NASA, Space, SpaceX

[Administrator]

[Impact]NASA: SLS rocket will carry 13 CubeSats to space in 2018[/Impact]

NASA has announced that the Space Launch System rocket’s first flight will involve carrying 13 CubeSats into space. The satellites will be a secondary payload, being delivered alongside an Orion spacecraft. Says the space agency, the rocket’s first flight will be called the Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1), and it will give “the rare opportunity for these small experiments to reach deep space destinations.”


CubeSats (small satellites) are often limited to low Earth orbit, making the SLS’ first launch a notable one. The mission will, among other things, help bolster NASA’s goal of getting humans to Mars by letting researchers carry out experiments beyond lower orbits.

Said NASA’s Bill Hill, “This rocket has the unprecedented power to send Orion to deep space plus room to carry 13 small satellites – payloads that will advance our knowledge about deep space with minimal cost.”

NASA says CubeSat makers will be battling it out for the opportunity to launch their wares on the first SLS rocket flight, doing so via a competition the space agency has planned. There will be four rounds called “Grand Tournaments”; ultimately the selection of three CubeSat payloads will happen next year. Several CubeSats have already been selected.

 

[Administrator]

[shadow=blue]NASA awards SpaceX, SNC, and Orbital ATK ISS cargo contracts[/shadow]

NASA has announced that SpaceX, Sierra Nevada Corp (SNC), and Orbital ATK have been given contracts for delivering cargo to the International Space Station. The contracts will span from 2019 to 2024, and though details are still light at this time, the space agency says each contract guarantees a minimum of six missions for the companies.


NASA just announced the news in a conference broadcast on NASA TV. According to the space agency, the contracts will start “upon award,” with each representing at least half a dozen missions. NASA has not yet ordered any of the missions, however.
https://twitter.com/NASA/status/687745144594890754?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Overall, the combined possible value of the contracts could be as high as $14 billion, but the space agency anticipates the real total to end up being less than that. Orbital ATK will be launching from Virginia and possibly from Florida if the mission requires, while SpaceX and SNC will both launch from Florida.

This is the major announced NASA had teased was in the pipeline for this afternoon. It was anticipated the trio ultimately awarded the contracts were going to be NASA’s focus; while there are other contenders out there, Boeing and the like have previously being knocked out of the battle.

 

[Administrator]

[Impact]NASA takes a tangible step back toward the Moon with commercial program[/Impact]
NASA is betting that commercial companies are finally ready for Moon missions.

NASA announced Thursday that it has partnered with nine companies to enable the delivery of small scientific payloads to the lunar surface. No money was exchanged up front, but the space agency said these companies would now be eligible to "bid" for contracts to deliver select experiments to the Moon.
The space agency made the lunar announcement with considerable fanfare, devoting an hour-long ceremony to questions from children, an astronaut in Houston bouncing on a wire to simulate lunar gravity, and other activities.

Beneath the pomp and circumstance, however, two factors stood out. One is that the science arm of NASA, the Science Mission Directorate, is getting more involved in funding lunar science experiments through this program. "The Moon is full of secrets that we don't know yet," Thomas Zurbuchen, who oversees scientific activities for NASA, said Thursday. And secondly, the government is taking a concrete step toward funding commercial activities on the Moon.

The companies
The nine companies that earned the right to bid on what are called Commercial Lunar Payload Services contracts are:

Astrobotic Technology Inc.: Pittsburgh
Deep Space Systems: Littleton, Colorado
Draper: Cambridge, Massachusetts
Firefly Aerospace Inc.: Cedar Park, Texas
Intuitive Machines LLC: Houston
Lockheed Martin Space: Littleton, Colorado
Masten Space Systems Inc.: Mojave, California
Moon Express: Cape Canaveral, Florida
Orbit Beyond: Edison, New Jersey
Most of these are not a surprise, as companies like Astrobotic, Masten Space Systems, and Moon Express have been working on delivering small payloads to the Moon for some time. One relative surprise was "Orbit Beyond," but it turns out this company is a consortium of mostly familiar entities also involved in lunar delivery—TeamIndus, Advanced Space, Honeybee Robotics, Ceres Robotics Inc., and Apollo Fusion.

