The thread for space cadets!

[Samson]

So it seems Boeing looked at Lada and decided their problem was too high build quality

Nose wheel falls off Boeing 757 airliner waiting for takeoff

A nose wheel fell off a Delta Air Lines Boeing 757 passenger jet and rolled away as the plane lined up for takeoff over the weekend from Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson international airport in the US, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Washer Found Missing On An Indian Boeing 737 MAX Aircraft

A component in the rudder control system of an Indian airline's Boeing 737 MAX aircraft was found missing earlier this month. The issue was related to the Boeing advisory in December 2023 regarding loose hardware on MAX aircraft.

 

[Kaitzilla]

The Secretary of State Antony Blinken was stuck in Davos after the Boeing 737 malfunctioned.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/17/business/sec-of-state-antony-blinken-forced-to-change-planes-after-boeing-breaks-down/index.html

Secretary of State Antony Blinken was forced to change planes to return to Washington from Davos after his plane suffered what the traveling press was told was a critical failure related to an oxygen leak.
Blinken and the traveling party boarded the modified Boeing 737 jet in Zurich on Wednesday after a day and a half of meetings at the global summit in Davos.
The plane suffered the issue after boarding and the party was forced to deplane, according to traveling press.

A new, smaller aircraft was being sent for Blinken, and many in the traveling party will now be returning to Washington commercially, according to the traveling press. State Department spokesperson Matt Miller on Wednesday said the plane suffered a mechanical issue. He said Blinken was still expected to be back in Washington Wednesday evening, and referred further questions to the US Air Force.
This is just the latest blow to Boeing’s once stellar, now badly tarnished reputation. On Jan. 5 an Alaska Airlines jet had a door plug blow out shortly after takeoff when the plane was at 16,000 feet, leaving a gaping hole in the side of the jet.

Boeing cargo plane engine caught fire.

The FAA has halted Boeing Max expansion plans.

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/faa-halt-boeing-max-production-expansion-hit-airlines-suppliers-2024-01-25/

Some of the passengers suing are saying the oxygen masks didn't work.
Every dead mask is potentially a dead passenger in a real emergency, but they typically only work for 10 to 15 minutes anyway.

Alaska Airlines passengers were hit in the face by debris, struggled with oxygen masks, and one had a seizure after landing, lawsuit says

14 passengers are named as plaintiffs in a class-action suit filed Tuesday, including three children, aged one, three, and five.

www.businessinsider.com

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.
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Also, rumors are swirling it was Boeing who did not install/tighten the bolts on the blown door and that their supplier Spirit was not at fault.

https://www.npr.org/2024/01/24/1226666911/boeings-quality-control-draws-criticism-as-a-whistleblower-alleges-lapses-at-fac

Seems like a great buying opportunity for Boeing stock.
The government will bail them out no matter how many people die.

 

[PhroX]

So it seems Boeing looked at Lada and decided their problem was too high quality

Nose wheel falls off Boeing 757 airliner waiting for takeoff

A nose wheel fell off a Delta Air Lines Boeing 757 passenger jet and rolled away as the plane lined up for takeoff over the weekend from Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson international airport in the US, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Washer Found Missing On An Indian Boeing 737 MAX Aircraft

A component in the rudder control system of an Indian airline's Boeing 737 MAX aircraft was found missing earlier this month. The issue was related to the Boeing advisory in December 2023 regarding loose hardware on MAX aircraft.

While Boeing definitely deserves a lot of criticism these days, and the 737 MAX problems (both current and previous) are entirely their fault, the nose wheel loss is really unlikely to be due to any failings on their behalf. The newest 757s are over 20 years old, so it's almost certainly going to be a maintenance problem - either parts weren't fitted properly, or inspections weren't done properly or when they were supposed to be. (not to mention, being over 20 years old means the design is pre-MD merger, i.e. back when Boeing was run by people who knew how to make planes...)

Similarly the bulk of the blame for the engine fire in @Kaitzilla's post probably lies with either the engine manufacturer (GE), and/or the airline (maintenance again). I've see from a couple of places there were some issues with fan shafts on some these engines when they first came out, and while good mitigation procedures were put into place, it's certainly not impossible that something was missed by one of these parties.

