It's been 34 years since I was mustered out of the US Navy Reserve; but, Hunky Husband makes sure I keep somewhat in touch with what's happening with the Navy by asking frequent Navy-related questions - usually about ships or boats, expecting anyone with any affiliation to know all about them. Of course, I was a part of NAVAIR.
HH had a special interest in the article from which the following excerpts were taking. The drone involved is from Boeing - his home-away-from-home for 35 years.
NAVAL AIR SYSTEMS COMMAND, PATUXENT RIVER, Md. - The MQ-25™ program successfully conducted the first ever aerial refueling operations between a manned receiver aircraft and unmanned tanker June 4 from MidAmerica Airport in Mascoutah, Illinois.
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During the flight, the receiver Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet approached the Boeing-owned MQ-25 T1 test asset, conducted a formation evaluation, wake survey, drogue tracking and then plugged with the unmanned aircraft. T1 then successfully transferred fuel from its Aerial Refueling Store (ARS) to the F/A-18.
"[Hunky Husband] flew first flight of WFT on 004."
HH spent a lot of time in that aircraft - on the ground and in the air. That was a long time ago! Before you ask, I'll volunteer that I believe that "WFT" was Wichita Flight Test. We had moved back to the Wichita area from Seattle just a few weeks before the quoted entry was made. I'm not sure when the photo of 004 was taken (presumably by a Boeing or USAF employee), but I had written "69" on the back of it.
The photo, below, of HH (back, right) and the rest of the crew with which he flew flight tests in 1963 has previously been posted on this blog; but, it seems appropriate to repeat it with the photos of tail numbers 669 and 004. The aircraft is 669. [There is a five-digit number stenciled onto the vertical stabilizer. The first two digits indicate the last two digits of the (Gregorian) year in which the aircraft was ordered while the last three digits indicate the last three digits of the aircraft's assigned serial number.] I posit that the photo was taken before a flight. Had it been taken after a flight, the guys would be looking bedraggled and sporting stubbles. Those flights were not short!
April 13, 2021
Ingenuity’s rotors will make about 2,500 revolutions per minute because of Mars's thin atmosphere. (NASA/AFP/Getty Images)
Ingenuity, which rocketed from Earth inside the belly of the space rover Perseverance on July 30, made it to Mars in February and spent just over a week getting ready for the spotlight. Perseverance, a $3 billion project to check for signs of life on Mars, is the main attraction. The robotic drone worth about $80 million is the follow-up act.
The aircraft went through the multiday process of descending from the rover, unfurling its solar panels and powering itself up to prepare for what was supposed to be its first launch on Sunday. However two days before the big event, its rotors failed.
“During a high-speed spin test of the rotors on Friday, the command sequence controlling the test ended early due to a ‘watchdog’ timer expiration,” according to NASA. The timer was designed to stop the operation if it detects issues.
The glitch occurred when the copter tried switching from preflight mode to flight mode. NASA said a software update is necessary to address the issue. The agency now has to develop, test and upload new software onto flight controllers. Then it has to reboot Ingenuity to move forward with its mission.
The software trouble postponed what is supposed to be only a brief flight. The plan was for Ingenuity to take off, hover for about 30 seconds, then safely land in place. It’s an easy accomplishment for drones on Earth, but a challenging feat on the Red Planet, currently more than 100 million miles away.
Mars’s atmosphere is thinner than Earth’s by a ratio of about 100, making liftoff more difficult. To compensate for this, Ingenuity’s rotors will make about 2,500 revolutions per minute (RPM). That’s far faster than a passenger helicopter on Earth.
Also, since Mars is so far away, joystick control isn’t an option. The entire operation has to happen autonomously. The chopper also contends with temperatures that can drop to minus 130-degrees Fahrenheit, pushing the tiny aircraft’s parts to their limits.
