Fifth Avenue Forum

You're a Greek asteroid.

The various deployments for the JWST are proceeding apace. The front and rear sunshade pallets both successfully extended, as well as the port and starboard sunshade booms. The next couple days will see the remaining steps to tension the five separate layers of the sunshade. The instruments on the JWST must be kept very cold in order to work properly, and that means that they must constantly "hide" from the sun behind a layered sunshade. The difference between the "hot" and "cold" sides of the sunshade will be in the hundreds of degrees. The fully-deployed sunshade covers roughly the same area as a tennis court, and the height of the JWST's mirror and instrument tower is around that of a three-story building.

Next up over roughly the next week will be the final tensioning of the sunshade, the deployment of the port and starboard mirror arms, and the extension of a radiator. At around one month after launch, there will be more more major engine burn to insert the JWST into L2 orbit. After that, it's months of cooling down the platform, tuning the instruments, and focusing the optics. Each of the JWST's 18 mirror segments has seven different motion actuators, and final aiming will require those segments to be aligned to 1/10,000th the thickness of a human hair.

Good job indeed by the Arianespace guys on the launch. The JWST's expected lifetime is fuel-limited. It needs periodic thruster burns to stay in place, and the amount of fuel on board was estimated to cover 10 years. But the launch from the Ariane 5 was so precise that the JWST didn't need to use nearly as much fuel as expected in order to perform the first couple course corrections, and that will extend its mission. NASA posted: "The Webb team has analyzed its initial trajectory and determined the observatory should have enough propellant to allow support of science operations in orbit for significantly more than a 10-year science lifetime."

Wow.

In that vein... What a fantastic scientific achievement.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/04/world/we ... index.html

Secondary mirror frame has been deployed...absolutely wild watching it in real time on the Observatory visualization tool. Incredible.

A "scoragami" of sorts for the Atlas V family today. The Atlas V was originally designed to fly with two different fairing sizes (4 and 5 meters), anywhere from 0 to 5 strap-on boosters, and either a single-engine or dual-engine Centaur upper stage. The 4-meter version flies with zero to three boosters, and the 5-meter version flies with zero to five boosters. In practice, the only launches that have ever used a dual-engine Centaur upper stage are the special version of the Atlas used for Boeing Starliner launches, so the Atlas V as commercially offered basically comes in 20 different combinations of fairings and boosters. To date, the two extremes have been the most popular. The "base" 401 version with no boosters and the smaller 4-meter fairing has launched the most times (40 launches), followed by the heaviest 551 version with the 5-meter fairing and all 5 optional boosters (12 launches).

Only one of those versions had never flown before: the 511, which is an Atlas V with a 5-meter fairing and a single strap-on SRB. And that version today saw its one and only expected launch; a 511 launched a pair of Space Based Space Surveillance satellites for the Air Force, which are used for detecting and tracking objects in Earth orbit, including tracking "space junk." Thus, as of today, every regularly offered permutation of the Atlas V has flown at least once.

I'm an avid astronomy nut, a (mostly) rational guy, I've seen photos of the far side of the Moon... But I have a bad feeling about this.

https://www.inverse.com/science/james-w ... -final/amp

The JWST has successfully inserted itself into its Lagrange orbit, and everything unfolded without a hitch. Before actual observations can start, there's still something like five months remaining of cooling down the instruments to their final operating temperatures and and fine-tuning the alignment of the individual mirror segments, but all of the butt-puckering "either this thing works as designed or we wasted billions of dollars" moments should be in the rear-view mirror. By July or so, we should be seeing some amazing new views of our universe.

In addition to the uncertainties associated with ISS operations, the Russian invasion of Ukraine will have other notable effects on spaceflight:

First, the European Space Agency has been purchasing and launching Soyuz rockets from the Guiana Space CentreSpace Centre for years now. The ESA has been using the Soyuz as a medium-lift launcher in between its own Vega and Ariane rockets. Russian has recalled its technicians from Guiana, so it looks like ESA Soyuz launches are off for the foreseeable future.

