Science
America Prepares Return to Space – Aeronautics Online
After nine years, thirty-six expeditions, and one mass global pandemic, the United States is finally prepared to launch its own astronauts into space once more. The Demo-2 mission’s launch, using SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Block 5, has just been set for 4:32pm (EDT) May 27th, and will end the longest period that the USA has spent without a crewed launch capability.
On the Demo-2 mission will be pilot Robert Behnken and commander Douglas Hurley, both veterans from the Space Shuttle Program. They will be onboard the Crew Dragon, the latest iteration of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, for its rendezvous with the International Space Station (ISS), and will run a series of tests on the spacecraft on the way there. These tests will include, amongst other systems, the spacecraft’s propulsion, controls, life support and display systems. Then, during the rendezvous with the ISS, there will be (another) chance to test the Dragon’s docking capabilities (after the successful Demo-1 mission).
Following this (presumably successful) rendezvous and docking, Hurley and Behnken will make an “extended stay”, which will last for a “to be determined” duration. However, this flight can be expected to return within 110 days, as the specific capsule is only qualified to remain in space that long, while future versions will be able to last the full length of 180 days (long enough for a full ISS Expedition). This wait in space will allow for complete checks on the Crew Dragon’s ability to survive in space for an extended period (as nothing can beat the real thing). Then, the Dragon will attempt to successfully bring it’s crew home safely.
This mission, if successful, will be momentous for NASA’s manned space program. As with the first flight of the Space Shuttle, Demo-2 will help to define the future era. In addition, a successful mission will finally end the USA’s dependence on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, opening up more possibilities for NASA and companies alike. Finally, by making this flight, (the first crewed orbital mission on a commercial vehicle,) NASA will definitively prove that its new approach, of buying transport as a service, is viable and profitable.
However, there remain some obstacles; an engine failure on the last Falcon 9 launch led to the vehicle crashing during its landing attempt, the fifth of that specific booster. While this is suspected to be related to the unprecedented experience of the booster itself, and a landing is not mission-critical, investigations still have to be made into this failure. Schedules also have a tendency to be pushed back in spaceflight, so May 27th is by no means a firm date; it is merely a goal. But the fact that this date is so close implies that a crewed launch, COVID-19 or not, will take place within the next few months.
The wait is almost over.
Featured image courtesy of SpaceX
Science
SpaceX sends 23 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit
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April 23 (UPI) — SpaceX launched 23 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit Tuesday evening from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Liftoff occurred at 6:17 EDT with a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sending the payload of 23 Starlink satellites into orbit.
The Falcon 9 rocket’s first-stage booster landed on an autonomous drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean after separating from the rocket’s second stage and its payload.
The entire mission was scheduled to take about an hour and 5 minutes to complete from launch to satellite deployment.
The mission was the ninth flight for the first-stage booster that previously completed five Starlink satellite-deployment missions and three other missions.
Science
NASA Celebrates As 1977’s Voyager 1 Phones Home At Last
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Voyager 1 has finally returned usable data to NASA from outside the solar system after five months offline.
Launched in 1977 and now in its 46th year, the probe has been suffering from communication issues since November 14. The same thing also happened in 2022. However, this week, NASA said that engineers were finally able to get usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems.
Slow Work
Fixing Voyager 1 has been slow work. It’s currently over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, which means a radio message takes about 22.5 hours to reach it—and the same again to receive an answer.
The problem appears to have been its flight data subsystem, one of one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers. Its job is to package the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth. Since the computer chip that stores its memory and some of its code is broken, engineers had to re-insert that code into a new location.
Next up for engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California is to adjust other parts of the FDS software so Voyager 1 can return to sending science data.
Beyond The ‘Heliopause’
The longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history, Voyager 1, was launched on September 5, 1977, while its twin spacecraft, Voyager 2, was launched a little earlier on August 20, 1977. Voyager 2—now 12 billion miles away and traveling more slowly—continues to operate normally.
Both are now beyond what astronomers call the heliopause—a protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the sun, which is thought to represent the sun’s farthest influence. Voyager 1 got to the heliopause in 2012 and Voyager 2 in 2018.
Pale Blue Dot
Since their launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard Titan-Centaur rockets, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have had glittering careers. Both photographed Jupiter and Saturn in 1979 and 1980 before going their separate ways. Voyager 1 could have visited Pluto, but that was sacrificed so scientists could get images of Saturn’s moon, Titan, a maneuver that made it impossible for it to reach any other body in the solar system. Meanwhile, Voyager 2 took slingshots around the planets to also image Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989—the only spacecraft ever to image the two outer planets.
On February 14, 1990, when 3.7 billion miles from Earth, Voyager 1 turned its cameras back towards the sun and took an image that included our planet as “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Known as the “Pale Blue Dot,” it’s one of the most famous photos ever taken. It was remastered in 2019.
Science
NASA hears from Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft from Earth, after months of quiet
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – NASA has finally heard back from Voyager 1 again in a way that makes sense.
The most distant spacecraft from Earth stopped sending back understandable data last November. Flight controllers traced the blank communication to a bad computer chip and rearranged the spacecraft’s coding to work around the trouble.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California declared success after receiving good engineering updates late last week. The team is still working to restore transmission of the science data.
It takes 22 1/2 hours to send a signal to Voyager 1, more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space. The signal travel time is double that for a round trip.
Contact was never lost, rather it was like making a phone call where you can’t hear the person on the other end, a JPL spokeswoman said Tuesday.
Launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 has been exploring interstellar space – the space between star systems – since 2012. Its twin, Voyager 2, is 12.6 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) away and still working fine.
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