** Great views of earth and vehicles approaching and docking to the station matched with a nice soundtrack:
The International Space Station’s High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV) experiment is an external camera platform located on the Columbus module of the space station. In addition to providing beautiful views of Earth, one of the goals of HDEV is to monitor the longevity and quality of its image sensors in the space environment. HDEV operations began April 30, 2014 and only a single bad pixel has been identified. Testing new engineering processes and camera system longevity expanded into having avid Earth-viewing followers and educational activities. To date, HDEV has reached over 300 million total views on UStream. Learn more: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/st…
** Science and technology payloads heading to the ISS aboard the CRS-17 Cargo Dragon:
When it launches on Friday, May 3, SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft will carry crew supplies, scientific research and hardware to the International Space Station to support dozens of the more than 250 science and research investigations. Learn more about the science headed to space: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages….
What’s up in the May sky? A meteor shower produced by debris from Halley’s Comet, asteroids named after dinosaurs and a “blue moon” on May 18th. Additional information about topics covered in this episode of What’s Up, along with still images from the video and the video transcript are available at https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/…
New Shepard hardware is produced at Blue Origin’s headquarters in Kent, Wash., and shipped down to Texas for flight. Cornell said people wouldn’t ride in the New Shepard capsule that was tested today, but in an upgraded capsule that’s currently sitting in Blue Origin’s “barn” in Texas.
“Because it’s such a special capsule to us, we actually decided to name the newest capsule that’s just in the barn the ‘RSS First Step,’ ” Cornell said. ” ‘RSS’? Reusable Spaceship, of course. And ‘First Step’ because it is our first capsule that is going to be taking people. It’s going to enable our vision of millions of people living and working in space
** CRS-17 Cargo Dragon launch set for early Friday morning following a fix to the ISS power problem that delayed the flight from Wednesday. However, weather is an issue. Only a 40% chance for suitable conditions for liftoff according to the USAF launch range forecast. This improves to 70% if the launch is postponed till Saturday morning
The rocket will blast off from the Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. You can watch the launch on the SpaceX webcast, which will start about 15 minutes before liftoff, currently set to occur during a 1 second window at 3:11:33 am EDT, or 7:11:33 UTC.
The CRS-17 Mission press kit provides info on launch events, the payloads and other aspects of the mission.
Note that this Cargo Dragon vehicle also flew on the the CRS-12 mission in August 2017. The Falcon 9 booster is new. The booster will attempt to land on a sea platform not far off the coast of Florida.
** Scott Manley discusses a NASA report on 2 rocket failures caused by a manufacturer’s flawed materials:
In 2009 a Taurus XL rocket failed because the fairing at the top refused to separate, then in 2011 the same things happened again. A multi year investigation traced the problem to materials from a supplier which had been fabricating test results.
*** More about Crew Dragon explosion in today’s CRS-17 pre-launch briefing:
Hans Koenigsmann of SpaceX said that the investigation is continuing and he would not speculate on the cause of the explosion. He did say,
The explosion started during the preparation for the firing of the SuperDraco thrusters and about a half second before they fired.
The Crew Dragon was destroyed.
He doesn’t think a SuperDraco itself failed.
He doesn’t think that the composite over-wrapped pressure vessels (COPVs) are to blame. These are not the same type of COPVs as the one that caused a Falcon 9 upper stage to explode on the pad in 2016.
The site of the test has not yet been fully cleared. There are, for example, pressurized COPVs visible so they must be careful when approaching the site.
Several Crew Dragon vehicles are in various stages of construction and so can be modified relatively easily to install the fixes required by the results of the investigation.
SpaceX has successfully completed a static fire of its newest Falcon Heavy center core, a sign that the most challenging hardware is firmly on track for a late-June launch target.
Currently penciled in for June 22nd, Falcon Heavy’s third launch is of great interest to both SpaceX and its customer, the US Air Force. Most of the two-dozen payloads manifested on the mission are admittedly unaffiliated with the US military. However, the rideshare – known as Space Test Program 2 (STP-2) – was acquired by the USAF for the branch to closely evaluate and certify SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket for critical military launches. The potential upsides of a successful demonstration and evaluation are numerous for both entities and would likely trigger additional positive offshoots.
… In perusing the April image release from the high resolution camera of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), I came across the image above, cropped and reduced to post here, of the discovery of another landslide within Hydraotes Chaos, one of the largest regions of chaos terrain on Mars. The image above was taken on February 9, 2019, and has since been followed up with a second image to create a stereo pair.
