Russia this morning used its Proton rocket to launch a weather satellite from Kazahkstan, successfully completing its first launch in 2023.
The 2023 launch race:
8 SpaceX
5 China
1 Rocket Lab
1 Japan
1 Russia
American private enterprise still leads China 9 to 5 in the national rankings, and the entire globe combined 9 to 7.
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on November 18, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The science team labeled this image “Inverted Channel and Possible Lake Deposits.” The sharp razor-like butte, which I estimate is about 200 to 400 feet high, is an example of the several inverted channels in the full image. The serrated-edged flat plateau at the top of this picture, one of several in the full image, is an example of those possible lake deposits.
Why do the scientists think a lake might have once been here? Located at 8 degrees north latitude in the dry equatorial regions of Mars, there is almost certainly no near surface ice here now.
As always, the overview map provides the context, and a possible explanation.
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NASA today announced that it has changed the planned landing site on the Moon for Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander, presently scheduled for launch at the end of March on the first flight of ULA’s new Vulcan rocket.
The original landing site for Astrobotic’s flight within Lacus Mortis, which is in the northeast quadrant of the lunar nearside of the Moon, was chosen by Astrobotic to suit its lander performance and safety, as well as Astrobotic’s preferences. However, as NASA’s Artemis activities mature, it became evident the agency could increase the scientific value of the NASA payloads if they were delivered to a different location. The science and technology payloads planned for this delivery to the Moon presented NASA scientists with a valuable opportunity, prompting the relocation of the landing site to a mare – an ancient hardened lava flow – outside of the Gruithuisen Domes, a geologic enigma along the mare/highlands boundary on the northeast border of Oceanus Procellarum, or Ocean of Storms, the largest dark spot on the Moon.
The white dot on the map to the right shows this location. The original location was to the west of Atlas Crater in the northeast quadrant of the Moon’s near side, where Ispace’s Hakuto-R lunar lander plans to touch down in April.
This decision by NASA was apparently prompted by the decision to send Intuitive Machines Nova-C lander to Vallis Schröteri in Oceanus Procellarum, which is the rill that flows west out of the crater Aristarchus. Gruithuisen Domes had been a potential landing site for Nova-C, and NASA probably did not want to lose an opportunity to go there.
Click for original image.
Curiosity appears to have identified a foot-wide rock on the surface of Mars that is likely a meteorite.
While the JPL press release at this link is certain this is a meteorite, the Curiosity science team is properly more circumspect:
The rock we are parked in front of is one of several very dark-colored blocks in this area which seem to have come from elsewhere, and we are calling “foreign stones.” Our investigations will help determine if this is a block from elsewhere on Mars that just has been weathered in an interesting way or if it is a meteorite.
The image to the right surely does look like a meteorite. If so, this would be one of the largest found so far on Mars by any rover.
Teruel airport in Spain, located about 200 miles east of Madrid, has announced plans to expand its operations to make itself a rocket spaceport.
At a recent conference, it was announced that PDL Space plans to operate satellite micro launchers from the little-known airport, located some 300km east of the capital Madrid.
Another company, Sceye, plans to install stratospheric spacecraft at the airport, which, since coming into commission ten years ago, has been used primarily as a maintenance centre for large aircraft.
The airport is located in the eastern interior of Spain. Any orbital launches will have to cross considerable parts of the country, as well as other European and African countries. This however might not be a problem for the moment, as PDL at present appears to be building suborbital rockets.
The city of Yuma in Arizona has provided $250 million to fund the cost for applying for an FAA license for a building a spaceport there.
The city hopes to build the spaceport just east of San Luis on a plot of land it owns, which is near the border, and right next to the Arizona State Prison complex. The spaceport itself would be a concrete slab, with aerospace companies bringing their own launching equipment.
Something however is fishy about this story. It doesn’t cost $250 million to put together such a license, unless Yuma also expects serious opposition that it will need to fight in court. And it should, as any launches from Yuma will have to cross parts of Mexico, and without that country’s permission such a spaceport will likely be blocked.
According to a report on China’s state-run press that has now been deleted, China plans to build satellite ground stations in Antarctica for use by its ocean-observation satellites.
