Tag: spaceflight

Psyche asteroid mission now scheduled for October 2023 launch

3:40 pm

After a year delay because certain flight software was not ready on time for its first launch window in the fall of 2022, the science team for the Psyche asteroid mission are now aiming for an October 2023 launch.

The launch period will open Oct. 5 and close Oct. 25. The asteroid, which lies in the outer portion of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, may be the remains of a core of a planetesimal, a building block of a rocky planet.

Due to the new launch date, Psyche has a new mission plan, which includes a flyby of Mars for a gravity assist and arrival at the asteroid in August 2029. The mission then will enter its 26-month science phase, collecting observations and data as the spacecraft orbits the asteroid at different altitudes.

Meanwhile, the two Janus probes that were to launch with Psyche last year remain in limbo, as this new Psyche launch date is useless to that mission’s plan to fly past a different asteroid.

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Boeing & NASA; 1st Starliner manned mission to now launch on July 21

3:34 pm

In a update posted by NASA today, agency and Boeing officials announced that they are now aiming to launch Boeing’s Starliner capsule on July 21, 2023 on its first manned mission to ISS.

The new target date provides NASA and Boeing the necessary time to complete subsystem verification testing and close out test flight certification products and aligns with the space station manifest and range launch opportunities.

The specifics behind this somewhat meaningless press release jargon can be found at this twitter thread. Apparently Boeing & NASA want to do more ground tests of the capsule’s parachute system as well as its flight software. There also appears to be some issue relating to the capsule’s batteries.

Boeing is also mulling a redesign of Starliner’s batteries for after this delayed crewed flight test. It also expects to redesign Starliner’s smart initiator system, which separates the crew from service module. NASA’s paying $24 million for that redesign amid added requirements

Though Boeing has a fixed price contract with NASA, if NASA demands redesigns or changes it has to pay for them. That Boeing and NASA are finding these issues at this late date, four years after Starliner was first supposed to launch, does not speak well of Boeing’s workmanship and quality control systems.

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The chaos between galaxies following their head-on collision

2:09 pm

The chaos between galaxies following their head-on collision
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken using the Gemini North ground-based 8-meter telescope in Hawaii. It shows two spiral galaxies about 180 million light years away following a head-on collision about 25 million years ago, in which the smaller spiral moved through the larger from the bottom to the top.

Upon exiting, the smaller spiral trailed behind it the reddish stream of material, while its outside arms on the right were bent downward. That trailing material is why astronomers have dubbed these the “Taffy Galaxies.” Imagine pulling two clumps of taffy apart. The stretched material linking the two clumps is the bridge of trailing material between these two galaxies. From the caption:

When the Taffy Galaxies’ collided, their galactic disks and gaseous components smashed right into each other. This resulted in a massive injection of energy into the gas, causing it to become highly turbulent. As the pair emerged from their collision, high-velocity gas was pulled from each galaxy, creating a massive gas bridge between them. The turbulence of the stellar material throughout the bridge is now prohibiting the collection and compression of gas that are required to form new stars.

The evolution of galaxies is incredibly slow, from the perspective of human existence. For example, this first collision 25 million years ago seems like it took a long time, but it will likely be followed by many more over the next billion years, eventually resulting in a single spherical elliptical galaxy. On the time scale of the universe, collisions every 100 million years or so means galaxies like this can mix and collide many times, and do so well within the existence of the theorized lifespan of the universe itself.

To us short-lived humans, however, this process just seems so slow it can’t possibly happen as described. But it does.

Sidebar: It appears this image was released to herald the repair of Gemini North’s primary mirror, which was damaged in two places on its edge during a recoating operation on October 20, 2022. Since then the telescope has been shut down as repair operations were undertaken. That repair is now complete, and it is expected the telescope will resume science observations in a few weeks.

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SpaceX launches another 56 Starlink satellites

1:19 pm

SpaceX today successfully launched another 56 Starlink satellites, using its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The first stage successfully completed its fourth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

Russia was also launching at almost the exact same time a classified military satellite, using its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from Plesetsk spaceport in northern Russia, but at the moment there is no word on whether that launch was a success.

For the moment then the leaders in the 2023 launch race are as follows:

21 SpaceX
11 China
5 Russia (with a planned launch today)
3 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads China 24 to 11 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 24 to 20. SpaceX now trails the rest of the world, including other American companies, 21 to 23.

