Tag: spaceflight

A galaxy with a tail of star-forming clusters

10:34 am

A galaxy with a tail of newborn stars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a survey of twelve different galaxies that have long tails. In this case, the galaxy is named Arp-Madore 1054-325, and the tail that trails off in the upper left is caused by the gravity of the nearby neighboring galaxy, which I think is the patch of stars just below it. Within it are many star clusters where new stars are forming. From the caption:

A team of astronomers used a combination of new observations and archival data to get ages and masses of tidal tail star clusters. They found that these clusters are very young — only 10 million years old. And they seem to be forming at the same rate along tails stretching for thousands of light-years. “It’s a surprise to see lots of the young objects in the tails. It tells us a lot about cluster formation efficiency,” said lead author Michael Rodruck of Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia.

Before the mergers, the galaxies were rich in dusty clouds of molecular hydrogen that may have simply remained inert. But the clouds got jostled and bumped into each other during the encounters. This compressed the hydrogen to the point where it precipitated a firestorm of star birth.

In some ways this galaxy portends one possible future of the Milky Way, after it collides with the nearby Andromeda galaxy in the far future.

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Pieces of a defunct ESA Earth-observation satellite will hit the Earth

10:05 am

The orbit of a defunct European Space Agency (ESA) Earth-observation satellite, ERS-2, is expected to decay later this month, with most of the satellite burning up in the atmosphere but some pieces surviving to hit the ground.

The satellite will break apart when it hits an altitude of about 50 miles (80 km), according to the FAQ [from ESA]. Most of the resulting fragments will then burn up in the atmosphere. Don’t worry too much about the ones the make it down to the surface, for they’ll contain no toxic or radioactive substances, according to ESA.

The article and the FAQ both go out of their way to minimize the risks. Both are correct. However, the risk of this debris hitting anyone, though very very very VERY small, still exists.

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India’s proposed space station now has a name: Bharatiya Antariksh Station

9:56 am

Though no money has yet been allocated to build it, and India’s space agency ISRO has only begun design work, it has now apparently decided to name the space station the Bharatiya Antariksh Station.

They tentatively hope to launch a test module in 2028 to do unmanned rendezvous and docking tests, with assembly beginning in 2028 and completed by 2035.

None of this schedule is certain of course. ISRO has been proposing this space station since 2017. Nothing has ever come of those plans.

Only now does this seem more likely, with India’s effort to shift its space effort from a government-owned and run program to a competitive commercial industry.

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India to do 19 launches through March 2025

9:41 am

India's planned launches through March 2025

According to India’s space bureaucracy IN-SPACe, that nation has planned as many as 19 launches through March 2025.

The image to the right shows the manifest that IN-SPACe released. That agency is tasked with encouraging India’s private and independnt space industry, and it claims that 30 missions in total are planned, with half by commercial companies. This number however includes payloads and suborbital test missions, not just orbital launches. Based on the manifest to the right it appears that 19 of these missions are launches, with six being entirely private launches. One of those private launches, the first of Agnikul’s commercial Agnibaan rocket, will be suborbital.

It thus appears that in 2024 India hopes to complete 14 orbital launches. If so, this would double that nation’s previous record of seven launches in a single year. This schedule is very aspirational, with those six entirely commercial launches likely not all happening as planned.

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Solar-orbiting asteroid that is a quasi-moon of Venus gets a name

9:18 am

The asteroid 2002-VE, discoverd in 2002, is in a solar orbit that makes it a quasi-moon of Venus. This means that the asteroid and Venus are in very similar orbits around the Sun, with 2002-VE shifting back and forth periodically from within Venus’s orbit to outside it.

An official name for 2002-VE has now been approved by the International Astronautical Union, and the history of that name, Zoozve, is a silly one. It appears a podcaster had misread the name on a poster of the solar system that was on the wall of his 2-year-old son’s bedroom. (You can see the poster here). He read “2”s as “Z”s, so that instead of seeing “2002VE” he read it as “Zoozve”.

Since then he has been campaigning to make this misreading official, and has finally succeeded.

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Vibration testing of Sierra Space’s Tenacity mini-shuttle completed

9:01 am

NASA engineers have now completed vibration testing of Sierra Space’s Tenacity mini-shuttle, set to launch on a Vulcan rocket later this year.