 

[r16]

it is big contracts time .

 

[Broken_Erika]

Ingenuity: Damage puts end to ground-breaking Mars helicopter mission​

Nasa's Ingenuity Mars helicopter, which made history by achieving the first powered flight on another world, has suffered mission-ending damage.

In a statement, Nasa said the aircraft was forced to perform an "emergency landing" that damaged its rotors.

The space agency's Bill Nelson said the aircraft was "the little helicopter that could" and had racked up far more missions than had been intended.

He said Ingenuity had "paved the way for future flight in our solar system".

Ingenuity is said to remain "upright" but images taken by an accompanying ground vehicle showed that "one or more of its rotor blades" were damaged and it was "no longer capable of flight".

Nasa said the circumstances were being investigated.

"Ingenuity has paved the way for future flight in our solar system, and it's leading the way for smarter, safer human missions to Mars and beyond," Mr Nelson, a Nasa administrator, said in a video message on social media.

"That remarkable helicopter flew higher and farther than we ever imagined and helped Nasa do what we do best - make the impossible, possible."

Ingenuity reached the Red Planet in February 2021 by riding on the belly of the Perseverance rover.

It was meant to be on a short technology demonstration to prove flight was possible in the ultra-thin Martian atmosphere.

The vehicle went on to support Perseverance by previewing areas of Mars that might be of interest, helping the wheeled robot and its drivers on Earth pick the right path.

Before its mission came to an end on Thursday, Ingenuity performed 72 flights and flew more than 14 times farther than originally planned.

Many will mourn the passing of the plucky chopper but its withdrawal from service has probably come at the right time, the BBC's science correspondent Jonathan Amos says.

The Perseverance rover is about to undertake some long, fast drives as it seeks to climb up on to the rim of Jezero Crater.

If still functional, Ingenuity would, in all likelihood, have struggled to keep up with Perseverance, or at the very least held up the rover's exploration.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68099672

 

[Kaitzilla]

Seems like a great buying opportunity for Boeing stock.
The government will bail them out no matter how many people die

It looks like the suck will intensify in the future.

Opinion: Can Boeing’s Misguided Leaders Be Stopped? | Aviation Week Network

We may be witnessing the slow demise of what was once the world’s greatest aerospace company, with few identifiable roadblocks to an act of self-immolation.

aviationweek.com

Can anything save Boeing from its management? The recent high-profile near-disaster involving an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-9 MAX is just another small step in Boeing’s downward spiral, and it is far from clear what will arrest it.

The safety concerns and manufacturing errors plaguing the company’s jetliner unit are just part of the problem. The production ramp-up has been a series of disappointments that will only worsen as regulators and customers scrutinize manufacturing and inspection processes.

The company is also quickly losing market share. CEO Dave Calhoun’s November 2022 announcement that there would be no new Boeing jetliner this decade had a predictable result: a record 1,300 Airbus A321neo orders in 2023. Boeing will be very lucky to retain 40% of the market by decade’s end. Given relentless cost-cutting and the demographics of the engineering workforce, it will be quite difficult for the company to create a new jetliner in the 2030s...

It just goes on and on.

I guess the world at least has Airbus to rely upon.

 

[r16]

it is really big contracts time . A goal is reaching the end without actual crashes . You know , despite Boeing itself .

 

[Klaus Hergersheimer]

Pluto is a planet

 

[r16]

oh , yes . But it takes a lot work to make it fit .

 

[EnglishEdward]

Are you referring to Pluto or nose wheels?

 

[r16]

ı had imagined the joke should have been more like Disney's Pluto .

 

[Samson]

‘Sci-fi instrument’ will hunt for giant gravitational waves in space

The first experiment to measure gravitational waves from space has been given the green light by the European Space Agency (ESA).

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will use the precise timing of laser beams travelling across 2.5 million kilometres of the Solar System to hunt for gigantic ripples in space-time caused by mergers between supermassive black holes, among other events.

ESA announced on 25 January that construction of the multibillion-euro mission will begin in 2025, with the launch planned for 2035. “It’s extremely exciting,” says Valeriya Korol, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, and a member of the LISA collaboration. “It will open a window to gravitational-wave sources that only LISA can see.”

