Senior VP Jarrett Jones said the schedule had to be pushed back following the Space Force decision to not select New Glenn as a national security launch provider. WASHINGTON — Blue Origin is pushing back the first launch of its New Glenn rocket to late 2022, saying it “re-baselined” the development of the launch vehicle after losing a key Pentagon contract last year. Blue Origin announced Feb. 25 that it has set a new target in the fourth quarter of 2022 for the first launch of the rocket from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The company originally targeted New Glenn’s inaugural launch for 2020, but by early 2020 had delayed it to late 2021. Jarrett Jones, Blue Origin’s senior vice president for New Glenn, told SpaceNews that the schedule had to be pushed back for technical and financial reasons following the Space Force decision in August to not select New Glenn for the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 2 Launch Services Procurement. “That was a big hit for us,” Jones said. “We had to consider the economics.” Blue Origin lost out to United Launch Alliance and SpaceX, who were selected as national security space launch providers from 2022 to 2027. Not being selected cost Blue Origin billions of dollars, he argued. Blue Origin in October 2018 won a $500 million Launch Service Agreement deal with the Air Force but the LSA was terminated in December 2020 after Blue Origin received just $255.5 million. Blue Origin estimated that not winning the five-year procurement contract cost the company up to $3 billion in revenue, Jones said.
Aerial view of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket factory at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Credit: Blue Origin
Despite the setback, “New Glenn is moving forward,” he said. “It was never a consideration” to not continue developing the vehicle for commercial and civil space customers. “Blue Origin remains committed to New Glenn, and we have the resources aligned to meet our plans.”
New Glenn will be ready to compete again for NSSL Phase 3 when the next contract goes up for bidding in 2024, said Jones. “We hope to launch NSSL payloads in the future, and remain committed to serving the U.S. national defense mission.”
After the loss of the Phase 2 contract, Blue Origin “re-baselined” the New Glenn timeline and development plan, Jones said. “We looked at everything that was on the table, including funding and customers, and we put together a high-probability schedule where we put all of our resources and spread out the necessary funding we needed.”
He cited several developments on the critical path for New Glenn to meet that new launch date, from production of the large propellant tanks for the rocket to radiation testing of its avionics. “I worry about everything,” he said.
The company has completed a qualification version of the seven-meter payload fairing for the rocket, along with a payload adapter, which will be tested later this year at NASA’s Plum Brook Station in Ohio. Blue Origin has a first stage simulator in its Florida factory that some observers caught a glimpse of earlier this month. “Within the next couple of weeks, people will start to see that roll around,” Jones said.
The company is also completing new facilities at LC-36, a former Atlas launch pad that Blue Origin took over in 2015. Major construction at the pad is now wrapping up, with system activation and checkouts starting. “The expectation is that next year it will be commissioned,” he said.
That pad alone cost the company $1 billion, part of $2.5 billion in overall investment by Blue Origin in facilities such as the New Glenn factory just outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center and an engine factory the company completed a year ago in Huntsville, Alabama.
Jones said Blue Origin intends to deliver flight qualified BE-4 engines to United Launch Alliance on time for ULA’s planned maiden launch of its Vulcan rocket late this year. “We’re hot firing regularly and every time you turn around, we’re doing additional tests,” he said. “We have over 11,000 seconds of accumulated test time and we feel confident.”
New Glenn will fulfill its current commercial New Glenn contracts and pursue new civil space launch contracts. The company has previously announced launch contracts with Eutelsat, Mu Space, OneWeb, Sky Perfect JSAT and Telesat, and Jones said the company discussed the revised development schedules with them. “We are still meeting their needs,” he said. “No one is surprised by today’s announcement.”
Blue Origin also intends to position New Glenn to compete with SpaceX in the rideshare market for small satellite launches. “That’s a really big opportunity for us,” said Jones. “We’re doing the development work now to look at the different adapters we need to have for different satellite sizes and for reconfigurable satellites.”
The Long March 5B heavy-lift rocket to launch China’s first space station module is soon to be assembled at Wenchang for launch in April. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC) stated Thursday that the Long March 5B was headed for Wenchang, citing a Feb. 16 press release from the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO). The 849-metric-ton Long March 5B heavy-lift rocket will launch the roughly 22-metric-ton Tianhe core module from Wenchang Satellite Launch Center following delivery, assembly, integration and testing. Ship tracking indicates that the Xu Yang 16 cargo ship traveled from Tianjin, the northern city in which the Long March 5B components are manufactured, arriving at Qinglan harbor Feb. 16. The vessel is apparently being used instead of the dedicated Yuanwang-21 and -22 cargo ships. China has not announced a timeframe for the mission. However previous Long March 5-series rocket launch campaigns have lasted around two months, indicating launch can be expected around mid-to-late April. The 16.6-meter-long, 4.2-meter-diameter Tianhe core module has already been delivered to Wenchang ready for launch preparations. Tianhe, meaning “harmony of the heavens”, is planned to be inserted directly into a low Earth orbit with an apogee of around 370 kilometers and inclined by 41 degrees.
Components of the Long March 5B (Y2) to launch the Chinese space station core module at a facility in Tianjin. Credit: CMSA
The module will provide regenerative life support and living space for three astronauts as well as propulsion to maintain the orbit of the entire complex.
China plans to construct its space station through 11 launches carried out across 2021 and 2022. These consist of three module launches, four Tianzhou cargo missions and four crewed flights.
The Tianhe core module and docking hub of the Chinese Space Station. Credit: CMSA
Launch of Tianhe is to be followed by a Long March 7 launch of the Tianzhou-2 cargo vessel to dock with, fuel and supply Tianhe. The Long March 7 is also in the final stages of preparation.
The first crewed mission, Shenzhou-12, will then launch from Jiuqun via a Long March 2F hypergolic rocket. CMSEO stated Feb. 16 that the selected crew have entered the intensive training phase ahead of the mission.
CASC states that the 12th and 13th Long March 2F rockets for launching the Shenzhou-12 and Shenzhou-13 missions are ready for action. This suggests two crewed missions in 2021, the first likely during the first half of the year.
The launch of Tianhe will mark the construction phase of the three-module low Earth orbit Chinese space station, a project approved in 1992 as part of a human spaceflight program.
Starting in 2003 China has launched six crewed missions and two testbed space laboratories in order to develop and verify a range of technologies and capabilities for the project.
The most recent was the 2016 month-long Shenzhou-11 mission to Tiangong-2 space lab. The latter was deorbited in 2018, avoiding a repeat of the uncontrolled Tiangong-1 reentry scenario.
In April 2020 carried out a test launch of the Long March 5B, debuting a prototype new generation crew spacecraft for deep space. The new, uncrewed craft was loaded with propellant to simulate a payload similar in mass to a space station module.
Notably the rocket’s large core stage reached orbital velocity and subsequently made an uncontrolled reentry off the west coast of Africa days later. A similar event can thus be expected for the launch of Tianhe and later experiment modules.
The launch of the Tianhe core module was delayed by the 2017 launch failure of the second Long March 5, postponing test launch of the Long March 5B. China is now condensing the space station construction schedule into an intensive two-year period, maintaining the target of completing the Chinese Space Station by the end of 2022.
After completion the CSS will be joined in orbit by the Xuntian optical module, a co-orbiting, Hubble-class space telescope. Xuntian will be capable of docking with the CSS for maintenance and repairs. The space station itself could also be expanded from three to six modules.
CASC is planning to carry out at least 40 launches in what would be a busiest year yet for China. The landing attempt of the Tianwen-1 Mars rover is expected in May-June, amid the Tianhe, Tianzhou and Shenzhou launches.
Astronomers have spotted a young star called TOI 451 that has three hot planets in orbit around it. The astronomers spotted the sun using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The young star has a lot in common with our sun, according a NASA statement of the discovery. However, considering our sun's age is roughly 4.6 billion years old, the star TOI 451 is relatively younger, at 120 million years old. The newly-discovered star could further the current understanding of how the solar system formed. The TOI 451 star is 95 percent the mass of the sun, 12 percent smaller, and emits only two-third the energy. All three planets that orbit TOI 451 sit very close to the star, according to the statement. This means that the planets are hot, with temperatures ranging from 2,200 °F (innermost planet) to 840 °F (outermost). The system also has a pair of companion stars that orbit far beyond the planets. The three planets and TOI 451 reside in a "river of stars" known as the Pisces-Eridanus stream which was discovered recently. The stream is 1,300 light-years long that covers one-third of the sky and is made up of stars that are less than 3 percent of the age of the universe.
The TOI 451 system. Image: NASA
Researchers had originally thought that the stream was old, as young stars can have dark spots like sunspots which cause fluctuations in their brightness. However, a closer look at the stream using the TESS observatory, researchers could observe that the stream was actually made up of very young stars that spin quickly.
Yellow dots show the locations of known or suspected members, with TOI 451 circled. Image: NASA
The planets discovered make for an excellent point of observation for telescopes as they develop, with tools like the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope that can detect whether an exoplanet has an atmosphere.
