Tag: spaceflight

Lucy snaps its first pictures of four of the Trojan asteroids it will visit

10:05 am

Lucy's first look at four Trojan asteroid targets
Click for original movie.

Lucy's route through the solar system
Lucy’s route through the solar system

Though still many millions of miles away and really nothing more than tiny dots moving across the field of stars, the science team for the asteroid probe Lucy have used the probe to take its first pictures of four of the eight Trojan asteroids it will visit during its travels through the solar system, as shown on the map to the right. The dots along its path show where Lucy will fly past asteroids, some of which are binaries.

The image at the top is a screen capture from a very short movie created from all of the images Lucy took of each asteroid. If you click on the picture you will see that movie. As I say, at this distance, more than 330 million miles away, the asteroids are nothing more than dots. The short films of each were obtained by pictures taken over periods from two to 10 hours long, depending on the asteroid.

These asteriods are all in the L4 Trojans, the first that Lucy will visit from ’27 to ’28.

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Curiosity gets a software update that will speed its travels and better protect its wheels

9:45 am

Panorama on March 27, 2023 (Sol 3781)
Click for full resolution panorama. The original images can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

Engineers this week completed a major software update on the Mars rover Curiosity that, among many other improvements, will allow it to travel more quickly across the rocky Martian surface but at the same time better protect its damaged wheels.

The team also wants to maintain the health of Curiosity’s aluminum wheels, which began showing signs of broken treads in 2013. When engineers realized that sharp rocks were chipping away at the treads, they came up with an algorithm to improve traction and reduce wheel wear by adjusting the rover’s speed depending on the rocks it’s rolling over.

The new software goes further by introducing two new mobility commands that reduce the amount of steering Curiosity needs to do while driving in an arc toward a specific waypoint. With less steering required, the team can reach the drive target quicker and decrease the wear that inherently comes with steering. “That ability was actually dreamed up during the Spirit and Opportunity days,” Denison said. “It was a ‘nice to have’ they decided not to implement.”

The software will also make it possible for Curiosity to travel more without the help of humans on Earth, which will also speed its travels up Mount Sharp, on ground that is getting increasingly rough, as shown in the mosaic above of navigation images from March 27th.

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Arianespace launches JUICE mission to Jupiter

9:21 am

Arianespace early today used its Ariane-5 rocket, on its next-to-last launch, to send the European Space Agency’s (ESA) JUICE mission on its way to Jupiter to study its large moons.

It will take eight years for JUICE to get to Jupiter, using flybys of the Earth, Moon, and Venus along the way. This journey might also include a flyby of an asteroid, depending on orbital mechanics and the spacecraft’s condition.

Once at Jupiter it will, from ’31 to ’34, do thirty-five flybys of the Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa, and then enter orbit around Ganymede for most of 2035, before being sent to crash onto the planet to end its mission.

Ariane-5 meanwhile has one more launch, in June. After this Arianespace will not at present have an active large rocket, as its Ariane-6 replacement is not yet flying, its maiden flight presently scheduled for the fourth quarter of this year.

This was also Europe’s first launch in 2023, so it does not get listed on the leader board. The leaders of the 2023 launch race are as follows:

23 SpaceX (with a launch scheduled for tonight)
15 China (with a launch scheduled for tomorrow)
6 Russia
3 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads China 26 to 15, but is now tied with the entire world combined 26 all.

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A pyramid on Mars

1:04 pm

A pyramid on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on January 21, 2023 by the high resolution camera of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label a “pyramidal mound”, which is I think understating the point somewhat.

This pyramid is almost perfectly square, with two perpendicular ridgelines rising from its corners to meet perfectly at the pyramid’s peak. A similar pyramid mound in the Cydonia region, where the so-called “Face on Mars” was found, caused endless absurd speculations in the 1990s of past Martian civilizations, all of which burst into nothingness when good high resolution images were finally obtained in the 2000s.

But what caused this very symmetrical natural feature?
» Read more

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German students about to attempt launch of suborbital hybrid rocket

10:17 am

A student project at the University of Stuttgart in Germany is about to attempt the first suborbital launch of a hybrid rocket that has the possibility of setting a new altitude record for student-built rockets.

The hybrid rocket is 7.80 m long and weighs around 70 kg. It was built by around 60 students from the University Group HyEnD of the University of Stuttgart. “It’s one of the most powerful and advanced student-built hybrid rockets in the world,” says Max Öchsle, HyEnD project manager. With this, the students have big plans: They want to beat their own altitude record of 32 km for student-built hybrid rockets, which they set in 2016.

