Showing posts with label space. Show all posts
Showing posts with label space. Show all posts
Thursday, April 11, 2024
Wednesday, January 24, 2024
Today's Nerd Thing
Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched about a month apart in 1977.
They're about 15 billion miles away, and while V1 went quiet this past December, the nerds are hoping to get a fix for it, and V2 seems to be doin' fine and goin' strong.
By golly, I love me some nerds.
In only 40,000 years, the Voyagers
will be closer to another star
than they are to our sun.
Wednesday, January 17, 2024
Today's Space Porn
ʻOumuamua is the first interstellar object detected passing through the Solar System. Formally designated 1I/2017 U1, it was discovered by Robert Weryk using the Pan-STARRS telescope at Haleakalā Observatory, Hawaii, on 19 October 2017, approximately 40 days after it passed its closest point to the Sun on 9 September. When it was first observed, it was about 33 million km (21 million mi; 0.22 AU) from Earth (about 85 times as far away as the Moon) and already heading away from the Sun.
ʻOumuamua is a small object estimated to be between 100 and 1,000 metres (300 and 3,000 ft) long, with its width and thickness both estimated between 35 and 167 metres (115 and 548 ft). It has a red color, like objects in the outer Solar System. Despite its close approach to the Sun, it showed no signs of having a coma. It exhibited non‑gravitational acceleration, potentially due to outgassing or a push from solar radiation pressure. It has a rotation rate similar to that of Solar System asteroids, but many valid models permit it to be more elongated than all but a few other natural bodies. Its light curve, assuming little systematic error, presents its motion as "tumbling" rather than "spinning", and moving sufficiently fast relative to the Sun that it is likely of an extrasolar origin. Extrapolated and without further deceleration, its path cannot be captured into a solar orbit, so it will eventually leave the Solar System and continue into interstellar space. Its planetary system of origin and age are unknown.
ʻOumuamua would be remarkable for its extrasolar origin, high obliqueness, and observed acceleration without an apparent coma. By July 2019, most astronomers concluded that it was a natural object, but its exact characterization is contentious given the limited observation window. While an unconsolidated object (rubble pile) would require ʻOumuamua to be of a density similar to rocky asteroids, a small amount of internal strength similar to icy comets would allow it to have a relatively low density. Proposed explanations of its origin include the remnant of a disintegrated rogue comet, or a piece of an exoplanet rich in nitrogen ice, similar to Pluto. On 22 March 2023, astronomers proposed the observed acceleration was "due to the release of entrapped molecular hydrogen that formed through energetic processing of an H2O-rich icy body", consistent with 'Oumuamua being an interstellar comet, "originating as a planetesimal relic broadly similar to solar system comets".
Avi Loeb has suggested that it could be a product of extraterrestrial technology, but there is insufficient evidence to support any hypotheses, "despite all [its] strangeness". In January 2022, researchers proposed Project Lyra, where a spacecraft launched from Earth could catch up to 'Oumuamua in 26 years for closer studies.
Sunday, September 24, 2023
Yay Nerds
I just fuckin' love me some nerds.
Imagine what the world could be like if what these guys are doing took priority over the utter bullshit ambitions of way too many asshole politicians.
The asteroid Bennu
The seven-year OSIRIS-REX mission ended on Sunday with the return of regolith from the asteroid Bennu, which might hold clues about the origins of our solar system and life.
A brown-and-white capsule that spent the last seven years swooping through the solar system — and sojourning at an asteroid — has finally come home. And it has brought a cosmic souvenir: a cache of space rock that scientists are hungry to get their hands on.
On Sunday morning, those scientists waited eagerly as the pod shot through Earth’s atmosphere at thousands of miles per hour. It gently parachuted down into the muddy landscape of the Utah Test and Training Range, about 80 miles west of Salt Lake City, at 8:52 a.m. local time.
The capsule’s landing is a major win for a NASA mission called OSIRIS-REX, which stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resources Identification and Security-Regolith Explorer. The spacecraft set out in 2016 to retrieve material from Bennu, a carbon-rich asteroid about 190 feet wider than the height of the Empire State Building. Researchers hope this pristine space dirt will reveal clues about the birth of our solar system and the genesis of life on Earth.
“This is a gift to the world,” said Dante Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona and the principal investigator of the OSIRIS-REX mission, at a news conference last month.
Scientists who were working on the mission endured many twists and turns, including a seven-year struggle to get the project greenlit by NASA. Their perseverance paid off as OSIRIS-REX became the first American spacecraft to retrieve material from an asteroid, bringing back a staggering amount of matter from space for scientists around the world to study. But the victorious final act means so much more for the OSIRIS-REX team members, many of whom “grew up on this mission,” according to Dr. Lauretta.
“A little bit of us is on that spacecraft,” said Rich Burns, the OSIRIS-REX program manager at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, at the news conference. “And a little bit of us is coming home with it.”
Bennu, a near-Earth asteroid, is currently many millions of miles from our planet. Like other asteroids in the solar system, it is a geological relic of the protoplanetary disk — a swirling mix of gas and dust that eventually coalesced into planets — that surrounded our sun billions of years ago. One theory is that small worlds like Bennu once seeded Earth with the prebiotic ingredients needed to form life.
But it is difficult to test this idea using meteorites, pieces of asteroids that reach Earth’s surface, which are heated by the atmosphere and are then contaminated by microbes on the ground, Dr. Lauretta said. Instead, many scientists turn their eyes (and their instruments) to space.
This is not the first chunk of an asteroid brought back to Earth. In 2010, the Hayabusa mission, led by the Japanese space agency JAXA, managed, in spite of technical troubles, to recover less than a milligram of material from a near-Earth asteroid named Itokawa. A decade later, a follow-up mission, Hayabusa2, retrieved a few grams of space rock from Ryugu. With that sample, scientists have found evidence suggesting that asteroids had delivered water to the early Earth, and discovered the presence of uracil — a building block of RNA, a molecule that helps form proteins.
OSIRIS-REX’s delivery will provide an abundant new stock of space rock. The team anticipates about half a pound of unsullied asteroid dirt. Shogo Tachibana, a planetary scientist at the University of Tokyo who led the Hayabusa2 sample analysis and is now a co-investigator on OSIRIS-REX, has “no idea” whether Bennu will be anything like Ryugu — but it’s what he is most looking forward to finding out.
From the beginning, the mission was a marathon. American scientists had long dreamed of fetching dust from an asteroid, and in 2004, a group submitted an application for what would become OSIRIS-REX. But NASA returned the project with the lowest ranking: Category 4, or “thanks, but no thanks,” Dr. Lauretta said. “The first proposal just bombed.”
The team tried again in 2007. This time, it scored a ranking of Category 1 — but failed to snag funding because the budget was too large.
The third time was the charm. NASA selected the project in 2011. “So that began our real journey,” said Harold Connolly, a cosmochemist at Rowan University who joined OSIRIS-REX 15 years ago. The team spent another half-decade “making sure all our little ducks were in a row,” he said, including designing and building the spacecraft, mapping the trek to Bennu and plotting the science campaign.
OSIRIS-REX launched in 2016, embarking on a roundabout series of fuel-efficient loops before arriving at Bennu on Dec. 3, 2018.
ImageA view looking into the OSIRIS-REx Curation Lab, which has shiny white walls and a shiny light gray floor, and a metal working station that is sealed off with gloves.
The OSIRIS-REX Curation Lab, where samples will be processed, at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.Credit...Mark Felix/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Despite the meticulous planning, the mission repeatedly faced the unexpected. “I call Bennu the trickster,” Dr. Lauretta said endearingly. “Because it has challenged us constantly on this program.”
Mission specialists expected Bennu’s surface to consist of smooth, sandy seas of fine particles. But as the asteroid came into focus, they found it was rocky and rough, with boulders, some 10 stories tall, sprinkled throughout. That made finding a place where the spacecraft could safely retrieve a sample from the surface riskier.
Engineers were troubleshooting that problem when Bennu threw them another loop: It was spewing rubble into space. That was “really exciting scientifically,” said Sandy Freund, the OSIRIS-REX program manager at the aerospace company Lockheed Martin. But “from an engineering standpoint,” the discovery posed a new problem.
The mission scientists frantically churned out calculations to make sure OSIRIS-REX was safe from being struck by the asteroid’s gravelly plumes. The operations team swiftly wrote new navigation software that could compensate for the rugged terrain on Bennu.
The next big hurdle was to select a sample site: a place where the spacecraft could safely fill its canister with fine grain regolith. That was made more difficult by the uneven ground of Bennu. Photos of the asteroid revealed some sandy regions on the surface — but only inside bowl-shaped craters. “We got to get inside one of those,” Dr. Lauretta said, to the distress of the operations team. “There’s nowhere else to go.”
The margin for error was small. Touch down wrong, and the spacecraft may have faced a fate like Hayabusa, which crash-landed on its asteroid. Or worse: OSIRIS-REX comes down on a slope and runs into what Dr. Lauretta calls “the banana peel scenario,” where it slips and falls into a crater.
“And then it’s all over,” he said.
After two years of surveying the asteroid, the mission team chose a spot it named Nightingale, near the asteroid’s north pole. In October 2020, OSIRIS-REX punched the surface of Bennu using a tool that was supposed to bounce off Bennu like a pogo stick.
But it did not exactly bounce as planned. Dr. Connolly recalled that he was shocked at how deep the instrument penetrated into the asteroid — about one and a half feet.
“We thought it would be a little more firm,” he said. “But it turns out gravity is basically the only thing that’s holding it together.”
The blow excavated a 30-foot-wide crater and blasted dusty debris into space — an unintentional experiment that revealed some properties of Bennu’s subsurface.
The surprises didn’t end there. When the team checked to make sure it had collected a large enough sample, it found the chamber overflowing with regolith.
“We had overachieved,” Ms. Freund said. “It was wedged open and leaking into space.” Every movement of the spacecraft led to greater loss of Bennu’s dust, like the way salt comes out of a shaker.
The team immediately halted all planned maneuvers to prevent losing any more of its precious cargo. Instead, the crew rushed to stow what remained in the leaky chamber within the return capsule.
Six months later, OSIRIS-REX captured one last look at Nightingale and then began the two-year journey back to Earth. “It was definitely an adventure,” Dr. Lauretta said.
In the days leading up to the sample’s plunge into Earth’s atmosphere, Dr. Lauretta was having trouble sleeping. He tried to push away “all of the doom scenarios” like what happened with NASA’s Genesis, a probe that grabbed plasma from the solar wind to bring back to Earth. In 2004, it crashed into a Utah desert when the parachute for its return capsule failed to deploy. (Despite the rough landing, researchers were able to recover and analyze the sample.)
“And that felt like a gut punch then,” Dr. Lauretta said while squeezing a stress ball shaped like the OSIRIS-REX capsule. Approaching the latest sample return was “unlike anything I’ve ever felt before,” he added. “I feel like there’s an electric wire at the base of my spine, just tingling.”
Michael Puzio, an engineering major at North Carolina State University, also felt “a bit terrified” leading up to the sample’s return. In third grade, Mr. Puzio won a contest to name the asteroid Bennu. It ignited in him a love of space and a dream to be an astronaut.
“But I think it’s in good hands,” Mr. Puzio added. The mission team “is pretty good at math, so I’ve heard.”
At 2 a.m. local time on Sunday morning, the OSIRIS-REX command team in Littleton, Colo., evaluated the landing conditions and held a go-or-no-go poll on the capsule drop. The team voted go and OSIRIS-REX released the capsule at 4:42 a.m.
Four hours later, it entered Earth’s atmosphere. The first parachute inflated 19 miles above the surface; a second was deployed just minutes later, slowing the cargo’s speed to 11 miles per hour.
For Dr. Lauretta, the safe return is both a professional achievement and a personal one: Michael Drake, the former principal investigator of OSIRIS-REX, died only five months after the mission was funded. “You need to be the one that finishes the dream,” Dr. Lauretta said Dr. Drake told him. “And so I did.”
The capsule and its contents are headed to a temporary clean room near the Utah landing site and then will be transferred to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Scientists plan to crack open the canister on Tuesday, and get a small amount of the material into the lab for what Dr. Connolly calls a “quick look” analysis. In October, the sample team will reveal the first results to the world, including Bennu’s composition and how it compares with material brought back from the asteroids studied by the Japanese missions.
Dr. Connolly struggled to express what it meant to him that the mission had come back to Earth.
“I feel like a little kid again,” he said. “I’m just so happy to be able to tell the story that these rocks contain.”
Scientists will spend the next two years conducting a more robust investigation of the asteroid. Small portions of the sample will be handed off to JAXA and the Canadian Space Agency for their own analyses.
Up to 75 percent of Bennu’s regolith will remain in storage so that scientists in the future can “work on the sample with new techniques that we don’t even know exist yet,” Dr. Connolly said.
The OSIRIS-REX mission may have come to an end, but the spacecraft remains fully operational in space. It will next visit Apophis, another near-Earth asteroid that was once seen as a major threat to crash into Earth. More recent measurements determined that the asteroid will pass by Earth in 2029, within one-tenth of the distance to the moon.
The new project is named OSIRIS-APEX, where APEX means Apophis Explorer, and may provide information for mitigating more hazardous encounters with asteroids.
The leader of OSIRIS-APEX will be Dani Mendoza DellaGiustina, a former student of Dr. Lauretta’s who is now a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona. It is another example of how the journey to Bennu and back has, from the project’s conception, raised a generation of scientists in the field.
“I’ve been working on some incarnation of this mission basically my entire adult life,” Dr. DellaGiustina said. She added that while she was “super stoked” about OSIRIS-REX’s return, “for me, it’s definitely not the last hurrah.”
Sunday, August 20, 2023
Oops
The obvious jibe:
The US has left junk up there from 6 crewed missions, plus dozens of missions of the US and other countries where we either deliberately crashed the thing into the surface or managed to land nice and easy. But we never clean up after ourselves.
