Science

it-turns-out-that-odysseus-landed-on-the-moon-without-any-altimetry-data

It turns out that Odysseus landed on the Moon without any altimetry data

Features, lunar lander, odysseus, Science, Space, Uncategorized / /
Intuitive Machines' <em>Odysseus</em> lander is shown shortly before touching down on the Moon. ” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IM-1-800×600.jpg”></img><figcaption> <p><a data-height=Enlarge / Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander is shown shortly before touching down on the Moon.

Intuitive Machines

HOUSTON—Steve Altemus beamed with pride on Tuesday morning as he led me into Mission Control for the Odysseus lander, which is currently operating on the Moon and returning valuable scientific data to Earth. A team of about a dozen operators sat behind consoles, attempting to reset a visual processing unit onboard the lunar lander, one of their last, best chances to deploy a small camera that would snap a photo of Odysseus in action.

“I just wanted you to see the team,” he said.

The founder and chief executive of Intuitive Machines, which for a few days this month has been the epicenter of the spaceflight universe after landing the first commercial vehicle on the Moon, invited me to the company’s nerve center in Houston to set some things straight.

“You can say whatever you want to say,” Altemus said. “But from my perspective, this is an absolute success of a mission. Holy crap. The things that you go through to fly to the Moon. The learning, just every step of the way, is tremendous.”

Altemus will participate in a news conference on Wednesday at Johnson Space Center to provide a fuller perspective of the journey of Odysseus to the Moon and all those learnings. But I got the sense he invited me to the company’s offices Tuesday because he was itching to tell someone—to tell the world—that although Odysseus had toppled over after touching down, the mission was, in his words, an absolute success.

After more than an hour of speaking with Altemus, I believe him.

Odysseus is a beastly machine, and the team flying it isn’t shabby, either. They have certainly busted their asses. The offices in south Houston were littered with the remains of junk food, coffee, and other elixirs of long nights and wracked brains. It’s all been a whirlwind, no doubt. Next to a bag of tortilla chips, there was a bottle of Ibuprofen.

Coming in blind

As has been previously reported, Intuitive Machines discovered that the range finders on Odysseus were inoperable a couple of hours before it was due to attempt to land on the Moon last Thursday. This was later revealed to be due to the failure to install a pencil-sized pin and a wire harness that enabled the laser to be turned on and off. As a result, the company scrambled to rewrite its software to take advantage of three telescopes on a NASA payload, the Navigation Doppler Lidar for Precise Velocity and Range Sensing, for altimetry purposes.

While this software patch mostly worked, Altemus said Tuesday that the flight computer onboard Odysseus was unable to process data from the NASA payload in real time. Therefore, the last accurate altitude reading the lander received came when it was 15 kilometers above the lunar surface—and still more than 12 minutes from touchdown.

That left the spacecraft, which was flying autonomously, to rely on its optical navigation cameras. By comparing imagery data frame by frame, the flight computer could determine how fast it was moving relative to the lunar surface. Knowing its initial velocity and altitude prior to initiating powered descent and using data from the inertial measurement unit (IMU) on board Odysseus, it could get a rough idea of altitude. But that only went so far.

“So we’re coming down to our landing site with no altimeter,” Altemus said.

Unfortunately, as it neared the lunar surface, the lander believed it was about 100 meters higher relative to the Moon than it actually was. So instead of touching down with a vertical velocity of just 1 meter per second and no lateral movement, Odysseus was coming down three times faster and with a lateral speed of 2 meters per second.

“That little geometry made us hit a little harder than we wanted to,” he said.

But all was not lost. Based upon data downloaded from the spacecraft and imagery from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which flew over the landing site, Intuitive Machines has determined that the lander came down to the surface and likely skidded. This force caused one of its six landing legs to snap. Then, for a couple of seconds, the lander stood upright before toppling over due to the failed leg.

The company has an incredible photo of this moment showing the lander upright, with the snapped leg and the engine still firing. Altemus plans to publicly release this photo Wednesday.

It turns out that Odysseus landed on the Moon without any altimetry data Read More »

brutally-bludgeoned-“vittrup-man”-went-from-forager-to-farmer-before-his-death

Brutally bludgeoned “Vittrup Man” went from forager to farmer before his death

anthropology, Archaeology, Biology, bog bodies, forensic archaeology, Science, Vitrup man / /

From forager to farmer —

The skull was shattered by at least eight blows before the body was tossed into a peat bog.

–

reconstructed skull showing fractures

Enlarge / The cranial remains of Vittrup Man, who was bludgeoned to death and tossed in a peat bog between 3300-3100 BCE.

Stephen Freiheit via Fischer A., et al./PLoS ONE

In 1915, peat diggers recovered the fragmented skeletal remains of a man with a severely fractured skull in a peat bog near the village of Vittrup in Denmark. The remains were kept in a museum for the next century, but scientists have now conducted an in-depth analysis of the remains using various techniques to learn more about the so-called Vittrup Man’s life and violent death. They described their findings in a recent paper published in the journal PLoS ONE—including the surprising fact that Vittrup Man grew up in a coastal foraging community along the Scandinavian coast before his murder as an adult in a farming culture in Neolithic Denmark.

Vittrup Man is one of numerous “bog bodies” unearthed from peat bogs in northwestern Europe. These are human cadavers that have been naturally preserved and frequently mummified by the unique chemistry of the bogs. As peat ages, it releases humic acid, which has a pH level similar to vinegar. The bog bodies are basically pickled, and decomposition is dramatically slowed because of the anaerobic conditions of the bog. The best-preserved bog bodies are those that were put there during the winter or early spring when the water is very cold—less than 4° Celsius (39° F), i.e., too cold for bacteria to thrive—because the bog acids were able to saturate the tissues before decay could begin.

