Cosmic Log
It’s pretty clear by now that a space rock ranging somewhere in size between an acorn and a football hit the darkened moon during Jan. 20’s total lunar eclipse. But were there two?
Confirmations of the first impact, and reports about the second, have been circulating through the scientific community and the Twitterverse over the past couple of days.
Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture sent eight NASA-sponsored scientific payloads to the edge of space and back on its New Shepard suborbital spaceship, marking another step toward putting people on board.
The rocket lifted off into clear, chilly skies from Blue Origin’s launch site in West Texas at 9:08 a.m. CT (7:08 a.m. PT). Minutes after launch, New Shepard’s gumdrop-shaped capsule separated from the hydrogen-fueled booster and headed to a maximum unofficial altitude of 350,775 feet (66 miles or 107 kilometers). That’s well above the 100-kilometer Karman Line that currently serves as the internationally accepted boundary of space.
The reusable booster maneuvered itself back to a landing on a pad not far from where it was launched, while the capsule deployed its parachutes and drifted back down to the desert terrain.
“Welcome home, New Shepard. Wow!” launch commentator Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin’s head of astronaut strategy and sales, said during today’s webcast.
In a follow-up tweet, Blue Origin said the 10-minute, 15-second mission “looks to have been a wholly successful flight.”
“A perfect day,” Bezos said in an Instagram posting:
Boeing says it has successfully completed the first test flight of a prototype for its autonomous passenger air vehicle, which could start carrying riders as early as next year.
The test was executed on Jan. 22 at an airport in Manassas, Va., near the headquarters of Aurora Flight Sciences, the Boeing subsidiary that’s been developing the electric-powered, vertical takeoff-and-landing aircraft, also known as an eVTOL craft. Boeing NeXt, the business unit that leads Boeing’s urban air mobility efforts, is in charge of the test program.
The uncrewed flight lasted less than a minute and involved a controlled takeoff, hover and landing. The maneuvers were designed to test the prototype’s autonomous functions and ground control systems. A test dummy was strapped inside the cockpit for the ride.
Boeing said future flights will test forward, wing-borne flight, as well as the transition phase between vertical flight and forward flight. That transition is considered the most challenging mode for high-speed eVTOL aircraft.
NASA says a medical issue is forcing a switch in the crew for the Boeing Starliner space taxi’s first crewed test flight to the International Space Station, currently scheduled for no earlier than August.
Astronaut Eric Boe will no longer be on the flight due to unspecified medical reasons, NASA announced today. Instead, three-time spaceflier Mike Fincke will take Boe’s place alongside NASA’s Nicole Mann and Boeing test pilot Chris Ferguson.
Fincke will begin training for the Starliner flight immediately, while Boe will replace Fincke as assistant to the chief for commercial crew in the astronaut office at Johnson Space Center in Texas, NASA said.
Today’s personnel switch represents the first shift in a lineup for commercial crew flights that was announced last August.
The much-anticipated first commercial airline flights from Paine Field in Everett, Wash., have been postponed until March 4 at the earliest, due to the partial government shutdown.
Alaska Airlines had been planning to start service at Paine Field on Feb. 11, pending government approval. But it turns out that the previous sentence’s dependent clause carried more than the usual weight.
“Several key groups within the Federal Aviation Administration, which conduct crucial certification and oversight work required for the start of commercial air service at Paine Field, are subject to furloughs because of the government shutdown,” Alaska Airlines explained today in a blog posting. “The FAA’s work on the environmental assessment continues. However, essential work groups within the FAA are furloughed and further delays are expected if the shutdown continues.”
In light of the snag, Alaska said “the responsible action” was to postpone the start of scheduled service until March 4 — again, “subject to receipt of all required government approvals.”
Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, says it’s scheduling the next uncrewed test flight of its New Shepard suborbital space ship for Jan. 23. Liftoff had been postponed several times, due to technical concerns as well as worries about high winds at the West Texas launch site.
It’s been a year since a squadron of underwater robots was sent out to monitor the underside of Antarctica’s Dotson Ice Shelf, and researchers report that the whole squad has survived the harsh southern winter.
Except for one unfortunate battery-powered drone, that is.
“The one that hasn’t come back, it could be any number of things,” said Jason Gobat, a senior principal oceanographer at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory. Maybe something broke, or maybe it got stuck in the silt at the bottom of the sea.
The good news is that two other Seaglider drones are continuing to transmit data via satellite. Four free-floating EM-APEX probes have been heard from as well.
Craig Lee, another senior principal oceanographer at the UW lab, said getting useful scientific data from the robo-squadron amounts to mission success for the research project known as Ocean Robots Beneath Ice Shelves, or ORBIS.
The experiment, supported with nearly $2 million in funding from Seattle’s Paul G. Allen Philanthropies, has shown that the robots can use acoustic signals to navigate their way under the ice shelf, monitor the water that flows into and out of the ice shelf’s subsurface cavity, and keep operating for a whole year.
Boeing’s moves to automate its manufacturing processes and streamline the quality assurance process for its airplanes has sparked discussions with union officials over the effect on jobs.
The controversy came to light in the current issue of Aero Mechanic — the newspaper published by the International Association of Machinists’ District 751, which represents Boeing assembly workers — and in The Seattle Times.
Union leaders are concerned about a Boeing campaign known as “Quality Transformation,” which relies on automated processes such as robotic riveting and precision machining to cut down on manufacturing defects. Boeing says such processes make airplane assembly more “mistake-proof.”
January’s usual weather conditions — with chilly temperatures for much of America and cloudy skies in the Pacific Northwest — aren’t exactly ideal for tracking a total lunar eclipse, but Jan. 20’s “Super Blood Wolf Moon” actually lived up to the hype.
Photographers across much of the country braved the cold to get some jaw-dropping snapshots and time-lapse views. Even in Seattle, where the weather forecast wasn’t promising, the hours-long progression from supersized full moon to a ruddy darkness and back to lunar brightness unfolded in mostly clear skies.
The National Reconnaissance Office’s latest classified spy satellite, NROL-71, was launched today by a United Launch Alliance Delta 4 Heavy rocket into California’s sunny skies.
Today’s trouble-free countdown at Vandenberg Air Force Base came in contrast to the string of technical glitches that held up liftoff by more than a month.
The original launch date had been set for Dec. 7, but the technical issues — including concerns about a hydrogen leak on one of the engine sections — forced repeated delays. One memorable delay came just as a fireball was sighted over the region, sparking a momentary mystery.
Plenty of mystery still surrounds the NROL-71 mission: Outside experts suspect that the payload could be the first of what’s known as the Block 5 KH-11 spy satellites — next-generation cousins of the Hubble Space Telescope that are tasked with watching Earth rather than the heavens.
Neither United Launch Alliance nor the NRO is saying anything on that score.