Category: Space Sunday

The first entirely private sector mission to the International Space Station (ISS) lifted-off from the SpaceX Falcon launch facilities at Pad 39A, Kennedy Space Centre (KSC) on Friday April 8th, 2022, carrying a crew of four to the station aboard the Crew Dragon vehicle Endeavour.

The launch took place at 16:17 UTC, with the Falcon 9’s first stage making a flawless ascent prior to upper stage separation, then completing a boost-back manoeuvre and a successful return to Earth to land on one of the SpaceX autonomous drone ships. It marked the 5th successful flight for the core stage, which coincidentally was the same stage that launched the first all-private mission to Earth orbit – Inspiration4 (see: Space Sunday: Inspiration4 and Chinese flights) in September 2021.

Ax-1 has been seen by some as just another jolly jaunt into space by those who can afford it; however and in fairness, it is slightly more than that. Axiom Space was founded to create the world’s first commercial space station. While others have since entered this arena, Axiom has been granted access to the forward port of the ISS’ Harmony module, to which Axiom plans to dock the Axiom Orbital Segment; a complex that could grow to five pressurised modules after 2024.

In order to help finance their plans, Axiom plan to offer a series of fare-paying flights to the ISS, with the 8-10 day Ax-1 being the first. However as a part of these flights, those paying for seats will also help Axiom pave the way towards their goal in bringing their first module to the ISS in 2024 and carry out a suite of selected on-orbit studies and experiments.

Commanding the mission is Michael López-Alegría, who was one of NASA’s most experienced astronauts prior to retiring in 2012. He holds the US record for the most EVAs undertaken by a NASA astronaut (10 totalling 67 hours and 40 minutes) and is also (and quite separately) licensed to officiate at wedding ceremonies. In 2017, he joined Axiom Space as their director of Business Development, and allowing him to regain his space flight status. Joining him on the mission are US entrepreneur  Larry Connor, Israeli businessman and former fighter pilot Eytan Stibbe and Canadian philanthropist and businessman Mark Pathy, each of whom paid an estimated US $55 million to join the mission.

Endeavour took a gentle path up to the space station over a 20 hour flight; however, docking was delayed by some 45 minutes due to an issue with the video system used by the ISS crew to monitor docking operations.

Following post-docking checks, the hatches between Endeavour and the ISS were opened, and the Ax-1 team were welcomed aboard the station by the 7-person crew. During a brief ceremony-come-video press briefing, López-Alegría – who had become the first former astronaut to return to the ISS – presented his three fellow crew members with astronaut pins. Whilst not official US astronaut pins, those presented to Stibbe, Connors and Pathy have been designed by the Association of Space Explorers, which encompasses a lot of members from 38 different countries that have flown astronauts.

Alongside of their work in support of Axiom Space, the Ax-1 crew will take part in a multi-discipline science programme of some 25 different research experiments sponsored by the ISS U.S. National Laboratory in collaboration with the Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic, Canadian Space Agency, Montreal Children’s Hospital, Ramon Foundation (named for Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut killed in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster of 2003) and Israel Space Agency.

As a fully private mission to the ISS, Ax-1 not only features a non-government crew launched aboard a private sector space vehicle and rocket, it is also being managed through the SpaceX flight control centre, Hawthorne, California and Axiom’s own mission control centre in Houston, Texas.

Artemis WDR: Further Issues and Delay

The Wet Dress Rehearsal for the Artemis 1 Space Launch System (SLS) vehicle at KSC’s Pad 39B continues to hit niggling problems, with a resumption of testing now pushed back until April 12th.

As I noted in my previous Space Sunday report, while it had been hoped this full test of a launch countdown procedure, including fuelling the massive rocket’s liquid propellant tanks, could be completed in a 3-day period between April 1st and April 3rd, the test ran into a series of issues that caused efforts to be scrubbed on two occasions.

The issues were now with the rocket itself, which performed flawless during the tests up until the scrubs were each called, but with support systems within the vehicle’s mobile launch tower. However, after the second set of issues on April 3rd caused a scrub, the plan had been to investigate and correct the issue in time to resume the countdown on April 4th and complete the tests ahead of the launch of the SpaceX / Axiom Ax-1 mission reported above – a launch that had already been postponed from April 3rd.

As the investigations took longer than planned, on April 4th, the decision was taken to stand down WDR operations to allow the Ax-1 to go ahead, and to resume the tests on April 9th. But on April 7th, during a check on the rocket’s systems, engineers found a problem when trying to maintain helium purge pressure in the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS), the upper stage of the rocket itself.