NASA said payload delivery could begin as early as 2019. These contracts do not have a time or quantity limit, and they have a combined maximum contract value of $2.6 billion during the next 10 years. The agency said it would look at a number of factors when comparing the bids, such as "technical feasibility, price, and schedule."

What this means
Under President Trump, NASA has sought to refocus its exploration efforts on going to the Moon first and testing technology there for eventual human missions to Mars. But the space agency is also interested in determining what resources on the Moon could enable its long-term colonization, provide rare metals needed on Earth, or possibly provide rocket fuel for missions elsewhere in the Solar System
To do this, the agency needs more data about the potential for these resources, water in particular. Earlier this year, NASA canceled a mission, Resource Prospector, that would have gone into the permanently shadowed craters near the lunar poles to determine the amount and availability of water ice there. The agency has positioned these new commercial missions as a first step toward doing that kind of prospecting research.

"This is a positive step forward," Clive Neal, a lunar scientist at Notre Dame, told Ars. However, he said none of these early missions were expected to have the kind of roving technology needed for mobility to map resource-rich areas on the lunar surface. Neal said NASA officials have said the new commercial payloads program will eventually get to the phase where such resource prospecting occurs.

Commercial impact
The commercial companies involved in Thursday's announcement were understandably excited by the new program. The promise of a guaranteed customer for the missions will likely help some of these companies close their business cases and raise additional funding.

"This is on the critical path for any commercial company wanting to provide commercial lunar services," Bob Richards, the founder of Moon Express, told Ars. "The threshold of capitalization needed and the nascent market of commercial lunar customers is otherwise out of reach of most companies, certainly most startups. So NASA is providing a critical priming of the pump to get things going."
This is an important moment for some of these companies. Although there was a strong field of entrants into the Google Lunar XPRIZE, no one succeeded in winning that competition to complete a soft landing on the Moon. Now, the prize is a NASA contract. And it is nearly time for the commercial lunar companies to deliver.

 

[Administrator]

[Impact]SpaceX delays attempt to fly the same rocket for a third time [/Impact]
There's a lot going on here, from a record number of launches to dozens of smallsats.
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Sunday a.m. Update: SpaceX said early Sunday that it is standing down from Sunday's launch attempt "to conduct additional inspections of the second stage." The company is working toward its backup launch attempt on Dec. 3, when the launch window opens at 1:32pm ET (18:32 UTC).

Original post: Sunday's launch attempt of a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, with a primary launch window from 1:32pm ET (18:32 UTC) to 2pm ET (19:00 UTC), is significant for a number of reasons.

For one, this will be the company's 19th launch of 2018, and if successful, it will break SpaceX's record for most missions flown in a calendar year. With a handful of launches remaining on its manifest in December, SpaceX is on pace to fly as many as 22 rockets this year. This signifies that SpaceX has solved production and processing issues that prevented it from launching more than eight rockets a year prior to 2017 and that last year was not a fluke.
Perhaps more importantly, a successful flight Sunday would mark the third flight of this particular first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket. This core first flew on May 11, for the Bangabandhu-1 mission, and then again on August 7 for the Merah Putih mission. Now, for the first time ever, SpaceX will attempt to fly the same first stage (and its nine Merlin engines) for a third time.

Such a feat—flying the same rocket three times in less than seven months—would bring the company closer to its cost-cutting goal of flying each Falcon 9 rocket 10 times between significant refurbishment. This has become possible after the company introduced a final variant of its Falcon 9 booster, dubbed Block 5, which engineers designed for optimal reusability. (The May flight of this rocket core marked the first time a Block 5 variant of the Falcon 9 launched). As but one (very) minor example of time and cost-reduction efforts, SpaceX no longer washes the first stage of the rocket between uses, which explains why the lower two thirds of the assembled rocket appears singed, but the top third is a pristine white. This is because the upper stage and payload fairing are new for each flight.

Finally, Sunday's mission is notable for its payload—there are many of them as part of the Spaceflight SSO-A mission. SpaceX will seek to set a US launch record for most satellites put into space at a single time, with 15 microsats and 49 cubesats from commercial and government entities around the world. (Two of these, interestingly, originate from Kazakhstan, a country that hosts many of the launches by the Russian space agency).
A company called Spaceflight organized the four-ton manifest for Sunday's flight. It designed the payload stack and coordinated a variety of satellite dispensers for when the mission has reached a Sun-synchronous polar orbit at an altitude of 575km. Deployment of the satellites will begin about 13 minutes after liftoff and conclude about 30 minutes after that point.

SpaceX will again seek to recover this booster with the droneship Just Read the Instructions stationed downrange in the Pacific Ocean. If successful, we likely can expect to see this first stage make an unprecedented fourth flight sometime in 2019.

The webcast below should begin about 15 minutes before the launch window opens.
https://youtu.be/Wq8kS6UoOrQ

 

[Administrator]

[Impact]Physicists detected gravitational waves from four new black-hole mergers[/Impact]
This brings the total number of events detected by LIGO and Virgo to 11.
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At a weekend workshop in Maryland, physicists from the LIGO and Virgo collaboration reported four previously unannounced detections of gravitational waves from merging black holes, including the biggest-known black-hole collision to date, roughly 5 billion years ago. That merger resulted in a new black hole that is a whopping 80 times larger than the Sun.

All four are part of the first official catalog of gravitational wave events (called the Gravitational Wave Transient Catalog, or GWTC-1), listing all events detected to date. Their addition brings the total number to 11. Two scientific papers on the new findings have been posted to the arXiv preprint repository (here and here), pending publication.
LIGO detects gravitational waves via laser interferometry, using high-powered lasers to measure tiny changes in the distance between two objects positioned kilometers apart. (LIGO has detectors in Hanford, Washington, and in Livingston, Louisiana. A third detector in Italy, Advanced VIRGO, came online in 2016.) On September 14, 2015, at 5:51am EST, both detectors picked up signals within milliseconds of each other for the very first time—direct evidence for two black holes spiraling inward toward each other and merging in a massive collision event that sent powerful shockwaves across spacetime.

The collaboration picked up two more black-hole mergers from that first run. The second run, from November 30, 2016, to August 25, 2017, produced seven more binary black-hole mergers (including the four just announced) and a binary neutron-star merger, supported by a simultaneous gamma-ray burst and signals in the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum. It was an unprecedented recording of a major celestial event, combining light and sound, and officially marked the dawn of so-called "multi-messenger astronomy."

If the new events are from the same second runs as events previously reported, why are we only hearing about them now? It's because the physicists wanted to make absolutely sure they were bona fide detections. "We've been sifting through the data, looking at every feature, comparing it to our astrophysical predictions, cross-checking it against monitors that tell us the health of the instruments, determining if it appears in all the detectors, and using our most robust (but slow-running) super-computer analysis codes," Shane Larsen, a Northwestern University physicist and member of the LIGO collaboration, wrote on the Write Science blog.

All that hard work paid off with the discovery of GW170729, GW170809, GW170818, and GW170823, referencing the dates on which the black holes were detected. "Having a collection of events is how we learn things about the Universe that can't be learned from just a few observations," Larson wrote. Among the things scientists have learned so far: the black holes involved in the mergers so far were formed from stars 45 times lighter than the mass of our Sun. That can tell scientists something about how black holes form and grow together, which can in turn yield insights into the evolution of stars.

The current catalog will continue to grow. LIGO and Virgo will begin the third observing run next spring, with even more sensitive instruments and improvements in data analysis techniques for detecting signals in all that noise. Plus, data from all the previous runs will soon be openly available, so there may well be even more undiscovered nuggets to be mined from them. "Historically, there have always been discoveries made in archived astronomical data long after it was collected," Larson wrote. "Data is simply too complex to understand everything in it, and we are too na?ve about everything that is going on in the Universe to recognize everything in our data the first time we work with it."
https://youtu.be/gmmD72cFOU4

 

[Administrator]

[Impact]Two months after mishap, Russian Soyuz rockets back into space with crew[/Impact]
This marked a critical launch both for Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, and NASA.

