Vulcan: Inaugural Rocket Moved to Launch Pad for Tanking Tests (News Release)
The first United Launch Alliance (ULA)Vulcan rocket is atop its Cape Canaveral launch pad for the next phase of qualification testing in preparation for the inaugural flight.
Over the next several days, ULA engineers and technicians will put the rocket through pathfinder tests to validate the successful performance of the Vulcan and Centaur stages, Vulcan Launch Platform (VLP), pad facilities and ground support systems.
The tanking tests will verify countdown steps, procedures and timelines and offer the opportunity to certify the launch team through real-world experience operating the hardware.
The VLP transported the rocket from the Vertical Integration Facility (VIF) to Space Launch Complex (SLC)-41 on March 9, riding the rails that connect the two locations. The rocket was stacked on the VLP inside the VIF in late January, and a series of readiness checks since then confirmed that the vehicle was ready to move on to launch pad testing.
Each tanking day is planned to be lengthy and incorporate extensive special test objectives. The expected duration of tests necessitates two shifts of launch console operators, dividing the crew into the "Preps and Tanking Team" and the "Detanking and Securing Team."
After the tanking tests are accomplished, the VLP will disengage from the pad systems for transport of the Vulcan rocket to the VIF for the next step in the countdown to the inaugural launch.
The first flight includes payloads for three distinctly different missions, deploying two Project Kuiper prototype broadband satellites into low Earth orbit for Amazon, sending Astrobotic's Peregrine commercial lunar lander to intercept the Moon and carrying a Celestis memorial payload into deep space.
Just thought I'd share these images that I took at last night's NBA game between the Los Angeles Lakers and Memphis Grizzlies at Crypto.com Arena (a.k.a. The Crypt). The Lakers won this game, 112-103, with LeBron James not playing due to an injury and Anthony Davis (AD) scoring 30 points and grabbing 22 rebounds in Tuesday's victory.
The biggest highlight of last night came during halftime...when the Lakers honored Pau Gasol by unveiling his retired jersey on the rafters at The Crypt, next to those of Kobe Bryant. In attendance at the game to witness this unveiling were former Lakers head coach Phil Jackson, Kobe's wife Vanessa and fellow (retired?) NBA player Marc Gasol—Pau's sibling who won a title with the Toronto Raptors in 2019.
Even if the Lakers lost this game, last night would've still been memorable. It was very emotional and nostalgic to see games that Pau and Kobe played together during their championship years in 2009 and 2010 on the Jumbotron during the ceremony—with Phil Jackson and Pau's other former Lake Show teammates like Derek Fisher, Metta World Peace and Sasha Vujacic posting video testimonials that congratulated Gasol on yesterday's achievement.
This makes me hope that LeBron and AD will win one last title here in Los Angeles before they move on in their careers, or in LeBron's case, retire from the NBA. A championship won't happen this year, but I think there are about two more years of this duo playing together...with the greatness of late 2020 hopefully being repeated before that time is up.
Oh, and all of the fans at the game last night also got a free commemorative Pau Gasol jersey (as shown at the bottom of this entry)! Happy Wednesday.
NASA’s DART Data Validates Kinetic Impact as Planetary Defense Method (News Release - March 1)
Since NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test(DART) successfully impacted its target nearly five months ago, on September 26 — altering the orbit of the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos by 33 minutes — the DART team has been hard at work analyzing the data collected from the world’s first planetary defense test mission.
The DART mission employed an asteroid-deflection technique known as a “kinetic impactor,” which in simplest terms means smashing a thing into another thing — in this case, a spacecraft into an asteroid. From the data, the DART investigation team, led by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, found that a kinetic impactor mission like DART can be effective in altering the trajectory of an asteroid, a big step toward the goal of preventing future asteroid strikes on Earth.
These findings were published in four papers in the journal Nature.
“I cheered when DART slammed head-on into the asteroid for the world’s first planetary defense technology demonstration, and that was just the start,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “These findings add to our fundamental understanding of asteroids and build a foundation for how humanity can defend Earth from a potentially hazardous asteroid by altering its course."
