The thread for space cadets!

[hobbsyoyo]

I don't know enough about orbital physics. How hard would it be to nudge one of these asteroids into orbit?

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/asteroid-2004-bl86-zips-safely-past-earth-1.2929800

I don't even know how to begin to do the calculations.

Extremely hard because it is so massive. They say it is a near-earth asteroid which means that it's orbit comes close to ours. These are the kinds of asteroids we would try tugging into Earth orbit since they would take a lot less energy to bring them here than one from the asteroid belt. However, this one is pretty massive and would thus take a whole lot of energy to bring it into orbit.

There are theoretical ways of making this easier (solar sails, using ice on the asteroid to fuel an implanted engine to tug it, painting part of it to create differential solar warming to nudge it around, gravity tug, etc) but all of those schemes are paper projects. The only proven way we could do it is with old fashioned chemical rockets and it's just too massive for that to be realistic.

Additionally, the asteroid as a 2.1 hour day, so it is spinning too fast for most of the above methods to work even on paper.

I should add that the asteroid retrieval mission that NASA is planning for the SLS is going to tug a much smaller asteroid than this one. I also think they wish to use advanced ion engines for this but I can't really remember.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Several of the systems used to plant the lander on the comet failed to work, which contributed to the bounce. Another huge problem is that we simply don't understand the surface constitution of comets very well which means any landing system is based on best guesses of what they need to do. Part of the mission of the lander was/is to characterize the surface constitution of the comet in order to aid future mission design.
______________

So SpaceX has been trying to retrieve the first stage of their Falcon 9 rockets for reuse. Here is a test landing at sea:

Link to video.
In these early attempts, they were just trying to hit a target zone that was on the square kilometers scale in size.

Now they are attempting to land on a floating barge at sea of the square meters scale in size:

Link to video.

Thought it failed, it was really extraordinary that they came so close!


They say the failure was the result of running out of hydraulic fluid - I believe they lost the ability to gimbal the engines right before touch down which resulted in the off-kilter landing.


Impressive stuff

The bolded part was incorrect. The hydraulics that gimbal the engine are actually pressurized by the pre-burner so it's impossible to lose hydraulic pressure while the engine is running. They actually lost pressure in the hydraulic systems they use a set of mini-wings they mount at the top of the first stage for aerodynamic control. That system is separate from the engine-gimballing system.

 

[warpus]

The Universe

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

^^ That gave me goosebumps. Excellent find, Warpus.

 

[warpus]

I can't stop looking at that either!

Has anyone heard of Copenhagen Suborbitals?

They are a volunteer ran & privately funded space program. Sort of. So far they've launched a couple rockets - their plan is to eventually put a man in space. I think it's pretty awesome, even if it seems ambitious.

Intro video:

Link to video.

One of their rocket designs

 

[El_Machinae]

I love these things. A (real) space cadet can pick a favourite, and shuttle in small amounts of money and volunteering time. It's a great way to keep teeny bits of momentum going, and eventually something will pop.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

The European Space Agency recently successfully launched a prototype space plane, the IXV:

Spoiler :

This was an effort led by the Italians to research methods for controlled re-entry as the ESA doesn't have a lot of experience with re-entry capsules or space planes. There is apparently not a lot of support for this project within the ESA which sucks because the proposed follow-on project is a fully-fledged space plane called PRIDE:

Spoiler :

which would be awesome.


In other news, SpaceX recently launched a satellite into deep-space (one of the lagrange points) which was a first for them. They were going to try and land the first stage booster at sea on their floating landing pad but weather at the landing site was really bad and the launch window was closing so they just did a soft-landing in the water instead.


Also, Orbital Sciences finally finished merging with ATK to form a new company called Orbital ATK. Orbital Sciences makes the Antares rocket which boosts supplies to the ISS but recently one exploded shortly after lift-off due to a failure in the 40+ year old Russian engines they were using. (You read that correctly, the engines are literally 40+ years old and have been sitting in a Moscow warehouse all this time). Orbital also makes a range of small payload orbital/suborbital carrier rockets such as the Pegasus or Taurus series.

ATK on the other hand primarily makes solid rocket boosters like the boosters used on the Space Shuttle or the larger (but basically very similar) boosters to be used on the SLS.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Mysterious bright spots seen on Ceres
http://spaceflightnow.com/2015/02/28/could-these-bright-spots-on-ceres-be-ice-volcanoes/

Could these bright spots on Ceres be ice volcanoes?
The discovery of puzzling bright spots on Ceres, the Texas-sized world now being studied by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, has scientists wondering whether the features could be plumes from volcanoes launching material into space.

Scientists have detected evidence of ice volcanoes on Ceres with telescopes before, but Dawn’s approach to the dwarf planet will yield the first up-close imagery and data on the little world’s make-up and terrain.

“Ceres’ bright spot can now be seen to have a companion of lesser brightness, but apparently in the same basin,” said Chris Russell, Dawn’s principal investigator based at UCLA. “This may be pointing to a volcano-like origin of the spots, but we will have to wait for better resolution before we can make such geologic interpretations.”

Scientists believe Ceres could be covered in a crust of ice, perhaps encasing an underground ocean.

Dawn is set to be captured by the gravity of Ceres on March 6, then spiral into the first of a series of orbits in April. The space probe will continue its observations of Ceres until at least late 2016, coming as close as 232 miles from the dwarf planet, which is the largest object in the asteroid belt sandwiched between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

The robotic mission is the first spacecraft to visit Ceres.

The latest images released from Dawn’s framing camera are the best photos ever taken of Ceres. Dawn’s imagery has exceeded the sharpest pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope since late January, when the mysterious bright spots started appearing in the mission’s data catalog.

A photo taken Feb. 19 from a distance of 29,000 miles shows two of the bright spots in the same region on Ceres, prompting scientists to think they may be the signatures of volcanoes.

“The brightest spot continues to be too small to resolve with our camera, but despite its size it is brighter than anything else on Ceres. This is truly unexpected and still a mystery to us,” said Andreas Nathues, lead investigator for Dawn’s framing camera team at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany.

So this is really interesting. Part of me wants this to turn out to be a couple of domed alien cities even though I know it's going to turn out to be ice or a geological feature.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Mars One loses it's television deal.

Mars One was working with the production company behind Big Brother to create a sort of reality TV show about their astronaut selection process. This was really important to the group because their business model for funding their Mars expedition was predicated on selling media rights to TV shows they would make about the effort. Losing the production company Endemol is a pretty big blow to them. They have switched to another production company but they won't publicly say who it is.

All this comes after a series of other blows -

They contracted with 2 companies to do design studies on Mars landers that Mars One has stated are vital to their effort. They have claimed they were going to send the two landers ahead of the manned expedition to scout landing locations and test out various technologies. It's been announced by the two companies that they contracted with that after producing the initial design studies, Mars One did not contract them for any additional work. This essentially means that their aggressive schedule for their expedition is slipping because if they aren't building the landers, they obviously can't make their launch window.

MIT also put out a detailed study showing the first group of Mars One astronauts would die within something like 60 days of landing on Mars because their technology isn't mature and their plans are not comprehensive enough. One of the pivotal problems was oxygen production and management - Mars One just doesn't have it figured out. The Mars One group has publicly stated that they are spending a great deal of time/resources putting together a counter-study to refute the MIT findings but in any case their credibility took a major hit.


So all in all, bad news for Mars One. I applaud them for trying and I do hope they can make something work out. However, I just don't think they are realistic enough or have enough financing to make this happen successfully.

 

[Kaitzilla]

Mysterious bright spots seen on Ceres
http://spaceflightnow.com/2015/02/28/could-these-bright-spots-on-ceres-be-ice-volcanoes/


So this is really interesting. Part of me wants this to turn out to be a couple of domed alien cities even though I know it's going to turn out to be ice or a geological feature.

If I was going to spy on the solar system, I'd set up camp in the asteroid belt.
And put my massive shiny telescope right there in fact.
(*Note* - Putting expensive equipment inside impact craters is hazardous, because impact crater)

Amazing the mission was launched over 7 years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_(spacecraft)

Dawn is a space probe launched by NASA in 2007 to study the two most-massive protoplanets of the asteroid belt: Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres.[6] Currently en route to Ceres, it is expected to enter orbit around the dwarf planet on March 6, 2015,[5] and has been taking increasingly high-resolution extended images of Ceres since December 1, 2014.[7]

Dawn was the first spacecraft to visit Vesta, entering orbit on July 16, 2011, and successfully completing its 14-month Vesta survey mission in late 2012.[8][9] Should its entire mission succeed, it will also be the first spacecraft to visit Ceres and to orbit two separate extraterrestrial bodies.[10]

The mission is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with major components contributed by European partners from the Netherlands, Italy and Germany. It is the first NASA exploratory mission to use ion propulsion to enter orbits; previous multi-target missions using conventional drives, such as the Voyager program, were restricted to flybys

Orbit in 3 days.
Ice volcanoes would still be neat.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Electric propulsion and hardy electronics certainly paid off this time!