Less than two months after a booster separation issue with a Soyuz rocket caused a dramatic, high-gravity landing, the Russian vehicle soared back into space on Monday at 6:31 ET (11:31 UTC). The launch from Kazakhstan, under mostly clear, blue skies, was nominal as each of the rocket's first, second, and third stages fired normally.

The launch sent NASA astronaut Anne McClain, Canadian David Saint-Jacques, and Russian Oleg Kononenko into space aboard their Soyuz MS-11 spacecraft. After making four orbits around the Earth, their Soyuz spacecraft is scheduled to dock with the Russian segment of the International Space Station at 12:35pm ET (17:35 UTC) Monday.
This marked a critical launch both for Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, as well as NASA. For Russia, Monday morning's successful launch came after several high-profile failures in recent years, which called the safety of its venerable Soyuz rocket into question.

For both Russia, the United States, and the rest of the space station partnership, Monday's launch was critical as well, because another serious problem would have put the future of the orbiting laboratory into jeopardy. The three-person crew now in space, European astronaut Alexander Gerst, NASA's Serena Au??n-Chancellor, and Russian Sergey Prokopyev, are due to return to Earth on December 19.

Back on schedule
Now, they will be able to come home on schedule, and the three astronauts that launched Monday should be joined by three additional astronauts in March. This will allow the station to resume normal operations with a six-person crew, enabling both housekeeping tasks on board the station as well as a full suite of scientific research.

After Monday morning's launch, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine thanked the Russian space agency on Twitter. "I’m grateful to Director General Dmitry Rogozin and the entire @NASA and @roscosmos teams for their dedication to making this launch a success," Bridenstine said.

The administrator was actually at the Russian launch site in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, in October when one of the four booster stages attached to the Soyuz rocket failed to separate properly. This booster then struck the core of the rocket, causing a significant jolt and triggering one of the Soyuz spacecraft's automatic escape systems. This sent the Soyuz spacecraft on a ballistic return trajectory to Earth that saved the lives of NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin.
A sensor rod, bent out of its normal configuration by a little more than 6 degrees, caused the booster separation issue. This happened during assembly of the rocket, and Roscosmos classified this as a handling error. To fix the process, Soyuz rockets already assembled for launch with their booster packs will be disassembled and reassembled to ensure that similar mistakes have not occurred.

NASA will remain reliant on Russia to get into space until commercial crew spacecraft under development by SpaceX and Boeing are ready to carry astronauts to the station. That could happen as early as next year.

 

[Administrator]

[Impact]NASA Live[/Impact]
Friday, Oct. 18, 6:50 a.m.: NASA TV live spacewalk coverage. Astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir will venture outside the International Space Station beginning at about 7:50 a.m. to replace a power controller that failed during the weekend. The spacewalk will be the first ever to be conducted by two women.

Friday, Oct. 18, 3:30 p.m.: Teleconference to discuss recommendations presented by the Planetary Protection Independent Review Board. The board examined the planetary protection guidelines the agency has used for decades to suggest changes needed to address the changing reality of space exploration. Planetary Protection is the practice of protecting solar system bodies from contamination by Earth life and protecting Earth from possible life forms that may be returned from other bodies in the solar system. Audio of the teleconference will stream live on this page.
https://youtu.be/21X5lGlDOfg
Thursday, Oct. 31, 3 p.m.: NASA Science Live — A Galaxy of Horrors.

Saturday, Nov. 1, 1 p.m.: Coverage of the release of the JAXA HTV-8 “Kounotori” cargo spacecraft from the International Space Station; release scheduled at 1:20 p.m. EDT

Saturday, Nov. 2, 9:59 a.m.: Launch of Northrop Grumman's Cygnus cargo spacecraft on resupply mission. Lifting off aboard an Antares rocket from Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport’s Pad-0A at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, Cygnus will deliver several tons of cargo including supplies and science experiments to the International Space Station. Cargo on board includes the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-02, an experiment that will look for evidence of dark, strange and anti-matter to help us understand how our universe was formed.
Five more spacewalks are planned in November and December aimed at repairing the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer.

Wednesday, Feb. 5, 11:15 p.m.: Launch of Solar Orbiter. Solar Orbiter, a joint NASA/ESA (European Space Agency) mission, will address central questions concerning our star, the Sun. The spacecraft will launch on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 411 rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral. NASA’s Launch Services Program is managing the launch.

https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive

 

[Administrator]

[Impact]

​

[/Impact]
We're less than one day away from a rocket launch! Our commercial cargo partner Northrop Grumman is scheduled to launch its next resupply mission to the International Space Station on Nov. 2 at 9:59 a.m. EDT from Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

The Cygnus spacecraft will deliver around 8,200 pounds of research, supplies, and hardware including supplies for upcoming spacewalks - http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001Ibm974CUeO-HbtlvxrNlWq7sfOd5d9JrA98qaJAg54uvDZmpz1qKPduXWb3Mkxtpy-USBGz9zUdfe8TFS196YZuN1cT_YKtc7zHG6jybdWMPhbi_R-35wvgI-c-TdEmw-EDOMVucYUZxBHGeqADui-TytiLTYyfUqvyQT9NssGVl8KEnYOPFGc_fqIkkBd7PwGSI8NCufOMeYE-es0FV1ghYqiDF7s2K3aQMAw0qIpNkBEeZSBfHagAvbi1Upb6wj-a7hrOng4ok2m3HwZTxnQ==&c=DO1x-HZqxh56AvKcaC76mJuc402yQ8MBp4RbHLVuqbBaFiG0KJ3p5Q==&ch=EE2V5mxg2wZIyhWNfD_oCgHFHIR03IH0tuG_E0qY7kDm6FzTmPojKg== and student http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001Ibm974CUeO-HbtlvxrNlWq7sfOd5d9JrA98qaJAg54uvDZmpz1qKPduXWb3MkxtpEOLJdi_yBvwcY2CcwYxBLR07FLBSCPJhEqUn1mYbVfl5oHVztDL19I0jW9LvVzAnOwZQpWZrvv01yj0wnnbM0Echjll9gY5dQxcpsGOa26NdiuzZXwwraaYspjVKCrO1z_yyHnhlwdHiuD2rxcHJRhxezrMzyccKgBi3T7qANa012e8xCatwAmqECqlNTorE-hVwrPwUek11KKVnSwYvSA==&c=DO1x-HZqxh56AvKcaC76mJuc402yQ8MBp4RbHLVuqbBaFiG0KJ3p5Q==&ch=EE2V5mxg2wZIyhWNfD_oCgHFHIR03IH0tuG_E0qY7kDm6FzTmPojKg==

CubeSats.
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Part of the Eastern United States may see the launch. Find out when and where with our viewing map. Outside the predicted visibility area? Coverage of the launch begins at 9:30 a.m.

Editor's note: This advisory was updated on Oct. 29 to update the time of NASA TV's coverage of the Cygnus capture, and on Oct. 31 to update the time of the Cygnus arrival on Nov. 4.

NASA commercial cargo provider Northrop Grumman is scheduled to launch its next resupply mission to the International Space Station at 9:59 a.m. EDT Saturday, Nov. 2. NASA’s prelaunch coverage will air live on NASA Television and the agency’s website beginning Friday, Nov. 1.

Loaded with around 8,200 pounds of research, crew supplies, and hardware, Northrop Grumman’s 12th commercial resupply mission for the space station will launch on the company’s Cygnus cargo spacecraft on an Antares rocket from Virginia Space’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility.

The Cygnus spacecraft, dubbed the SS Alan Bean, is named after the late Apollo and Skylab astronaut who died on May 26, 2018, at the age of 86. This Cygnus will launch 50 years to the month after Bean, Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon flew to the Moon on NASA’s Apollo 12 mission, during which Bean became the fourth human to walk on the lunar surface. Bean was the lunar module pilot aboard Intrepid with mission commander Conrad when they landed on Moon at the Ocean of Storms on Nov. 19, 1969.

With a Nov. 2 launch, the Cygnus spacecraft will arrive at the space station Monday, Nov. 4 at about 4:10 a.m., Expedition 61 NASA astronaut Jessica Meir will grapple the spacecraft using the station’s robotic arm. She will be backed up by NASA astronaut Christina Koch. After Cygnus capture, ground controllers will command the station’s arm to rotate and install Cygnus on the bottom of the station’s Unity module.

Complete NASA TV coverage of activities is as follows:

Friday, Nov. 1

11:30 a.m. – What’s on Board science briefing
Pete Hasbrook, manager of International Space Station Program Science Office at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston
Liz Warren, associate program scientist with the U.S. National Lab
Sam Ting, Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-02 (AMS-2) principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and Ken Bollweg, AMS project manager at Johnson
Kathleen Coderre, principal investigator for AstroRad Vest at Lockheed Martin Space, Littleton, Colorado, and Oren Milstein, co-founder and chief scientific officer for StemRad
Alessandro Grattoni, chairman of the Department of NanoMedicine at the Houston Methodist Research Institute, and Maurizio Geggiani, chief technology officer at Automobili Lamborghini, for the CraigX Flight Test Platform
Mary Murphy, senior internal payloads manager for the Zero-G Oven at Nanoracks LLC in Washington
2:30 p.m. – Prelaunch news conference
Kirk Shireman, manager of NASA’s International Space Station Program at Johnson
Pete Hasbrook
Jeff Reddish, Wallops Range Antares project manager
Frank DeMauro, vice president and general manager of Space Systems at Northrop Grumman
Kurt Eberly, Antares vice president at Northrop Grumman
Saturday, Nov. 2

9:30 a.m. – Launch coverage begins for a 9:59 a.m. liftoff
Monday, Nov. 4

2:45 a.m. – Coverage of Cygnus capture with the space station’s robotic arm
6:30 a.m. – Cygnus installation operations coverage
Media registration for the launch and associated activities has closed. However, media may participate via phone in the What’s on Board briefing and prelaunch news conference. Media interested in participating must contact Gina Anderson at [email protected] for call details.

The Cygnus spacecraft is scheduled to remain at the space station until Jan. 13, 2020, when it will depart the station, deploy Nanoracks customer CubeSats, deorbit and dispose of several tons of trash during a fiery re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere around Jan. 31.

This will be the first mission under Northrop Grumman’s Commercial Resupply Services-2 contract with NASA, for which the company will fly a minimum of six missions to the International Space Station through 2024.

Learn more about this space station resupply mission at:

https://www.nasa.gov/northropgrumman

-end- https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-television-coverage-set-for-cygnus-resupply-mission-to-international-space

 

[Administrator]

[Impact]NASA TV to Air Boeing Starliner Pad Abort Test[/Impact]

ASA and Boeing will broadcast live coverage of the CST-100 Starliner Pad Abort Test on Monday, Nov. 4, from Launch Complex 32 at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

The test is scheduled for 9 a.m. EST (7 a.m. MST) with a three-hour test window. Live coverage is targeted to start at 8:50 a.m., on NASA Television and the agency’s website. Coverage will be adjusted as necessary within the window.

Boeing’s Pad Abort Test is part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program work with the American aerospace industry -- through a public-private partnership -- to launch astronauts on American rockets and spacecraft from American soil for the first time since 2011. The goal of the program is to provide safe, reliable and cost-effective transportation to and from the International Space Station, which would allow for additional research time and increase the opportunity for discovery aboard humanity’s testbed for exploration.

The test is designed to verify that each of Starliner’s systems will function not only separately, but in concert, to protect astronauts by carrying them safely away from the launch pad in the unlikely event of an emergency prior to liftoff. During the test, Starliner’s four launch abort engines and several orbital maneuvering and attitude control thrusters will fire, pushing the spacecraft approximately 1 mile above land and 1 mile north of the test stand.

The spacecraft’s crew module will use parachutes with landing airbags to touch down at White Sands Missile Range. It will be recovered and brought back to Launch Complex 32 for evaluation and analysis.

For additional coverage, NASA's launch blog, and more information about the mission, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/commercialcrew

 

[Administrator]

[Impact]Station Preps for New U.S. Crew Ship in Middle of Space Research[/Impact]

Boeing’s new CST-100 Starliner crew ship rolled out to its launch pad in Florida today. The Expedition 61 crew is preparing the International Space Station for Starliner’s arrival while continuing advanced space research.

