Cosmic Log
Say it with Pluto? After NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft spotted a heart-shaped region on Pluto, you had to know it was just a matter of time before the dwarf planet made its appearance on a valentine.
Sure enough, this year’s crop of printable Valentine’s Day cards from NASA’s educational Space Place website includes a stylized Pluto.
“You’ll always be in my heart!” the card reads.
Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, is lifting the curtain just a bit on its future plans for rocket engines and spaceflights.
One of the revelations relates to progress on its methane-fueled BE-4 rocket engine, which is on track to provide propulsion for United Launch Alliance’s next-generation Vulcan rocket. Blue Origin tweeted out a picture of the engine’s bell, most likely taken at the company’s production facility in Kent, Wash.:
BE-4 forgings, assemble! Full engine testing later this year to support @ulalaunch Vulcan 1st flight in 2019. pic.twitter.com/BwRX3tmL2X
— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) February 2, 2016
NASA says it’ll send 13 miniaturized satellites – including a pop-up solar sail and a “lunar flashlight” – beyond Earth orbit when it flies its heavy-lift Space Launch System rocket for the first time in 2018.
The main payload for the test flight, known as Exploration Mission-1 or EM-1, is an uncrewed prototype for NASA’s Orion spaceship. The SLS will send Orion into a highly eccentric orbit that ranges beyond the moon and back.
But there’s also room inside the rocket’s adapter ring for a baker’s dozen of CubeSats, boxy spacecraft of a standard size that are becoming increasingly popular for low-cost space missions.
“They’re really on the cutting edge of technology,” NASA Deputy Administrator Dava Newman said today during a news conference at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.
The FBI denies having a secret collection of X-Files like the ones that Mulder and Scully are investigating in “The X-Files” TV series – but you’d expect the alien conspiracy to say that, wouldn’t you?
Whether or not the truth is out there, both the FBI and the CIA have capitalized on the X-Files buzz to rehash some of their, um, more unusual cases. The FBI’s online vault features nine cases having to do with unexplained phenomena, including flying saucer reports, cattle mutilations, ESP and the purported Majestic-12 conspiracy.
The CIA took its turn just in time for this season’s “X-Files” reboot, which continues tonight with what’s said to be the best episode to date. The spooks offered up five flying-saucer surveys from 1952 that would warm the heart of Fox Mulder, the true believer on the fictional FBI’s X-Files team. Five more files, dating from 1949 to 1952, take a skeptical view that’s in keeping with the usual attitude of Mulder’s partner, Dana Scully.
The CIA also threw in its top 10 tips for investigating unidentified flying objects.
When the moon is high in the sky, its gravitational pull warps the atmosphere enough to reduce rainfall ever so slightly. At least that’s the conclusion that researchers from the University of Washington reached after reviewing 15 years of detailed rainfall data.
The evidence is laid out in a paper to be published in Geophysical Research Letters.
Readings from the U.S.-Japanese Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, collected between 1998 and 2012, suggest that rainfall is reduced by about 1 percent if the precipitation falls when the moon is directly overhead or underfoot.
Those findings are in sync with a 2010 study that laid out a similar link between phases of the moon and precipitation. Both papers show that lunar tides have an effect on the atmosphere.
A color-coded map from NASA’s New Horizons mission shows where Pluto’s frozen water is concentrated, just in case we need to fill up our tanks on the way toAlpha Centauri or Planet Nine.
Water ice turns out to be more widespread on the dwarf planet than previously thought, the mission’s researchers reported today. They came to that conclusion after some sophisticated analysis of infrared imagery captured during the New Horizons spacecraft’s flyby last July 14.
Soon after the flyby, the mission team concluded that Pluto possessed mountains of water ice rising as high as 11,000 feet above the icy world’s surface. That conclusion was confirmed in follow-up studies based on the infrared data from the piano-sized probe’s Ralph/LEISA instrument.