Official space industry newspaper China Space News reported Feb. 2 that a subsidiary of the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC), a giant state-owned defense and space contractor, won a bid to construct a ocean observation satellite ground system. The project is being overseen by the National Satellite Ocean Application Service (NSOAS) and is stated to be part of a long-term marine economic development plan.
Renders of the 43.95 million yuan ($6.52 million) project show four radome-covered antennas at Zhongshan in East Antarctica. It is unknown if these are new and additional to antennas already established at the base. The antennas will assist data acquisition from Chinese satellites that orbit in polar and near-polar orbits. Satellites in these orbits are visible near the poles multiple times a day, allowing more frequent opportunities for downlink than with stations at lower latitudes.
Such ground stations could of course do many other things, including aiding military satellite surveillance.
Researchers have discovered a new kind of water ice that appears to match the density and structure of liquid water.
he ice is called medium-density amorphous ice. The team that created it, led by Alexander Rosu-Finsen at University College London (UCL), shook regular ice in a small container with centimetre-wide stainless-steel balls at temperatures of –200 ˚C to produce the variant, which has never been seen before. The ice appeared as a white granular powder that stuck to the metal balls. The findings were published today in Science.
The abstract for the paper can be read here.
Not only does this discovery suggest that there are many possible states of water ice, with a range of properties, this new type of ice could help explain many of the features we see on planets like Mars that appear to have been caused by flowing water. Mars has a lot of glacial ice, much of which might not be ice as we assume.
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and sharpened to post here, was taken on December 28, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows one tiny section of the interior slope of the giant Martian canyon Valles Marineris.
The while layers are not made of frost or ice, because they are light tan, as per the color image. Thus, the alternating layers of dark and light indicate different layering events. The dark layers are probably major lava flood events with a lot of dark ash intermixed, while the tan layers were flood lava events with little dark ash.
The dark lines that cut across these layers are ripple dunes formed from dust that has accumulated inside Valles Marineris.
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South Korea today reported that a fire had broken out in its Naro Space Center during work on a turbopump for a next generation rocket.
The fire started at 3:25 p.m. Tuesday at the Naro Space Center in the country’s southern coastal village of Goheung and was extinguished about an hour later, according to the Ministry of Science and ICT. The ministry said some experimental equipment was affected by the fire but reported no injuries.
The fire broke out while researchers were conducting an experiment to develop a 10-ton turbopump that injects fuel into an engine for a new space rocket, codenamed KSLV-III.
The KSLV-III will be an upgrade of the KSLV-II, also called Nuri, which has a launch scheduled right now in May. The KSLV-III is part of a $1.6 billion government project to develop this new rocket by 2032.
India’s space agency ISRO today released the results of its investigation into the launch failure of its SSLV rocket on its first flight in August 2022.
The investigation revealed that there was a vibration disturbance for a short duration on the Equipment Bay (EB) deck during the second stage separation. SSLV is a three-solid-stage launch vehicle unlike the PSLV, which is a four-stage rocket. The vibration affected the Inertial Navigation System (INS), resulting in declaring the sensors faulty by the logic in the Fault Detection & Isolation (FDI) software.
In plain English, it appears the vibration caused a failure in the inertial navigation system, thus resulting in the premature engine shutdown of the fourth stage.
According to the report, the problem has been fixed and the next SSLV launch is now tentatively scheduled for February 9, 2023.
South Korea yesterday officially announced that it has canceled a Russian contract that was supposed to use an Angara rocket to launch a multi-purpose satellite last year and signed a deal with Arianespace to use the Vega-C rocket instead.
The cancellation appears directly because of the sanctions against Russia due to its invasion of the Ukraine. Picking the Vega-C as a replacement at this moment however seems a strange choice, considering its last launch was a failure and it has failed three times in the last eight launches. I suspect Arianespace gave South Korea an extremely good price.
Meanwhile, South Korean officials still seem willing to continue another Russian launch contract, using a Soyuz-2 rocket launching from Kazakhstan. According to the article, officials are right now merely negotiating a launch date.
