TYB
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
Mar 24 2023
Outbound Comet ZTF
Former darling of the northern sky Comet C/2022E3 (ZTF) has faded. During its closest approach to our fair planet in early February Comet ZTF was a mere 2.3 light-minutes distant. Then known as the green comet, this visitor from the remote Oort Cloud is now nearly 13.3 light-minutes away. In this deep image, composed of exposures captured on March 21, the comet still sports a broad, whitish dust tail and greenish tinted coma though. Not far on the sky from Orion's bright star Rigel, Comet ZTF shares the field of view with faint, dusty nebulae and distant background galaxies. The telephoto frame is crowded with Milky Way stars toward the constellation Eridanus. The influence of Jupiter's gravity on the comet's orbit as ZTF headed for the inner solar system, may have set the comet on an outbound journey, never to return.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html?
Relativity Space launches world's first 3D-printed rocket on historic test flight, but fails to reach orbit
Mar 23 2023
The world's first 3D-printed rocket didn't earn its wings during its launch debut late Wednesday (March 22), but it did notch some important milestones.
The Relativity Space rocket, called Terran 1, lifted off from Launch Complex 16 at Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 8:25 p.m. EST (0025 GMT on March 23), kicking off a test flight called "Good Luck, Have Fun" (GLHF).
Terran 1 performed well initially. For example, it survived Max-Q — the part of flight during which the structural loads are highest on a rocket — and its first and second stages separated successfully. But something went wrong shortly thereafter, at around three minutes into the flight, when the rocket failed to reach orbit.
"No one's ever attempted to launch a 3D-printed rocket into orbit, and, while we didn't make it all the way today, we gathered enough data to show that flying 3D-printed rockets is viable," Relativity Space's Arwa Tizani Kelly said during the company's launch webcast on Wednesday night.
"We just completed a major step in proving to the world that 3D-printed rockets are structurally viable," she added.
Indeed, Relativity Space is likely celebrating at the moment. Rockets rarely perform perfectly on their first-ever liftoff; Japan's new H3 rocket failed during its debut flight earlier this month, for example. And Relativity Space co-founder Tim Ellis said before launch that getting through Max-Q was "the key inflection" for the GLHF mission.
"This will essentially prove the viability of using additive manufacturing tech to produce products that fly. We already effectively did this in ground testing, pushing and prodding well above this max stress successfully on both stages in a simulated worst-case flying environment, and have tested over 12,000 seconds of engine hot fires across dozens of articles — so I think we've done this already, but in flight of course is the most visceral proof," Ellis tweeted on March 7.
https://www.space.com/relativity-space-terran-1-test-launch-failure
chekt
-117th lower level floor, please