Russia's invasion of the moon isn't going very well either.
But there's something else.
I think I realize and appreciate how difficult it is to make something work properly over a distance of almost a quarter of a million miles. So I can respect the skill and the effort.
What bothers me is that humans are doing to the moon what we've done everywhere else. ie: We're trashing it.
The US has left junk up there from 6 crewed missions, plus dozens of missions of the US and other countries where we either deliberately crashed the thing into the surface or managed to land nice and easy. But we never clean up after ourselves.
And don't get me wrong - I'm not saying we shouldn't stretch and reach and aspire to bigger and better whatever. But seriously, humans are too often turning out to be a fucking plague. And there's something very karmic about how we're fouling the nest so badly that we're likely accelerating the timeline to where we're no longer the dominant species. And it's more than just possible we're hastening our own extinction.
Russia’s Lunar Lander Crashes Into the Moon
The robotic Luna-25 spacecraft appeared to have “ceased its existence” after a failed orbital adjustment, the space agency Roscosmos said.
A Russian robotic spacecraft that was headed to the lunar surface has crashed into the moon, Russia’s space agency said on Sunday, citing the results of a preliminary investigation a day after it lost contact with the vehicle.
It is the latest setback in spaceflight for a country that during the Cold War became the first nation, as the Soviet Union, to put a satellite, a man and then a woman in orbit.
The Luna-25 lander, Russia’s first space launch to the moon’s surface since the 1970s, entered lunar orbit last Wednesday and was supposed to land as early as Monday. At 2:10 p.m. on Saturday afternoon Moscow time, according to Roscosmos, the state corporation that oversees Russias space activities, the spacecraft fired its engine to enter an orbit that would set it up for a lunar landing. But an unexplained “emergency situation” occurred.
On Sunday, Roscosmos said that it had lost contact with the spacecraft 47 minutes after the start of the engine firing. Attempts to re-establish communications failed, and Luna-25 had deviated from its planned orbit and “ceased its existence as a result of a collision with the lunar surface,” Roscosmos said.
An interagency commission would be formed to investigate the reasons for the failure, it added.
Luna-25, which launched on Aug. 11, was aiming to be the first mission to reach the moon’s south polar region. Government space programs and private companies all over Earth are interested in that part of the moon because they believe it may contain water ice that could be used by astronauts for future space missions.
Another country, India, will now get the chance to land the first probe in the lunar south pole’s vicinity. Its Chandrayaan-3 mission launched in July, but it opted for a more roundabout but fuel-efficient route to the moon. It is scheduled to attempt a landing on Wednesday.
“It’s unfortunate,” Sudheer Kumar, a spokesman for the Indian Space Research Organization, said about the Russian lander’s crash. “Every space mission is very risky and highly technical.”
That India may succeed after Russia failed would be a blow to President Vladimir V. Putin, who has used Russian achievements in space as part and parcel of his hold on power.
That is part of the Kremlin’s narrative — a compelling one for many Russians — that Russia is a great nation held back by an American-led West that is jealous of and threatened by Russia’s capabilities. The country’s state-run space industry in particular has been a valuable tool as Russia works to remake its geopolitical relationships.
“The interest in our proposals is very high,” the head of Russia’s space program, Yuri Borisov, told Mr. Putin in a televised meeting in June, describing Russia’s plan to expand space cooperation with African countries. The initiative is part of the Kremlin’s overall efforts to deepen economic and political ties with non-Western countries amid European and American sanctions.
Interest in the Luna-25 mission within Russia itself appeared muted. The flight lifted off from a remote spaceport in Vostochny in the country’s Far East at an hour when most Russians, who live in the country’s west, were probably sleeping. The mission’s progress toward the moon was not a major subject in state media.
In recent decades, Russia’s exploration of Earth’s solar system has fallen a long way from the heights of the Soviet era.
The last unqualified success was more than 35 years ago, when the Soviet Union was still intact. A pair of twin spacecraft, Vega 1 and Vega 2, launched six days apart. Six months later, the two spacecraft flew past Venus, each dropping a capsule that contained a lander that successfully set down on the hellish planet’s surface, as well as a balloon that, when released, floated through the atmosphere. In March 1986, the two spacecraft then passed within about 5,000 miles of Halley’s comet, taking pictures and studying the dust and gas from the comet’s nucleus.
Subsequent missions to Mars that launched in 1988 and 1996 failed.
The embarrassing nadir came in 2011 with Phobos-Grunt, which was supposed to land on Phobos, the larger of Mars’ two moons, and bring back samples of rock and dirt to Earth. But Phobos-Grunt never made it out of Earth’s orbit after the engines that were to send it to Mars did not fire. A few months later, it burned up in Earth’s atmosphere.
An investigation later revealed that Russia’s financially strapped space agency had skimped on manufacturing and testing, using electronics components that had not been proven to survive the cold and radiation of space.
Otherwise, Russia has been confined to low-Earth orbit, including carrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station, which it jointly manages with NASA.
Luna-25 was to have completed a one-year mission studying the composition of the lunar surface. It was also supposed to have demonstrated technologies that would have been used in a series of robotic missions that Russia plans to launch to the moon to lay the groundwork for a future lunar base that it is planning to build with China.
But the schedule for those missions — Luna 26, 27 and 28 — has already slipped years from the original timetable, and now there are likely to be further delays, especially as the Russian space program struggles, financially and technologically, because of sanctions imposed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Although NASA and the European Space Agency continue to cooperate with Russia on the International Space Station, other joint space projects ended after the invasion of Ukraine. For the lunar missions, that means Russia needs to replace key components that were to come from Europe, including a drill for the Luna-27 lander.
Russia has struggled to develop new space hardware, especially electronics that reliably work in the harsh conditions of outer space.
“You cannot really fly in space, or, at least, fly in space for a long time, without better electronics,” said Anatoly Zak, who publishes RussianSpaceWeb.com, which tracks Russia’s space activities. “The Soviet electronics were always backwards. They were always behind the West in this area of science and technology.”
He added: “The entire Russian space program is actually affected by this issue.”
Other ambitious Russian space plans are also behind schedule and will likely take much longer than the official pronouncements to complete.
Angara, a family of rockets that has been in development for two decades, has only launched six times.
A few days ago, Vladimir Kozhevnikov, the chief designer for Russia’s next space station, told the Interfax news agency that Oryol, a modern replacement for the venerable Soyuz capsule, would make its maiden flight in 2028.
Back in 2020, Dmitry Rogozin, then the head of Roscosmos, said that the maiden flight of Oryol would take place in 2023 — meaning that, in just three years, the launch date has slipped five years.
Landing on the moon is treacherous, and China is the only country to do so successfully this century — three times, most recently in December 2020. Three other missions have crash-landed in recent years, most recently an attempt by Ispace, a Japanese company. Its Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander crashed in April when a software glitch led the vehicle to misjudge its altitude.
 |
| Clementine Lunar Orbiter 1994 |
On the fucking moon.