Peat has been a common fuel source since the Iron Age, and there are records of peat diggers coming across bog bodies dating back to 1640 in Germany. Bog bodies became of interest to antiquarians in the 19th century and archaeologists in the 20th century. One of the most famous examples is Tollund Man, a bog body found in the 1950s and dating back to the 5th century BCE. Tollund Man was so exquisitely mummified that he was originally mistaken for a recent murder victim, although only the head was preserved for posterity; the rest of the body was allowed to desiccate, given the less advanced state of preservation techniques in the 1950s.

But many bog bodies are only partially preserved, or only the skeletons (or parts thereof) survive. Vittrup Man falls into the latter category, consisting of a right ankle bone, the left tibia, the fractured skull, and a jawbone. He was discovered along with a wooden club, which archaeologists believe may have been the weapon used to bludgeon him to death. Various radiocarbon dating and isotope analyses confirmed that the bones all belonged to the same individual, while genetic analysis confirmed the remains were those of a male. He was likely deposited in the peat bog sometime between 3300–3100 BCE.

  • Left lower leg bone and right ankle bone of Vittrup Man.

    Marie Louise Jorkov/Fischer A., et al./PLoS ONE

  • The jawbone of Vittrup Man showing several worn teeth.

    Arnold Mikkelsen/Fischer A., et al./PLoS ONE

  • Drawing of Vittrup Man’s cranium showing front and back views of impact lesions and radiating fracture lines.

    Fischer A., et al./PLoS ONE

  • Drawing of Vittrup Man’s cranium showing right and left side views of impact lesions and radiating fracture lines.

    Fischer A., et al./PLoS ONE

Vittrup Man was included in a sweeping 2014 genomic project to learn more about Eurasia’s Mesolithic and Neolithic gene pools, but the resulting genetic profile was markedly different from other remains from the same region and time period. This intrigued University of Gothenburg (Sweden) archaeologist Karl-Göran Sjögren and his co-authors, and they decided to take a closer look, integrating data collected with various genetic, isotopic, physical, anthropological, and archaeological techniques. “To our knowledge, this is the first time that research has been able to map a north European inhabitant’s life history in such a high degree of detail and in such a high distance of time,” the authors wrote.

The size and distinctive characteristics of the skull, lower leg bones, and teeth indicate that at the time of his death, Vittrup Man was an adult male in his 30s. The cranium was shattered by at least eight blows delivered by a blunt object (like the wooden club), and the injuries were fatal, with no signs of healing post-trauma. There are no marks on the surviving bones indicating dismemberment, so the authors believe the body may have come apart while decomposing in the bog. It’s possible more Vittrup Man fragments have yet to be recovered.

But the clues gleaned from two of Vittrup Man’s teeth (sacrificed to science) are what provided the most interesting insights. Sjögren et al. found isotopes of strontium, carbon, and oxygen and concluded that the man had grown up along the coast of the Scandinavian Peninsula. Genetic analysis showed commonalities with Mesolithic people of Norway and Sweden; Vittrup Man had blue eyes and darker skin than the usual Neolithic farmer. The teeth and bones also had proteins and isotopes indicating a shift in diet from marine mammals and fish as a child, to sheep, goat, cereals, and dairy as an adult—the latter more typical of a farming community as opposed to a coastal foraging community.

Why Vittrup Man left the Scandinavian coast and ended up in Denmark remains a mystery. He may have been captured and enslaved or immigrated, or he may have been a foreign merchant selling goods like flint axes between foraging and farming communities. Either way, he eventually integrated into the farming community—at least until they killed him.

As for why he was killed, “At that time, it was commonplace in present-day Denmark to sacrifice humans in bogs, and these acts were often conducted in violent ways,” the authors concluded. “Evidently, such dubious honor was also given to persons of nonlocal provenance.”

PLoS ONE, 2024. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0297032  (About DOIs).

Brutally bludgeoned “Vittrup Man” went from forager to farmer before his death Read More »

varda’s-drug-cooking-winnebago-will-be-remembered-as-a-space-pioneer

Varda’s drug-cooking Winnebago will be remembered as a space pioneer

Commercial space, Features, hypersonic, Science, Space, Utah, Varda / /
Varda's reentry capsule soon after landing at the Utah Test and Training Range.

Enlarge / Varda’s reentry capsule soon after landing at the Utah Test and Training Range.

Varda Space Industries is finally able to celebrate. For nearly eight months, the in-space manufacturing company’s first mission was essentially stranded in low-Earth orbit, but not because of any technical malfunction or a restriction imposed by the laws of physics.

Instead, the spacecraft couldn’t return to Earth until Varda and three government entities—the US military, the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, and the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization—all got on the same page. This was far more complicated than anyone envisioned, and Varda had to bypass landing opportunities in July and September because it couldn’t secure governmental approvals.

Finally, earlier this month, the FAA approved a commercial reentry license for Varda’s space capsule, which was somewhat larger than a mini-fridge, to fall back into the atmosphere and parachute to a landing in the remote Utah desert southwest of Salt Lake City. Varda’s landing zone was at the Utah Test and Training Range, a sprawling military facility primarily used for weapons testing.

Varda’s capsule landed in the Utah desert at around 4: 40 pm EST (2140 UTC) last Wednesday. Approaching from the north, the craft’s heat shield protected it from scorching temperatures during reentry. Then, the capsule deployed a 6.2-foot-diameter (2.1-meter) parachute to slow its velocity for a relatively gentle landing.