Reading between the blather in the NASA press release at the link, it appears that testing was successful, proving that the Dream Chaser spacecraft can survive the vibrations of launch. This conclusion by me however remains unconfirmed. Engineers are now preparing the mini-shuttle for environmental testing.

Next up, Dream Chaser will move to a huge, in-ground vacuum chamber that will continue to simulate the space environment Dream Chaser will encounter on its mission. The spaceplane will be put through its paces, experiencing low ambient pressures, low-background temperatures, and dynamic solar heating.

Previously the launch date had been targeting April 2024, according to ULA officials. It now appears, from the vagueness of recent reports, as well as the actual testing now in progress, that the launch date has slipped. They appear to be targeting the first half of 2024, but are as yet unwilling to commit to a date.

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Scientists: We think the Saturn moon Mimas may have a young underground ocean

8:45 am

The uncertainty of science: Using computer modeling based on orbital data obtained from the orbiter Cassini, scientist now believe the Saturn moon Mimas may have a young underground ocean.

[I]n 2014, a team that included Lainey and that was led by Radwan Tajeddine, an astronomer then at the Paris Observatory, analysed images taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which explored Saturn and its moons between 2004 and 2017. By studying how the 400-kilometre-wide Mimas wobbled in its orbit around Saturn, the researchers concluded that it had either a buried ocean or a rugby-ball-shaped core. As more scientists studied how an ocean could have formed and evolved, it became harder to explain the geology of Mimas without invoking an ocean.

In the 2024 study, Lainey and his colleagues seem to have nailed the case. They went further than they had in 2014, by analysing not just the orbit’s wobble but also how Mimas’s rotation around Saturn changed over time. The team combined Cassini observations with simulations of Mimas’s interior and its orbit to conclude that there must be an ocean 20–30 kilometres below Mimas’s surface.

The journal Nature published the paper, and the link above goes to an article in Nature describing the results, with a headline “The Solar System has a new ocean — it’s buried in a small Saturn moon.” This is very poor journalism, but very typical these days from Nature. Nowadays that journal routinely pushes the results it publishes with great certainty, even if the data is quite uncertain.

And these results are quite uncertain. They are based on computer simulations using orbital data only. No data from Mimas itself is involved. While that orbital data and computer models might suggest an underground ocean that is very young, that is the best it does, “suggest.” Without question this conclusion is very intriguing, but it should not be treated as a discovery, only a theory that still needs confirmation with much better data.

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A small Martian volcano?

12:35 pm

A small Martian volcano?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on December 21, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The science team labeled it a “fresh crater”, but that description I think is misleading, as it implies a recent impact.

The crater does not look like a fresh impact crater to me. Such things on Mars usually appear very dark, as the impact dredges up dark material. This crater is not dark. More significant is the crater itself. The small 300-foot-wide inner crater, surrounded by a circular plateau and all sitting inside the larger 1,200-foot-wide crater is completely unique compared to any impact crater I have ever seen. Impacts in soft material, such as ice-impregnated ground, can cause concentric ripple rings, but they don’t look like this.

Instead, this crater more resembles the caldera of a volcano, where subsequent eruptions can produce overlapping depressions at the volcano peak. (See for example this picture of Olympus Mons.)

Moreover, the crater sits on top of a peak approximately 300 feet high. While impacts in ice-impregnated ground on Mars can produce splash aprons as seen here, the crater usually sits at about the same elevation as the surrounding terrain, not at the top of a peak. This peak suggests the apron was forned not by a splash but repeated flows coming down from the top.
» Read more

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Freedom capsule undocks from ISS with AX-3 commercial crew

10:06 am

SpaceX’s Freedom capsule today undocked from ISS at 9:20 am (Eastern), carrying three European passengers and one commander, with a planned splashdown in the Atlantic off the coast of Florida at 8:30 am (Eastern) on February 9, 2024.

Ax-3 astronauts Michael López-Alegría, Walter Villadei, Marcus Wandt, and Alper Gezeravci will complete 18 days aboard the orbiting laboratory at the conclusion of their mission. The SpaceX Dragon will return to Earth with more than 550 pounds of science and supplies, including NASA experiments and hardware.

