Credit: Taken from a 2024 NASA Office of the Inspector General report – NASA’s Readiness for the Artemis II Crewed Mission to Lunar Orbit (IG-24-011)
“What they’re talking about doing is crazy…We could have solved this problem way back when…Instead, they keep kicking the can down the road.”
-Statement by former astronaut Charlie Camarda, who does not believe the upcoming Artemis II mission is safe for the astronauts given his concerns about the Orion’s heat shield, as quoted by CNN. The news story cites others who state that the Orion heat shield issue has been resolved and the mission is ready to go. The Artemis II mission is set to launch as early as February 6th.
Image (Credit): The visual message on the Pioneer 10 and 11 plaques. (NASA Ames)
On this day in 2003, NASA heard its last message from Pioneer 10, the Jupiter space probe. Launched in 1972, it was the first spacecraft to cross the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter on its way to the outer planets. It is also one of only five spacecraft to leave our solar system.
If all goes well, in about 2 million years the Pioneer 10 spacecraft will encounter the star Aldebaran. Maybe some civilization in that solar system will be arguing about this object floating through the neighborhood the way we have argued about the origins of the interstellar object we call 3I/ATLAS.
Image (Credit): Mission patch for Pioneer 10 and 11. (NASA)
Image (Credit): NASA’s SLS and Orion spacecraft moving from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center. (NASA)
This week’s image shows NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion spacecraft making its way from the Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Pad 39B via the crawler-transporter. All of this is in preparation for the Artemis II mission, which will take four astronauts around the Moon. The flight could launch as early as February 6th.
NASA has reported that the Artemis II mission will include various items to mark the 250th anniversary of the United States, including:
a 1-inch by-1-inch swatch of muslin fabric from the original Wright Flyer the Wright Brothers used to make the first powered flight in 1903;
a 13-by-8-inch American flag, which flew with the first shuttle mission, STS-1, the final shuttle mission, STS-135, and NASA’s first crewed test flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, SpaceX Demo-2;
a flag that was set to fly on NASA’s Apollo 18 mission is included in the flight kit and will make its premiere flight with Orion;
a 4-by-5-inch negative of a photo from the Ranger 7 mission, the first U.S. mission to successfully make contact with the lunar surface;
soil samples collected from the base of established Artemis I Moon Trees planted at NASA’s 10 centers;
an SD card including the millions of names of those who participated in the “Send Your Name to Space” campaign, bringing the public along on this journey; and
Image (Credit): NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore. (NASA)
“It is hard to imagine people arguing down there, not to mention fighting. It looks so peaceful… so calm down on earth. From space, there are no borders that you can see. We are lucky to live on such a planet and we should not take it for granted. After my space experience, I am a lot more tolerant of people and opinions, of everything.”
-A 2007 statement by NASA astronaut Suni Williams, who announced her retirement from the agency earlier today. Although she spend 27 years with NASA, she will probably be best remembered for her Boeing Starliner flight to the International Space Station in 2024 that was supposed to last one week but became nine months instead. It was a replay of Gilligan’s Island in space. Her fellow astronaut on that troubled flight, Butch Wilmore, retired from NASA last August.
There was a time when Stonehenge was believed to be a kind of “Neolithic computer.” Archaeology has since corrected that misconception. Today, the evidence points strongly in another direction: to an arid hill in the Casma Valley on Peru’s northern coast, about 200 miles north of Lima.There stands Chankillo, a complex built around 250 B.C.E., considered the earliest known solar observatory in the Americas and the clearest known example of a monument designed to track the sun’s position throughout the entire year, according to a study in Science. Modest in appearance and largely absent from tourist posters and classic postcards, Chankillo has renewed attention as archaeologists report preliminary findings from ongoing excavations.
With a space station medical evacuation safely completed, NASA is focused on two challenging missions proceeding in parallel: launching four astronauts on a flight around the moon, at the same time as the agency is planning to send four replacement astronauts to the International Space Station...The Artemis 2 mission and Crew 12’s planned space station flight present a unique challenge for NASA. The agency has not managed two piloted spacecraft at the same time since a pair of two-man Gemini capsules tested rendezvous procedures in low-Earth orbit in 1965. The agency has never flown a deep space mission amid another launch to Earth orbit.
One of the most vivid portraits of “reborn” black hole activity – likened to the eruption of a “cosmic volcano” spreading almost one million light-years across space – has been captured in a gigantic radio galaxy. The dramatic scene was uncovered when astronomers spotted the supermassive black hole at the heart of J1007+3540 restarting its jet emission after nearly 100 million years of silence.
Note: Please ignore the previous posting for today about the Apollo 17 mission. It’s a good story, but I will need to retell it at another time (that is, on December 19th).
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