Despite an SRB Anomaly, Vulcan Centaur Completes Its Second Mission This Morning (On My Birthday)...

United Launch Alliance

United Launch Alliance Successfully Launches Second Vulcan Certification Flight (Press Release)

Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Fla. – United Launch Alliance (ULA) ushers in a new era of space capabilities with the successful launch of its second certification flight (Cert-2) of the next-generation Vulcan rocket on October 4 at 7:25 a.m. EDT from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

“The success of Vulcan’s second certification flight heralds a new age of forward-looking technology committed to meeting the ever-growing requirements of space launch and supporting our nation’s assured access to space. We had an observation on one of our solid rocket boosters (SRB) that we are reviewing, but we are overall pleased with the rocket’s performance and had a bullseye insertion,” said Tory Bruno, ULA’s president and CEO. “Vulcan provides high performance and greater affordability while continuing to deliver our unmatched reliability and orbital precision for all our customers across the national security, civil and commercial markets.”

The Cert-2 mission carried experiments and demonstrations associated with future capabilities of Centaur V, the world’s highest-performing upper stage designed to further deliver on ULA’s unrivaled legacy of reliability and precision. Centaur V provides 2.5 times the energy and 450 times the endurance of its predecessors, enabling the most complex orbital insertions within the most challenging and clandestine orbits.

“Vulcan is built with the strength of a national workforce whose unmatched dedication and innovation has modernized the very best of our industry-leading heritage,” said Mark Peller, vice president of Vulcan Development. “The foundation of Vulcan’s purpose-built design rests on the best of what we’ve learned from more than 130 combined years of launch experience with Atlas and Delta.”

The Cert-2 mission served as the second of two certification flights required for the U.S. Space Force’s certification process and ULA has now completed all requirements for certification. ULA continues to work closely with the U.S. Space Force as they take the next few weeks to review the data and compare it to ULA’s first certification mission to ensure that the vehicle performed as expected and there are no additional items that need review. Once the evaluation is complete to the Space Force's standards, the Vulcan rocket will be certified to launch national security missions.

“The team will continue to modify our infrastructure as we work towards an accelerated launch cadence to meet our customers’ manifest requirements while building off today’s successful launch and developing future Vulcan upgrades, including SMART reuse plans for downrange, non-propulsive recovery of Vulcan engines,” said Bruno.

ULA has sold more than 70 Vulcan launches to date, including 38 missions for Amazon’s Project Kuiper and multiple national security space launch missions as the part of the country’s Phase 2 launch procurement.

All rockets are not created equal. ULA is the nation’s most experienced, reliable and accurate launch service provider delivering unmatched value, a tireless drive to improve, and commitment to the extraordinary. Vulcan’s inaugural launch marked the beginning of a new era of space capabilities and provides higher performance and greater affordability while offering the world’s only high-energy architecture rocket to deliver any payload, at any time, directly to any orbit.

Source: United Launch Alliance

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United Launch Alliance


United Launch Alliance


United Launch Alliance

Note the difference in the plumes from the two SRBs several seconds after the burst of material from one of them, which would suggest a damaged nozzle. pic.twitter.com/OC1R97ZOtX

— Jeff Foust (@jeff_foust) October 4, 2024

A closer look at that third pic… almost seems like you can look up the nozzle of the SRB https://t.co/y5Wtd0TEJn pic.twitter.com/JRw4yy92i1

— Jared Locke 🚀 (@baserunner0723) October 4, 2024

BE-4s earn praise for compensating. https://t.co/2uZVPmNnbp

— Chris Bergin - NSF (@NASASpaceflight) October 4, 2024

And here’s the Bullseye plot. #CERT2 #VulcanRocket pic.twitter.com/SNoT5gDytz

— Tory Bruno (@torybruno) October 4, 2024

The Latest Celestial Discovery by Kepler's Successor...

NASA GSFC

NASA’s TESS Spots Record-Breaking Stellar Triplets (News Release - October 2)

Professional and amateur astronomers teamed up with artificial intelligence to find an unmatched stellar trio called TIC 290061484, thanks to cosmic “strobe lights” captured by NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite).

The system contains a set of twin stars orbiting each other every 1.8 days, and a third star that circles the pair in just 25 days. The discovery smashes the record for shortest outer orbital period for this type of system, set in 1956, which had a third star orbiting an inner pair in 33 days.

“Thanks to the compact, edge-on configuration of the system, we can measure the orbits, masses, sizes and temperatures of its stars,” said Veselin Kostov, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. “And we can study how the system formed and predict how it may evolve.”

