Space News thread

[Takeovers]

There is a dedicated YouTube live stream from NASA, beginning 18 minutes from now. Don't know if the 2 streams have identical content.

[harrybarracuda]

According to this it's doing 11,000+ mph

[Takeovers]

Soyuz has another technical problem. A Soyuz capsule is leaking a substantial amount of ammonia coolant liquid. It is not yet known if this will affect the ability of this capsule to bring cosmonauts and astronauts back to Earth or if they need to depart soon, ahead of schedule. There are also concerns that ammonia may attach to the outer surface of ISS parts and cause problems. Long term it would evaporate.

A Russian spacecraft started leaking uncontrollably on Wednesday night | Ars Technica

A Russian spacewalk was canceled at the last minute on Wednesday night when a spacecraft attached to the International Space Station unexpectedly sprang a large leak.


Cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin were dressed in spacesuits, with the airlock depressurized, when flight controllers told them to standby while the leak in a Soyuz spacecraft was investigated. The spacewalk was subsequently called off shortly before 10pm ET (03:00 UTC Thursday).


The leak appears to have originated in an external cooling loop located at the aft end of the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft. Public affairs officer Rob Navias, who was commentating on the spacewalk for NASA Television, characterized the spacecraft as leaking "fairly substantially." Video of the coolant leak showed particles streaming continuously from the Soyuz, a rather remarkable sight.


At no time were any of the crew members on the space station in danger, including Prokopyev and Petelin, their fellow cosmonaut Anna Kikina; NASA astronauts Frank Rubio, Nicole Mann, and Josh Cassada; and Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata. The leak was external to the station, not inside the orbiting laboratory.


However, the leak does raise questions about the viability of the Soyuz spacecraft, which is the ride back to Earth for Prokopyev, Petelin, and NASA's Frank Rubio. They launched to the space station back in September on board this Soyuz vehicle and are due to return to Earth next spring. After three hours Monday night the leak remained ongoing, showing no sign of abating.


The Soyuz is a hardy spacecraft, so it is plausible that there may not be any impact on its ability to undock from the space station and return to Earth. However, if Russian engineers—and those from NASA, considering that Rubio will be on board—determine there is an issue, a replacement Soyuz would need to be flown up to the station. Soyuz vehicles do have the capability to launch and dock autonomously. However, it would mean that, until such time as the replacement spacecraft arrived, the three crew members would have no emergency escape vehicle.

A screenshot of a live video from the ISS, showing the spray of coolant flying.

The other four astronauts on board the station flew up on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft in October. That vehicle cannot accommodate seven people for a return to Earth.


Given the long duration of the leak, NASA is also likely to have concerns about the impact of all that ammonia on space station surfaces and those of other docked vehicles. Much of the ammonia would probably boil off the surface of the hardware over time, but it will certainly complicate operations as the US space agency works toward conducting a spacewalk of its own on December 19 to install new solar arrays.

[Takeovers]

Scott Manley has already made a video about it. Nothing really new in it, mostly the same speculation. But a few very clear video sequences about the cooling liquid spraying out. Sure worth a watch, if for this only.

[harrybarracuda]

Ariane's Vega C goes tits up. Starts around the 35 minute mark.

What goes up must come down...

Vega rapidly losing altitude, lost telemetry at T+6:51 at 47km altitude 3.12km/s, down from apogee of 110km velocity 3.29km/s at T+4:39,

[sabang]

Regarding astropolitics, the authors note that by the time Beijing was able to contribute to the International Space Station, U.S. Congress had prevented it from doing so.


The International Space Station is no longer the only place where humans can live in orbit.

On Nov. 29, the Shenzhou 15 mission launched from China’s Gobi Desert carrying three taikonauts – the Chinese word for astronauts.

Six hours later, they reached their destination, China’s recently completed space station, called Tiangong, which means “heavenly palace” in Mandarin. The three taikonauts replaced the existing crew that helped wrap up construction.

With this successful mission, China has become just the third nation to operate a permanent space station.

China’s space station is an achievement that solidifies the country’s position alongside the U.S. and Russia as one of the world’s top three space powers. As scholars of space law and space policy who lead the Indiana University Ostrom Workshop’s Space Governance Program, we have been following the development of the Chinese space station with interest.

Unlike the collaborative, U.S.-led International Space Station, Tiangong is entirely built and run by China. The successful opening of the station is the beginning of some exciting science. But the station also highlights the country’s policy of self-reliance and is an important step for China toward achieving larger space ambitions among a changing landscape of power dynamics in space.

