Audit Report: Is NASA Ready for Artemis II?

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The NASA Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued an audit report earlier this week, NASA’s Readiness for the Artemis II Crewed Mission to Lunar Orbit, that expressed concerns about problems with the Artemis I test flight mission in late 2022. For example, the report noted:

…the Artemis I test flight revealed critical issues that need to be addressed before placing crew on the Artemis II mission. In particular, the test flight revealed anomalies with the Orion heat shield, separation bolts, and power distribution that pose significant risks to the safety of the crew…Specifically, NASA identified more than 100 locations where ablative thermal protective material from Orion’s heat shield wore away differently than expected during reentry into Earth’s atmosphere…Beyond the Orion anomalies, the Artemis I launch-induced environment caused greater than expected damage to ML-1 elevators, electrical equipment, enclosure panel doors, and pneumatic tubing, requiring extensive repairs that will cost more than $26 million, roughly 5 times more than the $5 million the EGS Program had originally set aside for postArtemis I launch repairs.

While NASA is already working on repairs and improvements in each of these areas, it still puts a bit of a damper on NASA’s earlier video about all of the successes of Artemis I. NASA has already lost too many astronauts to heat shield issues in the past, so this is a serious matter that needs to be resolved before putting humans in the Orion capsule.

The OIG auditors made six recommendations to NASA management. NASA concurred with these recommendations, but noted that the audit was conducted at a difficult time, stating:

Being audited in the middle of a development process presents several challenges including disruptions to ongoing workflow and priorities due to the reallocation of resources and the coordination challenges associated with audit activities.

Of course, auditors are never really welcome at any point in the process. If they come too late, they are accused of shooting the dead.

NASA conducted the test flight to learn about such issues, so in that sense it was a success. Hopefully, the space agency can make the necessary improvements while keeping the Artemis II mission on track given that it has already been delayed.

Space Quote: Preparing for the Boeing Starliner’s Crewed Mission

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Image (Credit): Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft being placed atop an Atlas 5 rocket at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. (United Launch Alliance)

“Today was a was a huge day for our Commercial Crew Program…All the (international) partners and then our whole team polled ‘go’ to proceed to the launch on May 6. Not only that, but we (signed) what we call an interim human rating for Starliner for this crewed flight test. … It was a was a huge deal for NASA and our entire team.”

-Statement by Steve Stich, manager of the Commercial Crew Program for NASA, as quoted by CBS News. After numerous delays, the Starliner’s first Crew Flight Test will take place on May 6. If successful, the Starliner will start bringing astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2025. This will provide NASA with greater redundancy in its ISS resupply runs.

NASA Experiences Early Success with its Solar Sail

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Image (Credit): Artist’s rendering of NASA’s Advanced Composite Solar Sail System spacecraft in Earth Orbit. (NASA/Aero Animation/Ben Schweighart)

On Tuesday, NASA’s Advanced Composite Solar Sail System was launched from New Zealand aboard a Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket. The successful launch was followed shortly thereafter by the deployment of an 80 square meter experimental solar sail.

In describing the mission, NASA noted:

Like a sailboat turning to capture the wind, the solar sail can adjust its orbit by angling its sail. After evaluating the boom deployment, the mission will test a series of maneuvers to change the spacecraft’s orbit and gather data for potential future missions with even larger sails.

If all goes well, larger sails will be developed to potentially replace large rocket engines and accompanying fuel tanks for future trips to the Moon, Mars, other parts of the solar system, and even interstellar locations.

You might be able to see the solar sail in the night sky as it orbits the Earth, so keep looking up.

Space Stories: More on Planet 9, A Collision with Pluto, and Explaining Free-Floating Planets

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Here are some recent stories of interest.

—IFLScience: “Astronomers Find Evidence Of A Massive Object Beyond The Orbit Of Neptune“

A team of researchers say they have found the “strongest statistical evidence yet that Planet 9 is really out there” in the solar system after studying a population of distant, unstable objects that cross Neptune’s orbit...In a new paper, the team looked at long-period objects that crossed the path of Neptune’s orbit, finding that their closest point of orbit to the sun was around 15-30 astronomical units (AU), with one AU being the distance between the sun and the Earth.

—CNN: “Pluto Gained a ‘Heart’ After Colliding with a Planetary Body“

A huge heart-shaped feature on the surface of Pluto has intrigued astronomers since NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft captured it in a 2015 image. Now, researchers think they have solved the mystery of how the distinctive heart came to be — and it could reveal new clues about the dwarf planet’s origins…an international team of scientists has determined that a cataclysmic event created the heart. After an analysis involving numerical simulations, the researchers concluded a planetary body about 435 miles (700 kilometers) in diameter, or roughly twice the size of Switzerland from east to west, likely collided with Pluto early in the dwarf planet’s history.

—University of Nevada: “Astronomers Offer New Model for Formation of Recently Discovered ‘Free-floating’ Planets“

The recent discovery of a potential new class of distant and mysterious “free-floating” planets has intrigued astronomers since stunning new images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope were shared late last year. These candidate planets, known as Jupiter-mass Binary Objects (JuMBOs), seem to orbit one another as they float freely in space unbound to any star—which counters prevailing theories of how planetary systems were thought to work. Now, a new study by a team of astrophysicists from UNLV and Stony Brook University, published April 19 in the journal Nature Astronomy, introduces a compelling model for how these JuMBOs may have formed.

Juno Views Lava Lake on Io

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Image (Credit): View of Jupiter’s moon Io as seen by the Juno spacecraft on April 9. It was the first-ever image of the moon’s south polar region. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS. Image processing: Gerald Eichstädt/Thomas Thomopoulos (CC BY))

The Juno spacecraft is still hard a work in the vicinity of Jupiter, with its latest mission being a flyby of the moon Io earlier this month (shown above).

Two recent flybys of the moon were also combined to create an image of a lake of cooling lava (shown below and via the video here). Juno’s principal investigator Scott Bolton explained the new image:

Io is simply littered with volcanoes, and we caught a few of them in action. We also got some great close-ups and other data on a 200-kilometer-long (127-mile-long) lava lake called Loki Patera. There is amazing detail showing these crazy islands embedded in the middle of a potentially magma lake rimmed with hot lava. The specular reflection our instruments recorded of the lake suggests parts of Io’s surface are as smooth as glass, reminiscent of volcanically created obsidian glass on Earth.

Juno has been zipping around Jupiter’s neighborhood since 2016. It’s main task is to study the origin and evolution of Jupiter, believed to be the first planet to have formed in our solar system. By doing so, NASA hopes to learn more about the solar system and the Earth as well.

Image (Credit): An artist’s rendering of Loki Patera, a lava lake on Jupiter’s moon Io, created using data from the JunoCam imager aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS)