SpaceX Falcon 9 launch with Dragon & successful landing at sea

CRS-8 | First stage landing on droneship
The company can land its rockets both on solid ground and at sea.


Today, SpaceX made history.
It is the first company—the first anybody to send a rocket to space and then land it on a floating barge.
Sixth time is the charm, apparently.
Persistence pays off.
Or at least, anyone with an interest in low cost access to space hopes it will.
The launch was flawless.
At 4:43pm ET, the nine engines on board the Falcon 9’s stage 1 rocket began pushing 1.53 million pounds of thrust against Earth.
After about two and a half minutes, and several hundred thousand feet of elevation gain, the first stage detached and began a controlled fall back to Earth, arcing towards the football field-sized barge (charmingly-named “Of Course I Still Love You”) in the Atlantic Ocean.

From The Verge by Loren Grush

  

SpaceX has finally landed its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship at sea, after launching the vehicle into space this afternoon.

It's the first time the company has been able to pull off an ocean landing, after four previous attempts ended in failure.

Today's success is a crucial milestone for SpaceX, as it shows the company can land its rockets both on solid ground and ocean. 

The why and how of landing rockets

This is the second time SpaceX has successfully landed one of its rockets post-launch; the first time was in December, when the company's Falcon 9 rocket touched down at a ground-based landing site in Cape Canaveral, Florida, after putting a satellite into space.

Now that SpaceX has demonstrated it can do both types of landings, the company can potentially recover and reuse even more rockets in the future.

And that could mean much greater cost savings for SpaceX.

Mastering the ocean landing is going to be important, since that’s the type of landing SpaceX will probably conduct more often.

At a recent NASA press conference, Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of mission assurance for SpaceX, said the next two to three flights will involve drone ship landings.

Ultimately, the company expects to land one-third of its rockets on land, and the rest at sea.

 Rocket landing 'Another step toward the stars,' Elon Musk says 

Why does SpaceX keep focusing on these ocean landings?

A drone ship floating on the ocean is a harder target to hit than a large expanse of ground, since it is smaller and floating on moving water.

Plus, all of SpaceX's ocean landing attempts have resulted in the rocket exploding.

Still, landing at sea can be less tricky than ground landings, and the main reason has to do with fuel.

To return back to Earth, the Falcon 9 has to use the fuel leftover from takeoff to reignite its engines in a series of burns.

These burns help to adjust the rocket's speed and reorient the vehicle into the right position for entering Earth's atmosphere and then landing.

Different types of landing techniques require different amounts of fuel, though, and that revolves around how the Falcon 9 launches.

The rocket doesn't travel straight upward into space but follows a parabolic arc up and away from the launch pad.

Onboard view of SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket landing in high winds

Because of this, the rocket has to go through a lot to conduct a ground landing.

The vehicle has to slow down in the direction it's heading, completely turn around, and then retread the vertical and horizontal distance it's covered to get back to the landing site.

That requires a lot of extra fuel.
Ocean landings aren't as complicated as that. SpaceX's drone ship can position itself in an ideal place to "catch" the vehicle on its more natural path back to Earth.

That decreases the distance the rocket needs to travel, as well as the amount of fuel needed to maneuver the Falcon 9 for landing.

For SpaceX missions that use up lots of fuel, performing a ground landing may not even be possible.

Rockets that launch heavy payloads or go to a high orbit need extra speed during the initial ascent, and extra speed needs more fuel.

Those Falcon 9s that have to reach extra high velocities don't have as much fuel leftover for the landing.

That’s when the drone ship is the best — if not only — option for recovery. 

The whole point of landing these rockets is to help save SpaceX money on launch costs.

Right now, most rockets are destroyed or lost after they launch into space, meaning entirely new rockets must be built for each mission.

SpaceX hopes to recover as many rockets as possible to cut down on cost of creating new vehicles. The Falcon 9 costs $60 million to make and only $200,000 to fuel.

If a recovered rocket doesn't need too much updating and refurbishment between launches, reusability could eliminate a good chunk of that manufacturing cost.

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell expects reusable rockets to bring down launch costs by about 30 percent, according to Space News.

That would make the company's vehicles an even cheaper option for clients than it already is. 