The first paper reports DART’s successful demonstration of kinetic impactor technology in detail: reconstructing the impact itself, reporting the timeline leading up to impact, specifying in detail the location and nature of the impact site, and recording the size and shape of Dimorphos.
The authors, led by Terik Daly, Carolyn Ernst and Olivier Barnouin of APL, note DART’s successful autonomous targeting of a small asteroid, with limited prior observations, is a critical first step on the path to developing kinetic impactor technology as a viable operational capability for planetary defense.
Their findings show intercepting an asteroid with a diameter of around half a mile, such as Dimorphos, can be achieved without an advance reconnaissance mission, though advance reconnaissance would give valuable information for planning and predicting the outcome. What is necessary is sufficient warning time — several years at a minimum, but preferably decades.
“Nevertheless,” the authors state in the paper, DART’s success “builds optimism about humanity’s capacity to protect the Earth from an asteroid threat.”
The second paper uses two independent approaches based on Earth-based lightcurve and radar observations. The investigation team, led by Cristina Thomas of Northern Arizona University, arrived at two consistent measurements of the period change from the kinetic impact: 33 minutes, plus or minus one minute.
This large change indicates the recoil from material excavated from the asteroid and ejected into space by the impact (known as ejecta) contributed significant momentum change to the asteroid, beyond that of the DART spacecraft itself.
The key to kinetic impact is that the push to the asteroid comes not only from colliding spacecraft, but also from this ejecta recoil. The authors conclude: “To serve as a proof-of-concept for the kinetic impactor technique of planetary defense, DART needed to demonstrate that an asteroid could be targeted during a high-speed encounter and that the target’s orbit could be changed. DART has successfully done both.”
In the third paper, the investigation team, led by Andrew Cheng of APL, calculated the momentum change transferred to the asteroid as a result of DART’s kinetic impact by studying the change in the orbital period of Dimorphos. They found the impact caused an instantaneous slowing in Dimorphos’ speed along its orbit of about 2.7 millimeters per second — again indicating the recoil from ejecta played a major role in amplifying the momentum change directly imparted to the asteroid by the spacecraft.
That momentum change was amplified by a factor of 2.2 to 4.9 (depending on the mass of Dimorphos), indicating the momentum change transferred because of ejecta production significantly exceeded the momentum change from the DART spacecraft alone.
This finding “[validates] the effectiveness of kinetic impact for preventing future asteroid strikes on the Earth,” the authors conclude.
DART’s scientific value goes beyond validating kinetic impactor as a means of planetary defense. By smashing into Dimorphos, the mission has broken new ground in the study of asteroids.
DART’s impact made Dimorphos an “active asteroid” — a space rock that orbits like an asteroid but has a tail of material like a comet – which is detailed in the fourth paper led by Jian-Yang Li of the Planetary Science Institute.
Although scientists had proposed that some active asteroids are the result of impact events, until now no one had ever observed the activation of an asteroid. The DART mission activated Dimorphos under precisely known and carefully observed impact conditions, enabling the detailed study of the formation of an active asteroid for the first time.
“DART, as a controlled, planetary-scale impact experiment, provides a detailed characterization of the target, the ejecta morphology, and the entire ejecta evolution process,” the authors write. “DART will continue to be the model for studies of newly-discovered asteroids that show activity caused by natural impacts.”
DART’s Legacy Begins
“We are so proud of the DART team and the investigation’s latest results,” said Jason Kalirai, Civil Space Mission Area Executive at APL. “With the core analysis activities starting after the impact of Dimorphos, the results demonstrate how successful the kinetic impactor technique can be — paving the way for a bright future for planetary defense.”
Johns Hopkins APL manages the DART mission for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office as a project of the agency’s Planetary Missions Program Office. The LICIACube project is managed by ASI Robotic Exploration Mission Office, with industrial contractor Argotec S.r.I. and a scientific team from the National Institute of Astrophysics, Polytechnic University of Milan, the University of Bologna, the University of Naples Parthenope, and CNR-IFAC.
After more than a 2-year hiatus, The Mandalorian is back! I watched the Season 3 premiere—a.k.a. Chapter 17, "The Apostate"—last night, and needless to say, it was great to see Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and his surrogate Jedi son Grogu back on my computer screen.
I won't delve into the plot details for Chapter 17 here, except to say that I do believe that this is the first time I saw a proton torpedo used against a living creature (the screenshot above is from that moment) in the Star Wars universe...at least in a live-action show. Poor gigantic alligator / crocodile / whatever that was.
And the image below indicates that Grogu will obviously be adding more adorable highlights like this to his repertoire. Chapter 18 (on March 8) can't arrive soon enough!
Just thought I'd end this month by sharing these four images that I took of the San Gabriel Mountains from the city of Rancho Cucamonga—in San Bernardino County, California—last Sunday.
These pictures were obtained using my Nikon D3300 DSLR camera. I had to drive around quite a bit in Rancho Cucamonga before I found an ideal location from which to take images of these mountains (the views of the snowcapped peaks were obscured by townhouses, apartment complexes and palm trees in most parts of the city)...which endured a major winter blizzard just the day before.
The blizzard was so intense that it caused snow to fall in low-elevation suburbs like Rancho Cucamonga, Fontana and areas near Pasadena in Los Angeles County (though Pasadena is near the foothill of the San Gabriel Mountains...or am I thinking of Altadena instead?)!
By the time I went to San Bernardino County on Sunday, the snow was already melting in that area. The best time to go was the day before, but I was at AMC theaters watching the new dark comedy film Cocaine Bear around that time, heh. (You can read my review for that movie here.)
These photos of the beautiful snowcapped peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains will do for now. It'll probably be a very long time before it snows in the unlikeliest areas of Southern California again, but that's okay!
As mentioned in this earlier Blog entry, I was going to draw an illustration of one of Marvel's coolest antiheroes: Ghost Rider. And here he is!
It wasn't until Season 4 of ABC's now-cancelled TV show Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.(AoS) that I found out there were different people who took up the mantle of Ghost Rider, such as Johnny Blaze(played by Nicolas Cage in two theatrically-released movies) and Robbie Reyes(portrayed by Gabriel Luna on AoS). As you can see from this artwork, I clearly went with the Johnny Blaze version of the Spirit of Vengeance.
So who will I draw next? I don't know... There are other projects that I need to work on before I end my sabbatical from work later next month.
I'm waiting till it starts warming up here in SoCal before I return to my job—as I hated leaving my house at 4 AM, in 38°F weather, a month ago and last December. Carry on!
So it was revealed over two hours ago that the earliest launch date for Astrobotic's Peregrine lander—which will head to the Moon on United Launch Alliance's (ULA)Vulcan Centaur rocket—is Thursday, May 4!
In a series of tweets posted today, ULA pointed out that the Vulcan rocket is still undergoing flight readiness verification tests at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida...with the two BE-4 engines performing well in their qualification testing. However, the engine testing is taking longer than expected, with the 6-week program most likely concluding in mid-April.
Due to this additional testing (which will culminate with a flight readiness firing for the BE-4 engines at the pad), ULA can't make the early April launch window for Peregrine.
While it's unfortunate that Astrobotic's robotic lander won't lift off in early spring as hoped for, it's still wonderful news that ULA is confident enough in the test campaign for Vulcan that it can target a specific launch date for its newest rocket and lunar payload! We'll see if May 4, a.k.a. Star Wars Day, will be the day that Peregrine successfully embarks on its almost month-long journey to the Moon...where it will hopefully touch down softly at Gruithuisen Domes.
Just thought I'd share these images after the Pentagon confirmed earlier today that the original picture, posted above, of a U.S. Air Force pilot taking a selfie with the now-defunct Chinese spy balloon is authentic.
This selfie was taken on February 3, one day before the balloon was shot down by an F-22 Raptor off the coast of South Carolina, as the U-2 Dragon Lady was circling the Chinese surveillance apparatus while it floated 40,000 feet above the U.S. mainland.
As of today, the operation to retrieve what remains of the balloon from the Atlantic Ocean is complete...and the analysis of the wreckage by such law enforcement agencies as the FBI is ongoing.
We'll see if China sends more of their balloons overseas to serve as target practice for America's fifth-generation fighters. Carry on.
NASA’s Perseverance Rover Set to Begin Third Year at Jezero Crater (News Release - February 17)
After completing the first sample depot on another world, the rover continues its hunt for Mars rocks worthy of study on Earth.
NASA’s Perseverance rover will celebrate its second anniversary on the surface of Mars on Saturday, February 18. Since arriving at Jezero Crater in 2021, the six-wheeled, nuclear-powered rover has been examining geologic features and collecting samples of the Red Planet that are central to the first step of the NASA-ESA (European Space Agency)Mars Sample Return campaign.
Scientists want to study Martian samples with powerful lab equipment on Earth to search for signs of ancient microbial life and to better understand the processes that have shaped the surface of Mars.
“Anniversaries are a time of reflection and celebration, and the Perseverance team is doing a lot of both,” said Perseverance project scientist Ken Farley of Caltech in Pasadena. “Perseverance has inspected and performed data collection on hundreds of intriguing geologic features, collected 15 rock cores, and created the first sample depot on another world. With the start of the next science campaign, known as ‘Upper Fan,’ on February 15, we expect to be adding to that tally very soon.”
In addition to the rock cores, Perseverance has collected two regolith samples and one atmospheric sample, and it has sealed three “witness” tubes. (Learn more about all 18 samples taken so far.)
Numbers play a big role in the life of a Mars rover mission, not just because the team includes an impressive quantity of scientists (who don’t usually mind numbers) and engineers (who love them), but because statistics provide the best and most efficient glimpse of vehicle trends and performance.
For instance, the mission can tell you not only that the rover has driven 9.3 miles (14.97 kilometers), but also that as of February 14, its left front wheel has performed 9,423 revolutions. They can tell you not only that the MOXIE (short for Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment) technology demonstration has produced 3.25 ounces (92.11 grams) of oxygen, but also that the Gas Dust Removal Tool (gDRT) – the little gas-puffing device on the robotic arm – has puffed 62 times to clear residual dust and particles from rock-abrading activities.
“We deal with a lot of numbers,” said Perseverance deputy project manager Steve Lee from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “We collect them, evaluate them, compare them, and more times than we want to admit, bore our loved ones with them during a family dinner.”
With that, here are some of the most up-to-date statistics regarding Perseverance’s first two Earth years of Jezero surface operations. Some will seem obscure, while others are more immediate, but they all underscore how productive the mission has been.
Perseverance Science Statistics
The rover carries seven science instruments, and they’ve been busy.
- Laser shots fired by the SuperCam science instrument: 230,554
- Soundings performed by the RIMFAX (Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Experiment) ground-penetrating radar to study underground rock layers: 676,828
- Mars audio recordings taken by SuperCam’s microphone: 662
- Hours of Mars weather data recorded by MEDA (Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer): 15,769.1
- Hours the X-ray filament on the PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry) instrument has operated: 298.2
- Laser shots by the SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) instrument: 4,337,010
- SHERLOC spectroscopy observations: 33
Perseverance Mobility and Operational Statistics
Along with the massive drill-toting robotic arm, the rover has a small sample handling arm inside its belly.
- Times the rover’s main robotic arm has been unstowed and stowed: 64
- Times the drill on that arm has touched Mars: 39
- Times drill bits have been exchanged: 48
- Abrasions performed by the drill: 17
- Distance the rover’s sample handling arm’s z-stage has traveled up and down: 676.1 feet (206.1 meters)
Perseverance’s Camera Statistics
Perseverance packs seven science cameras along with nine engineering cameras. Together, those cameras have taken more than 166,000 images.
“Behind each number is a lot of thought and effort from a very talented group of women and men on the Perseverance team,” said Art Thompson, Perseverance project manager at JPL. “We have come a long way together, and I can’t think of a better group to work with as we go even farther.”
In fact, when Perseverance marks its second landing anniversary, Mars will be 97 million miles (156 million kilometers) from Earth. The weather at Jezero Crater is expected to be sunny with a high of about 7 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 14 degrees Celsius).
The rover has instructions to perform remote science and take images of a place in Jezero Crater called “Jenkins Gap.” And people on the mission team are expected to take at least one moment to recall where they were and how they felt two years ago, when Perseverance landed on Mars.
NASA, ESA, CSA, I. Labbe (Swinburne University of Technology) and R. Bezanson (University of Pittsburgh). Image processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
NASA’s Webb Uncovers New Details in Pandora’s Cluster (News Release - February 15)
Astronomers have revealed the latest deep field image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, featuring never-before-seen details in a region of space known as Pandora’s Cluster (Abell 2744). Webb’s view displays three clusters of galaxies – already massive – coming together to form a megacluster.
The combined mass of the galaxy clusters creates a powerful gravitational lens, a natural magnification effect of gravity, allowing much more distant galaxies in the early universe to be observed by using the cluster like a magnifying glass.
Only Pandora’s central core has previously been studied in detail by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. By combining Webb’s powerful infrared instruments with a broad mosaic view of the region’s multiple areas of lensing, astronomers aimed to achieve a balance of breadth and depth that will open up a new frontier in the study of cosmology and galaxy evolution.
“The ancient myth of Pandora is about human curiosity and discoveries that delineate the past from the future, which I think is a fitting connection to the new realms of the universe Webb is opening up, including this deep-field image of Pandora’s Cluster,” said astronomer Rachel Bezanson of the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, co-principal investigator on the “Ultradeep NIRSpec and NIRCam ObserVations before the Epoch of Reionization” (UNCOVER) program to study the region.
“When the images of Pandora’s Cluster first came in from Webb, we were honestly a little star-struck,” said Bezanson. “There was so much detail in the foreground cluster and so many distant lensed galaxies, I found myself getting lost in the image. Webb exceeded our expectations.”
The new view of Pandora’s Cluster stitches four Webb snapshots together into one panoramic image, displaying roughly 50,000 sources of near-infrared light.
In addition to magnification, gravitational lensing distorts the appearance of distant galaxies, so they look very different than those in the foreground. The galaxy cluster “lens” is so massive that it warps the fabric of space itself, enough for light from distant galaxies that passes through that warped space to also take on a warped appearance.
Astronomer Ivo Labbe of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, co-principal investigator on the UNCOVER program, said that in the lensing core to the lower right in the Webb image, which has never been imaged by Hubble, Webb revealed hundreds of distant lensed galaxies that appear like faint arced lines in the image. Zooming in on the region reveals more and more of them.
“Pandora’s Cluster, as imaged by Webb, shows us a stronger, wider, deeper, better lens than we have ever seen before,” Labbe said. “My first reaction to the image was that it was so beautiful, it looked like a galaxy formation simulation. We had to remind ourselves that this was real data, and we are working in a new era of astronomy now.”
The UNCOVER team used Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) to capture the cluster with exposures lasting 4-6 hours, for a total of about 30 hours of observing time. The next step is to meticulously go through the imaging data and select galaxies for follow-up observation with the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), which will provide precise distance measurements, along with other detailed information about the lensed galaxies’ compositions, providing new insights into the early era of galaxy assembly and evolution.
The UNCOVER team expects to make these NIRSpec observations in the summer of 2023.
In the meantime, all of the NIRCam photometric data has been publicly released so that other astronomers can become familiar with it and plan their own scientific studies with Webb’s rich datasets. “We are committed to helping the astronomy community make the best use of the fantastic resource we have in Webb,” said UNCOVER co-investigator Gabriel Brammer of the Niels Bohr Institute’s Cosmic Dawn Center at the University of Copenhagen. “This is just the beginning of all the amazing Webb science to come.”
Hubble and @NASAWebb have both studied Pandora's Cluster in great detail, revealing gravitational lensing – which occurs when a massive object's gravity warps and magnifies the light coming from more distant objects behind it. ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/eCPBaVBssG
Only the center core of Pandora’s Cluster (or Abell 2744) has been previously studied in detail by @NASAHubble. Webb’s powerful view fills in the gaps, providing astronomers a much broader and deeper look at this region. pic.twitter.com/klbM7fTQqY