The Tiangong space station is much smaller than the International Space Station and consists of three modules. (Shujianyang/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA)

Capabilities of a Chinese Station

The Tiangong space station is the culmination of three decades of work on the Chinese manned space program. The station is 180 feet (55 meters) long and is comprised of three modules that were launched separately and connected in space.

These include one core module where a maximum of six taikonauts can live and two experiment modules for a total of 3,884 cubic feet (110 cubic meters) of space, about one-fifth the size of the International Space Station. The station also has an external robotic arm, which can support activities and experiments outside the station, and three docking ports for resupply vehicles and manned spacecraft.

Like China’s aircraft carriers and other spacecraft, Tiangong is based on a Soviet-era design – it is pretty much a copy of the Soviet Mir space station from the 1980s. But the Tiangong station has been heavily modernized and improved.

The Chinese space station is slated to stay in orbit for 15 years, with plans to send two six-month crewed missions and two cargo missions to it annually. The science experiments have already begun, with a planned study involving monkey reproduction commencing in the station’s biological test cabinets. Whether the monkeys will cooperate is an entirely different matter.

This image from a video feed at the Beijing Aerospace Center on Nov. 17, shows taikonauts working on the Tiangong station. (Xinhua News Agency via Getty Images)

Science & a Steppingstone

The main function of the Tiangong station is to perform .

Tiangong is strictly Chinese made and managed, but China has an open invitation for other nations to collaborate on experiments aboard Tiangong. So far, nine projects from 17 countries have been selected.

Although the new station is small compared to the 16 modules of the International Space Station, Tiangong and the science done aboard will help support China’s future space missions.

In December 2023, China is planning to launch a new space telescope called Xuntian. This telescope will map stars and supermassive black holes among other projects with a resolution about the same as the Hubble Space Telescope but with a wider view. The telescope will periodically dock with the station for maintenance.

China also has plans to launch multiple missions to Mars and nearby comets and asteroids with the goal of bringing samples back to Earth. And perhaps most notably, China has announced plans to build a joint Moon base with Russia – though no timeline for this mission has been set.

The three-person crew of taikonauts greets the crew already aboard the Tiangong station in early December.Astropolitics
A new era in space is unfolding. The Tiangong station is beginning its life just as the International Space Station, after more than 30 years in orbit, is set to be decommissioned by 2030.

The International Space Station is the classic example of collaborative ideals in space – even at the height of the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union came together to develop and launch the beginnings of the space station in the early 1990s. By comparison, China and the U.S. have not been so jovial in their orbital dealings.

In the 1990s, when China was still launching U.S. satellites into orbit, concerns emerged that China was accidentally acquiring – or stealing – U.S. technology. These concern in part led to the Wolf Amendment, passed by Congress in 2011, which prohibits NASA from collaborating with China in any capacity.

China’s space program was not mature enough to be part of the construction of the International Space Station in the 1990s and early 2000s. By the time China had the ability to contribute to the International Space Station, the Wolf Amendment prevented it from doing so.

It remains to be seen how the map of space collaboration will change in the coming years. The U.S.-led Artemis Program that aims to build a self-sustaining habitat on the Moon is open to all nations, and 19 countries have joined as partners so far.

China has also recently opened its joint Moon mission with Russia to other nations. This was partly driven by cooling Chinese-Russian relations but also due to the fact that because of the war in Ukraine, Sweden, France and the European Space Agency canceled planned missions with Russia.

As tensions on Earth rise between China, Russia and the West, and some of that jockeying spills over into space, it remains to be seen how the decommissioning of the International Space Station and operation of the Tiangong station will influence the China-U.S. relationship.

An event like the famous handshake between U.S. astronauts and Russian cosmonauts while orbiting Earth in 1975 is a long way off, but collaboration between the U.S. and China could do much to cool tensions on and above the Earth.

Eytan Tepper is visiting assistant professor of space governance at Indiana University and Scott Shackelford is professor of business law and ethics at Indiana University.

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/12/1...new-space-era/

[Simon43]

^^^
When the 3 new taikonauts went up to the Chinese Space Station around 6th December, they took with them a 'cubesat' designated CAS-10. Once on board the space station, they 'opened the window' and chucked out the cubesat, which then began transmitting a morse code beacon signal around 435 MHz.

So I fired up my homebrew UHF antenna (it's the smaller of the 2 helical antennas):



... and radio, and got a nice strong signal from this new satellite as it passed overhead.

http://onlinescienceteacher.com/CAS-10.wav

The pitch of the morse code varies because of the doppler shift, and also because I didn't have time to fire up my doppler shift tracking software (gpredict), which would have automatically adjusted the radio receiver frequency - I was doing it manually!

