Quantum fluctuations in science, space and society
Author:Alan Boyle
Mastermind of Cosmic Log, contributor to GeekWire and Universe Today, author of "The Case for Pluto: How a Little Planet Made a Big Difference," past president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.
An array of images shows Pluto from all sides, as seen by NASA’s New Horizons probe over the course of one full Plutonian day (6.4 Earth days) from July 7 to 13. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)
The bright heart of Pluto has been burned into our consciousness, thanks to scads of high-resolution pictures. But a new set of images from NASA’s New Horizons mission provides an all-around view of the dwarf planet, including the splotchy shapes that went out of view days before the time of closest approach on July 14.
Another 10-picture set shows Pluto’s biggest moon, Charon, from all sides.
The imagery was captured over the course of a full Plutonian day, which is 6.4 Earth days long. New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager and the Ralph / Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera were trained on the icy worlds as the distance to Pluto decreased from 5 million miles on July 7 to 400,000 miles on July 13.
An artist’s conception shows NASA’s Orion capsule in flight, with a silvery, metallic-based coating bonded to the capsule’s back shell tiles. (Credit: NASA)
NASA has released new artwork that reflects the latest look for its Orion deep-space crew vehicle – and it’s highly reflective.
Orion’s shiny back shell isn’t just for show: In Thursday’s update, NASA explains that the silvery, metallic-based thermal control coating is designed to reduce heat loss when the spacecraft is pointed toward the dark chill of outer space, and limit high temperatures when it’s exposed to the sun.
“You’re trying to hit this sweet spot because when you’re looking at the sun, you don’t want to get too hot, and then when you’re not looking at the sun and instead in darkness, you don’t want to lose all the heat that the spacecraft generates,” John Kowal, NASA’s thermal protection system lead for Orion, explained in the update.
Recreational drones are expected to face new registration requirements. (Photo via Chase Jarvis)
The head of the Federal Aviation Administration says the interim rules for registering recreational drones are likely to be issued next month, just in time for the holiday season.
FAA Administrator Michael Huerta’s update on the registration process, provided in a blog post, comes just as a task force is wrapping up its recommendations for setting up the registration system. Huerta says the task force will deliver its report to the FAA on Saturday.
The main recommendations have already come to light, thanks to leaks from the task force.
The big reveal comes when engineer and one-time spaceflier Howard Wolowitz (played by Simon Helberg) reluctantly joins his wife as well as his pal Raj and his girlfriend to help with Thanksgiving dinner at a homeless shelter. Howard gets stuck washing the dishes, but loses control of his sink sprayer when he sees Musk walk in with a load of dirty plates.
“What are you doing here?!” Howard asks.
“I’m washing dishes … I was on the turkey line, but I got demoted for being too generous with the gravy,” Musk replies.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard prototype spaceship lifts off for a test flight in April. (Blue Origin photo)
Even as Jeff Bezos celebrates past achievements in spaceflight, he’s looking forward to seeing his Blue Origin space venture make future achievements.
The next flight test of Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship should come “very soon,” Bezos said Thursday at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, after a ceremony marking the arrival of historic Saturn V rocket engine parts that his Bezos Expeditions team recovered from the Atlantic two years ago.
“We’re ready and excited to fly again,” Bezos said.
Billionare Jeff Bezos beams as Allison Loveland, a collection specialist at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, unwraps an Apollo F1 rocket engine injection plate. Geoff Nunn, the museum’s adjunct curator for space history, stands by to the left. (GeekWire photo by Alan Boyle)
Even Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos got misty-eyed at Seattle’s Museum of Flight during Thursday’s unveiling of rocket engine parts from the Apollo moonshots.
“I always do,” he told GeekWire afterward.
It’s not just the fact that Bezos has been a space fan since the age of 5. He funded the Bezos Expeditions voyage that recovered hundreds of parts from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, 14,000 feet down – and he was aboard the ship when the mangled 40-year-old parts were brought up from the deep in 2013.
It was Bezos who asked NASA to let some of the artifacts go on exhibit in his hometown museum. This summer, the space agency gave its OK. So Bezos was all smiles when he showed off some of the shrink-wrapped remains from the Saturn V rockets that sent Apollo 12 and Apollo 16 to the moon.
