Space In General

Danoff
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I guess the guy sold it for a good amount and he's planning on opening 2 new stores in the area. So win-win for both parties.
 
R1600Turbo
I guess the guy sold it for a good amount and he's planning on opening 2 new stores in the area. So win-win for both parties.
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I'm pretty sure that's not how economics works. Der ter gerns! [/sarcasm]
 
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I didn't get to watch live, just now saw it, but I saw the video of the landing was uninterrupted, both from the onboard and from the drone ship, which is the first time I've seen that! No cut-out at the moment of landing.
 
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wfooshee
I didn't get to watch live, just now saw it, but I saw the video of the landing was uninterrupted, both from the onboard and from the drone ship, which is the first time I've seen that! No cut-out at the moment of landing.
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They've been working on it, hopefully they found a solution.

Also, update on SN16.

 
SpaceX will start doing polar orbit launches for Starlink from Florida in July. Here's a possible booster landing scenario. Just 40 miles off the coast of Cuba. 🤓

 
Launch in about an hour as I type this. The booster will return to land.

Edit: scrub due to range violation. Backup date tomorrow.

 
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Forgot to post the new stream link but the 1st stage landed successfully and the 2nd stage is in a 45 minute coast as I type this.



 
What I am impressed by is the deceleration of the landing burn. From what I could tell from the telemetry at the bottom left, which may or may not match the time of the video (although it seemed close,) The thing is still coming down around 100 kph when it reaches its own length in altitude. These things don't burn and hover, they decelerate at exactly the right rate to reach 0 velocity and 0 altitude at the same instant, still burning hard!
 
wfooshee
What I am impressed by is the deceleration of the landing burn. From what I could tell from the telemetry at the bottom left, which may or may not match the time of the video (although it seemed close,) The thing is still coming down around 100 kph when it reaches its own length in altitude. These things don't burn and hover, they decelerate at exactly the right rate to reach 0 velocity and 0 altitude at the same instant, still burning hard!
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That's the nature of fuel efficiency with rockets in gravity. Slowing yourself down gradually is just wasted energy beacuse gravity will just try to speed you up.
 
R1600Turbo
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Special internet cookie for anyone who knows the connection between this image and this song...



In a vaguely related aside, I once met the father of the former Virgin Galactic CEO and almost ended up working in his lab a few years ago (and a friend of mine actually did end up working there).
 
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Exorcet
That's the nature of fuel efficiency with rockets in gravity. Slowing yourself down gradually is just wasted energy beacuse gravity will just try to speed you up.
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I understand that, but it's incredible to see it in action, computed to the last meter and last meter per second. Somebody has a busy slide rule!!!! (Yes, my ancientness is sufficient that my college engineering calculations were done with slide rules! We had computers, but you had to go to where they were. Slide rules were portable!!!)
 
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Spaceweather.com brings news of the first X-class flare of the new solar cycle.

FIRST X-FLARE IN 4 YEARS: Now, Solar Cycle 25 has really begun. On July 3rd, new sunspot AR2838 produced the first X-class solar flare since Sept. 2017. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the extreme ultraviolet flash:


The July 3rd explosion registered X1.5 on the Richter Scale of Solar Flares​

A pulse of X-rays ionized the top of Earth's atmosphere, causing a shortwave radio blackout over the Atlantic Ocean: blackout map. Mariners, aviators, and amateur radio operators may have noticed unusual propagation effects below 30 MHz just after 1429 UT.

X-flares are the strongest kind of solar flare. They are typically responsible for the deepest radio blackouts and the most intense geomagnetic storms. This is the first X-flare of young Solar Cycle 25. More are in the offing. During the previous solar cycle (Solar Cycle 24) the sun produced 49 of them. Forecasters believe that Solar Cycle 25 should be at least that active. We can therefore expect dozens more X-flares as the sun approaches Solar Maximum in the year ~2025. Solar flare alerts: SMS Text.