The Starliner spacecraft sits atop an Atlas V rocket from United Launch Alliance counting down to a liftoff Friday at 6:36 a.m. EST. This will be Boeing’s first Orbital Flight Test of the uncrewed vehicle that will dock to the station Saturday at 8:27 a.m.

NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Christina Koch are getting ready for duty Saturday morning when they will monitor Starliner’s automated rendezvous and docking with the orbiting lab. The duo will then conduct leak checks, open the hatch and ingress the vehicle to begin a week of docked operations. Starliner is also delivering about 600 pounds of cargo to the crew and will return science samples to Earth after its departure on Dec. 28.

Meanwhile, microgravity science is always ongoing aboard the station to improve life for humans on Earth and in space. Today, NASA Flight Engineer Andrew Morgan studied how weightlessness affects an optical material that can control the reflection and absorption of light. Results could improve solar power technology and electronic mobile displays.

Meir had her eyes scanned with an ultrasound device by ESA (European Space Agency) Commander Luca Parmitano for a look at her cornea, lens and optic nerve. She had a second eye exam using optical coherence tomography for a view of her retina.

The flight engineers in the Russian side of the space station checked on a pair of docked spaceships while working science and maintenance. Cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka charged electronics gear in the Soyuz MS-15 crew ship. He also worked on plumbing systems in the Progress 74 cargo craft. Cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov set up hardware for an Earth imaging study that explores the effects of natural and manmade catastrophes.

 

[Administrator]

[Impact]Meet Rosie – Boeing’s First Anthropometric Starliner Commander[/Impact]
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Onboard Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner is an anthropometric test device, called Rosie, who will provide a wealth of information about what astronauts will experience during flight aboard the spacecraft. Boeing named the test device after Rosie the Riveter, an icon who inspired women to join aerospace. Rosie’s 15 sensors will collect valuable data during the mission that will help make future crewed missions safe on Starliner.



Everyone’s favorite –Snoopy – is making his return to space aboard the Starliner spacecraft.

 

[Administrator]

[Impact]Jupiter Probably Has 600 Small, Irregular Moons[/Impact]

The better our technologies get, the better we get at finding objects in space. That’s certainly true of Jupiter and its moons. Prior to Galileo, nobody knew the other planets had moons. Then in 1609/10, as he made improvements to his telescope, he aimed it at the gas giant and eventually found four moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Now those four natural satellites also bear his name: the Galilean moons.

Over the centuries since then, and especially in our digital age, astronomical tools and methods kept improving. In particular, wide-field CCD (Charge Coupled Devices) have led to an explosion of astronomical discoveries. In recent years, the confirmed number of Jovian moons has risen to 79. Now, a new study says that there may be 600 small irregular moons orbiting Jupiter.

The title of the new study is “The population of km-scale retrograde jovian irregular moons.” The lead author is Edward Ashton from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of British Columbia. The authors will present their findings at the virtual Europlanet Science Congress 2020.

To be clear, the team of astronomers did not actually see 600 moons. Instead, they pored over archival 2010 data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. They searched a small area of the sky in that data—about one square degree—and found four dozen small, irregular moons. Based on that, they extrapolated the number of small moons that should be orbiting Jupiter, arriving at the 600 number.

There are two categories of moons: regular and irregular. While regular moons form by accretion of material in a disk, the same way planets do, irregulars are captured objects. In this study, the team of researchers found an abundance of small irregular moons, objects captured by Jupiter’s powerful gravity.

This annotated color view of Jupiter and its four largest moons — Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto — was taken by the JunoCam camera on NASA’s Juno spacecraft on June 21, 2016, at a distance of 6.8 million miles (10.9 million kilometers) from Jupiter. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
In 2017, researchers published a study announcing the discovery of 12 more irregular moons orbiting Jupiter. Prior to this new research, the number of known Jovian irregulars was 71. And scientists have speculated for years that Jupiter has an undiscovered population of smaller moons. Some astronomers have said that the large giants all have the same number of satellites, despite differences in their masses. It’s just that they’re hard to see.