Anyway - Russians:
The robotic Luna-25 spacecraft appeared to have “ceased its existence” after a failed orbital adjustment, the space agency Roscosmos said.
A Russian robotic spacecraft that was headed to the lunar surface has crashed into the moon, Russia’s space agency said on Sunday, citing the results of a preliminary investigation a day after it lost contact with the vehicle.
It is the latest setback in spaceflight for a country that during the Cold War became the first nation, as the Soviet Union, to put a satellite, a man and then a woman in orbit.
The Luna-25 lander, Russia’s first space launch to the moon’s surface since the 1970s, entered lunar orbit last Wednesday and was supposed to land as early as Monday. At 2:10 p.m. on Saturday afternoon Moscow time, according to Roscosmos, the state corporation that oversees Russias space activities, the spacecraft fired its engine to enter an orbit that would set it up for a lunar landing. But an unexplained “emergency situation” occurred.
On Sunday, Roscosmos said that it had lost contact with the spacecraft 47 minutes after the start of the engine firing. Attempts to re-establish communications failed, and Luna-25 had deviated from its planned orbit and “ceased its existence as a result of a collision with the lunar surface,” Roscosmos said.
An interagency commission would be formed to investigate the reasons for the failure, it added.
Luna-25, which launched on Aug. 11, was aiming to be the first mission to reach the moon’s south polar region. Government space programs and private companies all over Earth are interested in that part of the moon because they believe it may contain water ice that could be used by astronauts for future space missions.
Another country, India, will now get the chance to land the first probe in the lunar south pole’s vicinity. Its Chandrayaan-3 mission launched in July, but it opted for a more roundabout but fuel-efficient route to the moon. It is scheduled to attempt a landing on Wednesday.
“It’s unfortunate,” Sudheer Kumar, a spokesman for the Indian Space Research Organization, said about the Russian lander’s crash. “Every space mission is very risky and highly technical.”
That India may succeed after Russia failed would be a blow to President Vladimir V. Putin, who has used Russian achievements in space as part and parcel of his hold on power.
That is part of the Kremlin’s narrative — a compelling one for many Russians — that Russia is a great nation held back by an American-led West that is jealous of and threatened by Russia’s capabilities. The country’s state-run space industry in particular has been a valuable tool as Russia works to remake its geopolitical relationships.
“The interest in our proposals is very high,” the head of Russia’s space program, Yuri Borisov, told Mr. Putin in a televised meeting in June, describing Russia’s plan to expand space cooperation with African countries. The initiative is part of the Kremlin’s overall efforts to deepen economic and political ties with non-Western countries amid European and American sanctions.
Interest in the Luna-25 mission within Russia itself appeared muted. The flight lifted off from a remote spaceport in Vostochny in the country’s Far East at an hour when most Russians, who live in the country’s west, were probably sleeping. The mission’s progress toward the moon was not a major subject in state media.
In recent decades, Russia’s exploration of Earth’s solar system has fallen a long way from the heights of the Soviet era.
The last unqualified success was more than 35 years ago, when the Soviet Union was still intact. A pair of twin spacecraft, Vega 1 and Vega 2, launched six days apart. Six months later, the two spacecraft flew past Venus, each dropping a capsule that contained a lander that successfully set down on the hellish planet’s surface, as well as a balloon that, when released, floated through the atmosphere. In March 1986, the two spacecraft then passed within about 5,000 miles of Halley’s comet, taking pictures and studying the dust and gas from the comet’s nucleus.
Subsequent missions to Mars that launched in 1988 and 1996 failed.
The embarrassing nadir came in 2011 with Phobos-Grunt, which was supposed to land on Phobos, the larger of Mars’ two moons, and bring back samples of rock and dirt to Earth. But Phobos-Grunt never made it out of Earth’s orbit after the engines that were to send it to Mars did not fire. A few months later, it burned up in Earth’s atmosphere.
An investigation later revealed that Russia’s financially strapped space agency had skimped on manufacturing and testing, using electronics components that had not been proven to survive the cold and radiation of space.
Otherwise, Russia has been confined to low-Earth orbit, including carrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station, which it jointly manages with NASA.
Luna-25 was to have completed a one-year mission studying the composition of the lunar surface. It was also supposed to have demonstrated technologies that would have been used in a series of robotic missions that Russia plans to launch to the moon to lay the groundwork for a future lunar base that it is planning to build with China.
But the schedule for those missions — Luna 26, 27 and 28 — has already slipped years from the original timetable, and now there are likely to be further delays, especially as the Russian space program struggles, financially and technologically, because of sanctions imposed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Although NASA and the European Space Agency continue to cooperate with Russia on the International Space Station, other joint space projects ended after the invasion of Ukraine. For the lunar missions, that means Russia needs to replace key components that were to come from Europe, including a drill for the Luna-27 lander.
Russia has struggled to develop new space hardware, especially electronics that reliably work in the harsh conditions of outer space.
“You cannot really fly in space, or, at least, fly in space for a long time, without better electronics,” said Anatoly Zak, who publishes RussianSpaceWeb.com, which tracks Russia’s space activities. “The Soviet electronics were always backwards. They were always behind the West in this area of science and technology.”
He added: “The entire Russian space program is actually affected by this issue.”
Other ambitious Russian space plans are also behind schedule and will likely take much longer than the official pronouncements to complete.
Angara, a family of rockets that has been in development for two decades, has only launched six times.
A few days ago, Vladimir Kozhevnikov, the chief designer for Russia’s next space station, told the Interfax news agency that Oryol, a modern replacement for the venerable Soyuz capsule, would make its maiden flight in 2028.
Back in 2020, Dmitry Rogozin, then the head of Roscosmos, said that the maiden flight of Oryol would take place in 2023 — meaning that, in just three years, the launch date has slipped five years.
Landing on the moon is treacherous, and China is the only country to do so successfully this century — three times, most recently in December 2020. Three other missions have crash-landed in recent years, most recently an attempt by Ispace, a Japanese company. Its Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander crashed in April when a software glitch led the vehicle to misjudge its altitude.
Thursday, July 20, 2023
Wednesday, July 12, 2023
Today's Nerd Thing
The JWST has been in place and functional for a year, and we're getting our money's worth.
JWST keeps finding cosmic gems, black holes and surprising galaxies
NASA is marking the anniversary of the James Webb Space Telescope’s scientific debut with the release of a spectacular new image
The James Webb Space Telescope was designed to tunnel deeper into space and farther back in time than any previous observatory, with the audacious goal of seeing the very first galaxies that lit up the young universe. Creating pretty pictures was always a pleasant but ancillary feature of having this amazing new piece of hardware out in space.
Today, 365 days after NASA unveiled the mission’s first batch of data and images, it’s clear that the JWST can produce the hard science and the beauty shots with equal aplomb. NASA is marking the first anniversary of the JWST’s scientific debut with the release of a new image, demonstrating the telescope’s ability to re-envision the universe. The dramatic, somewhat hallucinatory image captures the dynamism of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth, where planetary systems like our own could be in the initial stages of forming.
“The telescope is working better than we could have possibly hoped for,” said NASA astrophysicist Jane Rigby, who earlier this month became the senior project scientist for the JWST.
The scientific community was a little conservative in planning their agenda for the first year of observations, but this next year of science will take full advantage of what the telescope can do, Rigby said. “We’re getting bolder in year two.”
The JWST’s journey around the sun has not been without speed bumps. The first year of scientific operations included a brief pause in data collection for safety reasons and a heart-stopping collision with space dust that forced project managers to fly the observatory more or less backward from now on.
But the scientists working with the telescope’s downloaded data are thrilled by its performance as it peers into the infrared portion of the spectrum, gathering light that can’t be collected by its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.
The big headline so far is that the JWST has seen lots of surprisingly bright galaxies in the early universe. This proved to be a bit befuddling.
No, the JWST did not disprove the big bang theory. Cosmology has not gone the way of phrenology. But the observations of so much light coming from the early period of galaxy formation led to a lot of head-scratching. Observation and theory have not been perfectly aligned.
“I think there is a tension,” said physicist Massimo Stiavelli, the JWST mission head at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “This is undeniable, because things are different from what we thought they would be.”
The JWST was conceived in the late 1980s as the successor to the yet-to-launch Hubble, but suffered many years of delays and near-death encounters with budget-minded lawmakers. It’s a $10 billion investment. It is not designed with the kind of modular features that would enable replacement parts if something went screwy.
Also it’s way out in deep space, in a gravitationally stable orbit around the sun called L2 that keeps it roughly a million miles from Earth. NASA doesn’t currently have spaceships to carry astronauts to L2 and back.
All this reinforces the joy among scientists that the telescope works as planned.
For a telescope of this design, a year is a big deal. The telescope’s mirrors have to remain extremely cold and can’t be pointed anywhere near the sun, so don’t expect to see any pretty JWST images of Venus. But a full orbit gives the telescope a chance to cover most of the universe.
JWST, which launched on Christmas morning 2021, has actually made one-and-a-half orbits, but the first six months were devoted to deploying its huge array of gold-coated hexagonal mirrors and a sprawling sun shade to keep them cool, as well as fine-tuning its instruments.
The light gathered by those mirrors carries information about multiple layers of the universe, from the farthest, dimmest, barely perceptible galaxies to more flamboyant galaxies in the foreground and star-forming clouds of dust and gas within our own Milky Way. And it’s looked at our immediate neighborhood, the solar system, returning poster-worthy pictures of Jupiter and Saturn that are jammed with scientific data.
The early universe is where the JWST has done its most interesting and, at times, puzzling investigations. The goal is to understand how the early universe evolved, how galaxies formed and how we got to where we are — on a planet orbiting a star on one of the spiral arms of a large galaxy.
“Our home is the Milky Way,” said Brant Robertson, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of California at Santa Cruz. “That is a galaxy. It’s a beautiful galaxy. We can take pictures from the inside. But it begs the question: How did it get here? How did it form?”
This cosmic archaeology is why the JWST was built in the first place. One strange feature of the universe is that light is eternal. It gets fainter but it’s still there, including the most ancient light, heavily shifted into the infrared portion of the spectrum by the expansion of space that’s been happening since the big bang. Astrophysicists can use the JWST to scan for extremely high-redshift galaxies, digging ever deeper into the past.
Robertson co-wrote one of two recent papers that describe the most distant galaxy yet detected and confirmed by the JWST, named JADES-GS-Z13-0. It was found at redshift 13.2, which corresponds to about 320 million years after the big bang. There are claims of possible galaxies at higher redshifts, but they await confirmation, he said.
Asked what the galaxy looks like, he said: “It’s a smudge.”
But what if you could somehow get in a spacecraft and transport yourself through various wormholes into the distant past and hover right next to that galaxy. Then what would it look like?
“If you could be right up next to it, the galaxy itself would be very blue to your eyes, because it’s forming stars,” Robertson said. “It would be a very blue sparkler in the early universe.”
A puzzle about early galaxies
Right away, astronomers looking at the JWST data on the early universe spotted something that defied expectations: a lot of oddly bright galaxies.
Brightness is an approximation for mass. Very bright galaxies, therefore, would normally be assumed to be very massive. But galaxies need time to grow. The theorists had previously worked out a general timeline for the evolution of early galaxies, and the ones detected by the JWST look at first glance remarkably mature for their age.
The JWST may be telling scientists that galaxy formation in the early universe was somehow more efficient than previously known.
“There’s some tweaking we need to do in our theories for how those very early galaxies formed and grew their stars,” said Jeyhan Kartaltepe, an astrophysicist at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
“Nothing we’ve seen makes me think we’ve broken cosmology,” Rigby said. “What it is telling us is that galaxies got their act together earlier than we gave them credit for.”
Counterintuitively for those of us who are not astrophysicists, black holes could be another factor in the luminosity of those early galaxies. Although by definition a black hole is a structure with such an intense gravity field that even light cannot escape, the region around a black hole can glow as gas and dust become superheated falling toward the event horizon.
Last year Rebecca Larson, at that time still a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, saw something peculiar as she scrutinized data from an extremely distant galaxy named CEERS 1019. It emitted that light more than 13 billion years ago — back when the universe was just getting rolling, and galaxies were small, ill-formed gaggles of hot, young, bright-blue stars.
Larson was puzzled by the unusually bright light coming from the core of CEERS 1019. “What the heck is this?” she thought.
What she guessed it to be — correctly — is a supermassive black hole. The galaxy, though young, had already managed to grow a black hole that scientists estimate to have a mass equal to 10 million suns. A report from Larson and her colleagues describe this as the earliest active supermassive black hole ever detected.
Excitement over exoplanets
What the past year has also started to show is that the JWST is, in the words of astrophysicist Garth Illingworth, a “spectroscopic powerhouse.” It has proved to be spectacular at picking through the spectra of the light it gathers, which carries information about the object being observed.
That ability yielded one of the telescope’s first major discoveries: carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a giant planet, WASP 39b, orbiting a distant star. The planet itself isn’t visible with current technology. But as it passes in front of, or behind, its parent star, the changes in starlight encode information about the atmosphere of the planet.
Until the JWST, no one had made a definitive detection of carbon dioxide in an exoplanet’s atmosphere, said Knicole Colon, a NASA astrophysicist.
“The first time we saw the spectral signature of that feature, it was just beautiful,” she said. “It hit us in the face. Here’s this whopping signal, which was fantastic.”
To be clear, scientists looking at spectra are looking at graphical presentations of data, not actual images. Larson, who found the supermassive black hole, was so transfixed by the spectral signature of a central bright region in that galaxy that, as she put it, “I never thought to go look at the actual images from JWST.”
That’s when Kartaltepe showed her the image of the galaxy obtained by the telescope. Strikingly, the galaxy had three bright spots, with a particularly bright spot right in the middle. That was Larson’s supermassive black hole.
“I just started crying,” she said.