Still, NASA hopes the eventual liftoff will serve as the kickoff of five aerial demonstrations, each designed to be more challenging than the previous one, over about 30 days. Step one was to prove the craft can fly. Step five is to test how far it can go. The goal for Ingenuity is to expand how the space agency can investigate other planets.
BTW: On the morning news, we were told that Ingenuity is about the size of a tissue box. Physics.org further states:
The triumph was hailed as a Wright Brothers moment. The mini 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) copter named Ingenuity, in fact, carried a bit of wing fabric from the 1903 Wright Flyer, which made similar history at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
and
More than six years in the making, Ingenuity is a barebones 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) tall, a spindly four-legged chopper. Its fuselage, containing all the batteries, heaters and sensors, is the size of a tissue box. The carbon-fiber, foam-filled rotors are the biggest pieces: Each pair stretches 4 feet (1.2 meters) tip to tip.
MiMi Aung is a Burmese American engineer and project manager at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She is a lead engineer on the Mars Helicopter Ingenuity, the first extraterrestrial aircraft.
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter is seen in a close-up taken by Mastcam-Z, a pair of zoomable cameras aboard the Perseverance rover.
This image was taken on April 5, 2021, the 45th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
NASA is targeting no earlier than Sunday, April 11, for Ingenuity Mars Helicopter’s first attempt at powered, controlled flight on another planet. To mark a month of Ingenuity flights, the agency will host several events to bring people along for the ride.
A livestream confirming Ingenuity’s first flight is targeted to begin around 3:30 a.m. EDT Monday, April 12, on NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency’s website, and will livestream on multiple agency social media platforms, including the JPL YouTube and Facebook channels.
Ingenuity arrived at Mars’ Jezero Crater Feb. 18, attached to the belly of NASA’s Perseverance rover. The helicopter is a technology demonstration with a planned test flight duration of up to 31 days (30 Mars days, or sols). The rover will provide support during flight operations, taking images, collecting environmental data, and hosting the base station that enables the helicopter to communicate with mission controllers on Earth.
The flight date may shift as engineers work on the deployments, preflight checks, and vehicle positioning of both Perseverance and Ingenuity. Timing for events will be updated as needed, and the latest schedule will be available on the helicopter’s Watch Online webpage:
The Digidog in the posting on News for Nerds, below, might have saved three police officers in Wichita KS a painful trip to the hospital last Saturday. An owner had called 9-1-1 to report apparent activity in a house that should have been vacant. Investigating, three officers were hailed by a shotgun blast - presumably accidently set off since there were no people in the house. Why three officers were within range of a single shotgun blast is beyond me; but, I'm not in law enforcement.
The New York Times reports on what the city's police department calls Digidog, "a 70-pound robotic dog with a loping gait, cameras and lights affixed to its frame, and a two-way communication system that allows the officer maneuvering it remotely to see and hear what is happening." Police said the robot can see in the dark and assess how safe it is for officers to enter an apartment or building where there may be a threat. "The NYPD has been using robots since the 1970s to save lives in hostage situations & hazmat incidents," the department said on Twitter. "This model of robot is being tested to evaluate its capabilities against other models in use by our emergency service unit and bomb squad."
But the robot has skeptics. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat, described Digidog on Twitter as a "robotic surveillance ground" drone.... Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union, said empowering a robot to do police work could have implications for bias, mobile surveillance, hacking and privacy. There is also concern that the robot could be paired with other technology and be weaponized. "We do see a lot of police departments adopting powerful new surveillance and other technology without telling, let alone asking, the communities they serve," he said. "So openness and transparency is key...."
A mobile device that can gather intelligence about a volatile situation remotely has "tremendous potential" to limit injuries and fatalities, said Keith Taylor, a former SWAT team sergeant at the police department who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "It's important to question police authority; however, this appears to be pretty straightforward," he said. "It is designed to help law enforcement get the information they need without having a deadly firefight, for instance." The Times reports that Boston Dynamics has been selling the dog since June. It's also already being used by the Massachusetts State Police and the Honolulu Police Department, "while other police departments have called the company to learn more about the robot, which has a starting price of about $74,000 and may cost more with extra features," according to Michael Perry, vice president of business development at the company.