The ICPS is based on the second stage of the Delta 4 launch vehicle. It uses a single RL10 engine to propelled the payload carrying section of the rocket – although it will be replaced by the more powerful and purpose-built Exploration Upper Stage from the third SLS flight (Artemis 4) onwards. This particular ICPS was one of the first to be completed, and had been in storage for several years awaiting the completion of the Artemis 1 core stage and boosters.

The issue was traced to a check valve intended to prevent helium – used to purge propellant lines and drain propellant – from escaping the rocket., the valve failing to function as intended. To allow time for a possible fix for the problem to be developed and attempted, the decision was taken to push test resumption by to April 12th. Unfortunately, by April 9th, it became clear that the valve would need to be replaced; but rather than cancel the WDR completely, NASA has decided to complete the test as planned on the 12th – but to only perform a “minimum fill” of the ICPS tanks;  enough to prove the propellant loading system works. This, with a full load of the core stage tanks is seen as sufficient for the WDR to be completed.

Replacing the check valve will be carried out once the rocket has been returned to KSC’s Vehicle Assembly Building as a part of the post-WDR checks. However, this means that any chance of Artemis 1 making the hoped-for May launch window is now out of the question, whilst NASA is confident replacing the valve will correct the issue, it is also unlikely the turn-around can be completed in time for the rocket to make the June 6th through 16th launch window, potentially making July the earliest Artemis 1 launch opportunity.

Continue reading “Space Sunday: Ax-1 Artemis, ESA & a galaxy far, far, away” →

The Furthest Star

My previous Space Sunday update ended with a note that NASA would be making an announcement at the end of March 2022 concerning a new discovery by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) that could have repercussions for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), once it commences its scientific mission. Announced on March 30th, that discovery was revealed to be the imaging of the most distant individual star from Earth yet discovered. So distant, in fact, that it has taken the light from it 12.9 billion years to reach us. By contrast, the next oldest individual star we have detected using Hubble was born when the universe was already some 4 billion years old, taking 9 billion years to reach us.

Christened  Eärendel, the Old English term for “morning star” (and, as Tolkien fans like me will know, was the name initially given to the half-human, half-elven navigator, prior to Tolkien changing the name of that character to Earendil), the star was discovered as a part of a HST programme called RELICS -the REionisation LensIng Cluster Survey, intended to capture to light from really far distant objects born not long after the Big Bang.

To do this, RELICS employs the phenomenon of gravitational lensing, whereby the mass of a huge object such as a galaxy or cluster of galaxies bend and focuses the light coming from objects far beyond them, allowing us to see them as magnified, arc-like objects. In this case, a cluster of galaxies called WHL0137-08 was found to be lensing the light of a galaxy far beyond them, drawing the collected light of that galaxy out into a slender crescent Hubble could see and which astronomers nicknamed the Sunrise Arc.

For the most part, the Sunrise Arc is blurred and instinct, like sunlight diffracted by the ripples on the surface of a swimming pool cast blurred clouds of light on the bottom of the pool. However, by coincidence, at the time the images of the Arc were recorded, Eärendel appeared directly on, or extremely close to, a curve in space-time that provided maximum brightening, allowing its light to stand out as an individual point within the blurriness of the Sunrise Arc – just like some rays of light can strike the surface of a swimming pool at precisely the right moment to avoid diffraction by the surface ripples and form pinpoints of light on the bottom of the pool rather than being blurred.

Initially it was thought that the star might in fact be a cluster, rather than a lone star, but careful analysis of Eärendel ‘s red shift has swayed astronomers towards believing it is most likely just the one star (although the potential for it to be a binary system hasn’t been entirely ruled out) of enormous size at least 50 times the mass of the Sun and correspondingly enormous luminosity.

Such is Eärendel age, that it at the time its light departed it, the star was likely only made up of primordial hydrogen and helium following the Big Bang. This makes it a prime target for study by JWST – which thanks to is infra-red capability can pick out more information about a target object than HST -, as doing so could reveal more about the state of the early universe and early stellar development.

However, such is the nature of things that – whilst referring to the star in the present tense, it’s important to note that it is very likely that while the most distant individual star observed by HST, Eärendel is not the oldest star yet found; in fact, it probably no longer exists. This is because such supermassive stars tend to burn through their available fuel stocks in mere millions of years, rather than billions. It’s therefore very likely that at some point when the light captured by Hubble was still making its way towards us, Eärendel either violently exploded into a supernova, or collapsed into a black hole – something we’ll only know for sure a few million years into our future.

