Archive for the ‘Space News’ Category
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February 2nd, 2023
They are small…and they are impactful.
Since 2013, the fight heritage for small spacecraft has increased by over 30% and has become the primary source to space access for commercial, government, private, and academic institutions.
The overall capability of small spacecraft continues to mature, with technologies still being developed to make, for example, deep space SmallSat missions more routine and more cost effective.
NASA’s Small Spacecraft Systems Virtual Institute has issued the 2022 State-of-the-Art Small Spacecraft Technology report.
This informative, fact-filled report contains an overview of current state-of-the-art SmallSat technologies and their development status as discussed in open literature.
This report — State-of-the-Art Small Spacecraft Technology — comes from the Small Spacecraft Systems Virtual Institute at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California.
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/2022_soa_full.pdf
Also, go to this website to review the work of the virtual institute at:
https://www.nasa.gov/smallsat-institute/small-spacecraft-body-of-knowledge
Posted in 
Credit: Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU)
There is a lengthy legacy of flying saucer folklore, of alien interlopers from afar; of governmental cover-ups tied to calls for “full disclosure” – an exposé that would divulge our Earth is, indeed, a stopover for starfolk whisking throughout the universe.
Tales of recovered vehicles and occupants, those poor souls that after crossing interstellar space discover a leak in brake fluid causing their craft to auger into our planet.
It goes on and on.
Unclassified report
The upsurge of public and government interest in Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), now tagged as Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP), is palpable.
That fact is underscored by the January 12 release of an unclassified version of a Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) report on UAP to Congress. It’s a required-by-law annual report.
The ODNI document emphasizes that UAP reporting is on the rise. “This increased reporting allows more opportunities to apply rigorous analysis and resolve events,” the report states.
Office of resolution
ODNI coordinated its report with the newly established All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), stood up last July under the Department of Defense to harmonize efforts across the U.S. federal landscape to help study UAP.
AARO’s mission involves looking into “anomalous, unidentified space, airborne, submerged and transmedium objects.”
Then there’s the signed into law 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that includes U.S. lawmaker lingo calling for more UAP and UFO insight.
Also diving in on UAP is a NASA blue ribbon study group tasked, in part, to scope out how NASA can use data to move the scientific understanding of UAPs forward.
Areas of research
Recently, the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies noted that some of the key areas stipulated by the U.S. Congress in the 2022 NDAA, items to be included in the UAP report by ODNI, did not make it into the public version presented to Congress.
These are also areas of research that future reports should address a number of items “as openly as possible,” the Coalition explains in a recent statement, such as:
- The number of reported incidents over restricted air space, and an analysis of such incidents.
- An assessment of any UAP activity that can be attributed to one or more adversarial foreign governments.
- Identification of any incidents or patterns.
- An update on any efforts underway on the ability to capture or exploit discovered UAP.
- The number of reported incidents, and descriptions thereof, associated with military nuclear assets, including strategic nuclear weapons and nuclear-powered ships and submarines.
- The number of reported incidents, and descriptions thereof, associated with nuclear material with weapons storage or civilian nuclear facilities.
The Coalition adds that it looks forward to the information that the ODNI and AARO “will be sharing with the public in the future, and is grateful that the U.S. government agrees that UAP are a critical area of scientific study.”
Daniel Evans, the assistant deputy associate administrator for research at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (Right) gave list of NASA’s UAP panelists to Bill Nelson, NASA chief, for his approval.
Image credit: NASA
Independent study team
For its part, NASA announced in June 2022 that an independent study team was being assembled to look into the UAP state of affairs.
A confab of 16 individuals, including scientists, aeronautical experts, and data analytics aficionados are now engaged in shedding light on the origin and nature of UAP.
That nine-month study effort is under the guidance of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate and NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, with the space agency declaring it is pursuing the assessment for the agency’s own science and air safety motives.
Katherine Rohloff, a spokesperson for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, says that the space agency has updated its “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study” public website to clarify the meeting cadence and output from the group.
The study team is periodically meeting to identify what data, from civilian government entities, commercial data and information from other sources, can potentially be pored over to help evaluate UAP.
A next step will be recommending a roadmap for potential future NASA unidentified anomalous data analysis.
After wrapping up the study, the information gleaned is to be released in a publicly available report. NASA expects to hold a full meeting of its UAP study team in late spring of this year, the NASA website explains, with the team findings to be broadcast to the public.
