Tag: spaceflight

What we will and will not see during the Pluto fly-by

9:32 am

Pluto's two hemispheres

The images above, released today by the New Horizons’ science team, provide the best global view so far of Pluto’s two hemispheres. I have cropped and rearranged the original to focus on Pluto.

The images illustrate some basic new knowledge about the planet. For one, scientists have now identified the planet’s poles, based upon its rotation. While scientists had had a very rough vague idea of Pluto’s rotation and inclination beforehand, they have now pinned it down pretty precisely.

The images also show the planet’s most striking and unique features, though not with enough resolution to tell us what they are.

New color images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft show two very different faces of the mysterious dwarf planet, one with a series of intriguing spots along the equator that are evenly spaced. Each of the spots is about 300 miles in diameter, with a surface area that’s roughly the size of the state of Missouri.

Scientists have yet to see anything quite like the dark spots; their presence has piqued the interest of the New Horizons science team, due to the remarkable consistency in their spacing and size. While the origin of the spots is a mystery for now, the answer may be revealed as the spacecraft continues its approach to the mysterious dwarf planet. “It’s a real puzzle—we don’t know what the spots are, and we can’t wait to find out,” said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder. “Also puzzling is the longstanding and dramatic difference in the colors and appearance of Pluto compared to its darker and grayer moon Charon.”

This image release also shows us what we will and will not see during the fly-by. The image on the left is the “encounter hemisphere.” This is the hemisphere that will be in view during New Horizons’ July 14 fly-by. We shall get very nice high resolutions of much of this hemisphere.

The other hemisphere, however, will not be facing us during the fly-by. Unless that can get some high resolution images before it rotates out of view, the row of large dark spots at the equator will remain a mystery.

The images also suggest that, because of Pluto’s tilt, much of the southern hemisphere is not going to be seen at all. It will remain an additional mystery for the many decades that are going to pass before another spacecraft finally returns to this distant place.

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The negative, depressing mainstream press

10:08 am

Sunday’s Falcon 9 failure has given us a great opportunity to learn something about the mainstream press and the elite culture that dominates it. As expected, while the space-oriented press focused on what happened and what will be done to fix the problem, almost every mainstream press outlet immediately concluded that the failure was a disaster that could and (with some outlets) should ring the death knell for private space. Here are just a few examples:

I could go on. Notice that these are almost all mainstream news sources. The few that specialize in science reporting, such as Scientific American, New Scientist, and National Geographic, also tend to push the left wing science agenda.

If you can force yourself to read these articles, as I have, you will find yourself inundated with negativity, pessimism, and a can’t-do attitude. Moreover, many of these articles seem expressly designed to encourage the public and politicians to withdraw their support for space exploration. For example, the Scientific American article, in outlining the history of recent ISS cargo failures, includes this quote:

Public support for the private space industry also took a blow last October (just three days after the Orbital Sciences ATK mishap) when Virgin Galactic’s suborbital space plane SpaceShipTwo crashed during a test flight, killing one of its pilots. [emphasis mine]

Does Scientific American provide us any evidence that public support had dropped after these failures? No. In fact, there is absolutely no evidence that support dropped, and if anything, based on the budget increases over the years for commercial space (despite Congressional efforts to trim that budget), support has continued to grow through thick and thin.

No, Scientific American inserted this statement because they want support to drop, and have tailored their article to help make that a self-fulfilling prophecy. The negativity of all these other articles suggest that their writers and outlets feel the same. Life is hard! Bad things can happen! Better that we stick our head in the sand and hide from the evil thunder gods rather than look up to try to figure out what thunder is!

For myself, I do not find the Falcon 9 failure this past weekend depressing in the slightest. This is a company and a rocket that hadn’t even existed a little more than decade ago, and in that short time they have revolutionized the rocket industry. Rockets fail. This is no surprise. Their track record, however, tells us that they will figure out what went wrong and start flying again, as soon as they can.

What I do find depressing is the failure culture of today’s modern intellectual society. It is one reason I do not depend on them for news, and in general try to depend on them for as little as possible for anything else.

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Cubesat company raises $80 million

8:56 am

The competition heats up: Spire, a cubesat satellite company focused on data gathering from space, has raised an additional $40 million in investment capital, bringing the total it has raised since 2012 to $80 million.

With the new funds, the company will support further growth and expand its constellation from 20 satellites in 2015 to more than 100 by the end of 2017.