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Zhurong: Small polygons on light curved dunes indicate regular atmospheric water interaction

1:12 pm

Zhurong's full journey on Mars

A paper published this week in Geophysical Research Letters by the science team for China Zhurong Martian rover has revealed the discovery of small polygon cracks on the surface of the many curved light-colored small dunes found in the region where Zhurong landed, suggesting the possibility of relatively recent water activity between the atmosphere and the dune surfaces.

Those dunes, dubbed transverse aeolian ridges (TARs) by the science team, are the many light curves visible in the labeled Mars Reconnaissance mosaic to the right. The blue arrows indicate Zhurong’s path south from its landing spot at the top and ending near the bottom of the picture after traveling about 1,400 feet.

According to the paper, the TARs were formed by the prevailing winds over many eons, coming first from the north and then from the northwest. The edges of the ridges, being smaller, are pushed ahead quicker, thus creating the curved shape. The polygons were small, never larger than 4 inches in size, with five to six sides. The scientists theorize that they were formed when atmospheric water interacted with the dune crust, causing fractures “due to temperature/moisture changes or deliquescence/dehydration cycling of salts”. This process could be slow or fast, and could actually be occurring in relatively recent times, as the scientists say it requires only a little water in the atmosphere.

More likely however we are seeing evidence of water from the past, from tens of thousands to several million years ago.

Zhurong meanwhile remains in hibernation, and might never come out of that condition. Orbital images indicate that its solar panels are dust-covered, the result of the heavy winter dust storm season. The project team however is hopeful that with time and the arrival of Martian summer the dust will be blown off and they can reactivate the rover. This hope however entirely depends on the arrival of a dust devil acoss the top of Zhurong, a random event that cannot be predicted. With both the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, such events happened regularly, allowing those missions to last years instead of only 90 days. With InSight it never happened, and the lander died after two-plus years on Mars.

Zhurong’s future fate thus remains unknown, but not promising at this moment.

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New map of the volcanoes of Venus

11:27 am

Map of Venus' volcanoes
Click for original image.

Using the archival radar data from the Magellan orbiter that circled Venus in the early 1990s, scientists have produced a new map of the volcanoes of Venus.

That map is to the right, and is publicly available for download.

Byrne and Hahn’s new study includes detailed analyses of where volcanoes are, where and how they’re clustered, and how their spatial distributions compare with geophysical properties of the planet such as crustal thickness. Taken together, this work provides the most comprehensive understanding of Venus’ volcanic properties — and perhaps of any world’s volcanism so far … because, although we know a great deal about the volcanoes on Earth that are on land, there are still likely a great many yet to be discovered under the oceans. Lacking oceans of its own, Venus’ entire surface can be viewed with Magellan radar imagery.

Although there are volcanoes across almost the entire surface of Venus, the scientists found relatively fewer volcanoes in the 20-100 km diameter range, which may be a function of magma availability and eruption rate, they surmise.

This new map catalogs about 85,000 volcanoes, but is also considered incomplete because the resolution of the Magellan data makes identifying volcanoes smaller than 1 kilometer impossible. It will require new orbiters to spot these volcanoes.

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Looking back from the foothills of Mount Sharp

10:17 am

Panorama looking back across Gale Crater, March 29, 2023
Click for original image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

The panorama above, cropped to post here, was taken today by the left navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity. It looks back at the rover’s previous travels, though only the terrain traveled in the past few months is visible, the rover having reached this point through the notch to the left of the distinctly dark mesa in the center of the picture. The lower flanks of Mount Sharp the rover traversed to get here are now blocked from view.

Instead, the image provides a spectacular example of the views north from Curiosity’s present position. The overview map to the right provides us the full context of the entire ten-plus year journey since Curiosity landed safely on Mars on August 5, 2012. The white squiggly line indicates the rover’s route. The yellow lines mark the approximate area covered by the panorama. The rim of Gale Crater is about 20-25 miles away.

As you can see, as spectacular as this view is, the journey up Mount Sharp has barely begun. Mount Sharp’s peak is about 18,000 feet high. The rover at this point has only climbed about 4,600 feet from the floor of Gale Crater.

