Blog for Sunday, June 25, 2023

It’s been a relatively slow week of news, but here are a couple of items I learned about recently.

OSIRIS-REx Sample Return -- In the June Planetary Society publication, they had a feature article about the return of the OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security- Regolith Explorer) probe with its sample of the asteroid Bennu. It’s been almost 7 years since it was launched on September 8, 2016 to the .5 km diameter carbonaceous asteroid. Scientists think the ancient surface of Bennu might have formed only 10 million years after the Sun making it about 4.5 billion years ago.

The rubble-pile asteroid surprised scientists with its rocky surface and the probe circled Bennu for 505 days before deciding where to take its sample. During the sampling process, people were stunned that the sample arm plunged 2 feet into the surface and created a flurry of dust, rocks and pebbles. Dante Lauretta, chief scientist, feels they might have gotten a 250-gram (a baseball’s mass) sample, far exceeding the 59.5-gram goal.

On Sunday, September 24, 2023, the sample return capsule will detach from the main probe, 4 hours and 60,000 miles away from Earth and then plunge into the atmosphere at a blistering 7.7 miles per second. Protected with a heat shield, the capsule will slow for 2 minutes before deploying its parachute and descending from 3200 ft to a 12 by 50-mile target ellipse in the Utah Test Range. With this heat shield protection, scientists will be able to analyze the material of the asteroid without it undergoing the heat and pressure that a meteor sample would endure.

The asteroid Bennu is known as a Potentially Hazardous Object (PHO) because its 1.2-year orbit brings it within 186,000 miles of Earth every 6 years. Astronomers calculate that it has a 1 in 1800 chance of colliding with Earth between 2178 and 2290. That’s a long shot, but the downside is it would take out an entire continent if it did hit us. The more we understand these objects, the better chance we have of doing something about it when there is a danger of collision.

Euclid Space Telescope to Launch – Euclid is scheduled to launch on a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida on Saturday, July 1. It will travel for 30 days to the L2 point beyond the moon just like the JWST. But Euclid will be a survey telescope meaning it won’t study individual objects. Over 6 years, it will survey 1/3 of the sky avoiding the plane of the Milky Way and the plane of the Solar System where dust would inhibit its observations. It will map galaxies out to 10 billion light-years away. Using spectroscopy, it will be able to estimate the distance to galaxies and create a 3-D map of the universe. It has 3 major goals: 1) how do galaxies change over time? 2) create a dark matter map by analyzing the distortion of galaxy shapes in its images; and 3) how does the expansion rate of the universe change over time? The first release of data will be 2.5 years after launch. All the mission’s questions are one of intense interest to me, so I can’t wait until 2026 for this first set of data.

 

Blog for Sunday, June 18, 2023

I’m a day late. It was a busy Father’s Day with setting up a new weather station and stopping in for some early Sunday donuts and mead at a local establishment. This is the 8th weekly blog, I think it is a habit. Hope you enjoy. Any feedback is appreciated.

Today, Monday June 19, US astronaut Frank Rubio will overtake US astronaut, Andrew Morgan, for the 13^th longest stay in space, 271.53 days. Of course, he is setting this record stay with his two fellow cosmonauts from the Soyuz 68S mission that launched on September 21, 2022. If he stays until September 27 of this year, he will set the US record for the longest stay in space at 371 days, breaking Mark Vande Hei’s record of 355 days set in 2022. Not bad for a rookie astronaut on his first mission. He will still be behind 5 other Russians and tied with his 2 fellow cosmonauts for the longest stay in space by any country. Valeri Polyakov has the record of 437.75 days set in 1994-1995 aboard the Russian Mir space station.

It slipped under my news radar but the show ‘Stars on Mars” started on June 5. You can catch the previous episodes on streaming or watch new ones at 7PM on Mondays on FOX TV. It is an analog Mars mission with William Shatner as the Earth based communicator, and 12 people including, 2 ex-football players, Marshawn Lynch and Richard Sherman, cyclist Lance Armstrong and various other TV personalities. I watched the first 2 shows on streaming and it is heavy on the reality-TV and light on the Mars science. I’m not sure if I would recommend it, but I might be hooked on the on-going person dynamics. My biggest question would be what our actual Mars simulation analog astronaut, Beth, thinks of the show?

UAP news is taking off– NASA recently had their first public presentation by their UAP Panel. UAP now stands for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, (recently the word, Aerial, was replaced with Anomalous so that events in space and under water could be included). Now on 6/12/23, we have a high security clearance official, David Grusch, claiming he heard that alien craft with bodies have been recovered and some American people have been murdered by them. These outrageous claims need evidence and so far, none has been produced. Grusch even admits he hasn’t seen evidence directly but only relaying second or third hand accounts. Mick West, a UFO video debunker, has done his best to be a rational mind analyzing the claims, but I’m worried that his level-headed responses will be dismissed by the radicals on the other side. NewsNation has done some broadcasts with Grusch, but they are far from being unbiased reporting. This type of coverage is undermining the report from NASA’s UAP panel which has studied the phenomena for the last 7 months and is trying to bring scientific analysis to the subject.

 

Blog for Sunday, June 11, 2023

This is the 7th weekly blog, I think it is a habit. Hope you enjoy. Any feedback is appreciated.

The week started out with a bang. I had joined Fraser Cain’s Universe Today as a patreon supporter and he scheduled me for a 15-minute Zoom interview on Monday, June 5. What an honor to talk to someone that I have seen for so many hours of video content with interviews and about astronomy and space issues. I zoomed from my upstairs lair and Fraser noticed my picture of the “Tesla in space” that Elon Musk launched on the first Falcon Heavy rocket. I was also surrounded by my models of the Space Shuttle and ISS and I think my “lava lamp” might have dated me. I told him about our MASS group and hoped he would check out our content. He seemed interested but I know he must be a very busy guy. I thanked him for letting me know about a phone app that identifies birds by their sounds, something that Carol and I are enjoying. Before I knew it, our time was up.

Vulcan rocket test fires its BE4 engines – On 6/7/23, the new rocket fired its engines for a 6-second test and it went according to plan. This is the last major hurdle for the Vulcan rocket to launch before the end of 2023. On its inaugural mission, possibly in July this year, it will send the Peregrine lunar lander from Astrobotic to a soft landing at the South Pole of the moon. The second Vulcan mission is to launch the first DreamChaser space plane to the ISS for a cargo delivery. The rocket uses methane-liquid oxygen burning BE-4 engines which are years late and coming from Blue Origin and Jeff Bezos. Vulcan is a critical rocket. It is needed due to the phase-out of the Atlas 5 which uses Russian based engines. Fortunately, we have a stockpile of Atlas 5 parts already in the US after Russia invaded Ukraine. The DoD has awarded its future military satellite contracts to be launched with 60% coming on Vulcan launches and 40% on SpaceX. The other US rocket, the Delta, is being de-commissioned because it is cost prohibitive. The Vulcan is capable of putting 27.2 mt (60,000 lb) into LEO which is more than a reusable Falcon 9 which maxes out at 22.8 mt (50,000 lb). Blue Origin also plans to use the BE-4 engines on its new rocket, the New Glenn. This rocket is critical because it will be launching the Blue Moon manned lunar lander for NASA.

 

Blog for Sunday, June 3, 2023

This is the sixth weekly blog, I think it is a habit. Hope you enjoy. Any feedback is appreciated.

The Meteor Plant, just above the "Love Blooms Here" plaque, is growing at over 1 inch per day and is now over 25 inches tall. Carol has a phenomenal "green thumb".

The Chinese Manned launch – On May 30, China launched ShenZhou-16 with 3 taikonauts. I’m amazed at the lack of transparency with China’s space program. The taikonauts weren’t announced until a day before launch and when they do a spacewalk it isn’t even announced until after it is performed. China says they want to land people on the moon by 2030. I think that is going to be the motivation behind the United States pursuing their lunar manned program. NASA says it is for science and Mankind, but I think the politicians look at the strategic military perspective. Look at this headline that Dean sent to me this week, NASA head worried China will stealAmerica’s God-given moon water.

It kind of snuck up on me but we set a couple of records for people in space with the Chinese launch and the Virgin Galactic sub-orbital mission on May 25. With the taikonauts, we broke the record for people in orbit with 17, 11 on the ISS and 6 going to or on the Tiangong-3 space station. For total people in space, if you consider the McDowell line (50 mi or 80 km), the record was set on May 25 at 20, you had the 6 Virgin Galactic sub-orbital people, 11 on ISS and 3 from China on Tiangong-3. We are taking baby steps, but slowing becoming a space-faring species.

Boeing’s Starliner Manned Mission Indefinitely Delayed – On June 1, Boeing announced that they are standing down from their launch of the CFT-1 mission with 2 astronauts on Starliner due to 2 issues, a lack of safely margin on their parachutes and flammable tape used to wrap wiring harnesses on the capsule. Boeing decided to get in Commercial Crew in September of 2009. C’mon, Boeing got more money ($4.2 billion) to develop Starliner than SpaceX got for Crewed Dragon, in September 2014. How long do we have to wait to have two independent methods for US astronauts to go into orbit? SpaceX has performed 10 manned missions on Dragon, 7 for NASA and 3 for private astronauts. I’m sure glad it is a fixed-price contract and Boeing has to pony up for the costs of the delay. So far, they have charged $900 million against their corporate earnings for the delayed program. Maybe we should get some more cost-plus contracts on the SLS rocket to prevent the cost overruns that are occurring there?