[harrybarracuda]

they 'opened the window' and chucked out the cubesat

So throwing their rubbish out of the window then.

[Takeovers]

Ariane's Vega C goes tits up.

Vega had some issues. They made a redesign which now had its second launch. The first launch, a test, worked well. Now this, the first commercial launch with customer payload, failed. After tje issues with the first Vega version this is a major setback. 3 out of the last 8 launches failed.

Even worse, the new second stage, the one that failed, is also the second stage of the upcoming, already much delayed new flagship Ariane 6. At least they know now the problem and can hopefully solve it before the first Ariane 6 launch.

They said in the launch video that Vega has quite a number of launch contracts lined up. I wonder if some of those will now jump ship and fly with SpaceX Falcon 9. Probably depends on how fast Arianespace can come up with a solution and do a new test flight.

[misskit]

NASA’s Mars InSight Mission Has Died. The Internet Weeps.

Saying goodbye is never easy, even when it’s directed toward a 794-pound Martian lander that no human has directly laid eyes on since 2018. Still, the internet is awash in obituaries for NASA’s InSight lander, the first spacecraft to document a marsquake, as it signed off for the last time. A NASA news release on Wednesday officially marked the end of the InSight mission, though the lander’s swan song began days earlier.


On Monday, the InSight mission’s official Twitter account posted a farewell message that could only be described as giving “my battery is low and it’s getting dark.”

InSight’s mission team knew the end was…near (not going to make the easy pun) for several months. Like its predecessor Opportunity, Martian dust covered InSight’s solar panels and led to its demise—in May, the Associated Press reported that InSight was generating just 10 percent of the power it had once been able to.


Although it could never realize its full potential, InSight is shuffling off this mortal coil having inarguably added volumes to our understanding of Mars. Its seismometer measured over 1,300 marsquakes, helping researchers understand the phenomena and infer the size and contents of Mars’ layers. But another facet of the lander—a heat probe called “the mole” designed to dig multiple feet below the Martian surface—came up short, only making it a few inches before it was stymied by clumping soil.


“InSight has more than lived up to its name,” Laurie Leshin, the director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in the news release. “Yes, it’s sad to say goodbye, but InSight’s legacy will live on, informing and inspiring.”

According to NASA, the determination that the mission officially ended—and, by extension, the declaration that the lander is in “dead bus” state, the engineering equivalent of calling something “clinically dead”—was made once the lander missed two communication sessions in a row with a spacecraft orbiting Mars. InSight’s last communication with Earth occurred on December 15. NASA’s international Deep Space Network will continue listening for any signs of activity from InSight, “just in case,” although it is unlikely to hear from it.


Does this make you weirdly emotional? You’re not alone. Well wishes poured in from myriad corners of the internet, and NASA’s website allows you to memorialize InSight’s short but eventful life by sending InSight a digital postcard with some of its most iconic images. Bruce Banerdt, a geophysics researcher at JPL who served as the principal investigator of the mission, called InSight a “friend and colleague” that has “earned its richly deserved retirement.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/nasas-...-over?ref=home

[Simon43]

...
Like its predecessor Opportunity, Martian dust covered InSight’s solar panels and led to its demise—in May, the Associated Press reported that InSight was generating just 10 percent of the power it had once been able to.
...

What a total cock-up, not once but twice. Surely after the demise of Opportunity, design engineers for Insight could have figured out a way of removing the dust from the solar panels, such as incorporating a mechanical vibrator that activates daily to shake the solar panels rapidly and to hence remove any dust.

[Takeovers]

What a total cock-up, not once but twice. Surely after the demise of Opportunity, design engineers for Insight could have figured out a way of removing the dust from the solar panels, such as incorporating a mechanical vibrator that activates daily to shake the solar panels rapidly and to hence remove any dust.

I don't disagree. It is what happens when a mission is pressed into a mass budget. InSight was not a flagship mission. It was budget limited which dictated the low lander mass. The required mission time was very limited and InSight exceeded that.

BTW Spirit and Opportunity had a target mission time of 3 month. They lasted many years, exceeded even the wildest optimistic expectations.

The real big blunder of InSight was the drill that failed to get into the surface and could not achieve its mission at all. The drill was designed by German DLR teams to NASA estimates what ground properties would be. It would have worked when those properties were as expected by NASA. But the ground was different and the drill failed completely. With a little more mass budget a drill could have been designed that would work in a wider range of ground properties. The drill and the sensors intended to be deployed were the core mission.

[Takeovers]

I want to introduce a new space startup company, Stoke Space.

Stoke Space / 100% reusable rockets / USA

A small company that wants to develop a fully and rapidly reusable launch vehicle. Similar goals as SpaceX with Starship but a small launch vehicle. They begin development with the second stage, which is the hard part.

They just released a video.



I can't judge their chance of success but unlike some other startups I at least don't see any obvious show stoppers. I wish them the best.

[harrybarracuda]

There is a super little documentary about Opportunity and Spirit called Good Night Oppy.

They did so much more than was ever expected.

Good Night Oppy (2022) [2160p] [WEBRip] [5.1] (download torrent) - TPB[2160p]_[WEBRip]_[5.1]

[cyrille]

Great images from the Webb telescope.

Gallery

[Takeovers]

Follow up to the leaking Soyuz 22 issue. Official declarations will be on Jan. 11 but the decision is now made.

Soyuz 22 is not safe for landing with crew. Repacement seats will be sent up in February. Soyuz 23 will launch with 1 cosmonaut, the next SpaceX Dragon will fly with 3 astronauts instead of 4, both in February. However if there is a disastrous event at the ISS in the meantime, they will attempt landing the 3 people on Soyuz 22, with risk of failure. The 3 crew of Soyuz 22 will have to stay 6 months longer than initially planned, until their new rides departs on schedule.

[Topper]

Damn, a six month extension....I bet that's got some astronauts pissed off.

[david44]

Perhaps the AFU may shoot it down and any Russian aircraft on re entry as a signal to Putin to stop killing and start talking

[malmomike77]

Virgin Orbit launch today – live: UK’s first-ever rocket mission to blast off from Cornwall spaceport

The UK is about to play host to an unprecedented space mission, which could turn the country into a home of new rocket launches.


It will be the first ever rocket launch from UK soil, as well as the first time that satellites have been launched from Europe.


Several satellites are due to be blasted into space on Monday night from Cornwall Airport near Newquay.


If all goes to plan the launch will take place at Spaceport Cornwall as part of the Start Me Up mission.


The initial window for the historic mission will open at 10.16pm local UK time on Monday, with additional back-up dates continuing into mid and late January.

https://www.independent.co.uk/space/rocket-launch-today-cornwall-uk-virgin-b2258491.html

[misskit]

At first I thought this photo was a joke. It isn’t.


Dead NASA satellite returns to Earth after 38 years



A defunct NASA satellite has fallen back to Earth after 38 years orbiting the planet.


The Earth Radiation Budget Satellite, known as ERBS, was launched in 1984 aboard space shuttle Challenger.


Until 2005, data from ERBS helped researchers investigate how Earth absorbed and radiated energy from the Sun, and measured ozone, water vapor, nitrogen dioxide and aerosol concentrations in the Earth’s stratosphere.


The US Department of Defense confirmed that ERBS reentered Earth’s atmosphere on Sunday at 11:04 p.m. ET over the Bering Sea, according to a statement from NASA.


It wasn’t immediately clear whether parts of the satellite survived re-entry. Most of the satellite was expected to burn up as it moved through the atmosphere. NASA had calculated that the risk of harm coming to anyone on Earth was very low – approximately 1 in 9,400.


The satellite far exceeded its expected two-year life span, operating for a total of 21 years.


An instrument on board ERBS, the Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment II (SAGE II), collected data that confirmed the ozone layer was declining on a global scale, NASA said.


That data helped shape the Montreal Protocol Agreement, an international agreement signed in 1987 by dozens of countries, that resulted in a dramatic decrease around the globe in the use of ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) – chemicals once commonly used in aerosol sprays, refrigeration and air conditioners.


If the ban on CFCs hadn’t been agreed, the world would be on track for a collapse of the ozone layer and an additional 2.5 degrees Celsius of global warming by the end of the century, a 2021 study found.


Today, SAGE III on the International Space Station collects data on the health of the ozone layer.

Dead NASA satellite returns to Earth after 38 years | CNN

[cyrille]

UK space mission fails after rocket 'anomaly' - BBC News

Space mission fails after 'rocket anomaly'.

[misskit]

^^It looks like a do-it-yourself second story built on a mobile home spaceship.

[harrybarracuda]

UK space mission fails after rocket 'anomaly' - BBC News

Space mission fails after 'rocket anomaly'.

Well it was called "Virgin Orbit".

It was never going to go all the way.

[cyrille]

I can't believe Headworx isn't on it like the proverbial car bonnet.

[Takeovers]

At first I thought this photo was a joke. It isn’t.

Not a joke, but it must be a photoshop job. We don't have the means of taking a photo of a satellite in orbit like this. Unless it is from deployment decades back, shortly after separation from the launch vehicle. But I don't think they did this so many years ago.