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Space Exploration II: Always Looking up

Kepler said:
Elmo is a hood ornament. Space X's achievements have nothing to do with him.
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He's not an ornament.

bird-droppings-on-car-bonnet-H36N9W.jpg
 
joecct said:
Something you may want to read when it's released in a month. From the author of Liftoff:

https://www.amazon.com/Reentry-Spac...?dplnkId=f9c925a2-5014-4426-8d77-c0b483d6cd1d

and this:
https://x.com/FutureJurvetson/status/1827393665377169618?t=DDQdeaM3Q7_melaSUKbGwA&s=19
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From the latter:

“Former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman helped write the proposal and provide and astronaut’s perspective. But their small team was no match for Boeing’s proposal-writing machine. It was intimidating knowing that 200 people were working on Boeing’s proposal, when Dragon’s team could fit in a small conference room.”
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I would so prefer to be on a proposal team of 6 than 200. I've been on both, and the latter will produce nothing but corporate tripe.
 
Starliner successfully detached from the ISS, performed it's detachment and de-orbit with bursts from the thrusters, and landed successfully, but empty, in the New Mexico desert tonight.
 
So after the cheery initial description of the successful autonomous landing of Starliner, more details have been released about the return trip that cemented NASA made the correct call to leave Butch and Suni on ISS and return Starliner empty.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/starliner-new-problems-return-earth

A new thruster on the Starliner capsule itself failed during the un-docking and de-orbit burn, along with a crash and reboot of the navigation system before re-entry.

Officially, Butch and Suni would have been fine according to NASA, but they reiterate they weren't going to chance it.

https://www.space.com/nasa-boeing-starliner-cft-could-have-returned-safely-with-crew-nasa-says
 
Two really cool missions launched in the past 10 days:
Hera:

The Hera mission marks a return to Didymos and Dimorphous and the first planetary defense mission for ESA. Michael Kueppers, ESA’s Hera project scientist, said the primary scientific goals are to measure the mass of Dimorphous, which will help them understand how efficient the DART impact was in 2022.

Kueppers said knowing it was the DART spacecraft that created a crater on Dimorphous and then going to study that will also help them better understand “the cratering processing.” He said those key facts can help inform future planetary defense missions, if and when future humans discover a threatening, Earth-bound asteroid.

“Once we have Hera and we investigate Dimorphous in detail, we know what it’s properties are and then, in case anything happens, one could again investigate that asteroid and then extrapolate the result from DART and Hera, essentially to find out which kind of impactor would be needed to get the right deflection for that next asteroid,” Kueppers said.
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Europa:

NASA's Galileo spacecraft zoomed by Europa a dozen times, but it carried scientific instruments from the 1980s. Europa Clipper boasts a 21st-century payload package with nine instruments to probe Jupiter's icy moon, from its ocean to the space around it.

"Europa Clipper carries the most sophisticated suite of instruments that we’ve ever sent to the outer solar system," said Bob Pappalardo, the mission's project scientist at JPL. "It carries a radar that can penetrate through ice like a CT scan to find liquid water, super high-resolution imaging. We’ll be able to look for warm spots and plumes at Europa—all these wonderful techniques that combine together to tell us could Europa be the kind of place that could support life today."

Europa Clipper's best camera will resolve features on the moon's surface as small as 1.5 feet, or 50 centimeters, in certain areas. These views will be 12 times sharper than the most detailed images captured by Galileo.

Other sensors on Europa Clipper will measure the composition of Europa's crust and tenuous atmosphere, search for erupting plumes of water escaping through cracks in the moon's ice shell, and scan for small pools of water that might be on or near Europa's surface.

Europa Clipper also carries an ice-penetrating radar to investigate the structure and thickness of Europa's ice shell, and measure the topography of the moon's outer crust. A mass spectrometer is mounted on the front of the probe to sniff gases in the moon's faint atmosphere, or potentially sample material from a plume shooting high above Europa, if scientists are lucky enough to guide the spacecraft through one.

The Hubble Space Telescope found evidence for jets of water vapor coming from Europa, and while the Galileo spacecraft didn't see these eruptions, scientists went back through the mission's data archive and found signatures consistent with the existence of plumes. Steering Europa Clipper through such a plume would make for a scientific gold mine, allowing researchers to study material coming from Europa's watery abyss.

Scientists will use magnetic and gravity field measurements from Europa Clipper to determine the depth and salinity of Europa's ocean. Bonnie Buratti, the mission's deputy project scientist at JPL, said rough estimates put the ocean's depth at 60 to 80 miles, and the ice shell's thickness is probably on the order of 10 to 20 miles.
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There is a good video talking about the clipper mission and how it’s really tough due to Jupiter’s constant radiation. I’ll have to look it up. IIRC, it was a recent Veritasium video.
 
MichVandal said:
There is a good video talking about the clipper mission and how it’s really tough due to Jupiter’s constant radiation. I’ll have to look it up. IIRC, it was a recent Veritasium video.
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Nope. Insane Engineering or something like that. Just watched it tonight. Crazy stuff
 
I'll have to watch his too then. The insane engineering was decent. Not as good as Veritassium but worth watching on the stuff you're already interested in.
 
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