SOLAR FLARE CAUSES RARE 'MAGNETIC CROCHET': The X-flare of July 3rd did something rare. "It disturbed all of my instruments," reports Rob Stammes, who operates a space weather observatory in Lofoten, Norway. The flare produced a radio burst, an ionospheric disturbance, a surge of electrical currents in the ground, and a deflection of the observatory's local magnetic field. All of these are shown in the strip chart recording, below.

​

"This is a first in many years," says Stammes. "The magnetic disturbance (circled in yellow) is especially rare."

The phenomenon is called a 'magnetic crochet.' Radiation from the flare ionized the top of Earth's atmosphere and caused currents to flow 60 km to 100 km above Earth's surface. These currents, in turn, altered Earth's polar magnetic field. Unlike geomagnetic disturbances that arrive with CMEs days after a flare, a magnetic crochet occurs while the flare is in progress. They tend to occur during fast impulsive flares like this one.
 
Is it just me or does Boston Dynamics' Spot seem like a better and far more cost effective way of exploring other planets than these dedicated, wheeled rovers? The rovers obviously have a lot of instruments on them, but wheeled vehicles seem so limited and frail. Spot could probably cover several miles a day (not sure Perseverance has even hit 1km yet) and easily recover if it falls, not to mention cover terrain that a wheeled rover could not. They could probably fit like 50 of them in a lander to boot! Imagine what and how fast we could learn if we had a pack of 50 Spots exploring mars.
 
Eunos_Cosmo
Is it just me or does Boston Dynamics' Spot seem like a better and far more cost effective way of exploring other planets than these dedicated, wheeled rovers? The rovers obviously have a lot of instruments on them, but wheeled vehicles seem so limited and frail. Spot could probably cover several miles a day (not sure Perseverance has even hit 1km yet) and easily recover if it falls, not to mention cover terrain that a wheeled rover could not. They could probably fit like 50 of them in a lander to boot! Imagine what and how fast we could learn if we had a pack of 50 Spots exploring mars.
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Powered with what? The rechargeable batteries the standard spot comes with won't work, so you're needing a fuel cell or solar panels. Weight and size just went up.

All of those joints will have to be dust-proofed, and you'll need much different communications than the wifi that the spot defaults to. Oh, look, more weight and size.

How many slips and fall will it be able to recover from? What damage will those solar panels sustain in such a tumble? All that walking requires sensors and intelligence to maintain and recover "upright-ness," and the weight and energy cost of that would be put to better use elsewhere. Everything you put on it has to be carried there, and has to take the place of anything else you'd rather it be doing up there.

I don't know for sure, I'm just guessing, but I'd wager that a walking robot has significantly higher energy needs to travel than a wheeled robot. How does that fit with your "several miles a day?"

Between hardening needed for a vacuum environment during the trip and a very low-pressure, VERY low-temperature, VERY dusty environment once there, the added communications needed to be useful on another planet, the energy requirement of all those motors for articulated legs, you've reached past a point of useful payback.

I see the value of several smaller robots over a larger one, maybe split up the experimental load with one for this, one for that, rather than all the eggs in one basket, but the process of making one of those things so it can function on Mars in the first place would completely change what the device is.

By the time you make it a reliable MARS explorer, it's no longer cost effective...
 
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wfooshee
Powered with what? The rechargeable batteries the standard spot comes with won't work, so you're needing a fuel cell or solar panels. Weight and size just went up.

All of those joints will have to be dust-proofed, and you'll need much different communications than the wifi that the spot defaults to. Oh, look, more weight and size.

How many slips and fall will it be able to recover from? What damage will those solar panels sustain in such a tumble? All that walking requires sensors and intelligence to maintain and recover "upright-ness," and the weight and energy cost of that would be put to better use elsewhere. Everything you put on it has to be carried there, and has to take the place of anything else you'd rather it be doing up there.

I don't know for sure, I'm just guessing, but I'd wager that a walking robot has significantly higher energy needs to travel than a wheeled robot. How does that fit with your "several miles a day?"

Between hardening needed for a vacuum environment during the trip and a very low-pressure, VERY low-temperature, VERY dusty environment once there, the added communications needed to be useful on another planet, the energy requirement of all those motors for articulated legs, you've reached past a point of useful payback.