This is not the first landslide found in Hydraotes Chaos. I highlighted a similar slide on March 11. Both today’s landslide as well as the previous one likely represent examples of gravitational collapses as shown in this science paper about Martian ground water. Some scientists have proposed that Hydraotes Chaos was once an inland sea, and as the water drained away the loss of its buoyancy is thought to cause this kind of landslide at the base of cliffs and crater rims.
The past presence of water also helps explain the soft muddy look of this landslide. When this collapse occurred the material was likely saturated with water. Today it is most likely quite dry and hardened, but when it flowed it flowed like wet mud. Its size, almost a mile long and a quarter mile across, speaks to Mars’s low gravity, which would allow for large singular collapses like this.
** Ocean Worlds in the Outer Solar System is the title of a Silicon Valley Astronomy Lecture given recently by Kevin Hand of NASA JPL:
Dr. Kevin Hand of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory asks where the best place is to find life beyond Earth. He concludes it may be that the small, ice-covered moons of Jupiter and Saturn harbor some of the most habitable real estate in our Solar System. Life loves liquid water and these moons have lots of it! Dr. Hand explains the science behind our understanding of these worlds, with a special focus on Jupiter’s intriguing moon Europa, which is a top priority for future NASA missions.
A sampling of recent articles, videos, and images dealing with space transport:
** Blue Origin plans to fly a New Shepard rocket vehicle on Thursday morning at the company’s facilities in West Texas. The website will provide a webcast.
“We are now on the verge of giving students and teachers the ability to build and fly affordable experiments in space. When teachers are this excited about putting experiments in space, their students can’t help but get excited about space, too.”
Elizabeth Kennick, president of Teachers in Space, does not take the opportunity to fly an experiment to space for granted. The nonprofit organization has worked with educators and engineers to design and test standard equipment for classroom-developed experiments, including 3D-printed frames, customizable processors, power adaptors and more. The equipment first flew on high-altitude balloons and more recently on a stratospheric glider. Now, thanks to support from NASA’s Flight Opportunities program, the equipment will fly higher than ever before: to space on the next launch of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket.
** The ISS crew has made progress towards fixing the power fault that caused the delay of the launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the CRS-17 Dragon Cargo vehicle. No word yet, though, if the mission will be allowed to take off early (3:11 am EDT) Friday morning.
** Rocket Lab preparing for an Electron launch of three USAF satellites during a two week window that opens this Saturday: Next launch | Rocket Lab
It’s beginning to feel like launch week! The payloads for the STP-27RD mission have been integrated onto Electron’s Kick Stage and fairing encapsulation is complete. The 14-day launch window window opens on 4 May UTC and yes, we will be live streaming launch. 🚀 pic.twitter.com/e1fagAFI88
Virgin Orbit has developed a small rocket called LauncherOne that can put satellites the size of washing machines into orbit. And its launchpad resides at 35,000 feet. Virgin Orbit owns a Boeing 747 airplane, called Cosmic Girl, which carries LauncherOne up into the sky. From there, the rocket will drop from underneath Cosmic Girl’s left wing and then ignite, climbing the rest of the way to orbit.
** Vector Launch moves towards test flights this year:
Lots of progress the past few weeks @vectorspacesys with our 1001 vehicle shipping out to the Arizona Test Site where it’s undergoing stage level testing. pic.twitter.com/zfCWHfZh0G
Skyrora will make three test launches over the next 12 months, the first expected to take place over the next few months, as part of its effort to certify its Skyrora XL satellite launch vehicle that will be 10 metres tall and will be able to loft a 100 kilogram payload into low-Earth orbit. The company conducted one of its first tests near Evanton, Scotland, in August 2018 when it launched its SkyLark Nano sounding rocket to an altitude of 6 kilometres, reaching a speed of Mach 1.45.
Among the launch tests planned for the coming year is one aiming to breach the so-called Kármán line, the altitude at which atmospheric flight ends and orbital dynamics begin – 100km.
It’s unclear what exactly the spacecraft is doing up there. X-37B missions are classified, and Air Force officials tend to speak of project goals in general terms, as this excerpt from the X-37B fact sheet shows: “The primary objectives of the X-37B are twofold: reusable spacecraft technologies for America’s future in space and operating experiments which can be returned to, and examined, on Earth.”
Still, the Air Force does divulge some payloads flying on X-37B missions. For example, we know that OTV-5 includes the Advanced Structurally Embedded Thermal Spreader experiment (ASETS-II), which is measuring the performance of electronics and oscillating heat pipes in the space environment.
