TYB
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
Nov 17, 2023
Nightlights in Qeqertaq
Light pollution is usually not a problem in Qeqertaq. In western Greenland the remote coastal village boasted a population of 114 in 2020. Lights still shine in its dark skies though. During planet Earth's recent intense geomagnetic storm, on November 6 these beautiful curtains of aurora borealis fell over the arctic realm. On the eve of the coming weeks of polar night at 70 degrees north latitude, the inspiring display of northern lights is reflected in the waters of Disko Bay. In this view from the isolated settlement a lone iceberg is illuminated by shore lights as it drifts across the icy sea.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html?
Lockheed Martin Opens 25,000-Square Foot, $16.5M Missile Defense Lab
HUNTSVILLE, Ala., Nov. 14, 2023 /PRNewswire/ – Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) today opened a $16.5M engineering facility at its Huntsville campus, introducing more capabilities for missile defense innovation in North Alabama.
This facility is a Lockheed Martin capital project and provides evidence of Lockheed Martin's investment in the Huntsville community, increasing opportunities for growth and advanced capability in North Alabama at the company's Huntsville campus. The new Missile System Integration Lab (MSIL) is where Lockheed Martin plans to conduct development, testing, and system integration for the nation's next long range ballistic missile defense interceptor – the Next Generation Interceptor (NGI) for the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA).
The MSIL will also house a digital engineering center and key infrastructure to create and maintain a digital thread throughout the integration process.
"Lockheed Martin is committed to North Alabama and this facility is further evidence of that," said Robert Lightfoot, executive vice president of Lockheed Martin Space. "We are pleased to celebrate adding an advanced facility to our Huntsville campus today – the same year we mark 60 years in the Rocket City supporting our customers."
The new lab's concept is strengthened by Lockheed Martin's decades of experience and expertise supporting the U.S. missile defense mission, across the product lifecycle and all phases of flight.
"This facility serves as a testbed to prove out our hardware and software integration, adding new levels of digital capability, agility and connectivity with our customers," said Sarah Reeves, vice president of NGI at Lockheed Martin. "It is another example of Lockheed Martin's investment in the technology and advanced facilities critical to reducing risk for our NGI program. The MSIL brings us even closer to flight testing and production of our interceptor, which will revolutionize U.S. homeland missile defense."
NGI program headquarters is located in Huntsville, where Lockheed Martin is bringing jobs, infrastructure and investment to help strengthen the region as a thriving excellence hub for missile defense.
The company is also planning to break ground this year on two state-of-the-art facilities in Courtland, Alabama, which will add missile production space and a payload manufacturing center supporting its growing portfolio of capabilities in the state.
https://news.lockheedmartin.com/2023-11-14-Lockheed-Martin-Opens-25,000-Square-Foot,-16-5M-Missile-Defense-Lab
Mark Levin Interviews Alina Habba
Nov 16, 2023
Mark speaks with Alina Habba, lawyer for Donald Trump, about the politically motivated fraudulent case against Trump and the gag order being overturned.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih1HKJzqrjc
China launches new-gen Haiyang ocean monitoring satellite
November 16, 2023
BREMEN, Germany — China launched the first of a new series of Haiyang ocean observation satellites late Wednesday.
A Long March 2C rocket lifted off into clear skies above Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 10:55 p.m. Eastern, Nov. 15 (0355 UTC, Nov. 16). The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) announced launch success within an hour of liftoff, also revealing the payload to be Haiyang-3 (01).
Haiyang-3 (01) will operate in a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit. It will provide all-weather ocean observation using an X-band SAR payload over a planned mission lifetime of eight years.
CASC says the new high-precision ocean water color observation satellite will target various water bodies around the world using multiple detection methods, providing insights into various environmental and biological processes. It will be able to provide continuous dynamic monitoring of water color, water temperature, sea ice and other variables, to deliver timely remote sensing information.
The Haiyang-3 series will complement the Haiyang-2 satellites with SAR observations. The earlier series focus on variables including wind speed, sea level and sea surface temperature.
The satellite was developed by the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST). It will be operated by China’s National Satellite Ocean Application Service (NSOAS).
https://spacenews.com/china-launches-new-gen-haiyang-ocean-monitoring-satellite/
Rogue rocket that slammed into the moon last year confirmed to be Chinese vehicle
Nov 16, 2023
The case of the mysterious moon crash is now conclusively closed, a new study reports.
On March 4, 2022, a rocket body slammed into the moon's far side, blasting out a weird double crater about 95 feet (29 meters) wide. The crash did not come as a surprise; astronomers had been tracking the rogue rocket for weeks and predicted, with impressive accuracy, where and when it would slam into the lunar surface.
The mystery involved the identity of the impactor, which astronomers designated WE0913A. Initial observations suggested it might be the upper stage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched the Earth-observing DSCOVR satellite in February 2015. But, after further work, astronomers soon settled on a different candidate: The third and uppermost stage of the Long March 3C rocket that lofted China's uncrewed Chang'e 5-T1 mission around the moon in October 2014.
One of the teams that came to that conclusion last year — a group based at the University of Arizona (UA) — has now strengthened it to the point of confirmation.
"In this paper, we present a trajectory and spectroscopic analysis using ground-based telescope observations to show conclusively that WE0913A is the Long March 3C rocket body (R/B) from the Chang'e 5-T1 mission," the researchers, led by Tanner Campbell, a doctoral student in the UA's Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, wrote in a study that came out Thursday (Nov. 16) in the Planetary Science Journal.
These two lines of evidence — how the object was moving and what it was made of — leave little doubt about WE0913A's provenance, Campbell and his colleagues report.
China, however, has attempted to sow doubt. More than that, in fact: Chinese officials have said that the Long March 3C's upper stage burned up in Earth's atmosphere shortly after the launch of Chang'e 5-T1, which tested technology ahead of the Chang'e 5 moon sample-return mission in 2020. But that assertion was denied by U.S. Space Command, which said last year that the object never reentered.
The new study also sheds further light on the distinctive crater that resulted from the March 2022 moon crash.
The researchers compared WE0913A's light curve — the change in its brightness over time — with those of thousands of hypothetical space objects, generated via computer simulations. And they found interesting differences.
"Something that's been in space as long as this is subjected to forces from the Earth's and the moon's gravity and the light from the sun," Campbell said in a statement. "So you would expect it to wobble a little bit, particularly when you consider that the rocket body is a big empty shell with a heavy engine on one side. But this was just tumbling end-over-end, in a very stable way."
The most plausible explanation for this behavior, team members said, is a dumbbell-like object — one with considerable mass at each end.
One such mass was the upper stage's two engines, which weighed a combined 2,400 pounds (1,090 kilograms) without fuel here on Earth. The mass at the other end of the rocket stage was probably in that ballpark as well, given how stably WE0913A was tumbling and the nature of the hole it gouged out of the lunar surface, Campbell said.
"This is the first time we see a double crater" in a moon impact, he said. "We know that in the case of Chang'e 5 T1, its impact was almost straight down, and to get those two craters of about the same size, you need two roughly equal masses that are apart from each other."
The mystery mass is too big to be just the standard instrument deck carried by the Long March 3C's third stage, which Campbell said likely weighed about 60 pounds (27 kg) or so. But that's just about the only inference we can make.
"Obviously, we have no idea what it might have been — perhaps some extra support structure, or additional instrumentation or something else," Campbell said. "We probably won't ever know."
https://www.space.com/moon-crash-march-2022-china-rocket-body