I see the value of several smaller robots over a larger one, maybe split up the experimental load with one for this, one for that, rather than all the eggs in one basket, but the process of making one of those things so it can function on Mars in the first place would completely change what the device is.

By the time you make it a reliable MARS explorer, it's no longer cost effective...
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Spot has a 605wh Li battery as standard and a runtime of 90 mins. Working that backwards, it seems like spot consumes around 400w while operating - not much more than a trained athlete on a bicycle. (By comparison, Perseverance consumes 900w at peak). An RTG with 1kg (3kg less than the Li battery) of Pu238 could provide more than 400w of power continuously for at least 50 years. I'm not sure what the rest of the RTG weighs, but Spot has a standard payload of 14kg. I'd bet that you could wrap some sort of simple skin around Spot with heating elements integrated in it to keep both dust out and the temperature of the robot at some minimal level. If you launch a pack of Spots to mars...who cares if a couple fall and can't get up. More than anything else, how cool would it be to have a wolfpack on mars? The communication issues you highlight seem trivial. I don't know what low pressure would do to Spot.

Again, Perseverance cost $2.2B to develop. I'm sure a lot of that cost was in the transportation of the rover to Mars...but even still...you could buy 31,000 spots for that much...or like 15,000 spots and $1b worth of electric blankets for them. And I'm sure there are plenty of Soviet RTGs just laying around you could salvage for free!
 
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Eunos_Cosmo
Spot has a 605wh Li battery as standard and a runtime of 90 mins. Working that backwards, it seems like spot consumes around 400w while operating - not much more than a trained athlete on a bicycle. (By comparison, Perseverance consumes 900w at peak). An RTG with 1kg (3kg less than the Li battery) of Pu238 could provide more than 400w of power continuously for at least 50 years. I'm not sure what the rest of the RTG weighs, but Spot has a standard payload of 14kg. I'd bet that you could wrap some sort of simple skin around Spot with heating elements integrated in it to keep both dust out and the temperature of the robot at some minimal level. If you launch a pack of Spots to mars...who cares if a couple fall and can't get up. More than anything else, how cool would it be to have a wolfpack on mars? The communication issues you highlight seem trivial. I don't know what low pressure would do to Spot.

Again, Perseverance cost $2.2B to develop. I'm sure a lot of that cost was in the transportation of the rover to Mars...but even still...you could buy 31,000 spots for that much...or like 15,000 spots and $1b worth of electric blankets for them. And I'm sure there are plenty of Soviet RTGs just laying around you could salvage for free!
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A Spot robot, as is, weighs less than 40 Kg. Perseverance weighs over a thousand. 400 watts to move 40 Kg around, vs 900 to move 1000? And you're trying to tout efficiency?
 
wfooshee
A Spot robot, as is, weighs less than 40 Kg. Perseverance weighs over a thousand. 400 watts to move 40 Kg around, vs 900 to move 1000? And you're trying to tout efficiency?
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No, it was just a point of reference. Spot is a lot faster and has legs + a lot of body articulation whereas Perseverance is very slow and is wheeled, so it makes sense Perserverance will be more power efficient on a W/KG basis. But again, with an RTG, efficiency doesn't really matter.

I should have just googled it...apparently NASA is at least somewhat interested in the idea.

Meet Au-Spot, the AI robot dog that's training to explore caves on Mars

In a presentation on Dec. 14 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), held online this year, researchers with NASA/JPL-Caltech introduced their "Mars Dogs," which can maneuver in ways the iconic wheeled rovers such as Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity and the recently launched Perseverance never could. The new robots' agility and resilience are coupled with sensors that allow them to avoid obstacles, choose between multiple paths and build virtual maps of buried tunnels and caverns for operators at home base, scientists said at AGU.
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Doesn't mention the proposed power source, but I'd bet its some sort of RTG.
 
Drone ship landing platform #3 has been completed and is ready for duty on the east coast. Edit: and this one is fully autonomous. Unlike in the past where a tug boat would pull it all the way to the landing zone, this one can get there on its own.

 
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