Astronomers have tested a method for reconstructing the state of the early universe by applying it to 4000 simulated universes using the ATERUI II supercomputer at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). They found that together with new observations, the method can set better constraints on inflation, one of the most enigmatic events in the history of the universe. The method can shorten the observation time required to distinguish between various inflation theories. Just after the universe came into existence 13.8 billion years ago, it suddenly increased more than 1 trillion trillion times in size in less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a microsecond, but no one knows how or why. This sudden inflation is one of the most important mysteries in modern astronomy. Inflation should have created primordial density fluctuations that would have affected the distribution of galaxy development. Thus, mapping the distribution of galaxies can rule out models for inflation that don't match the observed data. However, processes other than inflation also impact galaxy distribution, making it difficult to derive information about inflation directly from observations of the large-scale structure of the universe, the cosmic web comprising countless galaxies. In particular, the gravitationally driven growth of groups of galaxies can obscure the primordial density fluctuations. A research team led by Masato Shirasaki, an assistant professor at NAOJ and the Institute of Statistical Mathematics, applied a reconstruction method to turn back the clock and remove gravitational effects from the large-scale structure. They used ATERUI II, the world's fastest supercomputer dedicated to astronomy simulations, to create 4000 simulated universes and evolve them through gravitationally driven growth. They then applied this method to see how well it reconstructed the starting state of the simulations. The team found that their method can correct for the gravitational effects and improve the constraints on primordial density fluctuations.
"We found that this method is very effective," says Shirasaki. "Using this method, we can verify inflation theories with roughly one-tenth the amount of data. This method can shorten the required observing time in upcoming galaxy survey missions such as SuMIRe by NAOJ's Subaru Telescope."
These results appeared as Masato Shirasaki et. al. "Constraining Primordial Non-Gaussianity with Post-reconstructed Galaxy Bispectrum in Redshift Space," in Physical Review D on January 4, 2021.
China's Chang'e 4 spacecraft are back in action for a 27th lunar day on the far side of the moon, but it's the discoveries from the mission's previous lunar day that have scientists excited. The Chang'e 4 lander and Yutu 2 rover resumed activities on Feb. 6 after hibernating during the severe cold of lunar night, according to the Chinese state-run media outlet Xinhua. But one lunar day earlier the rover came across a curious rock specimen which the Yutu 2 drive team began to refer to as a "milestone." According to a Yutu 2 diary published by Our Space, the Chinese language science outreach channel affiliated with the China National Space Administration (CNSA), mission scientists agreed with the drive team that the elongated rock was worth closer inspection. The team then planned to do a close approach and analyze the rock with Yutu 2's Visible and Near-infrared Imaging Spectrometer (VNIS) instrument, which detects light that is scattered or reflected off materials to reveal their makeup. VNIS has been used to investigate a number of rocks and regolith samples along Yutu 2's path across Von Kármán crater. These include unusual melt glass specimens and potentially material from the lunar mantle. While not looking particularly exciting to the untrained eye, the find has generated interest among lunar scientists. "It seems to have a shard-like shape and is sticking out of the ground. That's definitely unusual," Dan Moriarty, NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, told Space.com.
This photo taken by China's Yutu 2 moon rover shows the elongated "milestone" rock on the lunar surface.
"Repeated impacts, stresses from thermal cycling, and other forms of weathering on the lunar surface would all tend to break down rocks into more-or-less 'spherical' shapes, given enough time," Moriarty said. "Think of how rocky beaches wear down stones to smooth, round shapes over time by repeated jostling in the waves."
Moriarty said both the shard-like shape and that pronounced "ridge" running near the edge of the rock seem to indicate that this rock is geologically young, and was emplaced relatively recently.
"Milestone" rock, China's Yutu 2 rover image
"I would definitely guess an origin as impact ejecta from some nearby crater. It is possible that a rock with this aspect ratio could have been produced by a process known as spallation, where intact fragments of rock are blown off the nearby surface without experiencing the same degree of shock pressures that the immediate target undergoes," Moriarty said, adding that this initial assessment is just a guess.
Followup detections and data from VNIS will provide much greater insight. Clive Neal, a leading lunar expert at the University of Notre Dame, agrees that, based on the images, the specimens are impact ejecta rather than exposed bedrocks. "The question I have is are they locally derived? Hopefully the spectral data will allow an evaluation of the origin as local or exotic, that is, from outside this area," he said.
Yutu 2 and the Chang'e 4 lander have already greatly exceeded their design lifetimes of 90 Earth days and one year, respectively. The rover has covered a total of 2,060 feet (628 meters) since its deployment from the lander on Jan. 3, 2019.
In November last year China launched its Chang'e 5 lunar sample return mission. The mission resulted in 3.81 lbs. (1.73 kilograms) of fresh moon samples being delivered to Earth just over three weeks later. CNSA last month published procedures for requesting samples for scientific analysis.