 

[El_Machinae]

How do we increase Mars One's financing and capacity to plan?

 

[uppi]

Maybe someone should point out to banks that off-planet tax havens are business opportunities they cannot afford to miss.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

How do we increase Mars One's financing and capacity to plan?

Crowdsourcing? I'm not really sure what they could do to make a business case out of their plan other than the media rights schtick.

On the planning side, well, they did the right thing in contracting Lockheed and (IIRC) Surrey Space Systems to do their trade studies on the landers. So long as they keep farming out work to real aerospace firms their planning will be ok. I think their problem is that in the past, they haven't done enough of this. They dream up awesome-sounding ideas and they back it up with just enough rocket science to sound plausible. But truth be told, they seem to know only enough rocket science to be dangerous because most of their work falls apart on close inspection.

So they should contract with other firms for their engineering work and at the same time start staffing up with lots of experience engineers and mission planners. At some point they'll have enough in-house experience to start doing/building/planning things on their own.

Assuming the money holds out.

Maybe someone should point out to banks that off-planet tax havens are business opportunities they cannot afford to miss.

You're really not that far off the mark. There's already loons that will sell you lunar and martian real estate.

Truthfully though, there is a lot of uncertainty over what kind of economic development and resource exploitation are allowed in space. The Outer Space Treaty (signed by the major space powers) does not allow nation-states to claim extraterrestrial territory but is mute on private enterprise entirely. There was a later follow-up treaty that did address private enterprise (and banned it) but it wasn't signed by any major space power.

So as ventures like Mars One, Planetary Ventures (asteroid miners backed by IIRC Paul Allen) and even SpaceX start developing and flying hardware with an eye toward space-industrial development, the issue of what is allowed and who can own what take center stage.

It's an interesting question to be sure and there are such a thing as 'space lawyers' - these questions are their bread and butter.

 

[uppi]

It is probably going to be a long time until every nation on earth has space laws in their books. Until then private enterprises could claim to operate under the laws of some backwater country.

Anyway, what the laws on earth say is one thing, enforcement another. A self-sufficient Martian colony is not going to care much about what a judge decides on earth.

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

No aliens. Bummer.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Those are the exact same images as before, so there's still a chance!

Dawn has been approaching from the night side of Ceres due to a small glitch months back. So there haven't been any better pictures since the ones you posted in that gif above from last month.

NASA is now awaiting confirmation that Dawn is in orbit and in the next few weeks we'll start getting better pictures from much closer to the surface.

 

[El_Machinae]

Well, we've already read the article "why I hope there's no life on Mars", I think.

Bigelow Aerospace recently got a letter of intent (or letter of something) from the FCC, helping them move forwards with the idea that a hotel on the Moon was viable

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

Those are the exact same images as before, so there's still a chance!

Very true. Even though the lights faded into the night, it might still be reflections of an abandoned alien colony.

Dawn has been approaching from the night side of Ceres due to a small glitch months back. So there haven't been any better pictures since the ones you posted in that gif above from last month.

NASA is now awaiting confirmation that Dawn is in orbit and in the next few weeks we'll start getting better pictures from much closer to the surface.

It is now, I think.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31754586

Is this the first crescent image? Or was one already made a while ago?

 

[hobbsyoyo]

It is now, I think.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31754586

Is this the first crescent image? Or was one already made a while ago?

Not sure. But I don't expect new images for a few days to be honest.

Well, we've already read the article "why I hope there's no life on Mars", I think.

I haven't, do share.

Bigelow Aerospace recently got a letter of intent (or letter of something) from the FCC, helping them move forwards with the idea that a hotel on the Moon was viable

And to top it all off, they are going to be launching an add-on inflatable addition to the ISS soon, which is a big step forward in their bid to launch inflatable space stations for industrial/scientific use.