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : SpaceX to try ocean platform landing of Falcon rocket

Wireless iBubble underwater drone will revolutionize the scuba diving experience

From Forbes

iBubble, is the first autonomous and wireless underwater camera.
The iBubble drone camera follows your underwater outings, autonomously and in high-definition.
You become your own director, creating professional pictures.

 

iBubble is the brainchild of diver Kevin Delfour and tech enthusiast Xavier Spengler.
As they looked for a way to create quality submarine videos with minimal equipment, the idea of an autonomous camera that was able to follow and film divers underwater became evident.
The pair turned to Startup Maker to create the product (Startup Maker is the French startup studio behind Hexo+, the follow drone that raised $1.3M last year on Kickstarter). iBubble is currently being developed in France.

Early on in the development of the product, Guillaume Néry was pulled into the project.
Guillaume is a freediving champion (126m vertical depth), and filmmaker.
He currently is the company’s ambassador.
Free from heavy video equipment, you simply enjoy your dive.
The wireless iBubble follows divers and swimmers in the deep, thanks to its intelligent onboard software.
While silently capturing your submarine journey, it understands your way of diving.
Gliding with you, analyzing your moves, sharing with your friends what you see and where you are.

 Guillaume Néry : "Intelligent, it silently captures your submarine journey. It understands your way of diving. Gliding with you, analyzing your moves, sharing with your team what you see and where you are."

iBubble shadows you via a connected bracelet.
Smart and wireless, you can let it follow you while you focus on your diving.
Features on the iBubble include Follow me, 360° selfie, zoom in, zoom out and several filming mode.
Switch between them with a touch of your bracelet.

Connect your camera to iBubble for instant 2D or 3D video capability.
The camera comes to life when the drone touches the water and withstands depths of up to 230ft. Thanks to integrated LED lights that adapt to the ambient light level, iBubble captures quality video, always.

iBubble will follow you for 1 hour on one battery. Simply swap batteries for a longer outing.
Once the battery is empty, the drone automatically resurfaces.
LED lights make it easy to locate.
iBubble works with most action sports cameras, including GoPro® Hero.
No more bulky camera housing cases! iBubble keeps your equipment safe, in style.
With convenient handles, the drone is a breeze to transport on land.
Pre-sales for the iBubble start in February 2016, with working prototypes being shipped to testers in September 2016.
General sales will start in January 2017.

NZ Linz update in the GeoGarage platform

8 nautical raster charts updated

see GeoGarage News

Tiny island chain wants to create the world’s largest ocean sanctuary

An aerial view of Raivavae island in the Austral Islands of French Polynesia. 

John Frumm via Getty Images 

From HuffingtonPost byChris d'Angelo

The Austral Islands reserve, if approved, would be roughly the size of California, Nevada and Arizona combined.

In an effort to protect fisheries and preserve one of the planet’s healthiest marine ecosystems, communities in a remote archipelago south of Tahiti are working to establish the largest fully protected marine reserve on the planet.

 Austral islands with the GeoGarage platform (SHOM chart)

The proposal, which municipalities in the Austral Islands presented to the French Polynesian government on Monday, would ban fishing in more than 385,000 square miles of ocean surrounding the island chain and establish sustainable coastal fishing areas around each of its five inhabited islands.
The Pew Charitable Trusts, which helped the communities draft their proposal, said in an announcement on Tuesday that islanders hope the reserve will “help maintain healthy fish stocks to feed their families and support local fishermen while maintaining Polynesian customs that date back hundreds of years.”
The reserve, if approved, would be roughly the size of California, Nevada and Arizona combined.

A fisherman off the coast of the Austral Islands. 

The Pew Charitable Trusts  

Jérôme Petit, director of Pew’s Global Ocean Legacy campaign in French Polynesia, told The Huffington Post that the 6,000-plus residents of Rimatara, Rurutu, Tubuai, Raivavae and Rapa are concerned about the environmental damage affecting the world’s fisheries.
“They say, ‘We fish now in one day what we could fish 20 years ago in one hour,’” Petit said.