A recovery team went out to retrieve the nearly 200-pound capsule and connect it to a helicopter line for a short flight to a nearby processing facility, where engineers would prepare the spacecraft for transport back to Varda’s headquarters in El Segundo, California.

The mood at Varda following the successful landing was “as cheerful as it gets,” said Delian Asparouhov, who co-founded the company in 2020 with former SpaceX engineer Will Bruey and scientist Daniel Marshall.

“I always felt confidence in our team’s ability to accomplish this,” Asparouhov told Ars. “It was just a question of time.”

Waiting game

Varda achieved several firsts with this mission. The Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) has some experience in supporting spacecraft landings, but this was the first time a commercial spacecraft landed at a military test range, adding another layer of regulatory and bureaucratic oversight. In September, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission deposited a cache of asteroid samples at UTTR.

Varda was the first company to secure a commercial FAA reentry license under streamlined commercial spaceflight regulations known as Part 450. This licensing paradigm is regularly used for commercial launches (there were 117 FAA-licensed launches last year), but this was the first time any company went through this process for a reentry.

Only two companies received commercial FAA reentry licenses before Varda—Lockheed Martin for a single test flight of the Orion spacecraft in 2014 and SpaceX for more than 40 commercial flights of its Dragon crew and cargo spacecraft. Both companies have operated under previous licensing regimes before the FAA introduced the revised Part 450 protocol in 2020.

The FAA’s commercial space office is responsible for licensing commercial launch and reentry operations, with a primary interest in ensuring that these activities don’t endanger the public. But FAA air traffic controllers had to find a time to clear a broad swath of airspace around the trajectory of Varda’s descending space capsule. The FAA’s temporary flight restriction for Varda’s reentry was unusually large, particularly for such a small spacecraft, stretching more than 400 miles (700 kilometers) long and 60 miles (100 kilometers) wide from southern Montana to western Utah.

The timing of Varda’s reentry, along with Varda’s access to the secure military facility, also had to be coordinated with the test range’s busy schedule of military exercises.

Varda’s drug-cooking Winnebago will be remembered as a space pioneer Read More »

spacex-discloses-cause-of-starship-anomalies-as-it-clears-an-faa-hurdle

SpaceX discloses cause of Starship anomalies as it clears an FAA hurdle

Science, Space, spacex, starship / /

RUD —

“Several engines began shutting down before one engine failed energetically.”

–

Starship launches on its second flight on November 18, 2023.

Enlarge / Starship launches on its second flight on November 18, 2023.

SpaceX

A little more than three months after the most recent launch of a Starship vehicle, which ended with both the booster and upper stage being lost in flight, the Federal Aviation Administration has closed its investigation of the mishap.

“SpaceX identified, and the FAA accepts, the root causes and 17 corrective actions documented in SpaceX’s mishap report,” the federal agency said in a statement issued Monday. “Prior to the next launch, SpaceX must implement all corrective actions and receive a license modification from the FAA that addresses all safety, environmental and other applicable regulatory requirements.”

SpaceX must still submit additional information to the FAA, which is responsible for the safety of people and property on the ground, before the agency completes its review of an application to launch Starship for a third time. The administrator for Commercial Space Transportation at the Federal Aviation Administration, Kelvin Coleman, said last week that early to mid-March is a reasonable timeline for the regulatory process to conclude.

A launch attempt is likely to follow soon after.

What went wrong

In conjunction with Monday’s announcement, SpaceX released details for the first time of what happened to cause the November 18 launch to go awry.

In this update, SpaceX noted that the Super Heavy first stage of the rocket performed nominally, with all 33 Raptor engines on this massive rocket igniting successfully. The booster then performed a full-duration burn to reach stage separation. At this point, the upper stage executed a successful “hot staging” maneuver in which the Starship stage separated from the booster while some of the booster’s engines were still firing.

For the Super Heavy booster, the next step was to perform a series of burns to make a soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico. As part of the initial burn, 13 of the rocket’s engines were intended to fire.

“During this burn, several engines began shutting down before one engine failed energetically, quickly cascading to a rapid unscheduled disassembly of the booster,” SpaceX said. “The vehicle breakup occurred more than three and a half minutes into the flight at an altitude of ~90 km over the Gulf of Mexico.”

The problem was subsequently linked to a problem with supplying liquid oxygen to the Raptor engines.

“The most likely root cause for the booster RUD was determined to be filter blockage where liquid oxygen is supplied to the engines, leading to a loss of inlet pressure in engine oxidizer turbopumps that eventually resulted in one engine failing in a way that resulted in loss of the vehicle,” the company stated. “SpaceX has since implemented hardware changes inside future booster oxidizer tanks to improve propellant filtration capabilities and refined operations to increase reliability.”

Starship vents

As Super Heavy was experiencing these problems, the six Raptor engines on the Starship upper stage were burning nominally and pushing the vehicle along a flight path intended to take it nearly two-thirds of the way around Earth before splashing down near Hawaii. However, at about seven minutes after liftoff, a large vent of liquid oxygen occurred. There was excess liquid oxygen on the vehicle, SpaceX said, to gather data representative of future payload deployment missions. It needed to be released before Starship splashed down.

“A leak in the aft section of the spacecraft that developed when the liquid oxygen vent was initiated resulted in a combustion event and subsequent fires that led to a loss of communication between the spacecraft’s flight computers,” the company said. “This resulted in a commanded shut down of all six engines prior to completion of the ascent burn, followed by the Autonomous Flight Safety System detecting a mission rule violation and activating the flight termination system, leading to vehicle breakup.”