LEISA’s survey mapped concentrations of water ice, but scientists figured out that the spectral readings could be thrown off if the frozen water was mixed in with frozen methane. When they modeled the contributions from other types of ice on Pluto’s surface, the resulting map showed wider stretches where water ice should be present.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk says he has his heart set on going into space himself, perhaps in the next four or five years, and organize the first flights to Mars by 2025.
Musk’s travel timetable came out this week during Musk’s chat at the StartmeupHK Festival in Hong Kong. The 44-year-old billionaire said he’d unveil his detailed plan for sending settlers to Mars in September at the International Astronautical Congress in Mexico. That means the SpaceX fans who have been buzzing about the Mars Colonial Transporter may have to just keep buzzing for another eight months or so.
The StartmeupHK talk was as wide-ranging as Musk’s interests, which take in electric cars (as Tesla Motors’ CEO), solar power (as Solar City’s chairman) and the potentialuses and misuses of artificial intelligence (as a backer of the OpenAI foundation). That’s all in addition to his focus on spaceflight and humanity’s interplanetary future.
Musk introduced yet another theme: the prospects for creating brain-computer interfaces that would let you store and retrieve images and other information directly from implants in your head.
It’s been 30 years since the loss of the shuttle Challenger and its crew on Jan. 28, 1986, but its impact is still being felt – sometimes with sadness, sometimes with hope for the future.
Seven astronauts died when the Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after liftoff, due to the failure of an O-ring seal that led to a burn-through in one of the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters. The result was an explosion that flung the orbiter in pieces into the Atlantic Ocean.
The investigation that followed found that the O-ring became brittle at low temperatures, and that the flight should not have launched on that chilly January morning. Investigators learned that “go fever” led mission managers to overrule the engineers who recommended a delay.
The mission’s commander, Dick Scobee, was born in Cle Elum, Wash. Challenger’s other astronauts were Michael Smith, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Greg Jarvis – and Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher in space.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture sent up its New Shepard suborbital spaceship on another flight test to outer-space altitudes today, and brought it back to a safe landing.
The uncrewed flight at Bezos’ West Texas test facility arguably marks the first time that a reusable rocket designed for a vertical landing proved to be actually reusable for space missions.
There are caveats to that claim, to be sure: The SpaceShipOne rocket plane, the X-15 and NASA’s space shuttles have all demonstrated reusability after going into space. Those craft landed horizontally, like an airplane, rather than vertically. In addition, test rockets flown by the DC-X program as well as Masten Space Systems, Armadillo Aerospace and SpaceX have been reused after taking vertical hops. However, those rockets stuck to altltudes below 100 kilometers (62 miles), the internationally accepted boundary of outer space.
Despite all the caveats, Blue Origin’s feat marks a significant step toward flying reusable rocket ships on suborbital space trips on a commercial basis, for tourism as well as for research.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture may have done another flight test, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX is making waves with its rocket progress – but don’t forget about Richard Branson.
“Our spaceship comes back and lands on wheels. Theirs don’t,” the billionaire founder of Virgin Galactic said during a CNBC interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “There’ll be banter like this which will take place, and that’s good. People will have a choice of which spaceships they want to use to go to space.”
Blue Origin is developing spaceships for suborbital as well as orbital trips. In November, Blue Origin’s uncrewed New Shepard test vehicle went into space for the first time and made a successful vertical landing. If all goes well, the company could be flying passengers in two years.
Today there was a torrent of tweets about a possible Blue Origin flight test. First, the Federal Aviation Administration alerted aviators to stay away from the airspace over the company’s test range in West Texas. Then, around midday today, the restrictions were lifted. One Twitter user, Patrick Brown, went so far as to post a picture of what appears to be a rocket trail leading up from the company’s test range in West Texas.
Blue Origin kept mum. “Unfortunately, Blue Origin doesn’t have anything to contribute at this time,” the company said in a statement emailed to GeekWire.