The thread for space cadets!

The 7th Starship was the new Block 2 version that was 6 feet taller (almost 2m) than the previous versions.
en.wikipedia.org

SpaceX Starship - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

What happened? :hmm:

Here is the chopstick catch which is very nice!
The super heavy booster is 303 tons (275 thousand kilograms) and 233 feet tall (71 meters)
The Statue of Liberty is 225 tons and is 151 feet tall, so the chopsticks caught something bigger than the Statue of Liberty :smug:
Statue of Liberty stands on a stone pedestal to reach 305 feet tall. :mischief:


Something appeared to go wrong with Starship at 8:03 when one of the 3 little engines in the center shut off.
By 8:25 Starship seemed to be using Liquid Methane way faster than Liquid Oxygen and things went downhill rapidly.
They have to be used in equal portions for thrust.

arstechnica.com

Fire destroys Starship on its seventh test flight, raining debris from space

The Federal Aviation Administration will likely require an investigation into the accident.
arstechnica.com arstechnica.com

Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, wrote on X that early signs from data suggested there was a propellant leak in a cavity above Starship's engine firewall. The leak was large enough to build pressure in excess of the ship's vent capacity.

"Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area," Musk wrote. "Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month."

Coming into 2025, SpaceX officials hoped to launch as many as 25 Starship test flights this year to experiment with new designs, attempt a recovery of Starship from orbit, and demonstrate orbital refueling, a capability that is critical to NASA and SpaceX's plans to land astronauts on the Moon later this decade.
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Turks and Caicos is an island north of Haiti.
SpaceX can't fly the rocket over Miami or Cuba, so the Carribean Islands and Turks it is! :shifty:
 
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Lots of metal bits falling over aircraft in random places affecting global air traffic. This is going to be bad Fior SpaceX.
 
Thorgalaeg said:
Lots of metal bits falling over aircraft in random places affecting global air traffic. This is going to be bad Fior SpaceX.
Click to expand...

Not really. Any agency willing to seriously go after Space X will quickly find itself labeled as "government inefficiency".
 
Asteroid spotted that has 1.3% chance of crashing into Earth in 2032

A 100 metre-wide asteroid has triggered global planetary defence procedures for the first time after telescope observations revealed it has a chance of colliding with Earth in 2032.

Asteroid 2024 YR4 was spotted by an automated telescope in Chile on 27 December last year but has since risen to the top of impact risk lists maintained by the US and European space agencies.

Based on measurements gathered so far, the asteroid has a 1.3% chance of smashing into Earth on 22 December 2032, or put another way, a nearly 99% probability of barrelling past without incident.

The asteroid is now hurtling away from Earth in almost a straight line making it hard for astronomers to determine its orbit with high accuracy. Astronomers aim to make more detailed observations over the coming months before the rock fades from view. If those measurements do not rule out an impact in 2032, the asteroid will probably remain on space agencies’ risk lists until it comes back into view in 2028.

A space rock the size of asteroid 2024 YR4 would not unleash a mass extinction event as happened 66m years ago: the asteroid that triggered the demise of the dinosaurs was 10 to 15km wide. But 100 metre-wide space rocks, which impact Earth on average every few thousand years, still have the potential to cause catastrophic damage on the city scale.
 
Iʻll need to update my carʻs bumper sticker then

1738249789915.png
 
Gravitational waves, particles and electromagnetic waves seen from the same event

For the first time we detected a gravitational wave signal, a neutrino signal and a radiowave signal from the same event. What it was we do not know yet, but it is a landmark.

S250206dm: a intriguing multi-messenger event [1]

An intriguing chain of events has been detected on February 6, 20205:

It all started with S250206dm, a gravitational wave detected by both LIGO interferometers. It has rapidly been classified as being either a merger of a neutron star with a black hole (55% probability) or a merger of a binary neutron start system (37%). There remains a roughly 8% probability that the event was due to noise background. The event has been fairly well localized (910 deg² at 90% containement) and is not too far way at 348 ± 114 Mpc .

A scan of the probable sky region in various wavelength has started to search a counterpart.