The students also hope to cross the boundary into space at an altitude of 100 km. In addition to the world record for hybrid rockets, this also makes the world record for student-built rockets in general possible. The previous record is 103.6 km and was set by the University of Southern California (USCRPL) team in 2019. “The world record is within our reach. We could indeed beat it,” says Öchsle. Öchsle is well aware that the record depends on other factors such as the weather.

The launch window begins on April 14th, and extends until April 25th, will take place at the new Esrange commercial spaceport in Sweden, and will be live streamed by the spaceport. Updates on the project can be found at the project’s own website.

What makes this particular student project interesting to me is its location, in Germany. That nation presently has three startup rocket companies racing to be the first to reach orbit. These students are clearly aiming for jobs with this emerging German rocket industry, and if successful at this project will bring to that industry some very sophisticated abilities.

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Museum offers $25k for recovery of meteorite that landed in Maine April 8th

9:55 am

Meteorite landing track

Because a instrument operated by NOAA picked up radar data of an asteroid fall over Maine on April 8, 2023, it has been possible for NASA scientists to publish a track, shown to the right, of where any pieces of the meteorite might have landed.

As a result, the Maine Mineral and Gem Museum has offered a $25k reward to anyone who turns in the first piece weighing more than one kilogram.

The $25,000 reward is only for the first kilogram, but Pitt said that the museum will also buy other fireball pieces that are found. “Depending upon the type of meteorite this is, specimens could easily be worth their weight in gold,” he said.

The American Meteor Society received six witness reports of Saturday’s fireball, half of which were in northeast Maine. One of the witnesses described the meteorite as having a “long glowing tail (but no smoke).” Another said that it was “bright red” while the tail was “very white.”

The museum also emphasized that any meteorite hunters must get landowner permission before entering private land.

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Hakuto-R1 now scheduled to land on Moon on April 25th

9:41 am

Lunar map showing Hakuto-R1's landing spot
Hakuto-R1’s planned landing site is in Atlas Crater.

The private company Ispace yesterday announced that their Hakuto-R1 lunar lander, presently in orbit around the Moon, will attempt a landing on April 25, 2023, landing in Atlas Crater.

At approximately 15:40 on April 25, 2023, (UTC), the lander is scheduled to begin the landing sequence from the 100 km altitude orbit. During the sequence, the lander will perform a braking burn, firing its main propulsion system to decelerate from orbit. Utilizing a series of pre-set commands, the lander will adjust its attitude and reduce velocity in order to make a soft landing on the lunar surface. The process will take approximately one hour.

Should conditions change, there are three alternative landing sites and depending on the site, the landing date may change. Alternative landing dates, depending on the operational status, are April 26, May 1, and May 3, 2023.

The lander carries several commercial payloads, including the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Rashid rover. Ispace says the landing will be publicly live streamed, with more details to follow.

The company has from the beginning been treating this entire mission as an engineering test, with ten major goals, all related to proving out the lander’s systems. It has now completed eight of those goals, with a successful landing and successful operations on the surface the last challenges. If Hakuto-R1 succeeds, Ispace will become the first private company to complete a privately funded planetary mission to the Moon.

Furthermore, the company is already planning its second lunar landing mission, Hakuto-R2 in 2024, and a third more ambitious lunar mission for NASA, partnering with the American company Draper.

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Triple crater on Mars

1:19 pm

Triple crater on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on January 22, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists have labeled simply as a “triple crater,” a very apt description.

What caused this? The most obvious explanation is the arrival almost simultaneously of three pieces. As this asteroid or comet entered the thin Martian atmosphere as a single object, that atmosphere was thick enough to break it into three parts but not enough to destroy it entirely. When it hit the ground, the top piece hit first, with the center and bottom pieces following in sequence, thus partly obscuring the previous hits.

The smaller surrounding craters could either be additional pieces from the bolide, or secondary impacts from ejecta thrown out at impact.
» Read more

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FCC makes official its regulatory power grab beyond its statutory authority

10:22 am

We are here to help you! The FCC yesterday officially launched a new stand-alone Space Bureau which will be focused on institutionalizing the many new regulations the FCC has proposed for controlling how satellites are built and de-orbited.