Live stream for that splashdown can be found here. The mission is a private one. Axiom sold the tickets, and purchased from SpaceX the Falcon 9 launch and use of its Freedom capsule. It also rented time on ISS from NASA for its crew and passengers.

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Computer problem on Voyager-1 remains unsolved

9:54 am

Engineers remain baffled over a computer issue that has prevented the receipt of any data since November 2023 from Voyager-1, floating some 15 billion miles away just outside the solar system in interstellar space.

In November, the data packages transmitted by Voyager 1 manifested a repeating pattern of ones and zeros as if it were stuck, according to NASA. Dodd said engineers at JPL have spent the better part of three months trying to diagnose the cause of the problem. She said the engineering team is “99.9 percent sure” the problem originated in the FDS [Flight Data Subsystem], which appears to be having trouble “frame syncing” data.

So far, the ground team believes the most likely explanation for the problem is a bit of corrupted memory in the FDS. However, because of the computer hangup, engineers lack detailed data from Voyager 1 that might lead them to the root of the issue. “It’s likely somewhere in the FDS memory,” Dodd said. “A bit got flipped or corrupted. But without the telemetry, we can’t see where that FDS memory corruption is.”

Since November the only signal received from Voyager-1 is a carrier signal that simply tells engineers the spacecraft is alive. Though the effort continues to try to fix the spacecraft, the odds of bringing it back to life are becoming slim, especially because its power supply will run out in 2026 at the very latest. Even if they manage to fix the issue now, the spacecraft has only a short time left regardless.

Considering the computers on this spacecraft, as well as its twin Voyager-2, have been operating continuously for almost a half century since their launch in 1977, their failure now is nothing to be ashamed of. The engineers that built both did well, to put it mildly.

As for Voyager-1’s future, even dead it will fly on into interstellar space, eventually getting within 1.5 light years of a star in the constellation Camelopardalis.

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JPL to lay off 8% of its work force plus 40 contractors

11:34 pm

Claiming the uncertainty of its federal budget allocation due to Congress’s inability to pass a new budget, the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) earlier today announced it was laying off 8% of its work force, 530 employees, plus 40 contractors.

In a memo to JPL staff Feb. 6, [director Laurie] Leshin said that a lack of a final 2024 appropriations bill — NASA is operating on a CR [continuing resolution] that runs until March 8 — forced the layoffs after taking other measures such as a hiring freeze and reductions in MSR [Mars Sample Return] contracts and other spending, as well as the earlier contractor layoffs. “So in the absence of an appropriation, and as much as we wish we didn’t need to take this action, we must now move forward to protect against even deeper cuts later were we to wait,” she wrote.

Uncertainty about how the Mars Sample Return project should be designed and built had caused Congress to express doubts about the project, with the Senate suggesting major cuts. NASA responded by loudly pausing the project and suggesting its own cuts. JPL has now followed up with these layoffs. Both have I think done so as a lobbying tactic, and as expected in this game of budget lobbying these actions have caused many legislators to scream in horror: “We really didn’t mean it! We really don’t want to cut anything!”

Expect our bankrupt Congress to fold and provide NASA and JPL the blank check it wants to fly a Mars mission that will cost billions, be years late, and likely be beaten to Mars by SpaceX’s Starship (which could do the job for a tenth the cost).

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Curiosity’s damaged wheels continue to appear stable despite the rough Martian terrain

12:27 pm

A new look at Curiosity's worst wheel
To see the original images, go here and here.

The rover Curiosity on Mars has for more than two years been traveling across a very rocky and rough terrain as it climbs higher and higher on Mount Sharp inside Gale Crater. Since the rover’s wheels experienced far more damage than expected early in its mission, when it was on the floor of the crater where the terrain was not as severe, engineers have adopted a whole range of techniques to try to reduce any further damage.

First, they increased the safety margins on the software that guides Curiosity. It picks its way very carefully through the rocks, and stops immediately if it finds itself crossing terrain that is too rough.

Second, the science team does a photo survey of the wheels after every kilometer of travel. The two pictures to the right compare the damage on the rover’s most damaged wheel, with an image from the previous survey on top and the most recent image, taken yesterday, on the bottom. I have numbered the same treads, called grousers, in the two images to make it easier to compare them.