An autonomous Ford Focus is put through its paces at a Michigan test facility. (Credit: Ford)
Have you ridden a self-driving Ford lately? They’re not on the market yet, but Ford President and CEO Mark Fields has been quoted as saying fully autonomous cars could be available for use on U.S. streets in four years’ time – and Ford is already experimenting with them in Michigan.
According to a Re/code report, Fields told reporters in San Francisco that Ford should be able to offer vehicles on that time frame that can operate autonomously on roads where high-definition maps are available.
Regulatory and legal issues are likely to be the main sticking points. “Technology tends to lead all that,” Fields said.
Ford has been testing robo-vehicles for more than a decade, and last week the automaker announced that it’s putting an autonomous Ford Fusion through its paces in a simulated real-world urban environment at the University of Michigan’s 32-acre Mcity research facility. It’s one more sign that Ford won’t take a back seat to Google and Apple in the fast-developing driverless landscape.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches the DSCOVR satellite in February. (Credit: SpaceX)
SpaceX is poised to win an Air Force national security launch contract by default because its archrival, United Launch Alliance, has dropped out of the competition.
ULA said this week that it decided not to bid on the Air Force contract for launching a GPS-3 satellite in 2018, leaving SpaceX as the sole bidder. The contract was the first of its kind to come up since the Air Force certified SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket to launch national security payloads.
Reuters quoted ULA’s chief executive officer, Tory Bruno, as saying that the Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture couldn’t submit a compliant bid because of a federally mandated ban on the use of Russian-built RD-180 engines for national security launches. ULA uses the RD-180s on the first stage of its Atlas 5 rocket, which has traditionally been used for such launches. A defense authorization bill currently under consideration in Congress includes a provision that would give ULA access to four more of the engines, but that bill has not yet been signed into law.
Bruno also told Reuters that the criteria for bid selection don’t give ULA enough credit for its record of reliability and schedule certainty, and that the accounting procedures for separating the funds for GPS-3 from other government contracts were too onerous.
Monday was the deadline for submitting a bid for the GPS-3 launch. SpaceX declined to comment on the prospects for the contract, which is thought to be worth in the neighborhood of $70 million to $80 million.
An artist’s conception shows the Stratolaunch jet landing. (Credit: Vulcan Aerospace)
The world’s largest airplane is taking shape for Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Aerospace venture, but it’s not yet clear what kind of rocket would be launched from the Stratolaunch super-jumbo jet.
The uncertainties reflect transitions taking place at Vulcan Aerospace as well as in the launch industry. Last month, the venture’s president, Chuck Beames, said he was still in the midst of defining where Stratolaunch fit in the context of Vulcan’s wider “NextSpace” vision. Meanwhile, there’s been a switch in the CEO spot for the Stratolaunch Systems subsidiary, from Gary Wentz to Jean Floyd.
The past few months also have been marked by rapid shifts in the satellite launch industry – particularly for small to medium-size satellites, which are supposed to be in the sweet spot for Stratolaunch’s air-launch system. The Wall Street Journal quotes unnamed aerospace industry officials as saying those shifts could threaten the project’s overall viability.
In a statement emailed to GeekWire, Vulcan Aerospace said the Journal’s report was “inaccurate” and “based on nothing more than rumors and speculation, not facts.” The statement went on to sketch out Vulcan’s vision of transforming space transportation to low Earth orbit by changing the current model for launching payloads into space.
PrecisionHawk is using its Lancaster drone to investigate the options for letting unmanned air vehicles fly beyond the view of their operators. (Credit: PrecisionHawk)
Should commercial operators be able to fly their drones beyond their line of sight? The question is a big deal for Amazon as well as Walmart, Google and other companies that want to use robotic air vehicles to deliver goods to consumers – but the Federal Aviation Administration needs convincing.
Now the FAA is trying to nail down an answer, thanks to a series of field tests known as Project Pathfinder.
Project Pathfinder is actually a quartet of test programs, aimed at determining the safety of extended drone operations in four scenarios.