The Nature of Sound on Mars

We’re all familiar with the concept of the speed of sound. Here on Earth and at sea level, with the temperature at 20ºC, sound travels at 343 metres per second (m/s). However, that is not an absolute; it varies according to the relative atmospheric temperature and density. At altitudes up to 20 km, the speed of sound slowly declines due to the thinning of the atmosphere; however, above 20 km, whilst the atmosphere continues to thin, its temperature actually increases, making it more excitable, and so the speed of sound increases once more.

Much the same was thought to be true on Mars, where the relatively thin atmospheric density close to the surface of the planet was thought to limit sound waves to around an average of 240 m/s (again, allowing for variations in temperature).  However, what no-one expected was that the speed of sound would vary according to frequency – but that is what the Mars 2020 mission has revealed.

An international team of scientists reached this conclusion after analysing recordings made by one of two microphones mounted on the Perseverance rover. The SuperCam microphone mounted at the top of the rover’s mast is somewhat directional in nature in that turning / tilting the SuperCam unit allows the microphone to be pointed directly at sound sources, allowing it to record them with a good level of fidelity.

This is been done a number of time during the rover’s mission. For example, the camera has been pointed towards the Ingenuity Mars helicopter, allowing it to directly record the low-frequency beating of the helicopter’s rotors. It is also naturally pointing at rockets targeted for “zapping” by SuperCam’s laser. It has also been able to listen to tools and equipment operating at the end of the rover’s robot arm. All of these sounds have now been collectively analysed, and scientist have been surprised to find that while lower frequency sounds – such as the beating of Ingenuity’s rotors – travel at the expected Martian average of 240 m/s, sounds at frequencies greater then 240 Hertz, such as the higher-pitched click-click-clicking of the SuperCam laser actually travel around 10 m/s faster – the first time this has ever been observed.

The cause for this unusual difference is thought to be the result of the Martian atmosphere being largely carbon-dioxide. In studying the tenuous Martian atmosphere, scientists have discovered during the day, the heat of the Sun, deflected as it is by the surface of the planet, generates an unusual turbulence in the first 10 km of atmosphere above the planet. This turbulence has an unusual impact on the carbon dioxide that isn’t seen in Earth’s denser atmosphere: it allows higher frequency sounds to excite the carbon dioxide molecules a lot more than low-frequency sounds, allowing such higher frequencies to be more rapidly transmitted through the atmospheric medium.

Because this effect happens almost smack in the middle of the bandwidth of sounds audible to the human ear, it means that if we were able to stand out in the open on Mars and listen to something like a symphony being played a few 10 of metres away, rather than hearing all the notes collectively as we would on Earth, we’d hear the higher notes a second or so ahead of the lower notes, resulting in a discordant mess. However, a more practical outcome of this discovery is that engineers believe that by listening to the different frequencies within the sounds made by various pieces of audible equipment on the rover, they could potentially identify if that part of the rover is experiencing issues, and thus be forewarned that action might be required well before a potential failure occurs.

Continue reading “Space Sunday: distant stars, sounds on Mars, a return and a rocket” →

NASA has rolled out the first of what is intended to be both the first of its new “super rocket”, the Space Launch System, and the vehicle to start the United States and its international partners on the road back to the Moon.

At 21:47 UTC on March 17th, the huge rocket, mounted on its mobile launch platform, slowly crept out of one of the high bays of the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), the iconic cube sitting within NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre which was used as an integral part of Project Apollo and which is now fulfilling a similar role for Project Artemis, on the back of a massive crawler-transporter at the start of a 6.72 km journey to Kennedy Space Centre’s Lunch Complex pad 39B.

It was not a swift journey, taking some 11 hours to complete  – albeit with stops along the way for checks to be carried out – the crawler-transporter finally reaching the top of the incline of the launch pad 04:15 UTC on Friday, March 18th.

The move of the rocket from VAB to pad was not in readiness for the launch of Artemis 1 – the mission this SLS vehicle will carry to orbit – but rather for the final series of tests to be carried out on the fully integrated rocket and its Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) payload to ensure both are ready for that launch, which is currently set for a provisional window in mid-May 2022.

As I noted in my last Space Sunday update, the focus of these tests will be a full wet dress rehearsal, due to take place in April. This will see the rocket fully fuelled and go through a full launch countdown that will stop just nine seconds prior to an actual launch. The intention is to make sure everything with the rocket, the payload and the launch systems are all ready for a launch attempt, and will be followed by a further 8-9 days of additional pad tests. After this, the rocket will be returned to the VAB and assessed ready for final flight clearance.