Second, the upper-stage engine on ESA's small-lift Vega-C rocket is the RD-843, which was developed by Yuzhnoye Design Bureau in
Dnipro, Ukraine, and is manufactured by Yuzhmash, which is also located in Dnipro. It's not clear how many RD-843 engines the ESA may have in stock, but they likely won't be getting any new ones out of Yuzhmash any time soon. The ESA is developing a new methalox engine to replace the RD-843, but that wasn't planned to fly before 2025 or so, and there are over 20 Vega-C launches on the manifest before then. A fair number of payloads may need to find other launchers. This could be a boon for US-based startups like Firefly Aerospace and Relativity Space, which hope to offer launchers with roughly that neighborhood of lift capacity.

Third, the war will likely have an ever greater impact on Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems' Antares rocket, which to date has been exclusively used to launch the Cygnus vehicle to the ISS. Not only does the Antares use Russian-made RD-181 engines, but the rest of the first stage is manufactured for NGIS by Yuzhmash. Reports are that NGIS has two boosters in stock, but it's probably not getting any more after that. The Cygnus is capable of launching on other vehicles, and it launched three times on the Atlas V after a launch failure in 2014 of the first version of the Antares, which used the old Soviet-leftover NK-33 engines. Those two Antares cores will cover the next 18 months' worth of Cygnus launches, but if the conflict hasn't ended before then, NGIS will need to look for another launch provider, which would probably be SpaceX for the reasons in the next paragraph.

Fourth, there are other joint science missions that may now be on hold. The ExoMars program is an astrobiology mission to Mars that's a joint venture between the ESA and Roscosmos. Russia is providing the Proton launcher and the Kazachok lander, and the ESA is providing the Rosalind Franklin rover that will be landed on Mars by the Kazachok lander. That mission was supposed to launch this year, but that's now highly unlikely to happen.

On the other hand, the war shouldn't impact ULA and the Atlas V even though the Atlas uses Russian RD-180 engines. ULA has already taken delivery of all of the engines needed to fly out the remaining manifest for the Atlas V, which is scheduled to be replaced by the Vulcan rocket. The Vulcan is years behind schedule, though, and because every Atlas V is already spoken for, NGIS won't be able to look to ULA for Cygnus launch services until the Vulcan comes on line and is available to commercial customers, which will likely take a couple years. If NGIS needs a Cygnus launch before then, it's pretty much SpaceX or nothing, and if NGIS wants to bid on future ISS resupply contracts, it will likely need to partner with SpaceX or ULA for launches rather than using its own launch vehicle.

Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin, who is a close buddy of Putin and therefore 100% on Team Putin, announced today that Russia would no longer supply rocket engines to the United States. As described above, the only vehicle that this would impact is the NGIS Antares. ULA already has every RD-180 in storage in the US that it needs to fly out the manifest for the Atlas V. And NGIS can launch the Cygnus on other launchers. All this does is deprive Roscosmos of a source of income.

Continuing his practice of trying to studiously ignore the fact that SpaceX exists, Rogozin (who once said that the US should try to get astronauts to the ISS on "trampolines"), said that the US could now fly on "broomsticks." Elon responded:

Been looking at this for a good 4-5 minutes now, and I still can't read it as anything other than "American Boomstick".

This may as well have been a thread on r/theexpanse:

I've been on the "Where's Webb" site every day since launch. Really well done.

28 billion light years.

I think I see my Dad.

Son of a dodint is out there somewhere.

That's pretty wild, though. Kind of like a little nudge to JWST. "Beat that, new guy."

Parts of the United States could be in for a dazzling view of the northern lights Wednesday night into Thursday morning.

The light show, also called the aurora borealis, will likely be visible from states along the northern border, but may also be seen from further south, in states such as Pennsylvania, Oregon, Utah and Missouri.

Crappy observing conditions last night... Shocker