How does this differ from my other news roundups or updates or just plain small news stories? What do you get when you cross an elephant and a rhinoceros? Elephino.
The expected lifetime of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope just jumped
Seriously jumped. The NGRST was originally planned to have a primary five-year mission followed by a five-year extended mission, but a major improvement was announced today. The lifetime is now being given as 22 years. I'm going to assume that the primary and extended missions have been increased from five years to 11 years each.
"As a result of exquisite planning by our orbital dynamics team, brilliant execution by the operations team, and a precise launch from SpaceX, Roman has fuel for at least 22 years of potential science operations," said Jamie Dunn, the center director at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, in a statement.
Now that captures my attention and gets a skeptical reaction. "exquisite planning?" "Brilliant execution?" Why is it even possible to double the expected life of the propellants needed onboard by those things. Why aren't exquisite planning and brilliant execution expected?
Then they dropped a little bomb.
— and it's all thanks to the spacecraft coming in less massive than the original design had projected.
Add that to the most stunning words I've ever reported. NGRST was done eight months ahead of schedule, and under budget.
The first link in this sub-topic, in the first paragraph, has details on how well all this worked out, but I think a good, short statement is this has been a well-run project.
An update to yesterday's post on SpaceX Starship Flight 14
The main update is that the booster is not going to attempt a recovery on the launch tower with the "mechazilla arms". One of the issues on the pretty astounding Flight 13 was that the SuperHeavy booster did not make a controlled soft landing in the gulf east of the Boca Chica launch site. Several modifications have been made and priority is being given to verification and not the (always very watchable) "grab it with the monster arms." SpaceX reports:
The booster’s primary test objective on Flight 14 will be executing a successful launch, ascent, stage separation, boostback burn, and landing burn at an offshore landing point in the Gulf of America. There have been several modifications to hardware and software to address issues seen on the previous flight.
After stage separation and flip on Flight 13, the Super Heavy booster was able to use all 33 engines on its boostback burn for the first time. In the terminal phase of the burn, the three center engines showed signs of ice clogging which triggered an early end to the maneuver. The booster went on to attempt a landing burn, with 8 of the 13 planned engines reigniting before the booster made a hard splashdown in the Gulf. The Super Heavy on this upcoming flight has hardware modifications to improve filtering to the engines and software changes to enhance relight reliability.
Unlike the scenarios I played with last night, such as Flight 15 being sent up soon after 14 for tests of the two Starships' abilities to transfer fuel - which means having to navigate and dock in space autonomously - SpaceX says the ship will do orbital tests.
Starship’s initial orbital mission is expected to fly at an altitude approximately 275 km (171 miles) above Earth and complete approximately six orbits around the planet over the course of a nearly 10-hour flight, with splashdown targeted in the Pacific Ocean to the west of Chile.
SpaceX says they've made some changes to heat shielding on Starship based on examining Flight 13's ship.
Several upgrades and experiments related to Starship’s heatshield will also be tested, with some improvements derived directly from data gathered from the Flight 13 Starship as it floated in the Indian Ocean. They include additional retention mechanisms added to tiles in areas deemed to be at highest risk of falling off during ascent, addressing recently discovered areas that offer flow paths behind tiles for plasma, and flying multiple areas with a curved tile design that has shown the ability to reduce heating in the gaps between tiles. And finally, two tiles recovered from Ship 40 are planned to be reflown on Ship 41, marking the first tile reuse for Starship.
The middle of that paragraph, from "They include" to "the gaps between the tiles" is especially interesting.
A close-up of Flight 13's heat shield after it landed in the Indian Ocean. This was before it was towed to Christmas Island and loaded for return to Starbase. Credit: SpaceX
And oh, by the way
Back on September 10, the peak day of the Atlantic hurricane season, I did a post on how there was nothing in the Atlantic with a chance of becoming a storm within a week. We're not a week out from that day and we have seen an area of interest on the NHC maps. Earlier today it went from a forecast possible development at 30% in the next 7 days, to a 40% chance and then back to a 30% chance of development. The area they're watching is mostly east of Bermuda and with systems at this point, they don't give potential paths that the potential storm might follow. Potentially.
Ars Technica's main space reporter, Eric Berger, is actually a meteorologist by degree and job experience. He has an article today pointing out that the Atlantic is about to break a record that has held for 85 years. Berger states: "But in 1941, the first hurricane did not form until September 17. This is the date of the latest first Atlantic hurricane on record." I can see no way that mess east of Bermuda could become a hurricane by Thursday.
No comments:
Post a Comment