The scale of LISA means that it will be able to observe gravitational waves of a much lower frequency than can be detected on Earth. This will allow the mission to spot phenomena, such as black holes orbiting each other, that are more massive and further apart than those seen by the ground-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which first detected gravitational waves in 2015.

LISA will consist of three identical spacecraft, each harbouring a 4.6-centimetre floating cube of gold and platinum, flying in an equilateral-triangle formation in orbit around the Sun. It will use lasers to measure the distance between the cubes in each craft with such accuracy that it will be able to tell when gravitational waves — subtle undulations caused by massive bodies accelerating — stretch space-time between them on the scale of picometres. (One picometre is 10^−12 metres.) Other subtle shifts in the signals will allow LISA to pinpoint where the gravitational waves are coming from. “This is almost a sci-fi sort of instrument,” says Korol.

LISA will be sensitive to gravitational waves with wavelengths between 300,000 kilometres and 3 billion kilometres. This is longer than those detected on Earth by LIGO and shorter than those seen by pulsar timing arrays, studies that are just starting to use ‘beacon’ stars to observe galaxies-wide gravitational waves.

All these experiments will observe different phenomena and produce complementary data, in the way that radio telescopes and visible-light instruments do, says Danzmann. LISA’s colossal scale will allow it to detect the gravitational waves produced when supermassive black holes merge, as well as the signals from systems at earlier stages of collision than LIGO can see. LISA should also be able to capture completely new phenomena, such as the spiralling of colliding white-dwarf stars, which are bigger than black holes, and systems in which two merging black holes are vastly different in mass.

 

[Kaitzilla]

‘Sci-fi instrument’ will hunt for giant gravitational waves in space

The first experiment to measure gravitational waves from space has been given the green light by the European Space Agency (ESA).

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will use the precise timing of laser beams travelling across 2.5 million kilometres of the Solar System to hunt for gigantic ripples in space-time caused by mergers between supermassive black holes, among other events.

ESA announced on 25 January that construction of the multibillion-euro mission will begin in 2025, with the launch planned for 2035. “It’s extremely exciting,” says Valeriya Korol, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, and a member of the LISA collaboration. “It will open a window to gravitational-wave sources that only LISA can see.”

The scale of LISA means that it will be able to observe gravitational waves of a much lower frequency than can be detected on Earth. This will allow the mission to spot phenomena, such as black holes orbiting each other, that are more massive and further apart than those seen by the ground-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which first detected gravitational waves in 2015.

LISA will consist of three identical spacecraft, each harbouring a 4.6-centimetre floating cube of gold and platinum, flying in an equilateral-triangle formation in orbit around the Sun. It will use lasers to measure the distance between the cubes in each craft with such accuracy that it will be able to tell when gravitational waves — subtle undulations caused by massive bodies accelerating — stretch space-time between them on the scale of picometres. (One picometre is 10^−12 metres.) Other subtle shifts in the signals will allow LISA to pinpoint where the gravitational waves are coming from. “This is almost a sci-fi sort of instrument,” says Korol.

LISA will be sensitive to gravitational waves with wavelengths between 300,000 kilometres and 3 billion kilometres. This is longer than those detected on Earth by LIGO and shorter than those seen by pulsar timing arrays, studies that are just starting to use ‘beacon’ stars to observe galaxies-wide gravitational waves.

All these experiments will observe different phenomena and produce complementary data, in the way that radio telescopes and visible-light instruments do, says Danzmann. LISA’s colossal scale will allow it to detect the gravitational waves produced when supermassive black holes merge, as well as the signals from systems at earlier stages of collision than LIGO can see. LISA should also be able to capture completely new phenomena, such as the spiralling of colliding white-dwarf stars, which are bigger than black holes, and systems in which two merging black holes are vastly different in mass.

Will it really work?

Won't the solar wind spoil the precision?

 

[Samson]

Japan’s Slim moon lander overcomes power crisis to start scientific operations

Japan’s Moon lander has resumed operations, the country’s space agency said on Monday, indicating that power had been restored after it was left upside down during a slightly haphazard landing.

The probe, nicknamed the “moon sniper”, had tumbled down a crater slope during its landing on 20 January, leaving its solar batteries facing in the wrong direction and unable to generate electricity.

