for re-flight with minimal refurbishment. As a result, Rocket Lab is moving forward with marine operations as the primary method of recovering Electron for re-flight. This is expected to take the number of Electron missions suitable for recovery from around 50% to between 60-70% of missions due to fewer weather constraints faced by marine recovery vs mid-air capture, while also reducing costs associated with helicopter operations.

Rocket Lab will assess the opportunities for flying a complete pre-flown first stage booster following the launch of the pre-flown Rutherford engine in the third quarter this year.

Rocket Lab is presently the only operational American company besides SpaceX that is aggressively pursuing reuse of its rocket. ULA says it wishes to recover and reuse the engines of its still-unflown Vulcan rocket, but development of this concept has been very slow. Many other new companies claim their rockets will be reusable, but none has yet even launched.

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North Korea claims it is about to launch a spy satellite

7:49 am

According to statements by North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un published in its state-run press, that country is only weeks away from launching a spy satellite into orbit.

[S]ome observers said the North may attempt to launch the satellite ahead of President Yoon Suk Yeol’s upcoming state visit to the U.S. later this month. “There is a high possibility that North Korea may attempt a launch around April 23-24, on the basis that weather conditions are favorable, to show off that it has the upper hand on the Korean Peninsula issue by putting it on the table during the South Korea-U.S. summit,” Yang Mu-jin, president of the University of North Korean Studies, said.

Some observers, however, projected that it will take a few more months for the North to put the satellite into orbit given the time needed for technical preparations.

North Korea has completed two previous orbital launches, using its solid-fueled rocket missile technology. It is presently unclear if this new launch will use the same, or fly something new.

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