As you can see, it does not appear as if the damage has increased in the 210 sols or seven months of travel since the last survey. This wheel looks bad, but it is the worst wheel on the rover, and the strategies that the engineering team adopted years ago to reduce further damage continue to work, even as Curiosity traverses some very rough ground.

The software requires the rover to travel shorter distances in each drive when the ground is this rough, but the consequence is that it will last much longer, and thus have a better chance of reaching higher elevations on Mount Sharp.

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SpaceX’s revenue estimate for 2024 is $13.3 billion

10:56 am

According to an independent analysis of SpaceX’s announced launch plans for 2024, the company’s revenue in 2024 is predicted to be somewhere around $13.3 billion, including earnings from Starlink subscribers.

This independent estimate is less than SpaceX’s own projection of $15 billion, but what is important is that the revenue in 2024 equals approximately the total amount of investment capital that SpaceX has raised for Starship/Superheavy and Starlink. Add to this the estimated revenues from 2023, $8 billion, and it appears SpaceX is in a very healthy position to complete the construction of Starship and begin flying it regularly for profit.

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Perseverance snaps its first picture of grounded Ingenuity

10:25 am

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Ingenuity on dune, as seen by Perseverance on February 4, 2024
Click for original image.

Perseverance on February 4, 2024 finally moved into a position where it was close enough to take its first picture of the now grounded Ingenuity helicopter. That picture, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, is to the right, taken by the rover’s left high resolution camera. You can see Ingenuity sitting on the slope of a dune near the upper right.

The overview map above provides the context. The green dot marks Ingenuity’s final resting spot. The blue dot marks Perseverance’s present location, with the yellow lines indicating approximately the area covered by the photo.

Whether the rover is now close enough to get good imagery for a final engineering test of Ingenuity — where its rotors will be rotated and shifted slowly to determine the extent of the propeller damage — is not clear. Perseverance could move much closer, but its science team might not want to cross these dunes out of fear the rover would get stuck. They might move forward a few more feet, to the top of the south bank of Neretva Vallis, before doing that test.

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Juno completes its closest approach of the Jupiter moon Io

9:53 am

Io on February 3, 2024
Click for full image.

The Jupiter orbiter Juno successfully completed its 58th close fly-by of the gas giant, during which it also made its closest approach to the volcanic moon Io, zipping past at a distance of 932 miles. The image of Io to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken at that closest Io approach, and shows a mountain on the horizon as well as a large shield volcano in the center (the dark splotch), with a major lava flow to the south. The picture was processed by citizen scientist Brian Swift.

Another image, processed by Björn Jónsson, shows the differences at one volcano dubbed Loki between the December 30, 2023 and the February 3, 2024 flybys. It appears that the brightness of the apron of lava that surrounds the volcano changes significantly depending on the lighting and the angle of view. In December it was almost black. In February it was greyish silver, almost shiny.

Another image, processed by Andrea Luck, captured faint eruption plumes on Io’s edge, caused by an ongoing eruption just beyond the horizon.

Juno still has four more flybys of Io coming up, but none will be as close as the February 3rd approach.

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A pin falls off Virgin Galactic’s mother ship during most recent passenger flight

9:14 am

Virgin Galactic has notified the FAA that a pin fell off its Eve mother ship, carrying its SpaceShipTwo Unity suborbital spacecraft, during most recent passenger flight on January 26, 2024.

Virgin Galactic said the alignment pin fell from its VMS Eve mothership aircraft, the plane that carries VSS Unity aloft. The pin is used to ensure Unity is aligned to Eve when mated during preflight preparations. After takeoff, the pin helps transfer drag loads from Unity into the pylon and center wing section of the aircraft. The alignment pin detached after Unity separated from Eve, although the company did not state how long afterwards the pin came off. The pin, along with a separate shear pin fitting assembly, do not play a role in flight activities after the release of the spaceplane.

The FAA states it will do an investigation before permitting more flights, but we know from a recent GAO report that it does no such thing. It simply observes the investigation by the company involved, and then rubber stamps it afterward. Nor is this wrong, as no one at the FAA is qualified to do such investigations, unlike the engineers at the company.

