Month: January 2021

Enlarge / A selfie taken by the InSight Lander. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Today, NASA announced that it was giving up on its attempts to place a temperature sensor several meters under the Martian surface. Part of the agency's InSight lander, the hardware was supposed to be placed deep enough to avoid the influence of Mars' weather, seasons, and daily temperature changes. But because of the unusual conditions at the landing site, the hardware never made it below the surface.

The InSight lander carried several instruments meant to provide a clearer picture of Martian geology. One of those instruments, the SEIS seismometer, has been successfully tracking marsquakes to provide a better perspective on Mars' structure and the local composition under the surface near the landing site. A second measures the wobbling of Mars' axis of rotation, which will be influenced by a combination of the red planet's composition and the gravitational influences of the rest of the Solar System.

InSight's other major experiment is the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package, or HP³. While previous landers hadn't put any hardware deeper than about 20 centimeters, HP³ was designed to operate several meters below the Martian surface. From there, the fluctuations on the surface would be somewhat averaged out, and HP³ could measure the heat flow from the Martian interior to the surface. This would allow an estimate of the energy still left in the Martian core from a combination of its formation and radioactivity, a key element in understanding what geological activity might still be possible there.

Enlarge / Director Maurice Dwyer leads the cast and crew in his production of "Cop Block," which prominently featured the Chrysler PT Cruiser, at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival. (credit: George Pimentel/WireImage/Getty Images)

Odds are you probably never liked the Chrysler PT Cruiser, a retro-style five-door hatchback sold from 2001 through 2010. In fact, you might even hate it. Most people do. Just ask Tom Gale, Chrysler Corporation’s former Vice-President of Design.

"The PT Cruiser gets hammered by a lot of people,” Gale said. “But it really hit a spot. You know, we sold 1.3 million of those things.”

Today, it’s easy to forget how outrageously popular this compact car was when it was launched. Credit the PT Cruiser’s success to its retro look, which was a relatively new automotive design trend that was growing in popularity at the time. The PT Cruiser would ultimately be but one of many retro-style vehicles created by automakers. Others include the 1989 Nissan S-Cargo, 1991 Nissan Figaro, 1992 Dodge Viper, 1993 BMW Z8, 1994 Dodge Ram, 1994 Ford Mustang, 1997 Jaguar XK-8, 1998 Plymouth Prowler, 1999 Jaguar S-Type, 1999 Volkswagen New Beetle, 2001 Mini Cooper, 2002 Ford Thunderbird, 2002 Jaguar X-Type, 2004 Chevrolet SSR, 2004 Chrysler Crossfire, 2004 Ford GT, 2004 Jaguar XJ-8, 2006 Chevrolet HHR, 2008 Dodge Challenger, 2009 Chevrolet Camaro, 2011 Fiat 500, 2017 Fiat 124 Spider, and, most recently, the forthcoming 2022 Ford Bronco.

Enlarge / Image of the first AR1 engine built by Aerojet Rocketdyne. (credit: Aerojet Rocketdyne)

Welcome to Edition 3.29 of the Rocket Report! What a wild weekend we're heading toward in the world of rockets and launch, with seemingly too much news to cover:

• Electron, Saturday, 07:38 UTC

• SLS Hot Fire, Saturday, 22:00 UTC

Enlarge (credit: US EIA)

Earlier this week, the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) released figures on the new generating capacity that's expected to start operating over the course of 2021. While plans can obviously change, the hope is that, with its new additions, the grid will look radically different than it did just five years ago. This includes the details, where a new nuclear plant may be started up, although it will be dwarfed by the capacity of new batteries. But the big picture is that, even ignoring the batteries, about 80 percent of the planned capacity additions will be emission-free.

New nukes?

The EIA's accounting shows that just under 40 Gigawatts of capacity will be placed on the grid during 2021, but there are a number of caveats to this. First and foremost is the inclusion of batteries, which account for over 10 percent of that figure (4.3GW). While batteries may look like short-term generating capacity from the perspective of "can this put power on the grid?", they're obviously not actually a net source of power. Typically, they're used to smooth over short-term fluctuations in supply or demand rather than a steady source of power.

Still, given the rarity of grid-scale batteries even a few years ago, 4.3GW of them is striking.