At the time, the vehicle had reached an altitude of 150 km, well into outer space, and had achieved a velocity of about 24,000 km/h. This is just short of orbital velocity, which is 28,000 km/h.

In its statement, SpaceX said it was implementing changes to the Super Heavy and Starship stages to account for these issues. The company is also seeking to improve the overall performance of Starship, with the addition of a new electronic Thrust Vector Control system for Starship’s upper-stage Raptor engines and more rapid propellant loading operations prior to launch.

SpaceX has four Starships in complete, or nearly complete, build stages. Should the next flight go smoothly, the company could begin to launch the world’s largest rocket on a more frequent basis.

SpaceX discloses cause of Starship anomalies as it clears an FAA hurdle Read More »

surprising-link-found-between-niacin-and-risk-of-heart-attack-and-stroke

Surprising link found between niacin and risk of heart attack and stroke

cardiovascular disease, cleveland clinic, Genetics, health, heart attack, inflammation, metabolites, niacin, Science, stroke, vitamin b3 / /

Unexpected —

Breakdown products of niacin, aka Vitamin B3, may spur vascular inflammation.

–

A shopper looks at a meat display on June 20, 2022, at the Market 32 Supermarket in South Burlington, Vermont. Niacin can be found in foods such as red meat, poultry, fish, fortified cereals and breads, brown rice, nuts, legumes, and bananas.

Enlarge / A shopper looks at a meat display on June 20, 2022, at the Market 32 Supermarket in South Burlington, Vermont. Niacin can be found in foods such as red meat, poultry, fish, fortified cereals and breads, brown rice, nuts, legumes, and bananas.

In the early 20th century, the deadliest nutrient-related disease in US history ravaged the American South. Pellagra, a disease caused by a deficiency in niacin and/or tryptophan, is marked by the four “D’s”: diarrhea, dermatitis that leads to gruesome skin plaques, dementia, and death. At its peak during the Great Depression, pellagra killed nearly 7,000 Southerners a year. Between 1906 and 1940, researchers estimate that the epidemic struck roughly 3 million Americans, killing around 100,000.

The deadly epidemic led to voluntary—and eventually mandatory—fortification of wheat and other cereals with niacin (aka Vitamin B3). By the middle of the century, pellagra nearly vanished from the US. But, decades later, the public health triumph may be backfiring. With Americans’ diets more reliant than ever on processed, niacin-fortified foods, the average niacin intake in the US is now nearing what’s considered the tolerable upper limit of the nutrient, according to a federal health survey. And an extensive study recently published in Nature Medicine suggests that those excess amounts of niacin may be exacerbating cardiovascular disease, increasing risks of heart attacks, strokes, and death.

The study, led by Stanley Hazen, chair of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Sciences at Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner Research Institute, connected high blood levels of a breakdown product of niacin—and to a lesser extent, tryptophan—to an elevated risk of major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE). And this elevated risk appears to be independent of known risk factors for those events, such as high cholesterol.

“What’s exciting about these results is that this pathway appears to be a previously unrecognized yet significant contributor to the development of cardiovascular disease,” Hazen said in an announcement of the study. It can be measured, he added, and one day could be a new avenue for treatment and prevention.

Metabolite fishing

Hazen and his colleagues didn’t start out suspecting niacin could be a culprit in cardiovascular disease. They arrived at that point after fishing through patients’ blood plasma. The researchers were carefully inventorying metabolites in the fasting plasma of 1,162 patients who had been evaluated for cardiovascular disease. They were looking for anything that might be linked to a heightened risk of heart attack, stroke, or death in a three-year period that couldn’t entirely be explained by other risk factors. Despite advances in identifying and treating cardiovascular disease, researchers have noted that some patients continue to be at risk of serious cardiovascular events despite having their traditional risk factors treated and controlled. Hazen and his colleagues wanted to know why.

The metabolomic trawling came up with an unknown metabolite (signature C7H9O2N2) that was significantly linked to having a MACE in the three-year period. People who had higher levels of this metabolite circulating in their systems were within the top 75th percentile for relative MACE risk in the cohort. Further work identified the metabolite as actually being two related molecules: 2PY (N1-methyl-2-pyridone-5-carboxamide) and 4PY (N1-methyl-4-pyridone -3-carboxamide)—both the final breakdown products of niacin.

Surprising link found between niacin and risk of heart attack and stroke Read More »

odysseus-has-less-than-a-day-left-on-the-moon-before-it-freezes-to-death

Odysseus has less than a day left on the Moon before it freezes to death

Odysseus lander, Science, Space / /

Phoning home —

So what are we to make of this? Is Odysseus a success or a failure?

–

NASA's LRO found <em>Odysseus</em> on the Moon.” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/odie1-800×454.jpg”></img><figcaption> <p><a data-height=Enlarge / NASA’s LRO found Odysseus on the Moon.

NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University

Time is running out for the historic Odysseus lander that made a soft touchdown on the Moon last Thursday evening.

In an update posted on Monday morning, the company that built the spacecraft, Intuitive Machines, said, “[W]e believe flight controllers will continue to communicate with Odysseus until Tuesday morning.” This is because the lander, which is tipped over on its side, will only be able to collect solar energy for a limited period of time.

Originally, the company had hoped to operate its privately developed lunar lander on the surface for a week or longer. But now, that will no longer be possible due to the limited ability of Odysseus to gather solar energy and remain powered on. As the Sun dips closer to the horizon, and with the two-week-long lunar night coming, the spacecraft will, effectively, freeze to death.