When it does take flight, SLS will become the most powerful launch system built by NASA. The Block 1 vehicle being capable of delivering up to 95 tonnes to low Earth orbit, and the upcoming Block 1B up to 105 tonnes, and the future Block 2 vehicle up to 130 tonnes – putting it in the same lifting class as SpaceX’s Starship / Super Heavy launch system, but potentially far more flexible in turns of specialised launches, SLS being capable of launching smaller payloads (e.g. 23-45 tonnes, depending on the launcher variant) directly to the Moon, or other payloads out into the solar system without any need for on-orbit refuelling.

However, as I’ve noted before, there are some significant cost issues for SLS that may impact its use, the most notable being that of ongoing costs. Development work on the SLS system has thus far eaten US $23.01 billion, and while NASA would claim a lot of that (US $14 billion) has gone directly into work creation, it nevertheless means that as a non-reusable system, SLS is terribly expensive: NASA’s own Office of Inspector General (OIG) estimates each launch will cost some US $4 billion, twice NASA’s launch cost estimate, and will never fall below US $1 billion as the agency has suggested.

This cost factor has already seen NASA turn to other launch systems for missions originally earmarked for SLS. The Europa Clipper mission, for example, has been move to a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launcher on the ground of launch costs (and the fact that SLS generates so much vibration at launch, it is unsuitable to fly certain sensitive instruments into space).

As it is, five SLS missions in support for Artemis have thus far been confirm, with vehicles for three more after Artemis 1 already under construction:

• Artemis 1: uncrewed mission to cislunar space to test the Orion MPCV; duration: some 25.5 days – mid 2022.
• Artemis 2: crewed mission to lunar orbit; duration: 10 days – 2024.
• Artemis 3: crewed lunar obit / lunar landing mission; duration:30 days – 2025/26:
• Artemis 4: crewed mission to a lunar near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) in support of the Lunar Gateway station and the core I-HAB deployment – 2026/27
• Artemis 5: crewed mission to a lunar near-rectilinear halo orbit(NRHO) in support of the Lunar Gateway station and the European System Providing Refuelling, Infrastructure and Telecommunications (ESPRIT) module, together with a lunar surface mission – 2027-28.

Starship HLS: NASA Updates

A further key component for Project Artemis is the Human Landing System (HLS), the vehicle that will be used to transfer crews between lunar orbit and the surface of the Moon and (initially) provide them with living space whilst on the Moon. Currently, only one contract has been issued for HLS, and as I’ve noted before, it is to SpaceX for the use of a lunar variant of their Starship vehicle, although the agency has more recently been order to acquire HLS vehicles from other sources.

Coinciding with the SLS roll-out at Kennedy Space Centre, NASA issued an update on the SpaceX HLS programme, including the work going into some key elements, such as the elevator that will carry the 2-person crew of Artemis 3 the 30-40 metres down the side of the vehicle to the Moon’s surface and back after landing, together with the airlock through which they’ll leave / enter HLS during surface operations and some of the living / working facilities inside the vehicle.

The update also confirms that HLS will require some six starship / super heavy launches:

• The launch of a special “tanker” Starship that will be parked in Earth orbit and used for a wide range of Starship propellant transfer operations.
• Four further launches of re-usable Starship vehicles equipped with additional fuel tanks that will carry propellants to be transferred to the orbital “tanker”.
• The HLS starship itself and the cargo needed for Artemis 3. This will dock with the “tanker” and take fuel from it that can be used to boost the HLS vehicle to lunar orbit and to both land it on the Moon and then get it back to lunar orbit.

Once the HLS is in lunar orbit, the 4-person Artemis 3 crew will then launch to the Moon aboard an Orion MPCV lifted by SLS, and rendezvous with HLS so two can transfer to it and then travel to / from the lunar south pole. After transferring back to Orion, the crew will return to Earth, leaving the HLS starship in lunar orbit, potentially with either fuel to be used by the crew of Artemis 5, the second lunar landing mission.

However, whilst SpaceX HLS is earmarked for this mission (and will likely be the only HLS craft capable of supporting Artemis 5 in 2027/28), some in Congress are pushing NASA to use an alternative HLS design for the second lunar landing (which is which Artemis 4 was switched from a join lunar gateway / lunar landing mission to being solely a lunar gateway mission.

Continue reading “Space Sunday: a big rocket, a telescope & yellow and blue” →