UAP have been reported by Navy pilots unlike anything they have ever witnessed.
Image credit: Enigma Labs/Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich
Community of interest
A seeing-is-believing person is Ryan Graves. As a former Lt. U.S. Navy and F/A-18F pilot, he was the first active duty flyer to report publicly about his and fellow pilot encounters with UAP.
Graves now chairs the newly-formed UAP permanent Community of Interest within the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), a group of over 30,000 aerospace professionals. The UAP faction is focused on alleviating the barriers to the scientific study of whatever it is, he says.
Shown at Congressional hearing, Video 1 2021 flyby movie showing a purported UAP.
Credit: Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee/Inside Outer Space screengrab
“We’re off and running,” says Graves with his group subdivided into human factors, hardware factors, and outreach subcommittees. “We’ll also be collaborating with various groups to validate and verify some of our hypotheses about [UAP] detection events,” he told Inside Outer Space.
“I approach this very agnostically. It’s not about aliens, UFOs or what have you. There’s an anomaly. We have detections of something that we can’t explain,” Graves adds. “Our mission is focused on aerospace safety. Our charter is to improve aviation safety by enhancing scientific knowledge, and mitigating barriers to the study of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.”
Graves is engaged in a series of “Merged Podcast” productions on UAP.
For example, go to a pilot’s UAP Sighting and what it means for aviation at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjildVLwSHw
To view the unclassified version of the ODNI document, go to:
https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Unclassified-2022-Annual-Report-UAP.pdf
Image credit: NASA
Years ago I wrote a story for AIAA’s Aerospace America magazine.
In my view, the reasons and revelations that haunt me to this day about the tragedy are far from being revealed. I covered the loss of the crew for Space.com at the time, reporting on the investigation from my perspective as I attended a number of the “hearings” on the disaster from Houston, Texas.
To this day, the entire calamity — and how it could have been prevented — has never been fully reported.
Adding to my own views regarding the loss of Columbia and crew was a visit to Kennedy Space Center. I saw first-hand recovered, twisted, and scared wreckage of the vehicle.
I cried.
There are truths out there yet to be revealed.
Meanwhile, take a read of my story – and remember Columbia and the seven-person crew:
Wait a Minute!
Curiosity Left Navigation Camera took this image on Sol 3724. Image shows the rock, “Cacao” and the shadow of the unstowed arm in the afternoon light. Is it a meteorite?
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover at Gale Crater is wheeling about finding and photographing some interesting features, including “foreign stones,” reports Ashley Stroupe, a mission operations engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
A recent photo taken by the robot shows a rock about which Mars researchers are intrigued.
The rock Curiosity parked in front of is one of several very dark-colored blocks in this area which seem to have come from elsewhere, and are dubbed “foreign stones.”
“Our investigations will help determine if this is a block from elsewhere on Mars that just has been weathered in an interesting way or if it is a meteorite,” Stroupe notes.
Curiosity Mast Camera Left image taken on Sol 3724, January 27,2023.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Curiosity Mast Camera Right image taken on Sol 3724, Janaury 27, 2023.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Meanwhile, Curiosity is taking a look at some other interesting terrain, as well as a look up into the sky of Mars to scan wispy clouds floating by.
At the moment, the Curiosity Mars rover is now ending Sol 3728 tasks.
Curiosity Right B Navigation Camera photo acquired on Sol 3728, January 31, 2023.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Curiosity Right B Navigation Camera photo acquired on Sol 3728, January 31, 2023.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Image credit: NASA
Taking a whiz on Mars, it’s a must-do for future Red Planet crews.
But doing so turns out to be good for on-the-spot cultivation of food to help sustain the extraterrestrial experience.
A new study suggests the possibility of using a blend of astronaut urine and Mars regolith to grow cyanobacterium called Synechococcus nidulans.
“We chose to investigate Synechococcus nidulans because it is an extremophile cyanobacterium capable of adapting to extreme environments such [as] the ones taking place on Mars,” explains Alessandro Concas of the Department of Mechanical, Chemical and Materials Engineering at the University of Cagliari in Italy.
Concas is lead author of a paper – “Modeling and experimental assessment of Synechococcus nidulans cultivation using simulated Martian medium and astronauts’ urine” – set to appear in the journal, Acta Astronautica.
Planting life on Mars – future “Martians” set up habitats on the Red Planet.
Credit: NASA
Potential food source
Concas and colleagues report that, while efforts are being made to develop novel techniques to cultivate microalgae on Mars, “further research activity is needed to verify the possibility to use microalgae and cyanobacteria as potential food source” in the framework of human expeditions to Mars that rely on in-situ (living off the land) resource utilization (ISRU) technologies.
The research paper explains that, while urine could supply macronutrients such as phosphates and ammonium, “regolith leachate” could provide relevant micronutrients and in particular iron which is known to strongly affect the growth microalgae and cyanobacteria.
Nutritional characteristics
The investigators also make note of the nutritional characteristics of the biomass produced using the selected growth media were investigated for the first time.
“The experimental results have been interpreted by a mathematical model that allows the identification of the set of operating conditions to maximize the biomass, and thus food productivity,” the research team explains.
Starships on Mars.
Credit: SpaceX
The team investigated the capability of the autotrophic strain Chrococcidiopsis sp. CCMEE 029 to tolerate perchlorate salts that are typically found top-side on the Red Planet.
Edible biomass
The results of the research show that the growth of this strain was not affected by Mars-relevant concentrations of Magnesium (Mg) or Calcium (Ca) perchlorate, thus demonstrating that Chrococidiopsis is a good candidate for bio-ISRU contexts on Mars.
According to Concas and collaborators, the results of this activity provide a first assessment on the possibility of growing this strain within a pressurized and heated dome on Mars to produce edible biomass and photosynthetic oxygen.
The growth of microalgae as food for astronauts is one of the main challenges ahead to support humans on Mars.
“The possibility of cultivating the cyanobacterium Synechococcus nidulans in a medium consisting of a mixture of simulated regolith leachate and astronauts’ urine, called Martian Medium, is investigated with the aim of reducing the payload deriving from nutrients to bring from Earth,” the paper notes.
UAP have been reported by Navy pilots unlike anything they have ever witnessed.
Image credit: Enigma Labs/Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich
The coming year will surely see a persistence of debate, discussion and disbelief regarding anonymous airborne occurrences.
Today they are branded as Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP). But perhaps UAP is an off-shoot of “flying saucers” from afar, and once identified will satisfy those hungry for a governmental confession that over the decades Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) have assaulted our atmospheric, as well as mental airspace.
Image credit: Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies
Enigma Labs is offering a new public platform for sighting reports of unidentified aerial objects.
Image credit: Enigma Labs
Whatever is at play here, organizations are taking close encounters with weirdness seriously.
2023: Year of the “big reveal“?
What confidently looms ahead is an entire year of UAP and UFO banter. Could 2023 become the year of the great reveal, the “truth” that Earth is on the receiving end of full-body contact with other star folk?
Conversely, will it be one more calendar of time that adds up to a nothing burger and confusing brouhaha?
Go to my new Space.com story – “Unidentified aerial annoyance: Full disclosure or dubious nonsense? – Whatever is at play here, organizations are taking close encounters with weirdness seriously” – at:
https://www.space.com/unidentified-aerial-annoyance-disclosure-or-nonsense
Artwork of Ingenuity Mars helicopter.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter that’s overflying Jezero Crater on behalf of the space agency’s Perseverance rover produced several color images during its 41st flight on January 27th.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The mini-chopper acquired these images using its high-resolution color camera, mounted in the helicopter’s fuselage and pointed approximately 22 degrees below the horizon.
The final stats of Flight 41, as posted by JPL:
Horizontal distance: roughly 600 feet (183 meters);
Maximum altitude: roughly 33 feet (10 meters);
Maximum ground speed: roughly 6.7 miles per hour (3 meters per second);
Duration of flight: 109.1 seconds.
Space Vault #1
Image credit: Leonard & Barbara David
For more than six decades of reporting on and assessing global space activities I have amassed loads of paper, reports/documents, books, photos, and countless tape recordings of space experts (some now long-gone) – never mind years of swag that I have accumulated.
Wernher von Braun signed recording.
Image credit: Leonard & Barbara David
Signed von Braun recording.
Image credit: Leonard & Barbara David
This combined “collected works” now resides within a home office, but for the most part is parked within two large storage facilities that are packed and stacked!
Recently, I have begun the dreaded (but fun!) task of sorting through hundreds of boxes. It’s an onerous chore, a dusty, deep-dive into space history…right up to today.
All that said, and as a 1946 graduate of life, I am now engaged in organizing this compilation.
But wait a minute!
How many out there have taken on a similar task of treasure trove hunting and gathering?