A paper, led by Kostov, describing the results was published in The Astrophysical Journal on October 2.

Flickers in starlight helped reveal the tight trio, which is located in the constellation Cygnus. The system happens to be almost flat from our perspective. This means that the stars cross right in front of, or eclipse, each other as they orbit.

When that happens, the nearer star blocks some of the farther star’s light.

Using machine learning, scientists filtered through enormous sets of starlight data from TESS to identify patterns of dimming that reveal eclipses. Then, a small team of citizen scientists filtered further, relying on years of experience and informal training to find particularly interesting cases.

These amateur astronomers, who are co-authors on the new study, met as participants in an online citizen science project called Planet Hunters, which was active from 2010 to 2013. The volunteers later teamed up with professional astronomers to create a new collaboration called the Visual Survey Group, which has been active for over a decade.

“We’re mainly looking for signatures of compact multi-star systems, unusual pulsating stars in binary systems, and weird objects,” said Saul Rappaport, an emeritus professor of physics at MIT in Cambridge. Rappaport co-authored the paper and has helped lead the Visual Survey Group for more than a decade. “It’s exciting to identify a system like this because they’re rarely found, but they may be more common than current tallies suggest.”

Many more likely speckle our galaxy, waiting to be discovered.

Partly because the stars in the newfound system orbit in nearly the same plane, scientists say that it’s likely very stable despite their tight configuration (the trio’s orbits fit within a smaller area than Mercury’s orbit around the Sun). Each star’s gravity doesn’t perturb the others too much, like they could if their orbits were tilted in different directions.

But while their orbits will likely remain stable for millions of years, “no one lives here,” Rappaport said. “We think the stars formed together from the same growth process, which would have disrupted planets from forming very closely around any of the stars.” The exception could be a distant planet orbiting the three stars as if they were one.

As the inner stars age, they will expand and ultimately merge, triggering a supernova explosion in around 20 to 40 million years.

In the meantime, astronomers are hunting for triple stars with even shorter orbits. That’s hard to do with current technology, but a new tool is on the way.

Images from NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be much more detailed than TESS’s. The same area of the sky covered by a single TESS pixel will fit more than 36,000 Roman pixels. And while TESS took a wide, shallow look at the entire sky, Roman will pierce deep into the heart of our galaxy where stars crowd together, providing a core sample rather than skimming the whole surface.

“We don’t know much about a lot of the stars in the center of the galaxy except for the brightest ones,” said Brian Powell, a co-author and data scientist at Goddard. “Roman’s high-resolution view will help us measure light from stars that usually blur together, providing the best look yet at the nature of star systems in our galaxy.”

And since Roman will monitor light from hundreds of millions of stars as part of one of its main surveys, it will help astronomers find more triple star systems in which all the stars eclipse each other.

“We’re curious why we haven’t found star systems like these with even shorter outer orbital periods,” said Powell. “Roman should help us find them and bring us closer to figuring out what their limits might be.”

Roman could also find eclipsing stars bound together in even larger groups — half a dozen, or perhaps even more all orbiting each other like bees buzzing around a hive.

“Before scientists discovered triply eclipsing triple star systems, we didn’t expect them to be out there,” said co-author Tamás Borkovits, a senior research fellow at the Baja Observatory of The University of Szeged in Hungary. “But once we found them, we thought, well why not? Roman, too, may reveal never-before-seen categories of systems and objects that will surprise astronomers.”

Source: NASA.Gov

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NASA GSFC

The Latest Update on Humanity's Second Most-Distant Interstellar Probe...

NASA / JPL - Caltech

NASA Turns Off Science Instrument to Save Voyager 2 Power (News Release - October 1)

The mission has been working to postpone the shut-off for as long as possible. Four other instruments aboard the interstellar spacecraft continue to operate.

Mission engineers at NASA have turned off the plasma science instrument aboard the Voyager 2 spacecraft due to the probe’s gradually shrinking electrical power supply.

Traveling more than 12.8 billion miles (20.5 billion kilometers) from Earth, the spacecraft continues to use four science instruments to study the region outside our heliosphere, the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun. The probe has enough power to continue exploring this region with at least one operational science instrument into the 2030s.

Mission engineers have taken steps to avoid turning off a science instrument for as long as possible because the science data collected by the twin Voyager probes is unique. No other human-made spacecraft has operated in interstellar space, the region outside the heliosphere.

The plasma science instrument measures the amount of plasma (electrically-charged atoms) and the direction it is flowing. It has collected limited data in recent years due to its orientation relative to the direction that plasma is flowing in interstellar space.