The Space Bureau was carved out of the FCC’s International Bureau to help the regulator handle its increasing workload in the industry. The restructuring effectively splits the International Bureau into two units: the Space Bureau and the Office of International Affairs (OIA) that will handle the FCC’s work with foreign and international regulatory authorities more generally.

While the bureau’s first leader, Julie Kearney, claimed the goal of this reorganization is to streamline licensing, she also made it clear that she will also be using her new position to make the proposed new regulations on satellite construction and deorbit the law of the land, even though Congress never gave the FCC this particular regulatory power.

Based on Congress’s general weakness and willingness in the past half century to cede power to the administrative state, Kearney and the FCC will likely succeed. For example, though a bill has been introduced in Congress to address the FCC’s power grab, it basically endorses it.

In other words, the bureaucrats in DC now essentially write the laws, Congress bows meekly to approve them, and then the bureaucracy moves to enforce them.

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Does India’s new space policy shift operations from the government to the private sector?

10:06 am

On April 6, 2023 the Modi government of India announced that it had approved a new space policy, describing it as designed to boost private commercial space over the government-run operations of its space agency ISRO.

At the time, and still to this day, the actual text of that policy has not been released. However, an article today from India provides some analysis of this policy, based on statements by several government officials, and suggests that the goal of that policy is the same as NASA’s has been for the past decade, shift from being the builder of spacecraft and rockets to simply being the customer buying those products from the private sector. The key statement illustrating this came from Dr. S. Somnath, chairman of ISRO.

Speaking to the media, Somnath said that the new policy is focused on strengthening the participation of private players in India’s space program. The ISRO chairman also said that the new policy outlines a framework under which the private sector can use ISRO facilities for a small fee. The policy also looks upon private players to create new infrastructure in the space sector.

In what can be seen as a critical move, Somnath told the media that “ISRO will not do any operational and production work for the space sector and focus its energies on developing new technologies, new systems and research and development.” This essentially means that the routine production and launches that the ISRO was so caught up with until now will be handled by the private sector completely.

In other words, ISRO’s effort to capture market share by launching its rockets (dubbed GSLV, PSLV, and SSLV) for profit will eventually end. The Modi government instead wants the private sector to do this work, with rockets it builds and owns.

Even if we assume this analysis is correct, replacing ISRO’s rocket with private rockets however cannot happen quickly. While India has a vibrant commercial space industry, it presently only has two startup rocket companies, Agnikul and Skyroot, neither of which is close to reaching orbit. For NASA, the transition from running and owning everything to being a customer took about a decade. Expect the same transition in India to take as long, assuming the Modi government stays firm against the resistance that will surely come from its government bureaucracy, and any later administrations hold to this policy as well.

Furthermore, that the policy text has not been made public strongly suggests that the Modi government recognizes that it will face strong opposition within India’s very large and powerful bureaucracy, which is far larger and stronger than even the U.S.’s administrative state in DC. Fighting that bureaucracy in India is going to be very difficult, if not impossible.

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Relativity ends Terran-1, will move to developing more powerful Terran-R

9:40 am

According to Tim Ellis, the head of the rocket company Relativity, it has decided to end any further work on its small test rocket, Terran-1 following its first failed launch and shift all work to developing its more powerful Terran-R rocket.

The company feels good about the data collected from the flight, as Terran 1 made it further into space than the debut launches from a majority of small rocket companies. It also validated the company’s test and launch program, he said, and its approach to 3D printing large parts of a rocket. “Terran 1 was always meant to develop technologies that were pushing the bounds for what was needed for Terran R,” Ellis said.

But now, it’s time to move on. Relativity Space is negotiating with NASA to move the one existing commercial launch on Terran 1—the Venture Class Launch Services Demonstration 2 mission—onto another rocket, possibly the Terran R. In other words, there will be no more Terran 1 launches.

Ellis also described some major changes in the design of Terran-R. The company will no longer attempt to make the second stage reusable, it will no longer 3D-print its entire structure, its first stage will be more powerful and will be flown and reusable like SpaceX’s Falcon 9, and its first launch will be pushed back from 2024 to 2026.

This decision means that Relativity will not become an operational and competitive rocket company for another three years, at the soonest. However, should it succeed in achieving these new plans for Terran-R, it will have a rocket that can directly compete with SpaceX, while beating out anything either ULA or Blue Origin can at this time offer. For example, the rocket will be able to put from 23 to 33 tons into low Earth orbit, which is more than the Falcon 9 (20 tons) and not much less than the Falcon Heavy (50 tons), and generally better than Vulcan (27 tons). As noted at the link:

[T]he US government (as well as commercial satellite customers) would very much like a second company to step forward and challenge SpaceX on innovation, price, and reliability. Ellis correctly sees that this lane remains open with questions about Vulcan’s long-term future, Blue Origin’s slow movement on New Glenn, and Rocket Lab’s focus on a smaller medium-lift rocket, Neutron.

Whether this new strategy will work depends entirely on whether Relativity can deliver by 2026. If it does so, it will very likely beat Blue Origin into orbit, and be chosen by the military to replace it as one of the Pentagon’s launch providers. It will also make ULA’s position more vulnerable, because Vulcan will no longer be the only other option, and it will likely not be able to compete with the prices offered by SpaceX and Relativity.

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SpaceX announces it will be providing a webcast for Starship’s first orbital flight

9:03 pm

Starship/Superheavy flight plan for first orbital flight
Click for original image.

SpaceX today revealed the details for its live stream of the first orbital launch of Superheavy/Starship, now targeting a launch date around April 21, 2023, depending on when the FAA issues the launch license.

A live webcast of the flight test will begin ~45 minutes before liftoff. As is the case with all developmental testing, this schedule is dynamic and likely to change, so be sure to stay tuned to our social media channels for updates.

I will embed that live stream here on Behind the Black. Stay tuned for more information.

The flight plan is shown above. The website also provides a detailed timeline. If launch manages to pass through Max-Q and get to stage separation, Superheavy will do a flip to do a soft targeted landing in the Gulf of Mexico. Starship will continue into orbit, and then fire its engines to return to Earth to do a soft targeted landing in the Pacific northeast of the Big Island of Hawaii.

That is the plan. Much can go wrong along the way, considering Superheavy has never flown once, no less with Starship stacked on top. Furthermore, Starship has never flown in its present iteration. Previous suborbital tests were using much earlier prototypes vastly different that this prototype, #24 in the series.

Regardless whether all goes perfectly or some things fail, the launch will be a success because it will provide SpaceX data for future test flights, which are waiting in the wings.

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Weird surface cracking in the Martian northern lowland plains

11:56 am

Weird surface cracks on Mars

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on January 15, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The picture was simply labeled “Channel-like feature”, which hardly describes this strange terrain.

Apparently a mantle of surface material has covered and filled an ancient east-west channel. That surface material however has since cracked along the edges of that channel as well along its length. The cracks suggest that the material in the channel is moving downhill slowly, cracking along the cliff walls while also being pulled apart to form the north-south cracks.

My regular readers will I think be able to guess what is going on here, but if you can’t, the overview map below will help explain this.
» Read more

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Startup aims to provide Space Force a satellite that can study the satellites of other countries

10:01 am

True Anomaly, a Colorado-based startup, has proposed building satellites for the Space Force designed to maneuver close to other satellites and provide high resolution imagery and data about them.

The company has already raised $30 million, and used it to hire 57 employees and a facility for manufacturing these satellites.

The startup plans to use the funding to scale the production of its Jackal Autonomous Orbital Vehicle, which was designed to study space objects at close range. The spacecraft collects photos, videos and data about any space objects in orbit, and it’s operated by humans with the assistance of artificial intelligence pilots.

Both China and Russia have flown a handful of satellites testing this exact technology. The U.S. has not, at least nothing comparable in recent years.

The real story here however is the manner in which the Space Force will do this. Instead of designing and building the satellites itself, which has been the policy of the military for decades, the Space Force is following the recommendations in my 2017 policy paper, Capitalism in Space, and becoming merely a customer, letting private companies do the work and own it themselves.

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Startup proposes capturing space junk with a satellite operating like a whale

9:53 am

Paladin satellite capturing space junk

Paladin, a new space junk removal startup based in Australia, has now proposed building a satellite that would literally swallow space junk and then send it over the ocean to burn up.

The image to the right shows the satellite as a piece of junk is about to be captured. The advantage it has on all other designs for capturing space junk is its simplicity. No nets, no harpoons, no grappling arms. The debris is captured inside a box inside the satellite, and then that box is released to burn up. This quote from the startup’s founder and CEO, Harrison Box, illustrates well his investment argument:

“The European Space Agency is currently paying 100 million euros to remove just one item of space junk. That’s the value they put on the job,” says Box. “Imagine the value of being able to remove hundreds.”

Paladin is one of 29 startups that have divided up $14 million in development money provided by a program of the Australian government. Thus, it is only at the very beginning of development, without a lot of cash to work with.

The idea however is smart, with great potential.

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Starship orbital test flight delayed one more week due to FAA delays

9:29 am

According to a tweet yesterday by Elon Musk, the first orbital test flight of Starship/Superheavy has been delayed again.

Starship launch trending towards near the end of third week of April

Musk had made it clear in an April 8th tweet the cause of this delay or any other delays:

Starship is ready for launch. Awaiting regulatory approval

Musk needs to be somewhat diplomatic as it will not help him to make federal bureaucrats his enemies. What he is doing here is subtly letting everyone know the sole cause of the delay, in order to press the FAA to get a move on, without saying so directly. He leaves that to others, such as myself, to say it instead.

I fear that the FAA is now demanding that it must look at the data from any wet dress rehearsal countdown, including the short engine burst that Superheavy will likely do at T-0, before it will issue the permit. If so, we could see more than a week delay. The launch should easily slip to late May if not later.

The absurdity of this is that it is utterly pointless for FAA bureaucrats to look at any of this data. What do they know? Nothing. If something was significantly wrong SpaceX engineers would know far sooner, and delay the launch themselves.

The delays seen in issuing this one launch license however give us a nice picture of what it will be like for the launch industry once the moratorium on heavy regulations by the FAA and other federal agencies expires on October 1, 2023. Expect a substantial slowdown in development and launches, with many of the new companies about to become operational instead going bankrupt in a replay of the destruction of Virgin Orbit by the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority.

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Exploring the cratered southern highlands of Mars, part 4

3:53 pm

Overview map

Gullies in Asimov Crater
Click for full image.

Today is the last part in our four part exploration of the cratered southern highlands of Mars, begun last week. (For the early parts, go here-Part #1, here-Part #2, and here-Part #3.) Though there is no need, new readers should read the first three parts first, in order to get the larger perspective of this final post.

The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on December 20, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the eastern main gully descending down into a pit that sits in the north center of 52-mile-wide Asimov Crater, as shown in the inset on the overview map above. (For an MRO high resolution of the western gullies into this pit, see this January 2019 cool image post.)
» Read more

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Report recommends Congress allow full regulation of commercial human spaceflight

12:10 pm

The modern instruction manual for America
The modern instruction manual for America

A new report by the RAND corporation has recommended that Congress allow the moratorium on full regulation of commercial human spaceflight, established by the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004 and extended several times, to expire on October 1, 2023.

That recommendation came despite a lack of progress on voluntary standards and key industry metrics. While standards development organizations like ASTM International and ISO have published 20 standards related to commercial spaceflight, the RAND report noted that “companies have yet to clearly or consistently adopt them in a manner that can be confirmed or verified publicly.” A diversity of technical approaches also hinders the development and implementation of standards.

The report also found that while the FAA had developed key industry indicators to assess readiness for adopting safety regulations, there were no goals for those indicators to determine when it was time to implement regulations. “It is, therefore, difficult to assess whether there has been progress toward meeting key industry metrics when there are not clear targets that could be met,” the report concluded.

Despite that lack of progress on standards or metrics, the RAND report nonetheless concluded that allowing the learning period to expire this year was the best approach. Doing so, it argued, would allow FAA and industry to start the process of developing safety regulations in a gradual manner and avoid a rush to regulate imposed by Congress should a high-profile accident take place while the learning period is still in effect.

It also recommended additional resources for the FAA to support that regulatory process, but did not quantify an increase in the budget for or personnel assigned to its Office of Commercial Space Transportation, or AST. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted words illustrate the crushing fundamentals of all government regulation. » Read more

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The Earth hangs above the Moon

10:42 am

The Earth hangs above the Moon

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) on December 10, 2015 and released by the LRO team this week. From the caption:

LRO slewed to the east as it passed over the northwest rim (-8.536°N, 251.028°E, 82 km altitude) of the Orientale basin and snapped this spectacular Earth-Moon sequence with the NAC and WAC [cameras]. Tropical Cyclone Bohale is visible in the center of the image. MODIS (onboard the NASA Aqua satellite) imaged the same storm 3 hours after LRO.