The Times points out that the robot dog is also being purchased by utility and energy companies as well as manufacturers and construction companies, which use it to get into dangerous spaces. "The robot has been used to inspect sites with hazardous material. Early in the pandemic, it was used by health care workers to communicate with potentially sick patients at hospital triage sites, Perry said."
The idea of going to Titan is intriguing if one is into really long-distance travel.
Posted by EditorDavid from the above-the-sixth-planet dept.
"Mars, Shmars; this voyager is looking forward to a submarine ride under the icebergs on Saturn's strange moon," says the New York Times, introducing a piece by cosmic affairs correspondent Dennis Overbye: What could be more exciting than flying a helicopter over the deserts of Mars? How about playing Captain Nemo on Saturn's large, foggy moon Titan — plumbing the depths of a methane ocean, dodging hydrocarbon icebergs and exploring an ancient, frigid shoreline of organic goo a billion miles from the sun? Those are the visions that danced through my head recently...diverted to the farther reaches of the solar system by the news that Kraken Mare, an ocean of methane on Titan, had recently been gauged for depth and probably went at least 1,000 feet down. That is as deep as nuclear submarines will admit to going. The news rekindled my dreams of what I think would be the most romantic of space missions: a voyage on, and ultimately even under, the oceans of Titan...
NASA recently announced that it would launch a drone called Dragonfly to the Saturnian moon in 2026. Proposals have also circulated for an orbiter, a floating probe that could splash down in a lake, even a robotic submarine. "The Titan submarine is still going," said Dr. Valerio Poggiali, research associate at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, in an email — although it is unlikely to happen before Titan's next summer, around 2047. By then, he said, there will be more ambient light and the submarine conceivably could communicate on a direct line to Earth with no need of an orbiting radio relay.
Titan is the weirdest place in the solar system, in some regards, and also the world most like our own. Like Earth, it has a thick atmosphere of mostly nitrogen (the only moon that has much of an atmosphere at all), and like Earth, it has weather, rain, rivers and seas. But on this world, when it rains, it rains gasoline. Hydrocarbon material drifts down like snow and is shaped into dunes by nitrogen winds. Rivers have carved canyons through mountains of frozen soot, and layers of ice float on subsurface oceans of ammonia. The prevailing surface temperature is minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit. A chemical sludge that optimistic astronomers call "prebiotic" creeps along under an oppressive brown sky. Besides Earth, Titan is the only world in the universe that is known to harbor liquid on its surface — with everything that could imply.
The following item reports the same information that I heard on BBC World Service via KMUW Radio a day or two ago.
Posted by EditorDavid from the yours-and-miners dept.
The University of Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance has calculated that Bitcoin's total energy consumption is somewhere between 40 and 445 terawatt hours (TWh) a year, with a central estimate of about 130 terawatt hours, reports the BBC: The UK's electricity consumption is a little over 300 TWh a year, while Argentina uses around the same amount of power as the CCAF's best guess for Bitcoin. And the electricity the Bitcoin miners use overwhelmingly comes from polluting sources. The CCAF team surveys the people who manage the Bitcoin network around the world on their energy use and found that about two-thirds of it is from fossil fuels....
We can track how much effort miners are making to create the currency. They are currently reckoned to be making 160 quintillion calculations every second — that's 160,000,000,000,000,000,000, in case you were wondering. And this vast computational effort is the cryptocurrency's Achilles heel, says Alex de Vries, the founder of the Digiconomist website and an expert on Bitcoin. All the millions of trillions of calculations it takes to keep the system running aren't really doing any useful work. "They're computations that serve no other purpose," says de Vries, "they're just immediately discarded again. Right now we're using a whole lot of energy to produce those calculations, but also the majority of that is sourced from fossil energy."
The vast effort it requires also makes Bitcoin inherently difficult to scale, he argues. "If Bitcoin were to be adopted as a global reserve currency," he speculates, "the Bitcoin price will probably be in the millions, and those miners will have more money than the entire [U.S.] Federal budget to spend on electricity."
"We'd have to double our global energy production," he says with a laugh. "For Bitcoin." Ken Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard and a former chief economist at the IMF, tells the BBC that Bitcoin exists almost solely as a vehicle for speculation, rather than as a stable store of value that can be easily exchanged.
When asked if the Bitcoin bubble is about to burst, he answers, "That's my guess." Then pauses and adds, "But I really couldn't tell you when."
Derby and Wichita are two of the four nominees in Kansas being considered as the new headquarters for U.S. Space Command – which is responsible for military operations in outer space.
At the start of September, four Kansas cities were announced as potential sites for the new U.S. Space Command headquarters – with Derby and Wichita among that short list.
The U.S. Air Force announced its search for a new location for Space Command – currently operating out of Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colo. – back in May, distributing screening information to governors across the country.
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Air capital
Derby and Wichita, along with Kansas City and Leavenworth, were the Kansas cities to be nominated – with 25 other states having nominees approved. Now, Nave [Greater Wichita Partnership's Executive Vice President of Economic Development Andrew Nave] noted the Air Force will review proposals over the next month and select a number of candidate locations by November. Potentially working in Wichita and Derby’s favor are their proximity to a hub of aerospace industry.
“We’re extremely proud of Wichita State University and the unparalleled assets that they have in aviation. They have the National Institute for Aviation Research, the National Center for Aviation Training (NCAT), which is now part of WSU Tech,” Nave said. “We have these very unique [sic] assets that few other places in the world have for aerospace, and so that was a big part of our presentation.”
Beyond the area’s aerospace heritage, Nave also highlighted the qualified work force that makes up the bulk of personnel at McConnell – with many of those airmen and women living nearby in Derby. That relationship, along with its quality of life aspects (schools, parks, etc.), are factors that Nave said made Derby’s consideration within the proposal an easy choice.
Tilley, an amateur radio operator living in Canada, found a "zombie" military satellite that was supposed to shut down in 1972. NPR reports: Recently, Tilley got interested in a communications satellite he thought might still be alive -- or at least among the living dead. LES-5, built by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory, was launched in 1967. Tilley was inspired by another amateur who in 2016 had found LES-1, an earlier satellite built by the same lab. What was intriguing to him about LES-5 was that if it was still working, it might be the oldest functioning satellite still in geostationary orbit. By scouring the Internet, he found a paper describing the radio frequency that LES-5, an experimental military UHF communications satellite, should be operating on -- if it was still alive. So he decided to have a look.
"This required the building of an antenna, erecting a new structure to support it. Pre-amps, filters, stuff that takes time to gather and put all together," he says. "When you have a family and a busy business, you don't really have a lot of time for that," he says. But then came the COVID-19 pandemic. British Columbia, where Tilley lives, was on lockdown. Like many of us, suddenly Tilley had time on his hands. He used it to look for LES-5, and on March 24, he hit the ham radio equivalent of pay dirt. While Tilley thinks it may be possible to send commands to the satellite, the MIT lab that built LES-5 didn't comment on the matter when NPR inquired.
In a triumph for the nascent industry of "satellite servicing," an aging communications satellite has returned to service in geostationary orbit.
Northrop Grumman announced Friday that its Mission Extension Vehicle-1, or MEV-1, has restored the Intelsat 901 satellite and relocated it into a position to resume operations.
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For more of the story and a great video, please click on the above title that is linked to the Ars Technica article.
Disclosure: Each month I draw a pension check from Northrop Grumman. They know nothing of my blog and/or postings so no endorsement of any sort is implied.
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