Tag: spaceflight

Australian rocket startup Gilmour preps for first test launch

9:23 am

Gilmour Space Technologies, a new Australian rocket startup, is now targeting April for the first test launch of its three-stage Eris rocket from a launchpad on the northeast coast of Australia.

Standing 25 m (82 ft) high, [Eris] has a first-stage diameter of 2 m (6.6 ft), and a second-stage diameter of 1.5 m (4.9 ft), and it’s designed to take a payload mass up to 305 kg (672 lb) up as high as 500 km (311 miles) for delivery to sun-synchronous or equatorial orbits. The Eris will be powered by five of Gilmour’s own Sirius rocket engines. This is a hybrid engine, meaning it uses a liquid oxidizer but a solid fuel. In a final bench test to destruction, it generated 115 kilonewtons (25,850 lbf) and burned for more than 90 seconds before exploding.

More information here.

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Update on upcoming first launch of Relativity’s Terran-1 rocket

9:13 am

Link here. Relativity has been doing longer and longer static fire tests on the launchpad, building to what could be the first every full duration static fire test of a rocket, on the launchpad.

A pair of spin-start tests on Terran 1’s first stage was completed on July 18 and 21 of this year. This was followed by hot fire tests, which not only started the nine Aeon 1 engines but allowed them to reach full thrust before shutdown. The first of these hot fire tests occurred on July 27 and lasted six seconds.

Once complete engine ignition was achieved, the next goal was to work toward firing the first stage for the full duration that will be needed during the flight from liftoff to stage separation. This type of “mission duty cycle” test is usually done on dedicated test stands rather than on the launch pad, but the test stand being used in place of the launch mount at SLC-16 enabled Relativity to streamline operations and complete long-duration firings on the launch pad. “To our knowledge, no other company has ever actually done a full flight duration test on the actual launch mount, or launch pad, at Cape Canaveral,” said Relativity CEO Tim Ellis, in an August interview with NASASpaceflight.

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Once this test is completed, the rocket will be rolled back to its assembly building for check-outs, and if all is well will then be returned to the launchpad for its actual launch. No date has been set for that launch, but if it occurs before SpaceX’s Starship orbital launch, it will be the first methane-fueled rocket to reach orbit.

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India buying land for new spaceport on India’s southern tip

9:06 am

Kulasekarapattinam

The Indian government has now acquired about 80% of the land it needs for new spaceport on that country’s southern tip.

The new spaceport will be built in Tamil Nadu’s southern region. The new spaceport at Kulasekarapattinam will have some advantages over India’s current and only spaceport at Sriharikota.

Rockets launching into polar orbit from Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh, must perform a turn manoeuvre to avoid flying over Sri Lanka. This necessitates the use of fuel and reduces the mass that can be carried into orbit. While this has little effect on large rockets, it has a negative impact on the capacity of small rockets such as the SSLV (Small Satellite Launch Vehicle) and those built by Indian start-ups.

A launch from Kulasekarapattinam will allow for a direct flight path to the polar regions (without having to fly over and around Sri Lanka), saving fuel and payload capacity.

Sriharikota’s location is much farther north, beyond the top of the map to the right. It appears this new spaceport is aimed at attracting new private smallsat rocket companies.

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Perseverance deposits first core sample for pickup later

8:57 am

Perseverance's location December 21, 2022
Click for interactive map.

The Mars Perseverance rover has now deposited its first core sample on the floor of Jezero Crater for pickup later by a future Mars helicopter for eventual return to Earth.

A titanium tube containing a rock sample is resting on the Red Planet’s surface after being placed there on Dec. 21 by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover. Over the next two months, the rover will deposit a total of 10 tubes at the location, called “Three Forks,” building humanity’s first sample depot on another planet. The depot marks a historic early step in the Mars Sample Return campaign.

The blue dot on the map to the right shows this location. The green dot shows Ingenuity’s present position. The red dotted line the rover’s future travel route.