The latest round of financing comes at a time when the need for advancements in weather and maritime data is at an all-time high. With the potentially catastrophic 2016 Weather Gap right around the corner, Spire offers a solution to the $2.4 trillion dollar global problem. Emerging as a leader in the ‘Space Race 2.0,’ Spire is the only commercial weather data provider with scheduled launches in 2015. The company will begin deploying its satellites on a near monthly basis beginning September 2015.

Though the company is willing to gather data in more ways than just weather, its offer to provide weather data suggests that the transition from government to private weather satellites is soon approaching. And there is no reason it shouldn’t. Weather data is very valuable. Just as private cable companies put up satellites to provide communications, so should weather outlets like the Weather Channel. It will pay for itself, and will likely provide us better data than any NOAA satellite.

In addition, this story indicates once again that the age of cubesats is now upon us.

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New Horizons gets closer

11:30 pm

Pluto and Charon

Cool image time! Even as the engineers successfully completed last night their last course correction engine burn, the New Horizons science team released an image showing both Pluto and Charon.

The 23-second thruster burst was the third and final planned targeting maneuver of New Horizons’ approach phase to Pluto; it was also the smallest of the nine course corrections since New Horizons launched in January 2006. It bumped the spacecraft’s velocity by just 27 centimeters per second – about one-half mile per hour – slightly adjusting its arrival time and position at a flyby close-approach target point approximately 7,750 miles (12,500 kilometers) above Pluto’s surface.

The image, which I have cropped to focus on the planets, is still somewhat fuzzy, though it also shows the increasing sharpness as the spacecraft gets closer.

Only two weeks to go!

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Another Dawn image of some of Ceres’ bright spots

10:37 am

The double bright spot, not over-exposed

Cool image time! As part JPL’s regular release of images from Dawn, one image of Ceres’ bright double spots was purposely not over-exposed. Thus, the surface is almost black (as it really looks), while the small cluster of spots stands out brightly but with some additional detail. (If you download the full image and use a graphics program to brighten it you will see that this is the double bright spot located inside a large crater.)

I have cropped and enlarged the original image to focus on the double spot. As you can see the brightest spot has a mottled look, almost like we are looking down at a snow-capped peak.

Though the leading theory remains that this is ice, this theory has not been confirmed yet. Make no assumptions or you may discover you are wrong.

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Russian sets record for most time spent in space

10:08 am

Russian astronaut Gennady Padalka has now set the record for the most total time spent in space, passing the previous record of 803 day set by Sergei Krikalev.

Padalka is due to return to earth on 11 September, by which time he will have spent 878 days in space – almost two and a half years. On 21 June he celebrated his 57th birthday in orbit. The commander said at a press conference before his flight in March that he would like to try for 1,000 days in space after his current record-breaking mission is over.

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NASA to waste $150 million on SLS engine that will be used once.

10:01 am

Government marches on! NASA’s safety panel has noticed that NASA’s SLS program either plans to spend $150 million man-rating a rocket engine it will only use once, or will fly a manned mission without man-rating that engine.

The Block 1 SLS is the “basic model”, sporting a Delta Cryogenic Second Stage (DCSS), renamed the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion System (ICPS) for SLS. The current plan calls for this [interim] stage to be used on [the unmanned] Exploration Mission -1 (EM-1) and [manned] Exploration Mission -2 (EM-2), prior to moving to the [Exploration Upper Stage] – also to be built by Boeing – that will become the workhorse for SLS.

However, using the [interim upper stage] on a crewed mission will require it to be human rated. It is likely NASA will also need to fly the [Exploration Upper Stage] on an unmanned mission to validate the new stage ahead of human missions. This has been presenting NASA with a headache for some time, although it took the recent ASAP meeting to finally confirm those concerns to the public.

Up until now, no one at NASA would admit that their SLS plans called for flying humans with an upper stage that has not been man-rated. They don’t have the funds to man-rate it, and even if they get those funds, man-rating it will likely cause SLS’s schedule to slip even more, something NASA fears because they expect the commercial manned ships to be flying sooner and with increasing capability. The contrast — a delayed and unflown and very expensive SLS vs a flying and inexpensive commercial effort — will not do SLS good politically.

However, if they are going to insist (properly I think) that SpaceX and Boeing man-rate their capsules and rockets, then NASA is going to have to man-rate its SLS systems as well. The result: more problems for SLS, contributing to what I believe will be its inevitable cancellation.