One such search has been performed automatically within the IceCube neutrino observatory. And it turned out a positive result! Named S250206dm NuTracks, two neutrino tracks have been found in spatial and temporal coincidence with the GW. The full report by IceCube is available here: GCN - Circulars - 39176 - LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA S250206dm: Two counterpart neutrino candidates from IceCube neutrino searches

At this moment no new source has been found (e.g. GCN 39204) but we invite everybody to participate in this exciting endeavour!

This [2] I think is reporting the radiowave observations, but I do not really understand.

At the event time 2025-02-06T21:25:30.439 (UTC) of S250206dm (GCN 39175; GCN 39178; GCN 39231), GECAM-C was observing normally and monitored 66.9% of the localization probability region of this GW event, while GECAM-A and GECAM-B detectors were turned off.


[1 ][2 ]
 
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Meet the ice-hunting robots headed for the Moon right now

Two US spacecraft launched to the Moon today from Florida’s Cape Canaveral, on their way to hunt for water that scientists think exists at the lunar south pole. What the craft finds could have big ramifications for NASA’s plans to send astronauts to this part of the Moon in the coming years.

One of the missions is a commercial lander; it aims to touch down closer to the Moon’s south pole than any previous mission, carrying NASA instruments including an ice-hunting robot drill. The other spacecraft, NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer, is an orbiter with the goal of producing the highest-resolution maps of water on the Moon.

Lunar water could provide a resource for expanded lunar exploration, such as by supplying the raw ingredients for rocket fuel at Moon bases. Scientists have known since 2009 that such water exists, but they want to know much more about where it is and how much there is. The two new spacecraft “are going after really important pieces of that puzzle,” says Parvarthy Prem, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, who is not affiliated with either mission.

The lander is expected to touch down on 6 March. It is the second attempt by Intuitive Machines, a company based in Houston, Texas, whose first lunar spacecraft tipped over on landing last year.

Lunar Trailblazer will take a leisurely trajectory and reach the Moon in several months. If all goes well, it will enter its final science-mapping orbit around August.

Searching for water

Many space agencies and scientists are keen to learn more about water at the lunar poles, which hold a geological record of the Solar System’s early history. The Indian mission Chandrayaan-2 is currently orbiting the Moon and building up its own data on where water might exist, as is a Korean probe that carries a NASA instrument to peer into shadowed, potentially ice-rich craters.

Intuitive Machines’ new lander, named Athena, is headed for the Mons Mouton region of the Moon. Researchers think there is water in the lunar soil there, perhaps bound up in minerals or in pores in the soil.

Athena will search for water in several ways, including the use of NASA’s ice-mining drill, TRIDENT. If Athena lands successfully, operators will command TRIDENT to penetrate the lunar soil, drilling up to one metre deep to pull up the soil and leave it in a crumbly pile on the surface. A mass spectrometer on board will analyse the pile for signs of water or other volatile substances that might be escaping as gases. That ability to drill and analyse simultaneously provides “critical data on how lunar soils behave”, says Jackie Quinn, the drill’s project manager at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida.

Nature (bloody paywall for the second half of the article :( )
 

Canadian contribution to private lunar lander could lead to a telescope on the moon​

Odysseus lander touched down on the lunar south pole after a nail-biting few days​

The first private spacecraft to softly land on the moon carries a Canadian instrument that will test the possibility of building an observatory at the Lunar south pole.

The phone booth-sized lander by Intuitive Machines, named Odysseus, launched on Feb. 15 and touched down on Thursday near a small impact crater about 300 kilometers from the moon's south pole.

It was a stressful event with navigation and communication issues, but 15 nail-biting minutes after it landed, mission control confirmed that they were receiving a faint but steady signal from the spacecraft.

"What we can confirm, without a doubt, is our equipment is on the surface of the moon and we are transmitting," said Intuitive Machines mission director Tim Crain.

"Houston, Odysseus has found his new home."

Odysseus carries a suite of twelve instruments, six of which are from NASA and the rest from commercial companies.

The Canadian component, built by space systems company Canadensys, is a miniaturized dual camera with one wide-field lens and one telephoto lens, that will point upwards to take images of the Milky Way Galaxy, as well as other astronomical objects including the Earth.

astronauts
This is a proof of concept study to determine whether the south pole of the moon is a good place for an astronomical observatory. It will also be a test of whether images from space can be broadcast back to Earth, which is very low on the horizon from the lunar polar regions.