Rho Ophiuchi, the star-forming region closest to Earth
NASA is marking the anniversary of the James Webb Space Telescope’s scientific debut with the release of a spectacular new image
The James Webb Space Telescope was designed to tunnel deeper into space and farther back in time than any previous observatory, with the audacious goal of seeing the very first galaxies that lit up the young universe. Creating pretty pictures was always a pleasant but ancillary feature of having this amazing new piece of hardware out in space.
Today, 365 days after NASA unveiled the mission’s first batch of data and images, it’s clear that the JWST can produce the hard science and the beauty shots with equal aplomb. NASA is marking the first anniversary of the JWST’s scientific debut with the release of a new image, demonstrating the telescope’s ability to re-envision the universe. The dramatic, somewhat hallucinatory image captures the dynamism of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth, where planetary systems like our own could be in the initial stages of forming.
“The telescope is working better than we could have possibly hoped for,” said NASA astrophysicist Jane Rigby, who earlier this month became the senior project scientist for the JWST.
The scientific community was a little conservative in planning their agenda for the first year of observations, but this next year of science will take full advantage of what the telescope can do, Rigby said. “We’re getting bolder in year two.”
The JWST’s journey around the sun has not been without speed bumps. The first year of scientific operations included a brief pause in data collection for safety reasons and a heart-stopping collision with space dust that forced project managers to fly the observatory more or less backward from now on.
But the scientists working with the telescope’s downloaded data are thrilled by its performance as it peers into the infrared portion of the spectrum, gathering light that can’t be collected by its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope.
The big headline so far is that the JWST has seen lots of surprisingly bright galaxies in the early universe. This proved to be a bit befuddling.
No, the JWST did not disprove the big bang theory. Cosmology has not gone the way of phrenology. But the observations of so much light coming from the early period of galaxy formation led to a lot of head-scratching. Observation and theory have not been perfectly aligned.
“I think there is a tension,” said physicist Massimo Stiavelli, the JWST mission head at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “This is undeniable, because things are different from what we thought they would be.”
The JWST was conceived in the late 1980s as the successor to the yet-to-launch Hubble, but suffered many years of delays and near-death encounters with budget-minded lawmakers. It’s a $10 billion investment. It is not designed with the kind of modular features that would enable replacement parts if something went screwy.
Also it’s way out in deep space, in a gravitationally stable orbit around the sun called L2 that keeps it roughly a million miles from Earth. NASA doesn’t currently have spaceships to carry astronauts to L2 and back.
All this reinforces the joy among scientists that the telescope works as planned.
For a telescope of this design, a year is a big deal. The telescope’s mirrors have to remain extremely cold and can’t be pointed anywhere near the sun, so don’t expect to see any pretty JWST images of Venus. But a full orbit gives the telescope a chance to cover most of the universe.
JWST, which launched on Christmas morning 2021, has actually made one-and-a-half orbits, but the first six months were devoted to deploying its huge array of gold-coated hexagonal mirrors and a sprawling sun shade to keep them cool, as well as fine-tuning its instruments.
The light gathered by those mirrors carries information about multiple layers of the universe, from the farthest, dimmest, barely perceptible galaxies to more flamboyant galaxies in the foreground and star-forming clouds of dust and gas within our own Milky Way. And it’s looked at our immediate neighborhood, the solar system, returning poster-worthy pictures of Jupiter and Saturn that are jammed with scientific data.
The early universe is where the JWST has done its most interesting and, at times, puzzling investigations. The goal is to understand how the early universe evolved, how galaxies formed and how we got to where we are — on a planet orbiting a star on one of the spiral arms of a large galaxy.
“Our home is the Milky Way,” said Brant Robertson, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of California at Santa Cruz. “That is a galaxy. It’s a beautiful galaxy. We can take pictures from the inside. But it begs the question: How did it get here? How did it form?”
This cosmic archaeology is why the JWST was built in the first place. One strange feature of the universe is that light is eternal. It gets fainter but it’s still there, including the most ancient light, heavily shifted into the infrared portion of the spectrum by the expansion of space that’s been happening since the big bang. Astrophysicists can use the JWST to scan for extremely high-redshift galaxies, digging ever deeper into the past.
Robertson co-wrote one of two recent papers that describe the most distant galaxy yet detected and confirmed by the JWST, named JADES-GS-Z13-0. It was found at redshift 13.2, which corresponds to about 320 million years after the big bang. There are claims of possible galaxies at higher redshifts, but they await confirmation, he said.
Asked what the galaxy looks like, he said: “It’s a smudge.”
But what if you could somehow get in a spacecraft and transport yourself through various wormholes into the distant past and hover right next to that galaxy. Then what would it look like?
“If you could be right up next to it, the galaxy itself would be very blue to your eyes, because it’s forming stars,” Robertson said. “It would be a very blue sparkler in the early universe.”
A puzzle about early galaxies
Right away, astronomers looking at the JWST data on the early universe spotted something that defied expectations: a lot of oddly bright galaxies.
Brightness is an approximation for mass. Very bright galaxies, therefore, would normally be assumed to be very massive. But galaxies need time to grow. The theorists had previously worked out a general timeline for the evolution of early galaxies, and the ones detected by the JWST look at first glance remarkably mature for their age.
The JWST may be telling scientists that galaxy formation in the early universe was somehow more efficient than previously known.
“There’s some tweaking we need to do in our theories for how those very early galaxies formed and grew their stars,” said Jeyhan Kartaltepe, an astrophysicist at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
“Nothing we’ve seen makes me think we’ve broken cosmology,” Rigby said. “What it is telling us is that galaxies got their act together earlier than we gave them credit for.”
Counterintuitively for those of us who are not astrophysicists, black holes could be another factor in the luminosity of those early galaxies. Although by definition a black hole is a structure with such an intense gravity field that even light cannot escape, the region around a black hole can glow as gas and dust become superheated falling toward the event horizon.
Last year Rebecca Larson, at that time still a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, saw something peculiar as she scrutinized data from an extremely distant galaxy named CEERS 1019. It emitted that light more than 13 billion years ago — back when the universe was just getting rolling, and galaxies were small, ill-formed gaggles of hot, young, bright-blue stars.
Larson was puzzled by the unusually bright light coming from the core of CEERS 1019. “What the heck is this?” she thought.
What she guessed it to be — correctly — is a supermassive black hole. The galaxy, though young, had already managed to grow a black hole that scientists estimate to have a mass equal to 10 million suns. A report from Larson and her colleagues describe this as the earliest active supermassive black hole ever detected.
Excitement over exoplanets
What the past year has also started to show is that the JWST is, in the words of astrophysicist Garth Illingworth, a “spectroscopic powerhouse.” It has proved to be spectacular at picking through the spectra of the light it gathers, which carries information about the object being observed.
That ability yielded one of the telescope’s first major discoveries: carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a giant planet, WASP 39b, orbiting a distant star. The planet itself isn’t visible with current technology. But as it passes in front of, or behind, its parent star, the changes in starlight encode information about the atmosphere of the planet.
Until the JWST, no one had made a definitive detection of carbon dioxide in an exoplanet’s atmosphere, said Knicole Colon, a NASA astrophysicist.
“The first time we saw the spectral signature of that feature, it was just beautiful,” she said. “It hit us in the face. Here’s this whopping signal, which was fantastic.”
To be clear, scientists looking at spectra are looking at graphical presentations of data, not actual images. Larson, who found the supermassive black hole, was so transfixed by the spectral signature of a central bright region in that galaxy that, as she put it, “I never thought to go look at the actual images from JWST.”
That’s when Kartaltepe showed her the image of the galaxy obtained by the telescope. Strikingly, the galaxy had three bright spots, with a particularly bright spot right in the middle. That was Larson’s supermassive black hole.
“I just started crying,” she said.
Friday, July 07, 2023
Yeah, You Betcha
Sign me up - you go first though.
"... just gotta work on that landing a little bit."
Thursday, June 29, 2023
Sunday, June 18, 2023
Today's Nerds
Early this year, the James Webb Space Telescope glitched, and shut down its Near Infrared Imager gizmo - and it stayed down for two weeks.
The nerds figured out the most likely cause was that it got zapped by some kind of high energy particle put out by a super nova - or some such.
And how did these amazingly talented and high-value tech wizards fix it?
Yup - they turned it off, and then turned it back on again.
God love the ÜberNerds.
Saturday, April 22, 2023
Deep Thought
The Milky Way is bigger
than your standard-issue galaxy.
The average galaxy has about
100 million stars.
The nerds' best guess right now
is that there's something like 2 trillion galaxies.
That's about 200,000,000,000,000,000,000
stars in the
"observable universe."
200 QUINTILLION STARS
Thursday, April 20, 2023
Oops
Wait just gol-durn minute, Elmo.
"... it's most ambitious goals"?
Like trying to get the thing not to explode?
That seems like a very low bar
for a rocket scientist.
Are we sure we've got
the right guy working on this project?
Thursday, April 13, 2023
Today's Glorious Nerds
 |
| Galaxies dancing |
 |
| Pillars Of Creation |
 |
| Ring Nebula |
 |
| Neptune |
This needs to be seen as a significant moment. It feels like we're at a weird place in our evolution - like hominins in Africa a few million years ago. We're up on our hind legs, and our little simian brains are developing pretty well, but while we may have given it a name, we still have no fucking clue what the wind is.
One question:
How can a galaxy be more than 33 billion light years away in a universe that's 14 billion years old?
You make my head hurt, nerds - but in a good way - so keep doin' that.
One other question:
Why can't we concentrate on this kinda thing, and stop with all that other shit like war and conquest and domination?
Tuesday, February 14, 2023
It's Not Aliens
It’s not aliens. It’ll probably never be aliens. So stop. Please just stop.
"There is no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns."
For decades the notion of unidentified flying objects—UFOs—and little green men running around Roswell, New Mexico, remained comfortably confined along the fringes of societal discourse. But no longer. Serious people in the government are taking a serious look at the phenomenon.
The story of why this posture began to change begins about 15 years ago and is long and complex. (This New Yorker article is a good place to start.) But the basic gist is that then-Nevada politician Harry Reid, a powerful political figure who at times led the US Senate, began to take it seriously. So he started shoveling money at the Pentagon to study the issue.
Along the way, perhaps because of the stigma attached, the government stopped calling sightings of unidentified objects UFOs and began referring to them as unidentified anomalous phenomenon (UAP). The release of three videos in 2020 by the US Navy heightened public attention. Then, in 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a much-anticipated assessment of the government's files on UAP.
This report, alas, held an unsatisfying conclusion for those who want to believe. "The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP," this report stated. In its nine pages, the report did not mention "aliens" a single time.
But the cat was out of the bag, and the government moved onward. Last December, the nation's buttoned-down space agency, NASA, named the members of a "study team" to determine how the space agency should analyze UAP. Knowing and respecting some of the members of this study team, I have no doubt that they will do good work, and we can rely on their conclusions.
Recent takedowns
All of this brings us to the recent spy balloon mania, during which US F-22 jets downed a Chinese balloon nine days ago and, subsequently, three unidentified objects over Canada and the United States. Given the lack of government transparency about what, exactly, these latter three objects were, conspiracy theories have multiplied. Misinformation, after all, loves nothing more than a vacuum.
The extent of the howls of "It must be aliens" was underlined on Monday when White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre felt compelled to address the issue during a press briefing. "There is no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns," she said. "I wanted to be sure the American people knew that, and it is important for us to say that from here."
So yeah, it's not aliens. Unless you believe the government is covering things up, of course.
Look, the universe is vast. It is so mind-bendingly vast that we cannot comprehend its immensity. There are billions of galaxies, and in each galaxy, there are billions of stars. One of the greatest scientific discoveries during the last two decades, thanks to the Kepler space telescope and other instruments, has confirmed that many, if not most, stars have planetary systems. So there are almost certainly billions and billions and billions of worlds out there upon which life like ours could arise.
But, in all probability, we haven't found it yet. Or rather, it hasn't found us yet, or revealed itself to us meager, carbon-based, Earth-confined wretches. Just why we haven't found it yet, by the way, is a fantastic philosophical question.
Extraordinary claims
The extent of the howls of "It must be aliens" was underlined on Monday when White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre felt compelled to address the issue during a press briefing. "There is no indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns," she said. "I wanted to be sure the American people knew that, and it is important for us to say that from here."
So yeah, it's not aliens. Unless you believe the government is covering things up, of course.
Look, the universe is vast. It is so mind-bendingly vast that we cannot comprehend its immensity. There are billions of galaxies, and in each galaxy, there are billions of stars. One of the greatest scientific discoveries during the last two decades, thanks to the Kepler space telescope and other instruments, has confirmed that many, if not most, stars have planetary systems. So there are almost certainly billions and billions and billions of worlds out there upon which life like ours could arise.
But, in all probability, we haven't found it yet. Or rather, it hasn't found us yet, or revealed itself to us meager, carbon-based, Earth-confined wretches. Just why we haven't found it yet, by the way, is a fantastic philosophical question.
Extraordinary claims
I will close this article by referencing an astronomer and a physicist. The astronomer is Carl Sagan, perhaps the most gifted science communicator of the 20th century. He once said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
Certainly, the existence of an intelligent species capable of traveling between stars would be an extraordinary thing. And while there is plenty of "evidence" of unidentified flying objects in our skies, there is no "extraordinary" evidence that proves the case. I'm sorry, there just is not. The truth is, almost every hyped alien sighting can eventually be explained by a rather pedestrian phenomenon.
The second quote is simply a tweet from an English physicist, Brian Cox, today: "I've always suspected that an advanced alien civilization with the technology to travel at close to light speed across interstellar distances would arrive in Earth orbit unobserved and proceed to dispatch a fleet of small, easily detectable balloons into our atmosphere."
Pretty much, Brian. Pretty much.
Tuesday, January 31, 2023
Today's Nerdiness
The short explanation of The Fermi Paradox is that every civilization eventually builds their version of Amazon and destroys itself.