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Falcon 9 explodes two minutes into launch

9:43 am

Today’s Falcon 9 rocket launch of a Dragon freighter to ISS ended in failure slightly past 2 minutes after lift-off when the upper stage exploded.

My first thought about this failure is the supply problems it causes at ISS. The Progress failure in April strained the supply lines, making this Dragon flight somewhat critical.

In a presentation to a committee of the NASA Advisory Council here April 9, NASA officials said that food supplies on the ISS would reach a threshold called “reserve level” on July 24, and go to zero by Sept. 5. That assumed that the station received no more supplies beyond a SpaceX Dragon cargo mission launched to the station in April.

The other major limiting consumable is a solid waste container known by the Russian acronym KTO. Without additional cargo missions beyond the Dragon flight, KTO supplies would reach the reserve level July 20 and be exhausted on Sept. 2. Other consumables, including water, would not reach reserve levels until later in the year or early 2016.

In other words, some of the station’s toilets are going to begin to overflow without more supplies. It is possible however that this problem will be alleviated by the planned July 3 launch of the next Progress, especially since NASA officials claimed just prior to the launch failure today that ISS had enough supplies to last through October.

As for the launch failure, I expect that SpaceX will quickly pinpoint the problem and schedule another launch. I have embedded video of the launch below the fold. Prior to the explosion of the first stage all looks completely normal. In fact, immediately before the failure the announcer notes this fact, making what happens next especially shocking.

Update: I have corrected the first paragraph, correcting it from “first stage” to “upper stage.”
» Read more

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Audi joins race to the Moon

9:55 am

The competition heats up: The carmaker Audi has joined one of the teams competing for the Google Lunar X-Prize.

Audi’s part in the project will be to supply technical know how though its Audi Concept Design Studio, including the application of its quattro all-wheel drive technology and its experience in lightweight construction, electric mobility, and piloted driving. The company says it will also help in testing, trials, and quality assurance.

The rover, now named the “Audi lunar quattro,” is scheduled to launch sometime in 2017 and is aimed at a landing zone north of the lunar equator somewhere near 1972 Apollo 17 mission landing site, through the law prevents the rover from actually visiting it because it’s a protected area. “The concept of a privately financed mission to the moon is fascinating,” says Luca de Meo, Audi Board Member for Sales and Marketing. “And innovative ideas need supporters that promote them. We want to send a signal with our involvement with the Part‑Time Scientists and also motivate other partners to contribute their know‑how.”

I should note that the article is wrong when it states “the law prevents the rover from actually visiting” the Apollo 17 site. This law was passed by the U.S. Congress, and this Google team and Audi are not based in the U.S. They are not under its jurisdiction.

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An update on Rosetta’s effort to re-establish contact with Philae

8:47 am

This update describes the status of the effort by the Rosetta science team to re-establish a stable communications channel with the Philae lander on the surface of Comet 67P/C-G.

Confirmed contacts between Rosetta and Philae have been made on 13, 14, 19, 20, 21, 23, and 24 June, but were intermittent during those contact periods. For example, the contact on 19 June was stable but split into two short periods of two minutes each. Conversely, the contact on 24 June started at 17:20 UT (on board Rosetta) and ran for 20 minutes, but the quality of the link was very patchy and only about 80 packets of telemetry were received. Prior to this, on Tuesday, 23 June, there was a 20-second contact, but no stable link was established and consequently no telemetry data were received.

There are many reasons why the contacts have been so intermittent, much of it related to Philae’s position on the surface. To improve things, they are carefully adjusting Rosetta’s position relative to the comet while avoiding placing the spacecraft in a position where the coma’s dust will cause problems.

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Finding Pluto is really New Horizon’s biggest problem

9:59 am

As New Horizons speeds towards its planned fly-by of Pluto on July 14, the biggest problem faced by its engineers is making sure the spacecraft actually finds and photographs the planet.

Because astronomers discovered the dwarf planet in 1930, they have seen only part of its 248-year path around the Sun, and they don’t know exactly where Pluto is. And New Horizons is so far from Earth that it takes 9 hours to send and receive a signal, making the spacecraft hard to direct in real time. “Everything is pushed to the extreme,” says Bobby Williams, an engineer at KinetX Aerospace in Simi Valley, California, who heads the mission’s navigation team.