The NAC and WAC images of the Earth were projected using a Point-Perspective projection to recreate the view one would see from the LRO spacecraft while taking the NAC image. Due to the relatively slow speed of the spacecraft slew, many NAC framelets of the Earth were acquired. All these WAC frames were oversampled and averaged, enabling a “super-resolution” color image (115 pixels across!), which was then combined with the 4000-pixel-wide NAC image.

…[For the Earth:] North is to the left, Antarctica to the right, Australia at the top, and Africa at the bottom

NAC and WAC are names of two different LRO cameras, one of which captured the Earth in high resolution color while the other captured the Moon. The two images were then combined, superimposing the Earth at the right size onto the second lunar image.

As noted in the caption, this view is as LRO sees the Earth from Lunar orbit, while taking a slewed oblique image of the Moon. It however is not how things would look if you were standing on the surface of the Moon. For one, the photo is zoomed in to get details on the lunar surface, making the Earth appear much larger.

For another, the image is taken 82 kilometers or 51 miles above the Moon. This higher altitude changes the position of the Earth relative to the Moon, making it appear farther from the horizon.

To a person standing in Orientale basin at 8 degrees south latitude (near the equator), but also near the edge of the visible near side of the Moon, the Earth would likely be very close to the horizon, but much smaller. To get a comparable view of the Earth, the person would likely need to use binoculars.

Orientale basin is mostly on the far side of the Moon, though it was known to exist before the space age because ground-based telescopes could see it on the edge of the visible face. It was only with the first lunar orbiters was the basin imaged from directly above, revealing its large size and distinct concentric rings forming its several circular rims.

At this location, the Earth would essentially always remain at approximately the same spot in the sky, though its illuminated face would wax and wane, like the Moon’s does, during the Moon’s twenty-eight day-long day.

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Exploring the cratered southern highlands of Mars, part 3

2:06 pm

Overview map

Pit and surface in crater
Click for original image.

This is the third part of this week’s series taking a look at some of the strange features in the southern cratered highlands of Mars. In the first part I posted a beautiful image of what appears to be a crater filled to the brim with glacial ice, surrounded by an ice sheet plain. In part two we took a look at the interior of Rabe Crater, which though very nearby does not appear to have obvious glacial features within it at all. What it has instead are deep open air pits and a lot of sand dunes.

Today’s image to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, takes us to the interior of an unnamed 45-mile-wide crater only about 70 miles north of Rabe. The black dot in the inset on overview map above indicates the photo’s location. The picture was taken on January 1, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Like Rabe, this crater also has many large open-air pits. In the picture one pit, near the lower center of the picture, is surrounded by soft-looking mounds and a strangely swirling textured and uneven terrain that makes up the majority of the crater’s floor.

This picture might help explain what we saw in Rabe. The textured terrain in this unnamed crater could easily be ice-impregnated and now hardened sand dunes. The pit could be where that impregnated ice has sublimated away, leaving behind the dust from those ancient dunes which then forms new sand dunes. In Rabe, the crater floor above its pits looks very similar to this swirling textured surface, suggesting the same process is going on there.

What strengthens this explanation is the many other craters nearby, all indicated by red dots in the overview map above, that also have pits or distorted crater floors. Their proximity suggests that there is an underground ice layer in this region, always at about the same elevation, and each crater impact exposed it. With time that exposed ice, no longer pure but filled with material from the impacts, sublimated partly away, producing the pits as well as ample sand to form sand dunes.

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Japanese businesses face major losses due to Virgin Orbit bankruptcy

9:58 am

Two Japanese companies (one partnering with a Japanese airport) now face major financial losses due to the bankruptcy of Virgin Orbit.

Two Japanese companies, ANA Holdings … and little-known Japanese satellite development start-up iQPS Inc emerged among the top six creditors when Virgin Orbit filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Tuesday.

ANA, owed $1.65 million, had been a key partner for the Oita spaceport, entering a provisional deal with Virgin Orbit in 2021 for 20 flights of its LauncherOne rocket there. ANA said it was hopeful Virgin Orbit, which has said it is seeking a buyer, would be able to restructure and resume business.

Fukuoka-based iQPS had paid a $5.2 million deposit to launch its small, lightweight constellation satellites weighing under 100 kilograms (220 pounds), representing a major portion of the $17.2 million Series A funding it had raised in 2017.