Astronomers using the MUSE (Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer) on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have captured a remarkable image of the spiral galaxy NGC 6902. NGC 6902 is located approximately 120 million light-years away in the constellation of Sagittarius. The galaxy was discovered on September 2, 1836, by the English astronomer John Herschel. Otherwise known as ESO 285-8 and LEDA 64632, it has a diameter of 210,000 light-years. NGC 6902 is the main member of a small group of galaxies called the LGG 434 group, or the NGC 6902 group, which also includes IC 4946 and ESO 285-5. “A zoom in towards the center of NGC 6902, the MUSE image shows a nuclear ring where the orange glow of intense star formation is visible,” ESO astronomers said. “Inside this ring lies a faint and small bar of stars.” The astronomers found that stars within this ring are distributed differently depending on their age, with younger stars aligned along the bar and older stars more dispersed. “These locations of the young and old stars within the central bar of NGC 6902 confirm predictions made years earlier from simulations and models,” they said.
This image, taken with the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, shows the spiral galaxy NGC 6902.
Image credit: TIMER Survey / ESO.
“This is the first time these predictions of galactic structure were confirmed with observations thanks to the incredible spatial resolution of the MUSE instrument.”
Once the changes have been reviewed and approved by program engineering and management, the new values will be given to the SLS flight software team to be updated in the Green Run Application Software (GRAS) that is running on the Core Stage’s three flight computers. The limits are part of thousands of operational and other system parameters that can be modified without needing to make an invasive code change. “We use the same process that we would use for the Day Of Launch I-Load Update (DOLILU), we use that same process,” Mitchell said. “It’s a capability that we can use to modify parameters within the flight software. By design, we wanted to make that process as easy and straightforward so that it could support a quick turnaround if you got into a situation where you’re having some troubles with a limit that was too tight.” I-load stands for “initialization load,” which is essentially a settings file that the software can load to update groups of parameters. “These are parameters that are part of a parameter control file where we manage over 10,000 different parameters that can be modified in flight software. We’ll make those tweaks to change those limit levels [and] we’ll generate an I-load file that can then be uploaded.” “[It’s] a pretty rapid process, and we’ve advertised with the KSC (Kennedy Space Center) folks that that’s a process that we can turnaround in about three or four days. And so that’s the same process that we’ll execute for making these parameter changes going into the next Hot-Fire attempt.”
Much of that time is still needed to ensure that the changes “do no harm,” by first testing the parameter control file changes on a separate set of computers in a test lab at the Marshall Space Flight Center. “We will test it to make sure that it works with the changes as expected. You always want to make sure that it did no harm when you make that change.”
The regression testing will verify that the parameter changes are input to the flight software correctly, that only the specific values are changed and not something else, and that no other unintended side effects occur when the file is loaded by the flight software.
(Photo Caption: The four Aerojet Rocketdyne RS-25 engines in the SLS Core Stage start during the Hot-Fire test on January 16. The engines operated normally during the test-firing, the first time the former Space Shuttle Main Engines had been throttled up to 109% power. A bad reading in one sensor value on Engine 4 during startup was quickly disqualified by its engine controller and was unrelated to the later abort of the test.)
In contrast, a code change would require more work and take longer to complete. “Without having to do a code change, we can turnaround the creation of [an] I-load file, the specific parameter change testing, in a couple of general regression tests to show proof that it did no harm.”
“The last thing we would want to do is make a code change for something like this because then you get into more extensive process and regression testing that instead of three or four days can easily go to maybe two to four weeks depending on what the change is.”
Vehicle in good shape post-firing
NASA reported that the Core Stage itself was in good shape after the short test-firing. The extra thermal protection system (TPS) layer for the Green Run Hot-Fire also appears to be in good condition.
A layer of reflective foil was applied to the bottom of the stage’s boattail and any other down-facing hardware in the area to protect against the higher heating expected in an eight-minute long static-firing. Within a few minutes of flight, the stage would be out of the appreciable atmosphere; instead, during a continuous static-firing at sea-level, the vehicle is subjected to extra heating and acoustic effects.
The Core Stage CAPUs also exhaust hydrogen gas while they are powered by the running engines. During the engine start and shutdown sequences, groups of hydrogen burn-off igniters are fired make sure that hydrogen gas from the engines or the CAPUs doesn’t build up to dangerous levels.
“Before we light off the engines, we [use] the hydrogen burn off igniters, the sparklers if you will,” Terry Prickett, NASA’s Deputy Chief Engineer for the SLS Core Stage, said. “We actually have dedicated sparklers that are shooting up into this area to ignite the CAPU exhaust so we don’t get a build up of the hydrogen gas and have a big pop event [that would] overpressurize that area.”
Prickett added that once the engines are up and running, they would then consume the CAPU’s hydrogen gas exhaust. “We would expect it to get entrained in the aspiration flow that’s coming down around the vehicle down through the flame bucket,” he said.
(Photo Caption: Residual hydrogen gas is consumed by hydrogen burn-off igniters after the engines shut down in the January 16 Hot-Fire test. The outside igniters are deployed around the bottom of the stage and its engines and are fired to allow a controlled burn of free hydrogen gas in the area rather than letting it build up and ignite all at once during engine startup and shutdown in the test stand at Stennis.)