On its side

The shorter-than-anticipated lifetime is due to the lander’s position on the surface. On Friday, during a news conference, Intuitive Machines’ chief executive, Steve Altemus, said the company believed Odysseus had come down to the lunar surface in a vertical configuration, as anticipated.

However, for reasons that Altemus did not entirely explain, the lander came down a bit faster than anticipated—6 mph (2.7 m/s) instead of 2 mph (0.9 m/s). Still, this pace, about the same as a moderate walk, was within the tolerances of the vehicle’s landing legs and structures to withstand. The problem is that the vehicle also had a lateral motion of about 2 mph, when it was supposed to come straight down.

Thus, as the vehicle descended to the Moon, it is possible that one or more landing legs may have been snagged by the lunar surface before the vehicle touched down. “It might have fractured that landing gear and tipped over,” Altemus said.

Based on the information available, the vehicle is lying horizontal but somewhat elevated off the ground. Intuitive Machines knew this, Altemus said, because the solar panels on the sides of the vehicle were able to gather solar power. This meant the body of the vehicle had to be somewhat raised above the surface. It’s possible, therefore, that the top of the vehicle tipped over onto a small boulder.

Odysseus, has solar panels on its sides as well as at the top of the vehicle.” height=”653″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/JT3A6259-980×653.jpg” width=”980″>

Enlarge / The Nova-C lander, named Odysseus, has solar panels on its sides as well as at the top of the vehicle.

Lee Hutchinson

Altemus said on Friday that the company was attempting to orient a solar array at the top of the vehicle to gather sunlight in addition to the panels on its side.

It seems like this operation was unsuccessful, as the lander’s solar arrays will only be able to gather enough energy to operate through Tuesday morning.

Data desired

Intuitive Machines received a valuable assist from a NASA spacecraft orbiting the Moon, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which flew over the landing site this weekend. From this imagery, NASA was able to determine a precise landing spot for the vehicle: 80.13 degrees south latitude, 1.44 degrees east longitude, at an elevation of 8,461 feet (2,579 meters).

Notably, the spacecraft landed in a crater where the terrain was sloped at 12 degrees, which may have contributed to its tipping over.

During the news conference on Friday, Altemus and the company’s chief technology officer, Tim Crain, said they expected to be able to conduct most of the science missions on board the lander despite its sideways configuration. “Best guess, we expect to get most of the mission data down once we stabilize our configuration,” Crain said.

However, at the time, the company was still planning to operate the lander through this week. It is unclear that there will be enough time to get all of that data down between now and Tuesday morning. The company did not provide any updates on this on Monday.

A success, or no?

Another critical question is whether operators will be able to download images of Odysseus on the surface of the Moon. To date, Intuitive Machines has not published photos from the Moon’s surface. There remains some hope, however, that a CubeSat camera developed by students at Embry Riddle, EagleCam, will be deployed and activated before Odysseus‘ power runs out.

So what are we to make of this? Is Odysseus a success or a failure?

The mission has achieved some notable firsts. No privately developed spacecraft has ever made a soft landing on the Moon before, and it is important that Intuitive Machines has been able to maintain contact with the lander for several days. And at 80 degrees south, no spacecraft has ever made a soft landing so close to a lunar pole.

Although Intuitive Machines is not going to achieve all of the mission’s objectives, getting down to the Moon in one piece was, unquestionably, the achievement by which Odysseus and its builders should be judged.

Odysseus has less than a day left on the Moon before it freezes to death Read More »

daily-telescope:-finally,-we’ve-found-the-core-of-a-famous-supernova

Daily Telescope: Finally, we’ve found the core of a famous supernova

daily telescope, Science, Space / /

A dense subject —

In the astronomy community SN 1987A has somewhat legendary status.

–

Webb has observed the best evidence yet for emission from a neutron star at the site of Supernova 1987A.

Enlarge / Webb has observed the best evidence yet for emission from a neutron star at the site of Supernova 1987A.

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, et. al.

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It’s February 26, and today’s image highlights the core of a (relatively) nearby supernova.

In the astronomy community, SN 1987A has somewhat legendary status. The first observable light from this exploding star in the Large Magellanic Cloud reached Earth in February, almost 37 years ago to the day. It was the first supernova that astronomers were able to observe and study with modern telescopes. It was still discussed in reverent terms a few years later when I was an undergraduate student studying astronomy at the University of Texas.

One of the enduring mysteries of the supernova is that astronomers have been unable to find its collapsed core, where they would expect to see a neutron star—an ultra-dense object that results from the supernova explosion of a massive star. In recent years, ground-based telescopes have found hints of this collapsed core, but now the James Webb Space Telescope has found emission lines that almost certainly must come from a newly born neutron star.

The astronomical details can be found here. It’s a nice validation of our understanding about supernovae.

I would also like to acknowledge that the Daily Telescope has been anything but “daily” of late. This is due to a confluence of several factors, including a lot of travel and work on other projects, including four features in the last month or so. I’ve had to put some things on the back-burner. I don’t want to stop producing these articles, but I also can’t commit to writing one every day. Maybe it should be renamed? For now, I’m just going to try to do my best. I appreciate those who have written to ask where the Daily Telescope has been—well, all of you but the person who wrote a nasty note.

Source: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, et. al.

Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope? Reach out and say hello.

Daily Telescope: Finally, we’ve found the core of a famous supernova Read More »

rto-doesn’t-improve-company-value,-but-does-make-employees-miserable:-study

RTO doesn’t improve company value, but does make employees miserable: Study

bosses, COVID-19, pandemic, return-to-office, S&P 500, Science, work from home, workers / /

WFH FTW —

Data is consistent with bosses using RTO to reassert control and scapegoat workers.

