Link here.
I am on the road so it is presently difficult to post images. Go to the link. Emily Lakdawalla does a fine job taking the New Horizon images and enhancing them to bring out the detals. And trust me, the details are really strange and cool. Nix looks like a chunk of a planet that got ripped apart.
Whiskey that was aged for three years on ISS was taste-tested this past week in Scotland, and the testers all found the taste “completely unlike anything they have ever tasted before.”
The space whiskey had a much smokier quality, with flavors akin to cherries, prunes, raisins, and cinnamon, he said. He also noted that the whiskey’s aftertaste was “pungent, intense, and long, with hints of wood, antiseptic lozenges, and rubbery smoke.” This was in contrast to the Earth-aged whiskey, which had richer flavors more characteristic of whiskey drinks. The space whiskey still had strong flavor, but they were strange, Lumsden said — and not particularly good. He still has yet to figure out why. “That I haven’t been able to work out yet,” he said.
This is not the same Japanese whiskey that was recently sent up to ISS. That is a second experiment, along the same lines.
Cool image time! A panorama produced from images taken by Curiosity’s Mast camera has revealed the remains of ancient sand dunes, cemented into sandstone and now eroding.
This sandstone outcrop — part of a geological layer that Curiosity’s science team calls the Stimson unit — has a structure called crossbedding on a large scale that the team has interpreted as deposits of sand dunes formed by wind. Similar-looking petrified sand dunes are common in the U.S. Southwest. Geometry and orientation of the crossbedding give information about the directions of the winds that produced the dunes.
The Stimson unit overlies a layer of mudstone that was deposited in a lake environment. Curiosity has been examining successively higher and younger layers of Mount Sharp, starting with the mudstone at the mountain’s base, for evidence about changes in the area’s ancient environment.
The image above is cropped and reduced in resolution. Be sure to look at the original.
This report also suggests that Curiosity is definitely moving up the geological layers on Mount Sharp. With each layer, we learn a little bit more about the complex geological history of Gale Crater.
Link here.
The story is fascinating because the lander’s behavior and response to commands has been quite puzzling. They have had about a half dozen short contacts of varying length, all interspersed with a lot of intermittencies. At the moment they have not entirely given up on Philae, since based on what they know of its location and condition it could remain functional through the end of this year. They also recognize that re-establishing contact is becoming increasingly unlikely. The big hope is that once the comet moves farther away from the sun and becomes less active, they will be able to move Rosetta in closer, when the chances of contact will improve.
The competition heats up: SpaceX today released a short video showing a very limited glimpse at the interior of the manned version of its Dragon capsule.
I’ve embedded the video below the fold, but I will tell you it is quite disappointing. Lots of tight close-ups of seatbelts and seats and instrument panels without really providing a clear picture of the capsule’s interior.
» Read more
The competition heats up: A Soyus rocket today launched from French Guiana the 9th and 10th satellites in Europe’s competing GPS system.
This launch enhances competition in two ways. First it is a success of the Russian Soyuz rocket, launched from the European spaceport in South America, Second, it establishes a competing GPS system to the American system, which is great for everyone. Expect future GPS units to provide the capability to use both the systems, as well as the Russian Glonass system.
The competition heats up: Firefly Space Systems, a new company aimed at the small satellite market, successfully test fired its first rocket engine today.
This company is aiming for the same market that Virgin Galactic is going for with its LauncherOne rocket. It will be interesting to see if either can make money selling launch services to these small satellites.
Cool image time! The first of what will likely be weekly image releases for the next few months from New Horizons was made public today, and shows Pluto’s surface to be incredibly complex and confusing.
New close-up images of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reveal a bewildering variety of surface features that have scientists reeling because of their range and complexity. “Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we’ve seen in the solar system,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado. “If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top — but that’s what is actually there.”
The image above only shows one cropped section. Make sure you look at the full image. In the section I’ve cropped we can see nitrogen ice flowing around chunks of some darker harder material, probably water ice. On the left, near the small crater, is what appears to be a canyon formed by flowing liquid. Other images show what appear to be dunes!
It appears, as is typical of scientific exploration, that we are going to be left with more questions from the New Horizons’ data than we had before the fly-by occurred.
Engineering by powerpoint! Several NASA engineers have proposed using SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket and an upgrade of its Dragon capsule to bring samples back from Mars.
The researchers have drawn up a plan that uses a modified version of SpaceX’s uncrewed Dragon cargo capsule, which has already flown six resupply missions to the International Space Station for NASA. The Red Dragon variant would include a robotic arm, extra fuel tanks and a central tube that houses a rocket-powered Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) and an Earth Return Vehicle (ERV).
Red Dragon would launch toward Mars atop SpaceX’s huge Falcon Heavy rocket, which is scheduled to fly for the first time next year. After a long deep-space journey, the capsule would touch down near the 2020 Mars rover (whose landing site has not yet been chosen). “Red Dragon can go anywhere the rover can go, as far as landing elevation and terrain,” Gonzales said. “We’re confident we could land in front of the rover and have it drive to us.”
Red Dragon’s robotic arm would then grab a sample from the rover’s onboard cache (assuming the 2020 rover does indeed carry its samples, rather than stash them someplace) and transfer it to a secure containment vessel aboard the ERV, which sits atop the MAV. If something goes wrong during this exchange, Red Dragon can simply scoop up some material from the ground using its arm. The MAV would then blast off from the center of the capsule, like a missile from a silo, sending the ERV on its way back to Earth. The ERV would settle into orbit around our planet; its sample capsule would then be transferred to, and brought down to Earth by, a separate spacecraft — perhaps another Dragon capsule.
I like this concept because it uses available or soon-to-be available resources that are also relatively cheap to adapt for the mission. I also warn everyone that this is, as I note above, engineering by powerpoint. It is a concept, hardly a real proposal. The track record of seeing these kinds of proposals by NASA actually happen is quite poor.
The competition heats up: Rocket engine-maker Aerojet Rocketdyne has reportedly made a $2 billion offer to buy the rocket company United Launch Alliance (ULA), a partnership of Boeing and Lockheed.
If this deal goes through, it will put the squeeze on Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, which presently has a contract to build rocket engines for ULA. Aerojet Rocketdyne had wanted that contract and had lost out. If they buy ULA, they could then kick Blue Origin out and take on the contract themselves.
I am honestly not sure what to make of this whole thing, however. It could be that Aerojet, having lost a number of contracts and faced with a significant lose in business, has decided it needs to become a rocket company to survive. It could also be that the corporate heads of ULA have decided that the company’s effort to replace its Delta and Atlas rockets with Vulcan is too risky, and they are better off taking the cash and running.
Or it could be any number of other reasons. We shall have to wait and see how this plays out.
Cool image time! The Dawn science team has released a new close-up of Ceres’s Double Bright Spot.
The new up-close view of Occator crater from Dawn’s current vantage point reveals better-defined shapes of the brightest, central spot and features on the crater floor. Because these spots are so much brighter than the rest of Ceres’ surface, the Dawn team combined two different images into a single composite view — one properly exposed for the bright spots, and one for the surrounding surface.
They have also released a detailed topographic map of the crater as well as a fly-around video, which I have posted below the fold. The interesting take-away from this new data is that, while the bright spots look at first glance remarkably like the snow-cap on a mountain-top, they are actually at the low spots in the crater. This suggests that they are instead material that has either bubbled up from below, or flowed downward to the crater bottom.
Be sure you click on the link and look at the full resolution image.
» Read more
The competition heats up: The president of the spaceport in Midland, Texas, said today that XCOR’s Lynx suborbital spacecraft will complete its first test launch in the second quarter of 2016.
My readers know that I have been very skeptical of XCOR. They also know, if they have read closely, that I would be thrilled if they proved me wrong and succeeded. I think we shall find out one way or the other next year.
The competition heats up: China’s next lunar lander will likely be the first to land on the Moon’s far side.
They aim to launch in 2020, after their next orbiter, which would act as a communications relay station, enters orbit in 2017.
Five years after it failed to enter Venus orbit as planned, the Japanese probe Akatsuki is about to try again, in December.
The article provides an interesting and detailed explanation of what had gone wrong in 2010, and then describes the amazing things engineers have done to make this second attempt even possible. If they succeed it will be one of the most brilliant achievements in the history of space exploration.
The competition heats up: An update on SpaceX’s effort to resume flight after its June Falcon 9 launch failure.
Lots of interesting details not only about the failure investigation but on upgrade plans for Falcon 9.
The competition heats up: Russian engineers have begun testing new equipment to be installed in an upgraded version of their manned Soyuz capsule.
The plan to test fly the new avionics on a Progress freighter before installing them in upgraded manned Soyuz, which they hope to fly in about six months.
The download of the majority of the data obtained by New Horizons during its fly-by of Pluto in July will begin on Sept 5.
They will begin releasing unprocessed images at their website each Friday beginning Sept 11.
The competition heats up: Boeing today unveiled “Starliner” as the new name for its CST-100 manned capsule.
This intensifies the competition because the new name is something the public can grab and identify. As long as Boeing was using the boring acronym they were holding back to stay in the boring do-nothing pork-laden government-funded NASA environment. Grabbing the public means they want the public to buy this product.
Posted from Spokane, Washington.
A Soyuz capsule has successfully docked with ISS, bringing three more asronauts to the staion.
ISS will have 9 humans on board until September 12, when two of these astronauts and one from the station return to Earth.
Posted from the airport in Tucson.
The competition heats up: Boeing has announced that it will reveal the name of its CST-100 manned capsule on Friday.