This fact, which has not been mentioned previously as far as I remember, suggests that there is a good chance that New Horizons might fly through its planned window and aim its cameras at the wrong spot in the sky, missing Pluto entirely. It also explains partly why the images released so far have been so fuzzy: They are focused mostly on doing navigation work, and are taking wide angle shots to make sure they catch Pluto in their picture frame. Zooming in too close might actually miss Pluto as they don’t exactly know where it is.

All this only makes the July 14th fly-by even more exciting. Let us hope they do due diligence and get the pictures we all want!

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OneWeb awards major launch contracts

9:51 am

The competition heats up: OneWeb today announced it had raised a half billion dollars in investment capital, and has also awarded two major launch contracts, one to the Arianespace/Russian Soyuz partnership and the other to Virgin Galactic’s LauncherOne.

The Soyuz gets 21 launches while LauncherOne gets 39. For Virgin Galactic this contract might save the company, as their effort to fly tourists on SpaceShipOne has badly stalled. The effort to build LauncherOne, however, seems to be gaining steam.

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The icy patches on Comet 67P/C-G

8:48 am

Data from Rosetta’s high resolution camera have identified more than a hundred small patches of ice on the surface of Comet 67P/C-G.

Some of these bright features are found in clusters, while others appear isolated, and when observed at high resolution, many of them appear to be boulders displaying bright patches on their surfaces.

The clusters of bright features, comprising a few tens of metre-sized boulders spread over several tens of metres, are typically found in debris fields at the base of cliffs. They are most likely the result of recent erosion or collapse of the cliff wall revealing fresher material from below the dust-covered surface.

By contrast, some of the isolated bright objects are found in regions without any apparent relation to the surrounding terrain. These are thought to be objects lifted up from elsewhere on the comet during a period of cometary activity, but with insufficient velocity to escape the gravitational pull of the comet completely.

Most of the images from Rosetta’s high resolution camera have been held back so that the project scientists could publish their papers from the data. This release is in conjunction with one of those papers [pdf].

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New images of Pluto

12:06 pm

Latest Pluto images

Cool image time! The two images on the right, taken on June 18 and June 15 respectively, — cropped from a larger collection — show Pluto’s two hemispheres, as best as New Horizons can at the moment resolve them.

While still as fuzzy as pre-space age planetary images, the pictures when compared with earlier images of the same hemispheres now clearly show several consistent features.

Things can only get better. Stay tuned!

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A closer close-up of Ceres’ double bright spot

9:19 am

Closer look at Ceres' double bright spot

Cool image time! In a new press release, the Dawn science team has unveiled a new close-up of Ceres’ double bright spot, shown on the right.

At least eight spots can be seen next to the largest bright area, which scientists think is approximately 6 miles (9 kilometers) wide. A highly reflective material is responsible for these spots — ice and salt are leading possibilities, but scientists are considering other options, too.

In other words, they still have not confirmed through spectroscopy, that these bright spots are ice.

Note also that they have reduced the image’s brightness so that the bright spots do not over expose as much as in past images. This not only allows more details to come out, but it portrays Ceres’ very dark surface more accurately. Even so, the image still shows that surface as brighter than it actually is.

A mountain on Ceres

The press release also described a second image, showing a single lonely mountain on the planet’s horizon, rising up three miles from the planet’s surface, shown in the cropped image to the left. Overall this image, as well as the others, suggest that the surface of Ceres is generally far less rough than we should expect.

Another science mystery to unravel!

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Falcon 9 landing barge replaced and upgraded

9:27 am

The competition heats up: SpaceX has replaced one of its automated first stage landing barges with an upgraded version.

With dimensions virtually identical to Marmac 300, she carries some new features, including a steel blast wall erected between the rear containers and the landing deck, in addition to the steel bow wall as previously seen on Marmac 300. Ongoing work visible on deck suggests that a second blast wall may be installed at the forward end of the landing deck as well.

The article also provides us a nice contrast between the government and the private sector. While a private company is now willing to buy a flight with a recovered first stage, even before a successful landing, the government is far more cautious:

According to Mr. Musk, officials have asked for “repeated, successful” demonstrations of a first stage landing on the drone ship before a landing attempt will be allowed at the Cape.

That the company has already demonstrated twice that the first stage can return very precisely to its target should have already satisfied these officials. Moreover, the landing site would be well secured and maintained by SpaceX, and they appear quite willing to bear any repair costs should the stage crash on that landing site.