Both spacecraft are powered by decaying plutonium and lose about 4 watts of power each year. After the twin Voyagers completed their exploration of the giant planets in the 1980s, the mission team turned off several science instruments that would not be used in the study of interstellar space. That gave the spacecraft plenty of extra power until a few years ago.

Since then, the team has turned off all onboard systems not essential for keeping the probes working, including some heaters. In order to postpone having to shut off another science instrument, they also adjusted how Voyager 2’ voltage is monitored.

Monitoring Results

On September 26, engineers issued the command to turn off the plasma science instrument. Sent by NASA’s Deep Space Network, it took 19 hours to reach Voyager 2, and the return signal took another 19 hours to reach Earth.

Mission engineers always carefully monitor changes being made to the 47-year-old spacecraft’s operations to ensure that they don’t generate any unwanted secondary effects. The team has confirmed that the switch-off command was executed without incident and the probe is operating normally.

In 2018, the plasma science instrument proved critical in determining that Voyager 2 left the heliosphere. The boundary between the heliosphere and interstellar space is demarcated by changes in the atoms, particles and magnetic fields that instruments on the Voyagers can detect. Inside the heliosphere, particles from the Sun flow outward, away from our nearest star.

The heliosphere is moving through interstellar space, so at Voyager 2’s position near the front of the solar bubble, the plasma flows in almost the opposite direction of the solar particles.

The plasma science instrument consists of four “cups.” Three cups point in the direction of the Sun and observed the solar wind while inside the heliosphere. A fourth points at a right angle to the direction of the other three and has observed the plasma in planetary magnetospheres, the heliosphere, and now, interstellar space.

When Voyager 2 exited the heliosphere, the flow of plasma into the three cups facing the Sun dropped off dramatically. The most useful data from the fourth cup comes only once every three months, when the spacecraft does a 360-degree turn on the axis pointed toward the Sun. This factored into the mission’s decision to turn this instrument off before others.

The plasma science instrument on Voyager 1 stopped working in 1980 and was turned off in 2007 to save power. Another instrument aboard Voyager 2, called the plasma wave subsystem, can estimate the plasma density when eruptions from the Sun drive shocks through the interstellar medium, producing plasma waves.

The Voyager team continues to monitor the health of the spacecraft and its available resources to make engineering decisions that maximize the mission’s science output.

Source: NASA.Gov

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NASA / JPL - Caltech

L-Minus 3 Days Before the Vulcan Centaur Rocket Takes Off on Its Second Flight Test into Space...

United Launch Alliance

Cert-2: Dress Rehearsal of Vulcan Launch Day Planned (News Release)

The United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan rocket rolled out to the Space Launch Complex (SLC) 41 pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on September 30 to undergo an extensive practice countdown ahead of its second Certification (Cert-2) flight test.

Known as a Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR), ULA is preparing to conduct a full day-of-launch test to ensure that the new rocket, pad systems and launch team are ready for the second Vulcan mission. The WDR exercises the hardware, procedures and the people to reduce the risk of a delay on launch day.

The rehearsal follows the tightly-scripted sequence by rolling the Vulcan from Vertical Integration Facility-G (VIF-G) to SLC-41 and performing the entire countdown operation to fuel the rocket with cryogenic propellant.

The countdown begins before sunrise under the guidance of the ULA launch conductor from the Advanced Spaceflight Operations Center (ASOC), located about four miles (6.4 km) from the pad.

The rocket stages are powered up, avionics tested and final preps to ground systems accomplished. That enables the ULA launch director to give approval for the fueling process.

The launch team configures the Vulcan Centaur for cryogenic loading and approximately one million pounds (454,000 kg) of methane, liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen flow into the rocket's tanks using the same procedures that will be executed on the actual launch day.

With the rocket filled up, permission will be given to enter terminal count at T-minus 7 minutes. The final phase of the countdown pressurizes the rocket, arms various systems and transitions the vehicle to internal power. The count finishes just prior to ignition time.

The rocket is then safed and cryogenic tanks drained. The thorough data will be performed before moving into the countdown for launch. Liftoff is targeted for no earlier than October 4.

The highly-instrumented rocket will carry a non-deployable inert payload into space, run unique experiments and conduct a series of detailed test objectives to collect performance data while fulfilling ULA’s certification obligations to the nation.

Source: United Launch Alliance

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3,2,1...our practice countdown has culminated as planned for the #VulcanRocket's Wet Dress Rehearsal. Activities will continue into this evening as propellants are drained and our teammates begin reviewing all the data collected today to ensure #Cert2 is ready to fly. pic.twitter.com/L6jfRRLHr0

— ULA (@ulalaunch) October 1, 2024