Jaxa, Japan’s space agency, prioritised transmitting landing data before the battery ran out on the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (Slim), but said there was a chance the probe would be able to recharge once the west side of the moon starts receiving sunlight in the coming days.

“Last evening we succeeded in establishing communication with Slim, and resumed operations,” Jaxa said on Monday. “We immediately started scientific observations with MBC [multi-band camera], and have successfully obtained first light for 10-band observation,” it said, referring to the lander’s spectroscopic camera.

What can you see in this?

Spoiler Answer :

A toy poodle apparently, but I do not see it

 

[Samson]

TIL that there exist quasi-moons that have complex orbits around the sun and a planet, and sometimes move between planets. Here is an example orbit.

 

[Samson]

New NASA images of the volcanos of Io

 

[Samson]

We have found a new sea to look for aliens

There’s a newfound ocean in the outer Solar System, and it’s in a very surprising place1. Mimas, a mid-sized moon of Saturn, turns out to have an ocean beneath its icy surface — despite looking too geologically inert to have water sloshing inside.

Mimas joins a growing list of icy moons that are also ocean worlds. The fact that boring-looking Mimas has an ocean means that “you could have liquid water almost anywhere”, says Valéry Lainey, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory.

That’s important because interactions between ocean water and rock, which would occur where a buried ocean meets a moon’s rocky core, can generate enough chemical energy to sustain living organisms. If there are more stealth ocean worlds out there similar to Mimas, there are greater chances of extraterrestrial life.

The discovery, reported today in Nature by Lainey and his colleagues, largely resolves the long-standing question of whether Mimas has an ocean. Many researchers hadn’t expected it to: Mimas’s geology does not display signs of a possible buried ocean, such as the icy rafts that jostle on Jupiter’s moon Europa or the geysers that spew from Enceladus, another icy moon of Saturn.

But in 2014, a team that included Lainey and that was led by Radwan Tajeddine, an astronomer then at the Paris Observatory, analysed images taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which explored Saturn and its moons between 2004 and 2017. By studying how the 400-kilometre-wide Mimas wobbled in its orbit around Saturn, the researchers concluded that it had either a buried ocean or a rugby-ball-shaped core2. As more scientists studied how an ocean could have formed and evolved, it became harder to explain the geology of Mimas without invoking an ocean.

In the 2024 study, Lainey and his colleagues seem to have nailed the case. They went further than they had in 2014, by analysing not just the orbit’s wobble but also how Mimas’s rotation around Saturn changed over time. The team combined Cassini observations with simulations of Mimas’s interior and its orbit to conclude that there must be an ocean 20–30 kilometres below Mimas’s surface.


Striped by its rings’ shadows, Saturn (light blue; artificially coloured) looms behind its moon Mimas (grey sphere)


The orbit and the models

 

[Samson]

TIL about Przybylski's Star, which appears to have elements in its atmosphere heavier than plutonium that we previously considered human made only. There are not many explanations for this, one is that they are decay products from the island of stability. Another is aliens, as it matches predictions that were previously made for aliens doing nuclear waste disposal or communication (as suggested by Carl Sagan).

Spoiler Youtube reference :

 

[innonimatu]

I wouldn't put too much trust on the ability to infer the compositon fo stars from the detected spectra and out current models. Certainly not enough to resort to aliens as a possible explanation for surprising measurements.

 

[Samson]

The brightest object in the universe is a quasar so bright we thought it must be a close star

Astrophysicists just spotted the brightest and fastest-growing supermassive black hole — and it turns out, it was hiding in plain sight for decades.

Dubbed J0529-4351, the quasar was so bright that it was first dismissed as a star. Described in a paper published in Nature Astronomy, the quasar has a mass of 17 billion Suns and it’s still growing. The black hole is consuming the equivalent of one Sun per day, shining brighter than 500 trillion Suns and making it the brightest known object in the universe.

J0529-4351 was first noted in a sky survey in 1980 but was not categorized as a quasar until last year. Automated analysis of data from ESA's Gaia satellite instead earmarked the quasar as a star because it seemed too bright to be anything else.

Spoiler Zoom in on youtube :