ANA and the government of Oita prefecture had also hoped to garner some economic benefits from tourism by making this deal with Virgin Orbit. That won’t be happening now, though the expectation by this Japanese local government was never realistic. In fact, it illustrates how divorced government officials are from economic reality. No airport spaceport is going to attract a lot of tourism, even if Virgin Orbit was prospering and launching monthly.

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Starship now stacked on launchpad

9:45 am

Starship stacked on top of Superheavy

In preparation for a final wet dress rehearsal countdown followed by its first launch, Starship has now been stacked on top of Superheavy at SpaceX’s launchpad at Boca Chica, Texas.

The picture to the right is a screen capture from a short video Elon Musk posted on Twitter. SpaceX had also tweeted that its “Team is working towards a launch rehearsal next week [April 10-11] followed by Starship’s first integrated flight test ~week later pending regulatory approval.”

At this time the FAA has still not issued the launch license. By announcing its plan to launch the week of April 17th, Musk and SpaceX puts pressure the government bureaucracy to get a move on.

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Venezuela agrees to join China’s lunar base project

9:31 am

During a visit to a new Chinese space facility in China, the head of Venezuela’s space agency announced that it has agreed to join China’s lunar base project.

Marglad Bencomo, executive director of the Bolivarian Agency for Space Activities (ABAE), visited China’s new, national Deep Space Exploration Laboratory (DSEL) March 30 to discuss cooperation and exchanges. She was met by Wu Yanhua, former deputy director of the China National Space Administration (CNSA) and now executive vice chairman of DSEL. The two sides exchanged in-depth views on international cooperation in the field of deep space exploration, according to a DSEL statement.

Bencomo said that Venezuela was willing to sign a China-Venezuela Memorandum of Understanding as soon as possible to jointly promote the construction of international lunar research stations, according to the DSEL statement.

If this partnership agreement is signed, Venezuela would be the first nation outside of Russia to join China’s project. China has offered a similar partnership deal to Brazil, which will likely not agree because it is a signatory to the Artemis Accords and working with China will threaten any work it does with the U.S. For example, the UAE recently ended a project to fly a rover on a Chinese rocket for these very reasons.

This deal with Venezuela is largely empty blather, since Venezuela is presently a bankrupt communist state, barely able to feed its own people.

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Axiom sets date for next commercial manned flight to ISS

9:19 am

Axiom and NASA yesterday announced May 8, 2023 as the launch date for the private company’s second commercial flight to ISS, this time carrying three passengers out of a crew of four, two from Saudi Arabia and the third, John Shoffner, completing his second paid flight with Axiom.

Two of its crewmates are Rayyanah Barnawi and Ali AlQarni, members of the first Saudi Arabian astronaut class. Barnawi will become the first Saudi woman ever to reach space, and she and AlQarni will be the first people from the kingdom to travel to the ISS.

Retired NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson will command the mission for Axiom. The Dragon capsule used will be Freedom, making its second flight, lifting off on a Falcon 9 rocket with a new first stage. The plan is to be docked to ISS for ten days, which means for that time period ISS will have three Arab astronauts on board, including the UAE’s astronaut, Sultan Al Neyadi, who is in the middle of a six month mission and is about to do his first spacewalk.

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Chinese pseudo-company succeeds in reaching orbit again after three straight failures

9:09 am

China's spaceports
China’s spaceports

The Chinese pseudo-company I-space has finally reached orbit again with a launch today of its Hyperbola-1 (SQX-1) solid-fueled rocket, lifting off from China’s Jiuquan inland spaceport in the Gobi Desert.

After an initial launch success in 2019, the company had failed three straight times until today. No word on whether the first stage landed near habitable areas in China. Nor did the pseudo-company reveal whether the rocket carried an actual satellite into orbit.

Jiuquan is presently the only spaceport where China permits these pseudo-companies to launch, and has been expanding its facilities for these commercial operations. This also means China will be experiencing more first stages dropping on their heads of its people, which is why it is also building a commercial launchpad at the Wenchang spaceport on the coast.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

23 SpaceX
15 China
6 Russia
3 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads China 26 to 15 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 26 to 25. SpaceX now trails the rest of the world combined, including American companies, 23 to 28.

UPDATE from BtB’s stringer Jay: Video of the launch can be found here. Jay also notes the lack of any mention of I-space in the official Chinese press, announcing this launch. Adds weight to the conclusion that these companies are not really real, but simply divisions of the Chinese government.