Any ideas welcomed!
Image credit: Leonard & Barbara David
Image credit: Leonard & Barbara David
Image credit: Leonard & Barbara David
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
New Imagery: Flight 41 from Ingenuity Mars Helicopter: NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter acquired these images using its navigation camera mounted in the helicopter’s fuselage and pointed directly downward to track the ground during flight.
This select set of Images were acquired on Jan. 27, 2023:
Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Pre-flight: 41 Stats via NASA/JPL-Caltech
Flight date: No earlier than 01/25/2023
Horizontal flight distance (nominal, w/ max divert): 587 feet (179 meters)
Flight time: 103.57 seconds
Flight altitude: 33 feet (10 meters)
Heading: Out to North West and return
Flight speed: 6.7 mph (3 meters per second)
Goal of flight: Scouting
Perseverance rover images show a gust of wind sweeping dust across the Martian plain beyond the rover’s tracks on June 18, 2021.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI
Serving as the exploration zone for NASA’s Perseverance rover is Jezero Crater. It turns out to be a site for swirls of dust…so much so that one device has been damaged on the rover by two passing dust devils.
The rover’s Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer is known as MEDA. It produces weather measurements such as wind speed and direction, temperature and humidity, and also gauges the amount and size of dust particles in the Martian atmosphere. The instrument suite was developed and provided by the Spanish Astrobiology Center at the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid, Spain.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Dust devils on Mars are whirlwinds of warm air with winds strong enough to lift dust, and they are abundant on Mars, where they are one of the elements that bring dust to the atmosphere.
Since its landing in February 2020, Perseverance has observed a plethora of dust devils via its MEDA instrument. Word is that a couple of dust devils damaged part of the hardware of the wind sensors of MEDA.
Wind Sensors (a) Image of WS2 on sol 339. (b) Detail of one of the boards of
WS1 on sol 339 showing the thin filament possibly damaged in the boards of WS2. (c) MEDA
data for the DD on sol 313. Wind data from WS2 was unavailable after the vortex produced its
peak pressure drop. Note the shift between pressure and RDS Top 7 data and the failure of WS2
at the time the dust content increases (d) MEDA data for the DD on sol 413. Yellow lines on (c)
and (d) indicate the moment when the failure in one of the WS boards occurred.
Image credit: Ricardo Hueso, et al.
A new paper – “Convective vortices and dust devils detected and characterized by Mars 2020” – details the wicked winds of Mars, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
High abundance of events
“Results for more than 400 Martian days from spring to autumn indicate a high abundance of events with small seasonal variability,” reports the paper, led by Ricardo Hueso of Física Aplicada, Escuela de Ingeniería de Bilbao, Universidad del País Vasco in Bilbao, Spain.
“Terrains with lower thermal inertia warming more efficiently at noon favor the appearance of dust devils. We also found an increased dust devil activity during a short dust storm that covered the region,” Hueso and colleagues note.
Large vortices with diameters of over 300 feet (100 meters) form frequently enough to dominate dust lifting at Jezero. Thanks to MEDA data, three dust devils that size were detected passing within less of 100 feet (30 meters) of the rover.
Intense vortices can put at risk surface hardware on Mars, as evidenced by the MEDA experience. The instrument has two booms. Two dust devils were responsible for damaging part of the hardware of the MEDA wind sensors. These sensors contain fragile elements such as sub-millimeter-wide conducting filaments exposed to the Martian atmosphere.
MEDA location. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Different seasons, different terrains
Since dust devils – DDs for short — are common features over most of the surface of Mars, new missions may have to take into account the risks of impacts by speedy sand particles or granules.
“Convective vortices in Jezero seem to be able to raise dust much more efficiently than in locations such as Elysium and Gale crater,” the research paper explains. That’s where NASA’s InSight Mars lander and the Curiosity rover have found no dust lifting activity (InSight), or very low dust lifting activity (Curiosity).
Image credit: NASA
The swirling dust lifting activity at Jezero is probably smaller than the dust lifting at Gusev crater observed by Spirit, but in most of these missions observations over different Martian Years have found strong differences.
“Thus, new observations by Perseverance over different seasons and terrains, exploring properties such as surface roughness and particle size and cohesion from surface images, will help to understand the characteristics that make Jezero so active in developing DDs within its rich population of convective vortices,” the paper concludes.
For access to “Convective vortices and dust devils detected and characterized by Mars 2020,” go to:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/2022JE007516