In the test stand at Stennis, the hydrogen burn-off igniters are run not only before and during engine startup but also during and after the engines and CAPUs shutdown.
The other TPS system around the engines are the engine mounted heat shield blankets that protect the engine section and the engine powerheads while the engines are running during a Hot-Fire test and also during launch when the Solid Rocket Boosters are burning on either side of the Core Stage.
The blankets are multi-layer insulation designed to handle the severe launch environment, but they also have an outer layer to protect against moisture instead of combustion. “The outermost layer is a thin, waterproofing barrier and the inner layers are insulation material,” Prickett said.
“The outer layer was expected to be consumed during the Hot-Fire, and like I say, it has no effect on the insulating capability of the blanket, it’s just there for a moisture barrier — a weather cover, if you will — while we’re sitting out there on the stand for months at a time. We don’t want rain and moisture getting into those blankets.”
“As far as how it looks afterwards, the moisture barriers are torn up and burned, there’s some burning that we saw on those, but the insulating part of the blankets looked intact and no damage basically at all on those,” he added.
Since the firing only lasted for about a minute, NASA and Boeing are still discussing whether they needed to do any work on the blankets before the second Hot-Fire. A new, fresh set of blankets will be installed for launch.
Stage and engines have reserves for another test-firing
NASA had planned to conduct more propellant loadings of the first flight Core Stage as a part of the Green Run campaign at Stennis and first-time launch integration activities at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In addition to filling the Core Stage with propellant for the Wet Dress Rehearsal and Hot-Fire tests for Green Run, a full SLS vehicle WDR is planned at KSC to demonstrate and verify the integrated launch vehicle and ground system capabilities.
At a minimum, propellant loading for a launch countdown was expected to be the fourth cryogenic cycle on the Core Stage. The Core can be loaded and unloaded (with one load and one unload counting as a single cryo cycle) a total of 23 times per the design.
“Before Green Run testing began, SLS had allocated nine cryogenic cycles for testing at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, and has used two of those during the Hot-Fire and Wet Dress Rehearsal, with seven cryogenic cycles remaining for additional testing. For the Artemis I launch, NASA is preserving 13 of the remaining 20 cryogenic loading cycles,” another NASA blog post said.
“There are some differences in the way we count [cryogenic loading] cycles on this program versus what we did on External Tank,” Prickett noted. “All these cycles go into a big spectrum that the tank is going to see, so we book-keep them as major cycles and minor cycles and it’s a combination of cryo and pressure.”
“There’s a little bit of difference here in the fact that on Shuttle we loaded against pressure, so we pressurized the tanks and then we loaded them. On [SLS], we do not do that.”
Likewise, the Stage Green Run testing was initially planned to be more expansive, and Aerojet Rocketdyne prepared the four RS-25 engines assigned to this first SLS Core Stage as well as the next engine set for the second Core for the possibility of additional pre-launch testing. Early plans to conduct two Green Run campaigns on the first two Core Stages and to perform two Hot-Fire tests in each one were scaled back over time.
“We had a ‘six-six, three-three’ requirement,” Aerojet Rocketdyne’s Doug Bradley said in an interview in 2020; at the time, he was RS-25 Deputy Program Director for the company. “That means, the first two flights– they had to be good for six tests or [firings] without any real changes in how we had to inspect them. The next two [flights] would be three.”
(Photo Caption: The four RS-25 engines are seen following shutdown after the January 16 test. The white heat shield thermal protection blankets above the engine nozzles have a thin, outer water-barrier cover that was expected to be burned over the course of a full, eight minute engine firing; however, they appear to have survived one minute of firing with less damage.)
“At one time, there were going to be two Core Stage tests on the engines. And so we put an abort in for both of those; that gets you up to four,” he explained. “Then we said ‘put in an on-the-pad abort for the flight’ and then the flight, so we came up with six. Then we said, ‘after you do the first two [flights], you’re not going to be doing two [ground tests] any more,’ so we said three.”
Following the first Hot-Fire, during the refurbishment and turnaround process to get the engines ready for the second Hot-Fire, an issue with the readings from one of four Main Combustion Chamber pressure sensors on Engine 4 was also repaired. The measurement from that sensor was “noisy” during engine startup, and that sensor was disqualified by the engine controller 1.5 seconds after the start command.
The noisy data was not due to a bad sensor but was somewhere within the wire harness that carries the data from the sensor to the engine controller. The issue was not serious enough to either shutdown the engine or to stop the ground test from continuing and was unrelated to the issue that stopped the test over 60 seconds later.
While not an issue for the Hot-Fire test, such a noisy start on one sensor on a single engine would have resulted in an on-pad abort per flight safety rules that mandate full redundancy of the system at liftoff.
January Hot-Fire short, but many firsts demonstrated
Although there wasn’t much of a middle to the January 16 Hot-Fire, the test accomplished many SLS Program firsts: including the first time a Core Stage completed a launch countdown, the first four-engine start sequence, first steady-state run-time at 109%, and first safe engine shutdown.
“Even before engine start we got a lot of firsts,” Looser said. “If you remember in the second Wet Dress Rehearsal, we stopped at around the five minute mark, so [January 16] was the first time to go up to flight pressure on both of those tanks as we enter the terminal count. We demonstrated the engine start box, starting all four CAPUs, transitioning the engines into their final purge sequence, and then getting the engine ready command.”
“We [also demonstrated] a three-minute launch ready hold as we were working an issue just prior to engine start; so we demonstrated that launch-ready hold capability,” he added.
Many of the firsts in the January 16 test were under control of the brand new SLS flight software; after vehicle power went to internal batteries at T-90 seconds, the vehicle was virtually isolated from the test stand, and the flight computers took over control of the vehicle from Boeing’s Stage Controller ground computers at T-30 seconds and completed the Core Stage’s part of the final launch countdown.
“That was the first time we’ve been able to go through that T-4 minutes 40 seconds [mark] all the way to T0 and into plus count with the real vehicle,” Mitchell also added. “Of course we performed that testing thousands of times in the various labs.”
Once the engines came up before T0 and the engine tap-off gas was powering the CAPUs — another first for the program — the stage was running off its own resources under its own control.
“What’s interesting is that when you look at and understand all the interactions that need to happen between the Stage Controller and the test stand and the Stage Controller and stage working through the Green Run Application Software to configure the stage so that it can become a self-contained entity and for GRAS to take over and execute the Hot-Fire and how seamlessly that worked, there’s hundreds of activities that happened during those last four minutes to get to T0, and I couldn’t be more pleased with how that whole integrated system performed,” noted Mitchell.
“It provides us a lot of assurance, certainly for a second Hot-Fire, but also gives us a lot of confidence when we go to do integration at KSC.”
By 2035, NASA wants to land humans on Mars. But reaching the red planet, on average around 140 million miles away, will be a mammoth feat. Colder than Antarctica and with little to no oxygen, Mars is a hostile environment. The longer it takes astronauts to get there and the longer they stay, the more they are at risk. That's why scientists are looking at ways to reduce trip time. Seattle-based company Ultra Safe Nuclear Technologies (USNC-Tech) has proposed a solution: a nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) engine that could get humans from Earth to Mars in just three months. Currently, the shortest possible trip for an unmanned spacecraft is seven months, but a crewed mission is expected to take at least nine months. Michael Eades, director of engineering at USNC-Tech, says that nuclear-powered rockets would be more powerful and twice as efficient as the chemical engines used today, meaning they could travel further and faster, while burning less fuel. "Nuclear technology will expand humanity's reach beyond low Earth orbit, and into deep space," he tells CNN. As well as enabling human space travel, it could open up space for galactic business opportunities, he says. Most rockets today are powered by chemical engines. These could get you to Mars, but it would take a long time -- at least three years for a round trip -- says Jeff Sheehy, chief engineer of NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate. NASA wants to get there faster, to minimize the crew's time in outer space, he says. This would reduce their exposure to space radiation, which can cause health problems including radiation sickness, increased lifetime risk of cancer, central nervous system effects and degenerative diseases.
It would also decrease the overall risk of the mission. "The longer you're out there, the more time there is for stuff to go wrong," he adds. That's why the space agency is looking to develop nuclear-powered rockets. An NTP system uses a nuclear reactor to generate heat from a uranium fuel. That thermal energy heats a liquid propellant, usually liquid hydrogen, which expands into a gas and is shot out the back end, producing thrust. NTP rockets produce twice the thrust per unit of propellant than a chemical system -- which is like saying it does "double the miles per gallon," says Sheehy. This means the technology could get astronauts to Mars and back in less than two years.
An illustration of a spacecraft with a nuclear-enabled propulsion system. Courtesy of NASA
However, one of the main challenges for building an NTP engine is finding a uranium fuel that can withstand the blistering temperatures inside a nuclear thermal engine. USNC-Tech claims to have solved this problem by developing a fuel that can operate in temperatures up to 2,700 degrees Kelvin (4,400 degrees Fahrenheit). The fuel contains silicon carbide, a material used in tank armor, which forms a gas-tight barrier that prevents the escape of radioactive products from the nuclear reactor, protecting the astronauts. Along with other companies developing similar technology, USNC-Tech has presented its development to NASA. While Sheehy would not comment on the specifics of any individual designs, he said the developments show that nuclear engines are feasible and could make "a good choice for human exploration to Mars."
Is the nuclear option safe?