The reserve would extend roughly 200 nautical miles around each island, with the exception of the islands’ northern coasts.
Sustainable coastal fishing areas extending 20 miles from each island would allow local anglers to fish from boats that are less than 25 feet long, according to the proposal.
Petit told HuffPost that the “whole community is really on board” with the idea.
The only opposition, he said, came from large fishing operations in Tahiti, which rarely fish in the area but voiced concerns that the reserve would prevent them from doing so in the future.
According to the proposal, fish from Austral waters account for less than 2 percent of French Polynesia’s overall catch, so the reserve wouldn’t have much of an impact on commercial fishing operations.
“We are pretty confident it will go through,” Petit said by email.
“The only question is when. But since there is such as strong public support, the government will probably move forward rather quickly.”

 This map shows the extent of the proposed protected area around the Austral Islands.

The sanctuary’s proposed name, Rāhui Nui Nō Tuhaa Pae, or “the big rāhui of the Austral Islands,” is a reference to the traditional Polynesian practice of rāhui, which involves conserving a resource by restricting access to it.
“In the 1980s, we witnessed overfishing along our coastlines as modern fishing techniques and freezers arrived to our island,” Tuanainai Narii, the mayor of Rapa, said in a statement.
“We brought our fish stocks back to healthy levels by reinstating a coastal rāhui.”
Now, Narii added, the island communities have seen the threat facing the world’s oceans and “recognize that more must be done to conserve pelagic fish stocks.”
Global populations of scombridae, the family of fish that includes tuna and mackerel, declined 74 percent between 1970 and 2010.
According to Pew, the Austral Islands are a “hot spot of marine biodiversity.”
Of the 455 species of mollusks found there, 98 are endemic.
The islands are also home to numerous species of sharks, rays, corals and fish.

The Austral Islands’ proposal would establish sustainable fishing areas extending 20 miles from each of the chain’s five inhabited islands. 

By designating the marine reserve, French Polynesia would fulfill a commitment it made in 2013 to protect at least 20 percent of its surrounding waters by 2020.
The overseas collectivity of France is already home to the largest marine mammal and shark sanctuaries in the world.
The latest proposal simply confirms the islands are serious about leading the way in ocean conservation, Petit said in a release.
“A marine reserve of this magnitude would add to the growing movement by Pacific island governments to protect their waters to improve the health of the ocean,” he said.
Last year, New Zealand established Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary, the world’s third-largest fully protected marine area.
Currently, the world’s largest sanctuary is the United Kingdom’s Pitcairn Islands in the Pacific Ocean, which measures 322,000 square miles.
The Austral Islands’ reserve would be 63,000 square miles larger.

Links :

• ClimateProgress : A Tiny Island Territory Has An Ambitious Plan For Ocean Protection

NASA examines El Niño's impact on ocean’s food source

Strong El Nino events have a big impact on phytoplankton (in green), especially when the warm water pushes far to the east of the Pacific Ocean, as in 1997.

Credits: NASA/Goddard

From NASA

El Niño years can have a big impact on the littlest plants in the ocean, and NASA scientists are studying the relationship between the two.

In El Niño years, huge masses of warm water – equivalent to about half of the volume of the Mediterranean Sea – slosh east across the Pacific Ocean towards South America.
While this warm water changes storm systems in the atmosphere, it also has an impact below the ocean’s surface.
These impacts, which researchers can visualize with satellite data, can ripple up the food chain to fisheries and the livelihoods of fishermen.

El Niño’s mass of warm water puts a lid on the normal currents of cold, deep water that typically rise to the surface along the equator and off the coast of Chile and Peru, said Stephanie Uz, ocean scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
In a process called upwelling, those cold waters normally bring up the nutrients that feed the tiny organisms, which form the base of the food chain.
"An El Niño basically stops the normal upwelling," Uz said.
"There’s a lot of starvation that happens to the marine food web."
These tiny plants, called phytoplankton, are fish food – without them, fish populations drop, and the fishing industries that many coastal regions depend on can collapse.

El Niño years can have a big impact on the littlest plants in the ocean, and NASA scientists are studying the relationship between the two. Ocean color maps, based on a month's worth of satellite data, show El Niño's impact on phytoplankton. 

With NASA satellite data, and ocean color software called SeaDAS, developed at the Ocean Biology Processing Group at Goddard, Uz has been mapping where these important phytoplankton appear. Orbiting instruments like the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer on the Aqua satellite, and the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite on the Suomi NPP satellite collect data on the color of the ocean.

From shades of blue and green, scientists can calculate the amount of green chlorophyll – and therefore the amount of phytoplankton present.

The ocean color maps, based on a month’s worth of satellite data, can show that El Niño impact on phytoplankton.

In December 2015, at the peak of the current El Niño event, there was more blue – and less green chlorophyll – in the Pacific Ocean off of Peru and Chile, compared to the previous year.

Uz and her colleagues are also watching as the El Niño weakens this spring, to see when and where the phytoplankton reappear as the upwelling cold water brings nutrients back to the region.

"They can pop back up pretty quickly, once they have a source of nutrients," Uz said.

Researchers can also examine the differences in ocean color between two different El Niño events.

During the large 1997-1998 El Niño event, the green chlorophyll virtually disappeared from the coast of Chile.

This year’s event, while it caused a drop in chlorophyll primarily along the equator, was much less severe for the coastal phytoplankton population.

The reason – the warmer-than-normal waters associated with the two El Niño events were centered in different geographical locations.

In 1997-1998, the biggest ocean temperature abnormalities were in the eastern Pacific Ocean; this year the focus was in the central ocean.

This difference impacts where the phytoplankton can feed on nutrients, and where the fish can feed on phytoplankton.

"When you have an East Pacific El Niño, like 1997-1998, it has a much bigger impact on the fisheries off of South America," Uz said.

But Central Pacific El Niño events, like this year’s, still have an impact on ocean ecosystems, just with a shift in location.

Researchers are noting reduced food available along the food chain around the Galapagos Islands, for example.

And there has been a drop in phytoplankton off the coast of South America, just not as dramatically as before.

Differences in December phytoplankton abundances are visualized for three years: during the strong East Pacific El Nino of 1997 (using SeaWiFS satellite data), during a normal year in 2013 (using data from MODIS on the Aqua satellite), and during the strong Central Pacific El Nino of 2015 (MODIS/Aqua).

Credits: Uz/NASA Goddard

Scientists have more tools on hand to study this El Niño, and can study more elements of the event, Uz said.
They’re putting these tools to use to ask questions not just about ocean ecology, but about the carbon cycle as well.
"We know how important phytoplankton are for the marine food web, and we’re trying to understand their role as a carbon pump," Uz said.
The carbon pump refers to one of the ways the Earth system removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
When phytoplankton die, their carbon-based bodies sink to the ocean floor, where they can remain for millions of years.
El Niño is a naturally occurring disruption to the typical ocean currents, she said – so it’s important to understand the phenomenon to better attribute what occurs naturally, and what occurs due to human-caused disruptions to the system.
Other scientists at Goddard are investigating ways to forecast the ebbs and flows of nutrients using the center’s supercomputers, incorporating data like winds, sea surface temperatures, air pressures and more.
"It’s like weather forecasts, but for bionutrients and phytoplankton in the ocean," said Cecile Rousseaux, an ocean modeler with Goddard’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office.
The forecasts could help fisheries managers estimate how good the catch could be in a particular year, she said, since fish populations depend on phytoplankton populations.
The 1997-1998 El Niño led to a major collapse in the anchovy fishery off of Chile, which caused economic hardships for fishermen along the coast.
So far, Rousseaux said, the phytoplankton forecast models haven’t shown any collapses for the 2015-2016 El Niño, possibly because the warm water isn’t reaching as far east in the Pacific this time around.
The forecast of phytoplankton populations effort is a relatively new effort, she said, so it’s too soon to make definite forecasts.
But the data so far, from the modeling group and others, show conditions returning to a more normal state this spring.
The next step for the model, she said, is to try to determine which individual species of phytoplankton will bloom where, based on nutrient amounts, temperatures and other factors – using satellites and other tools to determine which kind of microscopic plant is where.
"We rely on satellite data, but this will go one step further and give us even more information," Rousseaux said.

Links :

• GeoGraage blog :  Studying the heart of El Niño, where its weather begins /A still-growing El Niño set to bear down on U.S. / El Niño expected to strengthen further: High Impacts, unprecedented preparation / The strongest El Niño on record may be brewing in the Pacific / El Niño explained