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SpaceX successfully launches Intelsat communications satellite

9:41 pm

SpaceX tonight successfully used its Falcon 9 rocket to launch an Intelsat communications satellite into orbit, lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage completed its fourth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The two fairings completed their second and eighth flights.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

23 SpaceX
14 China
6 Russia
3 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads China 26 to 14 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 26 to 24. SpaceX now trails the rest of the world combined, including American companies, 23 to 27.

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April 6, 2023 Quick space links

5:21 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

  • China invites Brazil to participate in its lunar base project

    • There is no indication Brazil accepted the offer. The offer took place during a meeting between officials of the Brazil Space Agency and one of China’s pseudo-companies, China Great Wall Industry Corporation (which according to Jay “is the international launch service subsidiary” for China). Thus, this could be an effort by that pseudo-company to gain launch access to Brazil’s recently reactivated Alcântara spaceport.

 

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Exploring the cratered southern highlands of Mars, part 2

1:44 pm

Overview map

Dune-bedrock contact in Rabe Crater
Click for original image.

Our travels in the cratered southern highlands of Mars continues. Today we visit 67-mile-wide Rabe Crater, as indicated on the overview map above. The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on January 27, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

Rabe Crater is significant for several reasons. First, it was one of the first places on Mars where sand dunes were identified, by one of the Viking orbiters in the late 1970s [pdf]. Second, the pits and sand in its interior, are unusual and puzzling. The inset on the overview map provides a closeup look at the crater. The yellow mound in the central south of the crater floor is all dunes, which are surrounded by the pit with steep cliffs more than a 1,000 feet high.
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University of Arizona opens major facility for building and launching satellites

12:27 pm

anechoic chamber at UA's Applied Research Building
ARB’s anechoic chamber

Yesterday I attended the grand opening of the University of Arizona’s (UA) new Applied Research Building (ARB), designed to provide satellite builders as well as its students an almost completely comprehensive facility for the assembly, testing, and launching of satellites. From this event announcement:

To keep the university at the forefront of space science and exploration, ARB will serve as a world-class test and integration center for satellites, probes, and spacecraft, including:

  • A 40-foot tall high-bay payload assembly area used for constructing high-altitude stratospheric balloons and nanosatellites also known as “CubeSats.”
  • A thermal vacuum chamber that simulates environmental conditions in space to test balloon and satellite performance that is the largest of its kind at any university in the world.
  • A non-reflective, echo-free room called an anechoic chamber to test antennae for command, control, and data relay purposes.
  • A large lab for testing the performance of a range of objects, from airplane wings to sensors.

The anechoic chamber is pictured above. For scale, if a person was standing in the middle of the chamber their height would reach about six rows up. The carbon-infused styrofoam pyramids are designed to dampen reflections of radio signals in order to simulate the space environment while testing the antennas on a satellite. This is apparently is of the largest such chambers in the United States.
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Webb snaps infrared picture of Uranus

10:11 am

Uranus as seen in the infrared by Webb
Click for original Webb false-color image.

In a follow-up to a recent Hubble Space Telescope optical image of Uranus, scientists have now used the Webb Space Telescope to take a comparable picture in the infrared of the gas giant.

Both pictures are to the right, with the Webb picture at the top including the scientists’ annotations.

On the right side of the planet there’s an area of brightening at the pole facing the Sun, known as a polar cap. This polar cap is unique to Uranus – it seems to appear when the pole enters direct sunlight in the summer and vanish in the fall; these Webb data will help scientists understand the currently mysterious mechanism. Webb revealed a surprising aspect of the polar cap: a subtle enhanced brightening at the center of the cap. The sensitivity and longer wavelengths of Webb’s NIRCam may be why we can see this enhanced Uranus polar feature when it has not been seen as clearly with other powerful telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope and Keck Observatory.

At the edge of the polar cap lies a bright cloud as well as a few fainter extended features just beyond the cap’s edge, and a second very bright cloud is seen at the planet’s left limb. Such clouds are typical for Uranus in infrared wavelengths, and likely are connected to storm activity.

The Webb image also captures 11 of Uranus’s 13 rings, which appear much brighter in the infrared than in the optical.

Unlike all other planets in the solar system, Uranus’s rotation is tilted so much that it actually rolls as it orbits the Sun, a motion that is obvious by comparing these pictures with Hubble’s 2014 optical picture.

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