Shorter missions would limit the crew's exposure to space radiation, but there is still concern about the radiation emitted from the nuclear reactor inside the spacecraft. This would be mitigated through the rocket's design, Eades explains. The liquid propellants -- stored between the engine and the crew area -- block out radioactive particles, acting as "a tremendously good radiation shield," he says.
A rendering of the USNC-Tech NTP systems in line at a rocket hangar. The system is roughly 13 feet (four meters) long.
The distance between the crew and reactor also provides a buffer, says Sheehy, and any NTP design would place the living quarters at the other end of the rocket to the reactor.To protect people on the ground, NTP spacecraft would not lift-off directly from Earth, Sheehy adds. Instead, a regular chemical rocket would hoist it into orbit, and only then would it fire up its nuclear reactor. Once in orbit, it could do little harm, he says, as blasts and thermal radiation cannot move through a vacuum. If disaster struck and the rocket's reactor broke up, the pieces would not land on Earth -- or any other planet -- for tens of thousands of years, he says. By that time, the radioactive substance would have "naturally decayed to the point where it wasn't hazardous anymore."
Deep space exploration
Although USNC-Tech's current goal for a one-way trip is five to nine months, nuclear-powered technology has the potential to cut journeys from Earth to Mars to just 90 days, says Eades. These faster journey times could open up a wealth of opportunities. USNC-Tech is hoping to develop its technology for government agencies like NASA and the Department of Defense, and for the commercial space market. The company says its concept could help to power space tourism and "rapid orbital logistics services," such as transporting satellites or delivering spacecraft capable of repairing satellites out in space. Sheehy agrees that nuclear-powered rockets will be key to opening up the solar system but cautions that it could be at least two decades before they are used widely. Numerous demonstrations and tests would need to be carried out before a crew is sent to Mars in an NTP rocket, he says. "Nobody's ever flown nuclear propulsion yet," he says. "I think it's going to have to be flown a few times ... before somebody sells tickets."
Astronomers announced this month that a new deep-field survey called JADES will be carried out with the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble’s much-anticipated successor. The Webb is due to launch later this year. Astronomers announced a new deeper-than-ever sky survey this month (January 15, 2021), to be conducted with the James Webb Space Telescope, the Hubble telescope’s successor, scheduled for launch in October of this year. The new survey is abbreviated JADES, which is short for James Webb Space Telescope Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey. The survey will be like the Hubble Deep Fields, but deeper still. Its main goal is to see far away in space – and thus far back into the very young universe – and image it just at the end of the so-called Cosmic Dark Ages, that is, at the time when gas in the universe went from being opaque to transparent. This is also the time when the very first stars were forming – very large, massive and bright stars – in a veritable firestorm of star birth when the young universe was less than 5% of its current age. The Webb telescope will be located near the second Lagrange point – a relatively stable region of space, gravitationally speaking, known as L2 – some 930,000 miles (1.5 million km) from Earth. To conduct the new survey, the Webb telescope will be staring at a small point of space for nearly 800 hours (approximately 33 days) to be able to see fainter objects than those ever seen before and thus to find the first generation of galaxies. Astronomers want to know, among other things, how fast did these galaxies form, and how fast did their stars form? They also want to look for the very first supermassive black holes, which are thought to lie at the hearts of nearly all large galaxies, including our Milky Way.
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (in its eXtreme version) is the deepest view of the universe yet obtained … and will be, until JADES takes over. It stretches approximately 13 billion light-years and includes approximately 10,000 galaxies. It took 11.3 days for the Hubble Space Telescope to collect these ancient photons. Try downloading the largest version and zoom in on different sections. We’re seeing these galaxies as they were billions of years ago. How might they look today? Image via NASA/ ESA/ S. Beckwith (STSci)/ HUDF team.
The long-anticipated launch of the James Webb Space Telescope has been postponed a number of times for a variety of reasons, most recently because of effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is the formal successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, but is equipped with instrumentation able to image further into the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum than Hubble could.
This capability also makes it a worthy successor to the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope which recently went into retirement.
What makes the infrared part of the spectrum so important for surveys like JADES? If you look really deep, you will also look back in time, and the farther back in time you look, the more redshifted the galaxies are (the farther away they are, the faster they move away from us, and the more their light has been shifted towards the red part of the spectrum). This means that the light we want to observe, originally in the optical (visible) part of the electromagnetic spectrum, might not even show much in the optical part anymore. Instead, it’s been shifted to longer wavelengths, into the infrared regime.
In other words, the use of infrared cameras is necessary to be able to see the light from the first generation of galaxies. Daniel Eisenstein, a professor of astronomy at Harvard University, said:
Galaxies, we think, begin building up in the first billion years after the Big Bang, and sort of reach adolescence at 1 to 2 billion years. We’re trying to investigate those early periods. We must do this with an infrared-optimized telescope because the expansion of the universe causes light to increase in wavelength as it traverses the vast distance to reach us. So even though the stars are emitting light primarily in optical and ultraviolet wavelengths, that light is shifted quite relentlessly out into the infrared. Only Webb can get to the depth and sensitivity that’s needed to study these early galaxies.