The investigation however might impact the next flight. The company has said it intends to end flights using Unity after then next three, and then stand down as it replaces it with its next generation spacecraft. This incident might force that stand-down to occur sooner.

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Weather stops everything by SpaceX in the last 24 hours

9:00 am

SpaceX found itself stymied in the past 24 hours due to poor weather conditions on both coasts, with two launches and the return of a Dragon capsule from space all scrubbed.

First a Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg of 22 Starlink satellites was scrubbed, the launch pushed back from yesterday to tonight at 5.39 pm (Pacific).

Then a launch of a NASA climate satellite on a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral was scrubbed shortly thereafter, the launch rescheduled for 1:33 am (Eastern) tonight.

Finally, the return of Axiom’s Ax-3 commercial passenger flight to ISS was scrubbed today because of poor weather conditions.

NASA, Axiom Space, and SpaceX are standing down from the Tuesday, Feb. 6, undocking opportunity of Axiom Mission 3 from the International Space Station. Mission teams will continue to review weather conditions off the coast of Florida, which currently are not favorable for return, and set a new target opportunity for space station departure and splashdown of the Dragon spacecraft and Axiom crew members.

The undocking is now tentatively set for tomorrow morning, but this remains unconfirmed. The three passengers and the Axiom commander have so far spent 18 days in orbit. The original plan was for a 14 day mission, most of which to be spent on ISS, but weather can always extend such plans.

The launch scrubs illustrate the challenge SpaceX faces in reaching its stated goal of 150 launches in 2024. It appears the company is now capable of technically meeting that goal. To do it however it needs to launch almost every other day, and weather simply might not allow a pace like this during some parts of the year in both Florida and California. Whether the company can make-up for these delays with multiple daily launches at other times remains unknown. If it does, it will be another feather in the cap for SpaceX.

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Asteroid that landed near Berlin found and identified

3:07 pm

The meteorite that crashed near Berlin late last month, only hours after being spotted in space, has now been found and identified.

“We only spotted the meteorites after a Polish team of meteorite hunters had identified the first find and could show us what to look for,” said Jenniskens. “After that, our first finds were made quickly by Freie Universität students Dominik Dieter and Cara Weihe.”

The meteorites are fragments of the small asteroid 2024 BX1, first spotted with a telescope at Konkoly Observatory in Hungary by astronomer Dr. Krisztián Sárneczky, tracked and then predicted to impact Earth’s atmosphere by NASA’s Scout and ESA’s Meerkat Asteroid Guard impact hazard assessment systems, with Davide Farnocchia of JPL/Caltech providing frequent trajectory updates, and finally causing a bright fireball that was seen and filmed. This was Jenniskens’ fourth guided recovery of such a small asteroid impact, following a 2008 impact in Sudan, a 2018 impact in Botswana, and a 2023 impact in France.

Today, Jenniskens’ collaborators at the Museum für Naturkunde officially announced that the first examinations of one of these pieces with an electron beam microprobe prove the typical mineralogy and chemical composition of an achondrite of the aubrite type.

Aubrite meteorites are rare and hard to find, so this discovery is important.

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A spot where the surface of Mars cracked

1:22 pm

The spot where Mars cracked
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on September 14, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a small section of the Cerberus Fossae cracks, a parallel series of cracks that stretch more than 700 miles across the volcanic plains of Mars.

These cracks formed when the ground spread apart, creating a void in which the surface collapsed. You can see this process illustrated quite clearly by the crater in the lower right, as indicated by the arrow. The crater had existed prior to the crack. When the ground split and collapsed, only the northeast quadrant of the crater was destroyed.

These cracks might also have been the source of Mars’ most recent large volcanic event, as shown by the overview map below.
» Read more

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Curiosity looks ahead at very rough terrain higher on Mount Sharp

10:00 am

Panorama on Sol 4086, February 3, 2024
Click for full image.

The rough terrain higher on Mount Sharp
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced and enhanced to post here, was taken on February 3, 2024 by the high resolution camera on the Mars rover Curiosity. The area it covers is indicated by the rectangle on the panorama above, which has been cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here. That panorama was created from 46 photos taken by the rover’s right navigation camera on that same day.