Tuesday, September 27, 2022
They Did It
Shooting a BB at a boxcar from almost 7 million miles away, they missed dead center by just 50 feet.
Out-fucking-standing.
Tuesday, August 30, 2022
To The Moon - Eventually
(pay wall)
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — Thousands of people had come from near and far to pack the beaches, roadsides, rooftops and waterways. Some even camped overnight in hopes of seeing NASA’s giant new moon rocket launch for the first time, rising upward with a thunderous boom and jets of fire from its engines.
“We are going,” proclaimed NASA banners hung all around the space center. Even Vice President Kamala Harris was on hand to watch.
But on Monday, the rocket did not go, and NASA officials said it was too early to guess whether it might be able to launch Friday, the next potential opportunity, or later. Mission managers will meet on Tuesday to discuss their next steps.
Although there will be no astronauts on this test flight, this rocket — what NASA calls the Space Launch System — is to usher in a new era of human exploration including sending the first woman and the first person of color to the surface of the moon.
The first mission, without astronauts, is to be a weekslong flight around the moon to test both the rocket and the Orion crew capsule where astronauts will sit on future missions. In particular, NASA wants to make sure that the heat shield on Orion can survive a fiery entry through Earth’s atmosphere at 25,000 miles per hour, the speed of a spacecraft returning from the moon.
Monday’s scrubbed launch added another delay to the moon program, named Artemis, which has already cost more than $40 billion and is years behind schedule. The program, including the giant rocket, has nonetheless received steady support from Congress and NASA officials.
The issue that halted the launch on Monday was a liquid hydrogen line that did not adequately chill one of the rocket’s four core-stage engines, part of the preparations needed before ignition. Otherwise, sudden shrinkage from the temperature shock of supercold propellants crack the metal engine parts.
Troubleshooting efforts proved unsuccessful within the limited time, and at about 8:40 a.m. Eastern, Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, the launch director, decided that it was time to call it off and try again another day. Even if they had resolved the technical issues, weather conditions would likely have prevented a launch.
“This is a brand-new rocket,” Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, said during a news conference in the afternoon. “It’s not going to fly until it’s ready.”
If the launch cannot occur during the Labor Day weekend, the rocket will have to be rolled back to the giant Vehicle Assembly Building — essentially a garage for rockets. A trip there would most likely mean a delay of a month or more.
NASA officials said it was important to prudently tackle each problem as it arose and not to rush decisions that might lead to catastrophic failures.
“We are going to give the team time to rest, first of all, and then come back fresh tomorrow and reassess what we learned today and then develop a series of options,” said Mike Sarafin, the Artemis mission manager. “It’s too early to say what the options are.”
Had it lifted off, the flight would have capped a strong summer for NASA, which lit up imaginations all over the world when it released the first views of the cosmos captured by the powerful James Webb Space Telescope at the start of July.
Vice President Kamala Harris signed a piece of equipment
during a tour of the Kennedy Space Center.
Credit...Pool photo by Alex G. Perez
Instead, NASA’s engineers, V.I.P. spectators and the public at large were disappointed, but many were sympathetic.
That included Ms. Harris, who had been scheduled to deliver a speech after an Artemis I launch. Instead, she spoke to reporters on Monday after NASA scrubbed the flight.
“Innovation requires this kind of moment where you test out something that’s never been done and then you regroup,” she said. “And you figure out what the next step will be to get to the ultimate goal, which for us is going to the moon and showing how humans can live and work on the moon.”
Camille Calibeo, 25, who studied aerospace engineering in college, woke up at about 2 a.m. to board a boat to get a prime view of the launchpad. She said she was hoping the launch would still happen in the coming days. “There are so many people here and the excitement was crazy and definitely sad,” she said, “and hopefully I get to stick around.”
Kendal Van Dyke, 46, a senior program manager at Microsoft who lives in Orlando, and members of his family were set to watch the launch from the NASA Causeway. While disappointed, he emphasized that scrubbed launches were a standard risk in spaceflight.
“It’s not about wowing people. It’s about getting billions of dollars’ worth of hardware into space safely,” Mr. Van Dyke said. “Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t but that’s OK. We got a good experience and got to spend some time together.”
Six of his seven siblings traveled from around the region to watch the launch together and commemorate their father, who died in November and worked as a contractor on the Apollo program installing A.V. equipment to monitor astronauts on the launchpad. Several of his siblings now also work in the space industry.
“We thought it would be a great way to celebrate his passing and the accomplishments of the family” Mr. Van Dyke said.
It is not uncommon for technical problems to crop up during debut launch attempts. In 1981, the first space shuttle, Columbia, was on the launchpad with two astronauts strapped in for the first launch to orbit, but the countdown was halted by a computer glitch. Columbia successfully launched on the second try two days later.
For the Space Launch System rocket, the countdown started Saturday. Despite several lightning strikes on the launch site on Saturday afternoon, the countdown continued smoothly for the most part through the weekend. Then early Monday morning, the threat of nearby thunderstorms caused a 45-minute delay before liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen could begin flowing into the rocket’s propellant tanks.
Another problem cropped up when a leak was detected in a hydrogen fuel line that attaches to the bottom of the rocket. That was a recurrence of a problem that occurred during a practice countdown in April.
Engineers were able to fix that problem, and the filling of the hydrogen tank resumed.
The engine issue that arose later in the countdown also involved hydrogen but in a different part of the rocket. In the last part of the launch countdown, some liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen is diverted to flow around the four engines to cool them in preparation for ignition.
Three of the four engines were fine but, in the fourth, a hydrogen line did not appear to open properly, and one of the engines was not as cold as the others.
This was the first test of the engine chill-down, which usually occurs 4 minutes 40 seconds before launch. Dress rehearsals of countdown procedures earlier this year were designed to catch such issues but were cut short by technical problems. As a result, the engine chill-down was not tested. But mission managers believed the rocket had passed the critical test objectives, and they moved ahead with preparations for launch.
For Monday’s countdown, a chill-down test was added at an earlier point to allow troubleshooting in case a problem showed up. Mission managers recognized the risk.
“That is something that we’re going to demonstrate, end to end, for the first time on the day of launch,” Mr. Sarafin said last week after the mission team decided to go ahead with the launch attempt. “And if we do not successfully demonstrate that, we are not going to launch that day.”
Mr. Sarafin turned out to be correct.
Sunday, July 17, 2022
Thursday, July 14, 2022
Today's Nerds
Score a big one for the nerds.
Stephen's Quintet
You might recognize this one from
New images from the James Webb Space Telescope.
Region 3324 of the Carina Nebula
"It's A Wonderful Life"
Wouldn't it be nice if we could get a bit more of this kind of beauty and human achievement, and a lot less of the kinda shit people do to each other with guns and petty ambitions.
Sunday, May 08, 2022
Today's Nerdy Thing
I'll keep saying it - I love me some excitable nerds.
Dr Becky (Rebeccah Smethurst, PhD) - a little amped up about the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)
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