The camera is named ILO-X after the International Lunar Observatory Association, a non-profit enterprise incorporated in Hawaii that promotes the concept of building astronomical observatories on the moon.

Astronomers would be delighted to have an observatory on the moon because it provides the clear, airless view of the universe that you get from a space telescope, with the added benefit of being on land. That means there are no size limits, and in astronomy, size matters.

While the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes have returned astounding images, those instruments were limited by the space available in the nose cone of a rocket. In fact, Webb had to be folded up to take the ride to space.

A telescope on the moon could be built much larger and provide even finer details of the universe. An observatory on the far side of the moon would be shielded from noisy radio chatter bouncing around Earth.

High-tech industries across the country are building precision scientific instruments and sending them to space. And Canadian scientists have been doing this from the very start of the space race, with our first satellite Alouette One launched in 1962. That made us the third country in space after the Soviet Union and America.

Canada is best known for its astronauts and robotic Canadarm but we have also built satellites such as the Radarsat constellation. We also flew instruments to Mars, including one that measures cloud cover and another that analyzes the chemistry of rocks. Canadian instruments are also part of the James Webb Space Telescope.

We are a space-faring country, but we don't make a lot of noise about it. Rather than build big expensive rockets, we join with other countries and go along for the ride — a much cheaper way to explore space. While our instruments may be small, they still make significant contributions.

Perhaps our little camera on this mission could be a small step that leads to a giant leap for astronomy.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/bobs-blog-canada-spacecraft-moon-telescope-1.7123715
 
Here is the 8th Starship test.


Once again they caught the giant heavy booster with chopsticks. :)

And once again the new Block 2 version Starship blew up!
It made it to 20,000kph this time instead of 19,000kph like last time before malfunctioning.


It burns liquid Oxygen and liquid Methane (Natural Gas is 95% methane).
We ship tons of LNG to Europe, so diverting some to rockets on the Texas coast means easy refueling.

Not sure where we get the liquid Oxygen.
Maybe just cool down outside air and siphon it off the Nitrogen? :dunno:
 
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Kaitzilla said:
Not sure where we get the liquid Oxygen.
Maybe just cool down outside air and siphon it off the Nitrogen?
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Yep, just outside air and a lot of refrigeration. Oxygen has a higher boiling point than nitrogen (-183C vs -196C), so separating it just comes down to cooling it to between those temperatures so the oxygen liquifies, but the nitrogen stays a gas. Other minor air components (argon and the other noble gases get separated the same way, based on different boiling points.
 
1813.jpg


A European spacecraft has taken photos of Mars’s smaller and more mysterious second moon during its flight past the planet en route to a pair of asteroids more than 110m miles (177m km) away.

The Hera probe activated a suite of instruments to capture images of the red planet and Deimos, a small and lumpy 8-mile-wide moon, which orbits Mars along with the 14-mile-wide Phobos.

The spacecraft barrelled past Mars at more than 20,000mph and took shots of the lesser-seen far side of Deimos from a distance of 620 miles.
 
For me Phobos and Deimos will always be associated with DOOM!
 
Saturn has 128 new moons

Saturn officially has 128 new moons, taking the gas giant’s total to a whopping 274 — almost twice as many as every other planet in the solar system combined. All of the new moons are shaped like irregular potatoes just a few kilometres in diameter. “I don’t think there’s a proper definition for what is classed as a moon. There should be,” says astronomer Edward Ashton, who co-discovered the moons. It’s unlikely we’ll be able to spot more with current technology, says Ashton, but that’s alright with him. “I’m a bit mooned out.”

NYT (paywalled) Minor Planets centre list
 
stfoskey12 said:
Are there any physical properties of moons around that size that could be used to make a good cutoff?
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The object not orbiting a planet I'd say. As with every definition the borders are porous and fuzzy. But a good rule of thumb is that if it spends the majority of it's time circling a planet it's a moon. Up to a size of course then it becomes a double planet.
 
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