Those rough small peaks are higher on Mount Sharp, though far below its summit. The summit itself is not visible, and in fact has never been visible to Curiosity since it landed on Mars in August 2012. The peak is about 26 miles to the south and about 16,000 feet higher up, with much of the mountain in the way.

These small, rough peaks are in an area that the rover will likely never go, as shown in the overview map below.
» Read more

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China completes two launches yesterday

9:38 am

China successfully completed two launches yesterday from two different spaceports using two different rockets.

First a Long March 2C rocket launched 11 satellites as part of a civilian-based communications constellation, lifting off from it Xichang spaceport in southwest China. No word on where the rocket’s lower stages crashed, all of which use very toxic hypergolic fuels.

Next a Smart Dragon-3 rocket produced by the pseudo-company Landspace placed nine satellties into orbit, lifting off from a barge just off the coast of China. No information at all was released about the nine satellites. Furthermore, China’s state-run press made no mention of Landspace in its report, indicating once again what it thinks of these so-called private companies.

The 2024 launch race:

10 SpaceX
8 China
2 Iran
1 India
1 ULA
1 Japan
1 Rocket Lab

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Sunspot update: The Sun in January acted like solar maximum is here

11:11 am

In my monthly sunspot update at the start of January, I asked in the headline “Are we now in the next solar maximum?”

The Sun’s sunspot activity in January since then has apparently answered that question. NOAA this week posted its monthly update of its graph showing solar sunspot activity on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere, and as I do every month since 2011, I have posted that graph below, with annotations to provide a larger context.
» Read more

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Collins Aerospace tests its new spacesuit on the Zero Gravity airplane

9:37 am

On January 30, 2024 Collins Aerospace, one of two companies that NASA has contracted to design and build new spacesuits for its future missions, successfully tested its new spacesuit on the Zero Gravity airplane, where it was able to have a person use the suit in short but weightless conditions.

Collins is designing its suit in collaboration with ILC Dover and Oceaneering. Former NASA astronauts, John “Danny” Olivas and Dan Burbank, each donned the suit and performed a series of test objectives while onboard a Zero Gravity plane that’s able to perform parabolic maneuvers to simulate microgravity for short bursts. They were surrounded by several support personnel who were gathering data about the suit performance.

In total, they performed 40 parabolas during the flight. Collins said the primary goals included “evaluation of the suit’s pressure garment system fit and functionality, use of International Space Station tools and interfaces, and reviewed performance of the new Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or EMU, against the current design.”

The two spacesuit contracts (the second is with Axiom) are costing NASA about $335 million total to get the suits designed, built, and certified for use in spacewalks and ground operations on the Moon. Both companies appear on schedule to deliver those suits in less than three years.

Previously, NASA had tried to build new spacesuits on its own, and had spent a billion dollars over fourteen years while building nothing. The contrast in this story between the government and private enterprise should be clarifying to everyone.

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One last engineering test planned for Ingenuity

9:23 am

Engineers plan to do one last engineering test with Ingenuity, slowly rotate its propellers while collecting imagery, likely from both the helicopter and Perseverance.

Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity Project Manager, said that NASA and JPL still aren’t sure what caused the damage to Ingenuity’s blades; it remains unclear whether the helicopter’s power dipped during landing, causing unwanted ground contact, or if it accidentally struck the ground to cause a “brownout.”

Tzanetos added that NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) will slowly rotate the helicopter’s blades and “wiggle” them, or adjust their angle, while collecting video in order to allow the team to determine the extent of Ingenuity’s damage. However, Tzanetos said that no matter what such imaging will show, the dual-rotor drone has flown its last flight and will soon end its mission.

This test will likely not occur until Perseverance gets into a position where it can film the test also. The helicopter’s cameras look downward, so all it will be able to photograph is the shadow of those blades as they move. Perseverance can look directly at it, and if it gets into a position slightly higher than Ingenuity it can get a good viewing angle down at the blades.

At the moment the rover is about a thousand feet to the east, though steadily working its way towards it.

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Japan’s lunar lander shuts down for long lunar night

9:15 am

SLIM's last image
Click for original image.

After two days of post landing operations, engineers for the Japanese lunar lander SLIM have shut it down now as the sun has set at its landing site on the Moon and its solar panel can no longer charge its batteries.