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Philae contacts Rosetta again

9:08 am

Philae today sent another 2 minutes worth of information to Rosetta.

The downlink was stable; the two contacts received by Rosetta lasted two minutes each. Both delivered numerous packets of lander housekeeping and status data, 185 in total, which are still being analysed at the time of this writing. No science data were anticipated or received.

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SES wants to launch with a recovered Falcon 9 first stage

10:31 pm

The competition heats up: Commercial satellite company SES has requested SpaceX that one of its satellites be the first to be launched with a recovered Falcon 9 first stage.

SES has seven satellites under construction, five of which are contracted for SpaceX launches, starting with SES-9. SES said it has been given a guarantee by SpaceX that the launch will occur no later than September. SES has agreed to allow SES-9 to be the first launch using an upgraded Falcon 9 main-stage Merlin 1D engine, whose performance is being increased to allow SpaceX to attempt first-stage recovery even on launches to geostationary transfer orbit, the destination of most telecommunications satellites.

Just as it secured an attractive SpaceX price for the SES-8 by being one of the first established customers, SES now wants a cut-rate price on a Falcon 9 with a previously used first stage. “Our launch vehicle for SES-9 will be a recoverable vehicle,” Halliwell said. “We believe they will be able to recover it on this mission. We actually asked them: If we do recover it, can we use it again and get a good price discount? We’re still in discussions.”

In other words, if SpaceX is successful in landing the first stage after it puts SES-9 into orbit in September, they want first dibs, at a good price, of using that stage on a future SES launch.

SES’s willingness to do this changes my estimated time frame for the first successful reuse of a first stage. I had assumed that the commercial satellite companies would all be reluctant to put one of their payloads on a rocket using a recovered first stage, until they had seen at least one test flight of such a stage. SES proves this assumption wrong, to my delight.

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UrtheCast releases its first commercial videos of Earth

9:33 am

The competition heats up: UrtheCast has released high resolution videos of three Earth cities taken from its camera on ISS.

Take a look. The cameras are quite successful in capturing the motion of vehicles on highways and road, which is amazing considering the vibrations that ISS experiences merely from astronaut movements.

The company plans to offer the imagery in several tiers, from a free video feed on its website to an API that will allow customers, including corporations, governments and individuals, to purchase imagery data from its database or make real-time requests for a look at a given spot on the earth. The cameras scan the ground under the ISS, which tracks the earth between about 51 degrees north and south latitude.

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France sells Arianespace to Airbus Safran

9:16 am

The competition heats up: In negotiations resulting from increased competition in the launch industry, France and its space agency have agreed to sell their stock in Arianespace to Airbus Safran, builders of the new Ariane 6, giving that private company 74% ownership.

I have reported on this deal earlier. This report makes it clear, however, that Arianespace will essentially become irrelevant after the deal is completed. Airbus Safran will build and own the rocket, and will be in charge.

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Rosetta repositions to improve contact with Philae

8:52 am

Engineers have begun shifting Rosetta’s trajectory paralleling Comet 67P/C-G in order to maximize communications with the lander Philae.

Commands to adjust the trajectory were successfully uploaded Monday evening; further commands will be uplinked on Thursday evening. The spacecraft will perform two manoeuvres, one on Wednesday morning and the second on Saturday morning. The effect of the two ‘dog-leg’ burns will be to bring the orbiter to a distance of 180 km from the comet and to reproduce the orbiter-comet geometry of the first contact.

We should therefore not expect further news from Philae for the rest of this week.

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Another successful course correction for New Horizons

9:31 pm

New Horizons has successfully completed another course correction and is shipshape for its fly-by of Pluto on July 14.

A 45-second thruster burst on June 14 refined New Horizons’ trajectory toward Pluto, targeting the optimal aim point for the spacecraft’s flight through the Pluto system. This was only the second targeting maneuver of New Horizons’ approach to Pluto; Sunday’s burst adjusted the spacecraft’s velocity by just 52 centimeters per second, aiming it toward the desired close-approach target point approximately 7,750 miles above Pluto’s surface.

The maneuver was based on the latest radio tracking data on the spacecraft and range-to-Pluto measurements made by optical-navigation imaging of the Pluto system taken by New Horizons in recent weeks.

Right now all looks good for the fly-by.

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