In fact, the James Webb Space Telescope was built specifically for this purpose. Up to now, infrared images are much less resolved – less clear – than optical images, because of their longer wavelength. With its much larger collecting area, the Webb will be able to image, in infrared, at the same resolution – detail – that Hubble could obtain in the optical part of the spectrum.
Get ready for a whole new set of mind-blowing images of the universe, this time in the infrared, from Webb!
After having successfully deployed its solar panels – precisely as it’s supposed to do once it’s in space – the Webb telescope is shown here ready for the final tests on December 17, 2020, at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Then it will be packed up and transported to French Guyana, to be launched on October 31, 2021, via an Ariane V rocket. Image via NASA/ Chris Gunn.
The use of deep field surveys is a young science, for two reasons. First, astronomers didn’t have the right instrumentation before Hubble to do them. Second, it’s also because no one initially knew the result of staring into a piece of empty space for a long time. Such a long stare into the unknown would require valuable observation time, and if this long observation didn’t produce any results, it would be considered a waste.
But in 1995, Robert Williams, then the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSci), which administrates the Hubble telescope, decided to use his “director’s discretionary time” to point the Hubble toward a very small and absolutely empty-looking part of the sky in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major the Great Bear. There were no stars visible from our Milky Way (or extremely few), no nearby galaxies visible in the field, and no visible gas clouds. Hubble collected photons for 10 consecutive days, and the result, the Hubble Deep Field, was a success and a paradigm changer: A patch of sky about as small as the eye of George Washington on an American quarter (25-cent coin) held out at arm’s length, showed a 10 billion-light-years-long tunnel back in time with a plethora of galaxies – around 3,000 of them – at different evolutionary stages along the way. The field of observational cosmology was born.
This was done again in 1998 with the Hubble telescope pointed to the southern sky (Hubble Deep Field South), and the result was the same. Thus we learned that the universe is uniform over large scales.
Next was the installation of a new, powerful camera on Hubble (the Advanced Camera for Surveys) in 2002. The incredible Hubble Ultra Deep Field was acquired in 2004, in a similarly small patch of sky near the constellation Orion, about 1/10 of a full moon diameter (2.4 x 3.4 arc minutes, in contrast to the original Hubble Deep Fields north and south, which were 2.6 x 2.6 arc minutes). And so our reach was extended even deeper into space, and even further back in time, showing light from 10 thousand galaxies along a 13-billion-light-years-long tunnel of space. If you’ll remember that the universe is about 13.77 billion years old, you’ll see this is getting us really close to the beginning!
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field was the most sensitive astronomical image ever made at wavelengths of visible (optical) light until 2012, when an even more refined version was released, called the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field, which reached even farther: 13.2 billion years back in time.
The JADES survey will be observed in two batches, one on the northern sky and one on the southern in two famous fields called GOODS North and South (abbreviated from Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey).
Marcia Rieke, a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona who co-leads the JADES Team with Pierre Ferruit of the European Space Agency (ESA), explained:
We chose these fields because they have such a great wealth of supporting information. They’ve been studied at many other wavelengths, so they were the logical ones to do.
Look closely. Every single speck of light in this image is a distant galaxy (except for the very few ones with spikes which are foreground stars). This telescopic field of view is part of the GOODS South field. It’s one of the directions in space that’ll be observed in JADES, a new survey that aims to study the very first galaxies to appear in the infancy of the universe. Image via NASA/ Hubble Space Telescope/ James Webb Space Telescope site.
The GOODS fields have been observed with several of the most famous telescopes, covering a great wavelength range from infrared through optical to X-ray. They are not fully as deep (the observations don’t reach as far back) as the Ultra Deep Field, but cover a larger area of the sky (4-5 times larger) and are the most data-rich areas of the sky in terms of depth combined with wavelength coverage. By the way, the first deep field, HDF-N, is located in the GOODS north image, and the Ultra deep field/eXtreme (don’t you love these names?) is located in the GOODS south field.
There are a large number of ambitious science goals for the JADES program pertaining to the composition of the first galaxies, including the first generation of supermassive black holes. How these came about at such an early time is a mystery. As well, the transition of gas from neutral and opaque to transparent and ionized, something astronomers call the epoch of reionization, is not well understood. JADES team member Andrew Bunker, professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who is also part of the ESA team behind the Webb telescope, said:
This transition is a fundamental phase change in the nature of the universe. We want to understand what caused it. It could be that it’s the light from very early galaxies and the first burst of star formation … It is kind of one of the Holy Grails, to find the so-called Population III stars that formed from the hydrogen and helium of the Big Bang.
People have been trying to do this for many decades and results have been inconclusive so far.