–

Empty cubicles

Enlarge / Empty cubicles

For some, having to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic was stressful. Parents balanced job duties while caring for children. Some struggled to set up a home office and adjust to new tools, like video conferencing. Lonely workdays at home added to social isolation. The line between work and life blurred.

For others, working from home was a boon—comfort, convenience, flexibility, no commuting or rush-hour traffic, no office-environment distractions. When the acute aspects of the pandemic receded, some who at first struggled began to settle into a work-from-home (WFH) groove and appreciated the newfound flexibility.

Then, bosses began calling their employees back to the office. Many made the argument that the return-to-office (RTO) policies and mandates were better for their companies; workers are more productive at the office, and face-to-face interactions promote collaboration, many suggested. But there’s little data to support that argument. Pandemic-era productivity is tricky to interpret, given that the crisis disrupted every aspect of life. Research from before the pandemic generally suggested remote work improves worker performance—though it often included workers who volunteered to WFH, potentially biasing the finding.

For a clearer look at the effect of RTO policies after the pandemic, two business researchers at the University of Pittsburgh examined a sample of firms on the S&P 500 list—137 of which had RTO mandates and 320 that clearly did not between June 2019 and January 2023. The researchers collected publicly available data on each company, including financial data and employee reviews. They then looked at what factors were linked to whether a firm implemented an RTO policy—such as the company’s size, financial constraints, and CEO characteristics—as well as the consequences of the RTO mandates—employee satisfaction and financial metrics of the firms.

Overall, the analysis, released as a pre-print, found that RTO mandates did not improve a firm’s financial metrics, but they did decrease employee satisfaction.

Drilling down, the data indicated that RTO mandates were linked to firms with male CEOs who had greater power in the company. Here, power is measured as the CEO’s total compensation divided by the average total compensation paid to the four highest-paid executives in the firm.

Before the analysis, the researchers hypothesized that RTO mandates may be used to blame employees for poor firm performance. But, companies that have institutional ownership—such as hedge funds or endowments—would not fall for such a “blame game” and would thus would be less likely to implement an RTO mandate. The data supported those hypotheses. Firms with weaker stock performance before employees were able to return to the office were more likely to enforce RTO mandates. However, institutional ownership decreased the probability of RTO mandates.

Although CEOs often justified RTO mandates by arguing it will improve the company’s performance, “Results of our determinant analyses are consistent with managers using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat for bad firm performance,” the researchers concluded.

Unsurprisingly, the researchers also found that RTO mandates were linked to decreases in employee satisfaction. Specifically, after an RTO mandate, employees’ ratings significantly declined on overall job satisfaction, work-life balance, senior management, and corporate culture. But their ratings of factors unrelated to RTO did not change, indicating that the RTO mandate was driving dissatisfaction.

The study has limitations, including a short time frame to look at long-term outcomes of RTO policies and a time frame that overlapped with a labor shortage. Worker responses may be different in a tight labor market. Still, the study adds some data to the ongoing debate—and feuds—over RTO policies.

RTO doesn’t improve company value, but does make employees miserable: Study Read More »

a-giant-meteorite-has-been-lost-in-the-desert-since-1916—here’s-how-we-might-find-it

A giant meteorite has been lost in the desert since 1916—here’s how we might find it

astrophysics, Chinguetti meteorite, geophysics, meteorites, Physics, Science / /

“This story has everything…” —

A tale of “sand dunes, a guy named Gaston, secret aeromagnetic surveys, and camel drivers.”

–

Chinguetti slice at the National Museum of Natural History

Enlarge / Chinguetti slice at the National Museum of Natural History. A larger meteorite reported in 1916 hasn’t been spotted since.

In 1916, a French consular official reported finding a giant “iron hill” deep in the Sahara desert, roughly 45 kilometers (28 miles) from Chinguetti, Mauritania—purportedly a meteorite (technically a mesosiderite) some 40 meters (130 feet) tall and 100 meters (330 feet) long. He brought back a small fragment, but the meteorite hasn’t been found again since, despite the efforts of multiple expeditions, calling its very existence into question.

Three British researchers have conducted their own analysis and proposed a means of determining once and for all whether the Chinguetti meteorite really exists, detailing their findings in a new preprint posted to the physics arXiv. They contend that they have narrowed down the likely locations where the meteorite might be buried under high sand dunes and are currently awaiting access to data from a magnetometer survey of the region in hopes of either finding the mysterious missing meteorite or confirming that it likely never existed.

Captain Gaston Ripert was in charge of the Chinguetti camel corps. One day he overheard a conversation among the chameliers (camel drivers) about an unusual iron hill in the desert. He convinced a local chief to guide him there one night, taking Ripert on a 10-hour camel ride along a “disorienting” route, making a few detours along the way. He may even have been literally blindfolded, depending on how one interprets the French phrase en aveugle, which can mean either “blind” (i.e. without a compass) or “blindfolded.” The 4-kilogram fragment Ripert collected was later analyzed by noted geologist Alfred Lacroix, who considered it a significant discovery. But when others failed to locate the larger Chinguetti meteorite, people started to doubt Ripert’s story.

“I know that the general opinion is that the stone does not exist; that to some, I am purely and simply an imposter who picked up a metallic specimen,” Ripert wrote to French naturalist Theodore Monod in 1934. “That to others, I am a simpleton who mistook a sandstone outcrop for an enormous meteorite. I shall do nothing to disabuse them, I know only what I saw.”