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InSight mission ended

3:01 pm

Location of InSight's largest quakes
The white patches mark the locations on Mars of the largest quakes
detected by InSight

NASA today announced that it has officially ended the mission of the InSight lander on Mars.

Mission controllers at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California were unable to contact the lander after two consecutive attempts, leading them to conclude the spacecraft’s solar-powered batteries have run out of energy – a state engineers refer to as “dead bus.”

NASA had previously decided to declare the mission over if the lander missed two communication attempts. The agency will continue to listen for a signal from the lander, just in case, but hearing from it at this point is considered unlikely. The last time InSight communicated with Earth was Dec. 15.

Other than the success of InSight’s seismometer, this project was mostly a failure. Its launch was delayed two years, from 2016 to 2018, because of problems with the original French seismometer, forcing JPL to take over. Then its German-made mole digger failed to drill into the Martian surface, causing the failure of the lander’s second instrument, a heat sensor designed to measure the interior temperature of Mars.

Fortunately the seismometer worked, or otherwise it would have been a total loss. That data has told us much about Mars and its interior.

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Webb in safe mode intermittently during the past two weeks

2:49 pm

According to a short update today from the science team, the Webb Space Telescope went into safe mode on December 7, 2022 and was in that state “intermittently” through December 20, 2022 because of a software issue.

The James Webb Space Telescope resumed science operations Dec. 20, after Webb’s instruments intermittently went into safe mode beginning Dec. 7 due to a software fault triggered in the attitude control system, which controls the pointing of the observatory. During a safe mode, the observatory’s nonessential systems are automatically turned off, placing it in a protected state until the problem can be fixed. This event resulted in several pauses to science operations totaling a few days over that time period. Science proceeded otherwise during that time. The Webb team adjusted the commanding system, and science has now fully resumed.

It would be nice to have a more detailed description of that “software fault”, and how it affected the attitude control system. Such things can be very trivial, or they can be disastrous. NASA has a responsibility to tell the public which.

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The same region on Ganymede, as seen by Voyager-1 in 1979 and Juno in 2021

11:30 am

Ganymede compared between Voyager-1 and Juno
Click for full image.

When the Jupiter orbiter Juno did a close pass of the moon Ganymede on June 7, 2021, it took four pictures, covering regions mostly photographed for the first time by Voyager-1 in its close fly-by in 1979.

Scientists have now published the data from this new fly-by. Though Juno’s higher resolution pictures revealed many new details when compared with the Voyager-1 images from four decades earlier, the scientists found no changes. The comparison image, figure 2 of their paper, is to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here.

A flicker comparison between the registered JunoCam and Voyager reprojected mosaics revealed no apparent new impact features. Given the high albedo of fresh craters on Ganymede, with high albedo ejecta deposits two or three times the diameter of the craters themselves, we argue that new craters as small as 250 m diameter would be detectable in images at these 1 km per pixel scales. Extrapolating Ganymede cratering rates from Zahnle et al. (2003) below 1 km, the probability of JunoCam observing a new crater over 12.2 million km2 in 42 years is 1 in 1500, consistent with none being observed.

In other words, at these resolutions finding no new impacts is not a surprise.

Of the new features detected, the Juno images could see more details in the bright rays emanating from the crater Tros (in the lower center of both images), and thus found “…terrain boundaries previously mapped as ‘undivided’ or as ‘approximate’, several large craters, and 12 paterae newly identified in this region.”

Paterae resemble craters but are thought to be a some form of volcanic caldera. Their geological origin however is not yet completely understood.

The paper’s conclusion is actually the most exciting:

The insight gained from this handful of images makes it likely in our opinion that new observations from the upcoming JUICE and Europa Clipper missions will revolutionize our understanding of Ganymede.

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SpaceX and the Ukraine resolve funding issues for Starlink terminals

9:39 am

According to a Ukrainian official, the Ukraine has worked out a method to pay for another 10,000 Starlink terminals by obtaining funding from several European nations.

Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov has announced that over 10,000 additional Starlink terminals will be sent to Ukraine in the coming months, confirming that issues regarding how to fund the country’s critical satellite internet service have been resolved.