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Hakuto-R1 snaps first picture of Moon from lunar orbit

9:18 am

Hakuto-R1's first released image from lunar orbit
Click for original image.

The science team for Ispace’s Hakuto-R1 privately-built lunar orbiter/lander earlier this week released the spacecraft’s first picture of the Moon since entering lunar orbit on March 20, 2023.

That image is to the right, cropped and reduced to post here. The photo resolution is quite good. It also demonstrates that the spacecraft’s attitude control systems for pointing the camera are working correctly.

Launched on December 11, 2022 by a Falcon 9 rocket, Hakuto-R1 will land in Atlas Crater on the northeast quadrant of the Moon’s visible hemisphere sometime in April, making it the first successful private commercial planetary lander to reach another world. If successful, it will then release the United Arab Emirates Rashid rover, that nation’s first planetary lander but its second planetary mission, following the Mars orbiter, Al-Amal, now circling Mars.

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Israel launches spy satellite

9:04 am

Israel yesterday successfully launched a radar reconnaissance satellite using its Shavit-2 solid-fueled three-stage rocket.

This was Israel’s first launch since 2020. It took place from Israel’s coastal launchpad, and traveled west over the Mediterranean so that its stages would not fall on habitable areas. This retrograde orbit, opposite of the Earth’s rotation, is costly in terms of fuel and the size of payload put in orbit, which is why the satellite weighed only 661 pounds.

The leader board for the 2023 launch race remains the same:

20 SpaceX (with a planned launch later today)
11 China
5 Russia (with a planned launch later today)
3 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads China 23 to 11 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 23 to 20. SpaceX now trails the rest of the world, including other American companies, 20 to 23.

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Mars’ largest mountain region

1:05 pm

Mars' largest mountain region
Click for original image.

The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on September 21, 2015 by the context camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). I originally was going to post a high resolution image of some of these mountains, taken on January 1, 2023 that showed some slope streaks, but quickly realized that a wider view of this mountain region was a much more interesting story.

This picture covers an area about 50 by 50 miles. As you can see, it is endless series of random hills ridges and peaks, with only a vague hint of a northeast to southwest alignment. Ground travel through this region would be slow and twisty, immediately reminding me of my many trips to West Virginia, where the hills and valleys are almost as random and never ending.

The overview map below however suggests the scale of this region exceeds West Virginia many times over.
» Read more

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Webb finds Earth-sized exoplanet likely too hot to have atmosphere

9:25 am

The uncertainty of science: Using the infrared Webb Space Telescope, scientists have measured the temperature of the Earth-sized exoplanet, dubbed Trappist-1b, and found its temperature is probably too hot to have atmosphere.

The red dwarf star Trappist-1is about 40 light years from Earth, and in 2017 was found to have a solar system of seven exoplanets, all rocky terrestrial planets like the inner planets of our solar system. Trappist-1b is the innermost exoplanet. To measure its temperature, Webb observed the star while the planet was eclipsed by the star as well as when it was not, and measured the tiny difference in infrared light.

The team analyzed data from five separate secondary eclipse observations. “We compared the results to computer models showing what the temperature should be in different scenarios,” explained Ducrot. “The results are almost perfectly consistent with a blackbody made of bare rock and no atmosphere to circulate the heat. We also didn’t see any signs of light being absorbed by carbon dioxide, which would be apparent in these measurements.”

As this was the innermost of the star’s solar system, it is also the one most likely to lack an atmosphere. Webb’s observations of the system continue, so there is a chance that data about the other exoplanets will eventually tell us more about them.

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Virgin Orbit extends pause in operations, having failed to get new financing

9:11 am

Virgin Orbit has extended its worker furlough and pause in operations now that a $200 million deal with a Texas investor has fallen through.

Reuters reported last week that Texas-based Matthew Brown had been in talks to invest $200 million in the company. Those talks have collapsed, said two people familiar with the discussions who asked not to be identified. Brown declined to comment on Monday.

Virgin Orbit, teetering on bankruptcy after a January rocket failure and struggles to raise funds, furloughed nearly all its 750 employees on March 15 while it sought a financial lifeline that would allow it to focus on upgrading its launch business.

This is very bad news for the company, because it indicates that there might not be a financial savior for it.

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