Encouraged by a separate report of local blacksmiths claiming to recover iron from a giant block somewhere east or southeast of Chinguetti, Monod intermittently searched for the meteorite several times over the ensuing decades, to no avail. A pilot named Jacques Gallouédec thought he spotted a dark silhouette in the Saharan dunes in the 1980s. But neither Monod nor a second expedition in the late 1990s—documented by the UK’s Channel 4—could find anything. Monod concluded in 1989 that Ripert had likely mistakenly identified a sedimentary rock “with no trace of metal” as a meteorite.

Still, as Rutgers University physicist Matt Buckley noted on Bluesky, “This story has everything: giant unexplained meteorites, sand dunes, a guy named Gaston, ductile nickel needles, secret aeromagnetic surveys, and camel drivers.” So naturally, it intrigued Stephen Warren of Imperial College London, Oxford University’s Ekaterini Protopapa, and Robert Warren, who began their own search for the mysterious missing meteorite in 2020.

A giant meteorite has been lost in the desert since 1916—here’s how we might find it Read More »

can-we-drill-for-hydrogen?-new-find-suggests-additional-geological-source.

Can we drill for hydrogen? New find suggests additional geological source.

Energy, green energy, hydrogen, Science, Sustainability / /
Image of apartment buildings with mine tailings behind them, and green hills behind those.

Enlarge / Mining operations start right at the edge of Bulqizë, Albania.

“The search for geologic hydrogen today is where the search for oil was back in the 19th century—we’re just starting to understand how this works,” said Frédéric-Victor Donzé, a geologist at Université Grenoble Alpes. Donzé is part of a team of geoscientists studying a site at Bulqizë in Albania where miners at one of the world’s largest chromite mines may have accidentally drilled into a hydrogen reservoir.

The question Donzé and his team want to tackle is whether hydrogen has a parallel geological system with huge subsurface reservoirs that could be extracted the way we extract oil. “Bulqizë is a reference case. For the first time, we have real data. We have a proof,” Donzé said.

Greenish energy source

Water is the only byproduct of burning hydrogen, which makes it a potential go-to green energy source. The problem is that the vast majority of the 96 million tons of hydrogen we make each year comes from processing methane, and that does release greenhouse gases. Lots of them. “There are green ways to produce hydrogen, but the cost of processing methane is lower. This is why we are looking for alternatives,” Donzé said.

And the key to one of those alternatives may be buried in the Bulqizë mine. Chromite, an ore that contains lots of chromium, has been mined at Bulqizë since the 1980s. The mining operation was going smoothly until 2007, when the miners drilled through a fault, a discontinuity in the rocks. “Then they started to have explosions. In the mine, they had a small electric train, and there were sparks flying, and then… boom,” Donzé said. At first, Bulqizë management thought the cause was methane, the usual culprit of mining accidents. But it wasn’t.

Hydrogen at fault

The mine was bought by a Chinese company in 2017, and the new owners immediately sent their engineering teams to deal with explosions. They did measurements and found the hydrogen concentration in the mine’s galleries was around 1–2 percent. It only needs to be at 0.4–0.5 percent for the atmosphere to become explosive. “They also found the hydrogen was coming from the fault drilled through back in 2007. Unfortunately, one of the explosions happened when the engineering team was down there. Three or four people died,” Donzé said.

It turned out that over 200 tons of hydrogen was released from the Bulqizë mine each year. Donzé’s team went there to figure out where all this hydrogen was coming from.

The rocks did not contain enough hydrogen to reach that sort of flow rate. One possible explanation is the hydrogen being released as a product of an ongoing geological process called serpentinization. “But for this to happen, the temperature in the mine would need to reach 200–300 degrees Celsius, and even then, it would not produce 200 tons per year,” said Donzé. “So the most probable was the third option—that we have a reservoir,” he added.

“Probable,” of course, is far from certain.

Can we drill for hydrogen? New find suggests additional geological source. Read More »

rocket-report:-starliner-launch-preps;-indian-rocket-engine-human-rated

Rocket Report: Starliner launch preps; Indian rocket engine human-rated

ariane 6, Astroscale, blue origin, Boeing, Commercial space, rocket report, Science, Space, spacex, starliner, starship / /

Cape-a-palooza —

The Bahamian government and SpaceX signed an agreement for Falcon 9 booster landings.

–

The first stage of United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket was lifted onto its launch platform this week in preparation for an April liftoff with two NASA astronauts on Boeing's Starliner Crew Flight Test.

Enlarge / The first stage of United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket was lifted onto its launch platform this week in preparation for an April liftoff with two NASA astronauts on Boeing’s Starliner Crew Flight Test.

United Launch Alliance

Welcome to Edition 6.32 of the Rocket Report! I’m writing the report again this week as Eric Berger is in Washington, DC, to receive a well-earned honor, the 2024 Excellence in Commercial Space Journalism Award from the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. Cape Canaveral is the world’s busiest spaceport, and this week, three leading US launch companies were active there. SpaceX launched another Falcon 9 rocket, and a few miles away, Blue Origin raised a New Glenn rocket on its launch pad for long-awaited ground testing. Nearby, United Launch Alliance began assembling an Atlas V rocket for the first crew launch of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft in April. 2024 is shaping up to be a truly exciting year for the spaceflight community.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Astroscale inspector satellite launched by Rocket Lab. Astroscale, a well-capitalized Japanese startup, has launched a small satellite to do something that has never been done in space, Ars reports. This new spacecraft, delivered into orbit on February 18 by Rocket Lab, will approach a defunct upper stage from a Japanese H-IIA rocket that has been circling Earth for more than 15 years. Over the next few months, the satellite will try to move within arm’s reach of the rocket, taking pictures and performing complicated maneuvers to move around the bus-size H-IIA upper stage as it moves around the planet at nearly 5 miles per second (7.6 km/s).

This is a first … Astroscale’s ADRAS-J mission is the first satellite designed to approach and inspect a piece of space junk in orbit. This is a public-private partnership between Astroscale and the Japanese space agency. Of course, space agencies and commercial companies have demonstrated rendezvous operations in orbit for decades. The difference here is the H-IIA rocket is uncontrolled, likely spinning and in a slow tumble, and was never designed to accommodate any visitors. Japan left it in orbit in January 2009 following the launch of a climate monitoring satellite and didn’t look back. ADRAS-J is a technology demonstration that could pave the way for a follow-on mission to actually link up with this H-IIA rocket and remove it from orbit. Astroscale eventually wants to use these technologies for satellite servicing, refueling, and further debris removal missions. (submitted by Ken the Bin and Jay500001)

Software error blamed for Firefly launch malfunction. Firefly Aerospace released an update Tuesday on an investigation into an upper stage malfunction on the company’s Alpha rocket in December. The investigation team, consisting of membership from Firefly, the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Transportation Safety Board, Lockheed Martin, NASA, and the US Space Force, determined a software error in the rocket’s guidance, navigation, and control software algorithm ultimately caused the Alpha rocket to release its payload into a lower-than-planned orbit following a launch from California.

Upper stage woes… The software error prevented the rocket from sending the “necessary pulse commands” to control thrusters on the upper stage before its main engine was supposed to reignite. This second burn by the upper stage was supposed to circularize the rocket’s orbit, but it didn’t happen as planned. Still, the Alpha rocket safely released its commercial satellite payload for Lockheed Martin. Although the lower orbit caused the satellite to reenter the atmosphere earlier this month, Lockheed Martin said it was able to achieve many of the objectives of the technology demonstration mission, which focused on testing an electronically steered antenna. This was the fourth launch of an Alpha rocket, and two of them have suffered from upper stage malfunctions during engine restart attempts. Firefly says it is preparing the next Alpha rocket to fly “in the coming months.” (submitted by Ken the Bin)

The easiest way to keep up with Eric Berger’s space reporting is to sign up for his newsletter, we’ll collect his stories in your inbox.

A good fundraising round for Gilmour Space. Australian startup Gilmour Space Technologies has raised $55 million Australian dollars ($36 million) in a Series D funding round announced Monday, Space News reports. The funding supports the small launch vehicle startup’s campaign to manufacture, test, and begin launching rockets and satellites from the Bowen Orbital Spaceport in North Queensland. Gilmour Space, founded in 2012, is developing a three-stage rocket called Eris. The first Eris test flight is expected “in the coming months, pending launch approvals from the Australian Space Agency,” according to the Gilmour Space news release.

Launching from down under… Gilmour Space is aiming to launch the first Australian-built rocket into orbit later this year. The Eris rocket is powered by hybrid engines, and Gilmour says it is capable of delivering about 670 pounds (305 kilograms) of payload mass into a Sun-synchronous orbit. The $36 million fundraising round announced this week follows a $46 million fundraising round in 2021. According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Gilmour Space is aiming for the first flight of Eris in April, and this latest fundraising should give the company enough money to mount four test flights. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Rocket Report: Starliner launch preps; Indian rocket engine human-rated Read More »

a-little-us-company-makes-history-by-landing-on-the-moon

A little US company makes history by landing on the Moon

intuitive machines, Odysseus lander, Science, Space / /
Odysseus passes over the near side of the Moon following lunar orbit insertion on February 21.

Enlarge / Odysseus passes over the near side of the Moon following lunar orbit insertion on February 21.

Intuitive Machines

For the first time in more than half a century, a US-built spacecraft has made a soft landing on the Moon.

There was high drama and plenty of intrigue on Thursday evening as Intuitive Machines attempted to land its Odysseus spacecraft in a small crater not all that far from the south pole of the Moon. About 20 minutes after touchdown, NASA declared success, but some questions remained about the health of the lander and its orientation. Why? Because while Odysseus was phoning home, its signal was weak.

But after what the spacecraft and its developer, Houston-based Intuitive Machines, went through earlier on Thursday, it was a miracle that Odysseus made it at all.

Losing your way

The landing attempt was delayed by about two hours after mission controllers had to send a hastily cobbled together, last-minute software patch up to the lander while it was still in orbit around the Moon. Patching your spacecraft’s software shortly before it makes its most critical move is just about the last thing a vehicle operator wants to do. But Intuitive Machines was desperate.

Earlier on Thursday, the company realized that its navigation lasers and cameras were not operational. These rangefinders are essential for two functions during landing: terrain-relative navigation and hazard-relative navigation. These two modes help the flight computer on Odysseus to determine precisely where it is during descent—by snapping lots of images and comparing them to known Moon topography—and to identify hazards below, such as boulders, in order to find a safe landing site.

Without these rangefinders, Odysseus was going to faceplant into the Moon. Fortunately, this mission carried a bunch of science payloads. As part of its commercial lunar program, NASA is paying about $118 million for the delivery of six scientific payloads to the lunar surface.

One of these payloads just happened to be the Navigation Doppler Lidar experiment, a 15-kg package that contains three small cameras. With this NDL payload, NASA sought to test out technologies that might be used to improve navigation systems in future landing attempts on the Moon.

The only chance Odysseus had was if it could somehow tap into two of the NDL experiment’s three cameras and use one for terrain-relative navigation and the other for hazard-relative navigation. So, some software was hastily written and shipped up to the lander. This was some true MacGyver stuff. But would it work?

A little US company makes history by landing on the Moon Read More »