Mars will kill you

Not only were the MARCOs small and cheap, using off-the-shelf components, much of the work was done by what NASA called "early career" (young) investigators. The youthful but spirited MARCO team was present at JPL yesterday for the big day.

Here's a photo of a MARCO (on the left) and its spring-loaded ejector (on the right), during testing and integration at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.



Here's a picture of Mars taken by one of the MARCOs as it flew by. (They didn't go into Mars orbit.) The camera (a cell-phone camera?) doesn't seem to have resolved much detail on the planet. The grid thing on the right is an antenna that folded out for communication with the Earth. Communications worked great. The entire radio was only about the size of a softball. Somebody on one of the briefings yesterday said that the thrusters that the little vehicle used to orient itself were modified from fire-extinguishers. I like this kind of imaginative low-budget space exploration.



The original specification for Cubesats was jointly drawn up by Cal Poly and Stanford engineers in 1999. To date, some 700 of them have been orbited, using left-over payload capacity on rockets launching larger satellites.

This is the first time that they have gone interplanetary. And they worked great! NASA is considering them for all kinds of future low-budget deep space missions to various places (asteroids and whatnot). They can also operate in 'swarms', where a whole fleet of these little things is sent instead of one larger vehicle.

 

try landing Insight on Mars . . . without exploding

https://www.wired.com/story/try-landing-insight-on-mars-without-exploding/

 

Insight's solar panels have unfolded and it's receiving sunlight and charging.

Here's a much better photo taken today with a different camera than the one that took the photo yesterday just a few minutes after landing. That was a wide-angle survey camera, this is the camera is attached to the robot arm that will place the seismograph and not-so-boring boring thing on the surface. It needs to see what it's doing. Since it takes 4 to 20 minutes for radio waves to travel between Earth and Mars, depending on where the planets are in their orbits, JPL will probably be moving the arm in small little increments so that they can tell if it's headed for trouble. The stuff on top of the lander appears to be the things that the arm (the white thing on the right?) will be placing on the surface. The seismograph is the biggie. It has to situated just right, then covered with a protective cover to shield it from the wind. The seismograph was jointly built by the French, the Swiss and British and reportedly can detect movements down to the atomic scale. So they obviously want to place it where noise is least. The not-so-boring boring thing is German. So it's an international endeavor. The Americans made the vehicle (Lockheed-Martin) and got it to Mars on an American rocket (a ULA Atlas) so that it can deploy European instruments. Another interesting thing is that Insight's got a weather station that can send back continuous weather information. Earlier landers and rovers only spot-checked the weather periodically and didn't monitor it continuously. They say that they hope to put a lot of this data (weather and seismic) out there in the public domain so that scientists everywhere can work on it.(NASA photo):

 

It looks a lot like a piece of Arizona I drove through once.



I think we should start one of those "fake moon landing" conspiracy theories.

 

NASA's busted again!

Mars does look a lot like the American southwest. The biggest difference seems to me to be that there's always some kind of dry-lands vegetation in the Earth scenes. I'm not sure that I've ever seen anywhere in the southwest with no plant life visible.

 

Note to conspirators: Be sure to Photoshop out all plant life.

 

While on the subject of little microsats like the MARCOs, there's this:

SpaceX will be flying a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg tomorrow, Sunday Dec 2. It will be this particular booster's third trip into space. It previously flew in May and August of this year. A SpaceX photo of it preparing for tomorrow's launch is below. The plan is to recover it this time on SpaceX's Pacific "droneship" out in the ocean. The payload is 64 small satellites, from a whole variety of groups who are sharing the cost.

The launch window is from 10:32 AM PST to 11:00 AM PST tomorrow. (1:32 PM EST to 2:00 PM EST) It will be livestreamed here:

https://www.spacex.com/webcast

Their customer (a Seattle based space rideshare company!) describes the mission:

"A total of 64 spacecraft from 34 organizations will be launched as part of the Spaceflight SSO-A: SmallSat Express mission. The SmallSat Express is the largest single rideshare mission from a U.S. based launch vehicle to-date... The mission includes 15 microsats and 49 cubesats... The payloads, which vary from technology demonstrations and imaging satellites to educational research endeavors, are from 17 countries, including the U.S., Australia, Italy, Netherlands, Finland, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, U.K., Germany, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Thailand, Poland, Canada, Brazil and India."

http://spaceflight.com/sso-a/

 

Oops.... the SSO-A launch originally scheduled for today has been pushed back to tomorrow, Monday Dec 3. Same time, 10:32 AM PST (1:32 EST). Same place for the live webcast.

According to SpaceX's twitter page, a technical fault has developed with the second stage and additional inspections are underway.

 

The next couple of days will be busy with lots of interesting space-related livestreams.

Not only will SpaceX hopefully be lofting the commercial launch from Vandenberg using a twice-flown Falcon9 Monday (tomorrow). They apparently have a bi-coastal back-to-back scheduled, with an unmanned Dragon 1 supply capsule lofted by a pristine unused Falcon9 destined for the Space Station due to launch from Cape Canaveral Tuesday.

And Roskosmos has their Soyuz boosters back in business, after the recent accident. They will be launching Expedition 58, a manned Soyuz carrying three astronauts (an American, a Canadian and a Russian) from Baikunur tomorrow (Monday), also destined for the Space Station.

https://www.nasa.gov/launchschedule/

NASA will be livestreaming the Soyuz launch on NASA TV tomorrow from Kazakhstan, at 6:31 EST. (3:31 PST, I don't expect to be up to watch it live.)

https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive

When they get done with that, they aren't finished.

At 8:45 AM PST/11:45 EST tomorrow (Monday), Osiris Rex will be arriving at the tiny asteroid Bennu, and NASA TV will livestream coverage from Mission Control at Lockheed Martin in Colorado on their NASA TV channel.

I hope that SpaceX will stream the cargo Dragon launch on Tuesday. (10:38 AM PST/1:38 PM EST) The booster landings are always the most interesting part of those.

The three Expedition 57 astronauts (an American, a German and a Russian) currently up on the Space Station will be returning by Soyuz capsule on Dec 20. (Dunno if there will be any TV of that. The landing will occur in remote Kazakhstan.)

Another upcoming event is the first unmanned demonstration flight of the SpaceX Dragon2 (the crew Dragon) on Monday January 7. SpaceX is certain to provide live video of that.

 

From Elon Musk's twitter page:

 

The Soyuz with the three astronauts took off successfully and just mated with the Space Station. I didn't watch the launch (it happened at night my time) but just saw some pretty dramatic live video shot from both the station and the capsule of the Soyuz capsule flying entirely around the Space Station, assuming station-keeping mode above it, then very slowly and laboriously approaching as distances and rates decreased and the Russian pilot tried to aim his crosshairs at a little target on the side of one of the Russian modules. Finally capture was confirmed. Now they are clamping the Soyuz down and equalizing pressure with the station so that the hatch can be opened.

 

SpaceX just launched their Falcon9/Dragon resupply mission to the Space Station. Launch, stage separation and orbital insertion went well.

Replay available here

https://www.spacex.com/webcast

Then the first stage booster attempted to return to Cape Canaveral. Boost-back and re-entry burns went well, the thing aimed itself correctly, then right before the landing burn, it started to roll excessively and was obviously trying and failing to regain control of itself. The SpaceX TV cut out at that point and went to a view of the second stage performing flawlessly (Elon Musk says it shouldn't have and will release the missing parts). Word is that the poor suffering booster came down in the water right next to its lovely landing pad, but is intact.

Elon Musk thinks that the hydraulics on the 'grid-fins' (those things that fold out and look like waffle-irons) failed.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1070386062164283392

There's a video that somebody shot. You can see the roll and how the thing is trying to complete its landing anyway.

https://twitter.com/dezmondOliver/status/1070387032503930880

 

Elon musk just released the missing on-board footage here

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1070399755526656000

Apparently the water landing is a feature, not a bug. The boosters aim at a point in the water right off the Cape Canaveral coast intentionally, so that if anything goes wrong you don't have this giant explosive thing coming down on Cape Canaveral's head. Then it diverts to the landing pad during the last moment landing burn.

 

Musk posted this better quality video of the flawed water landing.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1070446975642812416

 

the sound of wind on Mars

http://digg.com/video/insight-lander-mars-wind-sound

 

Very nice NASA photo of the SpaceX Dragon supply capsule arriving at the Space Station. (Extra-credit if you can identify the land below.)



And here's a short NASA video from inside the Space Station showing the recent Soyuz capsule hatch opening and the arrival of three new astronauts on the Station.

https://twitter.com/NASA/status/1069678777670631424

 

The Hirise Mars orbiter has captured photos of the Insight lander on Mars' surface from orbit. (Plus its heat shield and parachute which were nearby.) The lander is in the center left in a dark circle created by its rocket descent engines. (The blow-up view shows the two circular solar panels on each side. The parachute and the lander's outer protective backshell are near the bottom. The heat shield is at the upper right at a crater's rim. The bright spots of light are sun reflections.

https://www.uahirise.org/releases/insight/hardware/

NASA/JPL/U. Arizona photo:

 

Speaking of space news, there's a bunch of it this morning...

Virgin Galactic flew another test flight of their Spaceship Two space tourism rocket plane this morning. They ran the engine for 60 seconds and the vehicle reached 51.4 miles/82.68 km/271,000 feet. (100,000 ft higher than last flight.) The target altitude was 50 miles. It's now safely back on the ground at their Mojave California base.

The altitude they reached is technically space as defined by NASA and the US Air Force. So this is the first manned spaceflight launched in a US vehicle from US territory since the last Shuttle flight in 2011. It's also the first private manned spaceflight since Burt Rutan's little Spaceship One flew three times in 2004. (This vehicle is the direct descendant of that vehicle.) The two test pilots on this flight will get commercial astronaut status.

https://twitter.com/virgingalactic/status/1073251588523712513

https://www.virgingalactic.com/articles/first-space-flight/

https://twitter.com/planet4589

https://twitter.com/NASA/status/1073272440703328258

https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/flightopportunities/Four_NASA_Sponsored_Experiments_Set_to_Launch

Virgin Galactic photo: