While Hackaday’s bread and butter is, of course, hacks, we sometimes cover things that most of us are interested in that are probably out of reach for the typical hacker. Space, for example, is undeniably cool, even though your chances of putting yourself or even your own rover on the Moon aren’t very good at the moment (but, of course, give it time). If you are looking for something to put on your e-reader and you are also interested in space, save your money and get some downloadable books directly from NASA.
There’s something for everyone on the site. The site has four main categories: aeronautics, Hubble, science, and NASA history. Aeronautics has two volumes of “NASA’s Contributions to Aeronautics,” a book on the X-15, and a book about aviation pressure suits. Want to know more about the giant wind tunnel at Langley?
For the Hubble, you’ll find titles that have great images, of course, but also a book with an overview of the telescope or, if you prefer, about gravitational lensing.
The science titles go really deep with books on black holes, Landsat, the Cassini mission, and the Spitzer telescope. If you prefer history, there’s everything from a history of near-Earth object research to lessons from the Columbia tragedy for engineers, managers, and leaders. We were also interested in the book “Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication.”
The books are typically available in EPUB or PDF, and they are all free. Just what you need for your next plane trip or to round out your Calibre library.
In this age of neural net “AI”, even the most skeptical of Butlerians have to agree that these machine learning models can be very, very good at pattern recognition if nothing else. NASA is on the same page, and to take advantage of that pattern recognition, they’ve built a machine learning module called COFFIES, which stands for Consequence Of Fields and Flows in the Interior and Exterior of the Sun, because at NASA everything is an acronym, or at least a backronym. Like most such names, this one is at least vaguely descriptive: the model is trying to predict what’s going on in the material flows and magnetic fields deep within our local star, and using those inferences is able to predict active regions– that’s sunspots to us chickens — up to 12 hours before they visibly form.
If you didn’t live through it, it is hard to understand how excited the general public was about the race for the moon. You can capture some of it by watching “Lunar Bridgehead,” a film about JPL monitoring the Ranger spacecraft as it hit, rather hard, on the lunar surface.
The Ranger program had been plagued with problems. The first five didn’t make it to the moon. Ranger 6 hit the moon, but failed to start its cameras. Ranger 7 was the first successful mission. There would be two more successful missions before the end of the program.
After getting his hands on a rope driver module from the Apollo project era that had a big ‘Scrapped Module’ stamped on it, [Mike Stewart] was naturally left curious as to what exactly had failed in this module. Originally destined for the Apollo Guidance Computer, these Raytheon-manufactured modules were the pinnacle of space-grade high-tech of the 1960s, with requisite acceptance testing so as to not endanger a very expensive space mission.
The cool part here is that the acceptance documents for the module in question (B16-B17) have been scanned in and can be found on the Internet Archive. With the part itself being potted and very much inaccessible, this document helpfully lays out the expected measurements on the module’s pins, as well as schematics and mechanical drawings. Unfortunately the reasons for the rejection were not recorded, so replicating the failing test results is required to understand the reason.
NASA Rope Driver Module with suspicious exploration marks. (Credit: Mike Stewart, YouTube)
A slight complication here is that the testing procedure doesn’t just involve hooking up a multimeter for some voltage and capacitance measurements. There are also temperature and voltage extremes, and vibration tolerance involved, which would be somewhat complex to test, but most of all risk damaging a historical artefact. Thus a somewhat conservative testing procedure was chosen, even if this may not reveal the actual fault.
As noted in the video, sometimes modules were also rejected because someone simply dropped it on the floor along the way. However, generally if a module was found to be faulty they would open it to diagnose said fault, with a closer look at this module indeed revealing suspicious marks in the potting compound where it was apparently opened and conceivably repaired. This also might explain why they also put the ‘For engineering use only’ on it.
With multiple of such locations visible in the potting compound, these locations were mapped to the schematics for the module, to get some idea of what may have been accessed. After this, basic testing was performed on the module, as per the acceptance testing document.
Along the way an error was detected in said document, in the form of the wrong pin number. In table 4-2 the input pin 269 was mistakenly listed as having output pin number 169 when it should have been pin 168. Pin 169 is chassis ground, so this was presumably fixed in a later version of the document.
After all the testing with just stationary, room-temperature conditions, everything appeared to check out. This means that likely this was indeed a repaired module that got subsequently used for engineering purposes rather than installed in flight-ready hardware. The only issue found was that channels were out of calibration, but whether this was an original flaw or due to the module being half a century old is hard to tell in the absence of repair logs.
Overall it’s an exciting opportunity to document another part of history, since so many of the details pertaining to these original modules and related technologies got lost or muddled over the decades.
There was a particularly tense moment aboard the International Space Station earlier this month, with NASA directing their astronauts to secure themselves in the Dragon capsule and prepare for a potential return to Earth while their Russian counterparts engaged in what we now know to have been some impromptu demolition work on their side of the orbiting complex.
Despite objections from their American partners, Roscosmos had given their cosmonauts the go-ahead to drill and cut into the walls of the Zvezda module — one of the core components of the ISS which has been in orbit since 2000 — to try and identify and ultimately repair persistent leaks that have been venting the Station’s atmosphere out into space for several years. We may never know the exact nature of the behind-the-scenes communication that went on between the two space agencies, but in the end the Russians abandoned their plan and NASA’s personnel were told to resume their normal duties.
But where do things go from here? Although it’s true the International Space Station is entering its final years, the mission isn’t over yet, and that means the two countries need to continue to work together if they hope to get any science done in the time they have left.
At this point there hasn’t been any official word from either agency, but sources that wish to remain anonymous have been dropping hints, and that’s got the rumors swirling. With the understanding that anything is still possible, at this point it looks like Russia is going to abandon any further attempts to repair the leak and instead seal off the crippled compartment of the Zvezda module. This won’t solve all the problems, and in fact will create some new ones. But if that’s what it will take to keep the peace with NASA until Station operations wind down, it’s apparently a bargain they’re willing to make.
When the Artemis lunar program was first conceived, the third mission would have seen astronauts step foot on the Moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. But as hard as getting into space is, a sojourn to our nearest celestial neighbor is even more mindbogglingly complex, and so earlier this year it was announced that actually landing on the Moon would be pushed out to the fourth mission.
In turn Artemis III would take a page out of the Apollo 9 playbook and test out rendezvous and docking procedures with commercial landers while operating in the relative safety of low Earth orbit. Moving the target date for the landing a few years down the road gave all involved parties a little more breathing room, but it also provided a valuable opportunity to gain insight into the performance of the vehicles and systems ahead of the critical moment. In the original timeline, the first time Orion would attempt to dock with the lander would have been just before descending to the lunar surface — leaving precious little time to troubleshoot should anything go wrong.
Yesterday NASA held a press conference to update the public on their progress towards the planned 2027 launch of Artemis III, which included the long-awaited announcement of the crew that will kick the tires on the next-generation lunar landers being developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin
Even if you’re not normally interested in what’s happening in low Earth orbit, you probably heard that last week NASA ordered its personnel aboard the International Space Station to button themselves up in the docked Dragon spacecraft and await further instructions should they need to make a hasty departure. Known as Safe Haven, this emergency procedure is performed whenever there’s an elevated risk of damage to the Station.
NASA has provided an update on what happened, but it arguably leaves more questions than answers. Usually, crews go to their Safe Haven because some bit of space junk has wandered to close to the orbiting complex, but this time it was because Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev were getting ready to start cutting into the walls of the PrK transfer tunnel in an effort to address its persistent air leak.
After about an hour and a half, the Russians called off the effort and NASA gave their people the OK to leave the Dragon and return to their normal duties. NASA Press Secretary Bethany Stevens later posted on social media that the space agency would “look forward to working with Roscosmos on a collaborative approach to address the leaks” in the future. There’s currently no word on what a future repair attempt may entail, or when it would be attempted.
This is one of those things were we might not hear the full story for some time, but it sure does sound like not only did the Russians want to do something that NASA didn’t think was safe, but that the whole thing was sprung on them at the last moment. To give you an idea of how serious Mission Control was taking the situation, they decided to cram five people into a Dragon capsule that only has four seats — it certainly would have made for one wild ride down to Earth if they were given the order to evacuate.
There’s something for everyone on the site. The site has four main categories: aeronautics, Hubble, science, and NASA history. Aeronautics has two volumes of “NASA’s Contributions to Aeronautics,” a book on the X-15, and a book about aviation pressure suits. Want to know more about the giant wind tunnel at Langley?