The governments of several European Union countries are ready to share payment said Fedorov (who is also Ukraine’s minister for digital transformation) in an interview with Bloomberg, affirming that “As of now all financial issues have been resolved.” Fedorov did not publicly identify which governments are contributing towards the payments but confirmed that there’s currently no contract in place and that Ukraine will need to find additional funding by spring 2023.

Elon Musk had threatened to end Starlink support without some form of payment. It appears his threat, which was almost immediately retracted, forced some action by these governments.

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Kepler’s first discovered exoplanet is spiraling into its aging star

9:33 am

Measurements of the orbit of first exoplanet discovered by the Kepler space telescope have determined that its orbit is very slowly shrinking, and that it will eventually spiral into its aging sun.

In the case of Kepler-1658b, according to the new study, its orbital period is decreasing at the miniscule rate of about 131 milliseconds (thousandths of a second) per year, with a shorter orbit indicating the planet has moved closer to its star.

Detecting this decline required multiple years of careful observation. The watch started with Kepler and then was picked up by the Palomar Observatory’s Hale Telescope in Southern California and finally the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Telescope, or TESS, which launched in 2018. All three instruments captured transits, the term for when an exoplanet crosses the face of its star and causes a very slight dimming of the star’s brightness. Over the past 13 years, the interval between Kepler-1658b’s transits has slightly but steadily decreased.

The scientists think tidal forces are causing the orbit to shrink. The star itself is old and beginning to expand as it evolves towards its own stellar death.

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ISS spacewalk postponed because controllers had to maneuver station to avoid space junk

9:26 am

An American spacewalk to install new solar panels to ISS yesterday was suddenly scrubbed when ground controllers identified a piece of space junk that was going to fly within a quarter mile of the station.

While flight control teams were preparing for today’s U.S. spacewalk, updated tracking data on a fragment of Russian Fregat-SB upper stage debris showed a close approach to station. Based on this new data, flight control teams directed the crew to stop spacewalk preparations as the ground team stepped into procedures to perform a Pre-Determined Debris Avoidance Maneuver (PDAM.)

Russian controllers successfully used the engines on a docked Progress freighter today to complete the avoidance maneuver, firing those engines for 10 minutes and 21 seconds.

It appears the station was never in any danger.

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Virgin Orbit finally receives launch license from British bureaucracy

9:15 am

We’re here to help you! The UK’s Civil Aviation Authority has finally issued a license to Virgin Orbit to launch nine satellites from a Cornwall airport.

The launch date however has not yet been set, because it appears licenses for the nine satellites still need to be issued, though according to the article at the link, approval appears “imminent.”

The press release from the UK Space Agency brags about the speed in which this license was issued:

The UK Civil Aviation Authority granted the licences within 15 months, well within the expected timescales for these types of licences, putting the UK’s regulatory framework on a competitive footing with other international space regulators.

Hogwash. If the licensing process for every commercial launch in the UK is going to take this long, rocket companies are going to quickly find other places to launch from.

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Launch failure for Arianespace’s Vega-C rocket

8:58 am

The second launch of Arianespace’s Vega-C rocket, an upgrade from the Vega rocket that has launched previously, failed yesterday when a problem with the second stage occurred at 2 minutes 27 seconds into the flight.

Designated Vega Vehicle 22 (VV22), the rocket was the second Vega flight of the year and Arianespace’s fifth mission of 2022. VV22 was originally set to launch in November 2022, but a component in the upper composite in the payload fairing needed to be replaced. The launch failure occurred during stage 2 flight, with CEO Stephane Israel citing an “underpressure” indicated during that stage’s burn.

I have embedded video of the launch below, cued to T-30 seconds, just before launch. The rocket was carrying two Earth observation satellites built by Airbus.

The rocket itself has four stages, with the failure occurring when the second stage clearly did not maintain the rocket’s correct path. Though it appeared to be working, it was not providing enough power, so instead of continuing upward into space, the rocket fell back into the atmosphere.
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