The picture to the right, reduced to post here, was the last image sent back by SLIM before shut down. It looks to the southeast across the width of 885-foot-wide Shioli Crater, the opposite rim the bright ridge in the upper right about a thousand feet away.

The engineers shut the spacecraft down prior to sunset in order to increase the chances that it will survive that very long harsh lunar night and reactivate when the Sun rises in two weeks. They recognized that the odds of this occurring are slim (no pun intended), because the lander was not designed to withstand the night’s cold temperatures, and more important, the solar panel will not get recharged until late in the lunar day, an additional week-plus past sunrise. That long period of inactivity will likely kill it.

No matter. The spacecraft’s main goal was to prove the ability of its landing system to land softly within a small target zone. It did so, even if it had an engine issue that caused it to land upside down. This new engineering will make it possible to send unmanned and manned landers to places on other planets that previously were impossible.

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Texas state court rules in favor of activist lawsuit against SpaceX

9:00 am

The activists who sued SpaceX and local authorities, claiming the beach closures required during tests and launches at Boca Chica violate the Texas constitution, have had their lawsuit reinstated by a higher state court after a lower court had dismissed it.

Texas’ 13th district court of appeals ruled in favor of SaveRGV, the Sierra Club and the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas in suits alleging that a 2013 state law allowing beach closures for space flight activities goes against the Open Beaches Amendment to the Texas Constitution.

In July 2022, Cameron County’s 445th District Court dismissed the coalition’s lawsuit, saying the organizations lacked standing in their complaint against Texas Land Commissioner Dr. Dawn Buckingham, the Texas Land Office, Cameron County and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

The appeals court reversed that decision Thursday, allowing the lawsuit to proceed.

The lawsuit still must be litigated, so these activists have not yet won their case. However, this decision might prevent further beach closures while the case plays out in the courts, which would essentially shut down any further tests or launches at Boca Chica. If so, it will not matter if the FAA finally finishes its paperwork and approves a third test launch of Starship/Superheavy later this month. The launch will not be possible.

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A soft but dim spiral

10:51 am

A soft but dim spiral
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a survey of nearby galaxies in which supernovae had previously been detected.

This softly luminous galaxy — lying in the constellation Hercules, about 110 million light-years from Earth — seems outshone by the sparkling foreground stars that surround it. The type II supernova which took place in this galaxy in 2019, while no longer visible in this image, definitely outshone the galaxy at the time!

What amazes me about this somewhat dim spiral galaxy is its beautiful structure, its two spiral arms coiling outward in perfect symmetry. And yet, we are looking at a object that is almost entirely empty space, hundreds of thousands of light years across. Somehow the almost infinitesimal force of gravity at those distances is still able to shape the arms, and the spirals.

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Another exoplanet found in habitable zone

9:55 am

Astronomers using both space- and ground-based telescopes have confirmed the existence of another rocky exoplanet inside the habitable zone of its star.

The star is a red dwarf 137 light years away. The exoplanet, dubbed TOI-175 b, is estimated to be larger than Earth, with a diameter 1.5 times that of our home planet. It orbits its star every nineteen days. Even more intriguing, the data suggests this star has a second exoplanet even better positioned in the habitable zone that would be the smallest habitable-zone exoplanet so far found, about the size of Earth.

The second planet however is not yet confirmed.

This discovery is no longer very unique. In the past few years astronomers have discovered a plethora of Earth-sized exoplanets, many in the habitable zone.

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Japan and India team up for unmanned lunar lander mission

9:42 am

Japan and India are now partnering to put a lander/rover on the Moon in 2025, dubbed LUPEX.

Set tentatively for 2025, LUPEX will be launched on JAXA’s H3 launcher, with a 350-kg rover developed by the Japanese agency. ISRO is developing the lander. The instruments will be on the lander and the rover. Initial feasibility studies and the lander’s configuration have been completed. The rover will sample the soil with a driller and the samples will be analysed using equipment on the rover,

Unlike the previously successful lunar landers from both countries (India’s Chandrayaan-3 and Japan’s SLIM), LUPEX is being designed to survive the 14-day-long lunar night, with a mission that is aiming to last three to six months.

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