The Canada-France-Hawai‘i Telescope on Mauna Kea played a central role in this work. That telescope has a powerful digital camera called the MegaCam. It’s a 340 megapixel wide-field imager that sees in the optical and the near-infrared. In this study, the astronomers focused on 60 exposures of 140 seconds each of a region near Jupiter.

Their method involved what the team calls a “shift-and-stack parameter space for the data set.” That method can reveal smaller, fainter moons hidden in the data. Basically, there are 126 ways to combine these images, by digitally shifting and stacking them, to mimic all the possible speeds and directions that these new, potential Jovian moons might travel across the sky.

The team of astronomers found 52 objects in their images which they identified as irregular moons. The objects had magnitudes down to 25.7, and that corresponds to objects with diameters of approximately 800 meters (875 yards.) Of those 52, seven of the brightest were already-known irregular moons. While those seven are prograde moons, the other 45 are very likely retrograde moons, meaning they orbit opposite of Jupiter’s direction of rotation.

From that data, the team extrapolated to arrive at their total of 600 irregular Jovian moons.

Jupiter’s inner moons are prograde, while the outter moons tend to be retrograde. The oddball moon Valetudo, discovered in 2017, is a prograde moon that crosses the orbit of the outer group of retrograde moons. Image Credit: Roberto Molar-Candanosa / Carnegie Institution for Science.
These are not confirmed discoveries, yet. Confirmation requires observation with large, ground-based telescopes. Considering the small sizes, and the time it takes to for each moon to complete an orbit, that’s a huge task. There may not be enough scientific value in confirming all these tiny objects to justify all of that sought-after observing time.

In an interview with Sky and Telescope, lead author Edward Ashton said there are no plans for follow-up observations to confirm these findings. “It would be nice to confirm them,” Ashton said, “but there is no way to track them without starting from scratch.”

Unlike Jupiter’s larger moons, like Io, Europa and Ganymede, these irregular moons did not form by accreting material in a disk. Instead, they likely formed as stand-alone Solar System objects in heliocentric orbits. Through some uncertain mechanism, they were eventually captured into their orbits around Jupiter. Their capture may have been due to “gas drag, pull down due to sudden mass growth and threebody interactions,” the authors write in their paper.

This study also raises an interesting question: What, exactly, is a moon?

We grow up looking at the Earth’s moon, so we tend to think we know what a “moon” is. But there’s no strict definition of the size range for moons. Image Credit: NASA / GSFC / Arizona State University
At what point is an object small enough to no longer be considered a moon? There are bound to be all kinds of boulders, rocks, and dust orbiting planets. Some small satellites are referred to as moonlets, but there’s no agreed upon definition of that, either. Is something that’s only 100 meters (328 ft.) in diameter really a moon? A moonlet? Is there a cutoff?

The International Astronomical Union doesn’t name objects smaller than one km (0.62 mi) in diameter, so none of these objects will get recognizable names. And their confirmation will have to wait for some future day. It’s possible that the Vera Rubin Observatory, which will have the power to detect dim, transient objects in the Solar System, can confirm the existence of these moons, and more.

These results are an interesting new chapter in our understanding of Jupiter. We’ve gone from Galileo’s 1610 observation of four moons orbiting the planet, to this new study, involving powerful telescopes with advanced digital cameras, and complex computer-based methods of examining the data.

Now, we know that Jupiter’s moons include the largest natural satellite in the Solar System (Ganymede), a volcanic moon (Io), and moons with oceans under a layer of ice (Europa.) We’re even sending a spacecraft, NASA’s Europa Clipper, just to study one of Jupiter’s moons more closely, seeking signs of life.

 

[Administrator]

[Impact]Ten Things to Know About Bennu[/Impact]
NASA’s first mission to return a sample from an ancient asteroid arrived at its target, the asteroid Bennu, on Dec. 3, 2018. This mission, the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer, or OSIRIS-REx, is a seven-year long voyage set to conclude upon the delivery to Earth of at least 2.1 ounces (60 grams) and possibly up to almost four and a half pounds (two kilograms) of sample. It promises to be the largest amount of extraterrestrial material brought back from space since the Apollo era. The 20-year anniversary of the asteroid’s discovery was in September 2019 — and scientists have been collecting data ever since. Here’s what we already know (and some of what we hope to find out) about this pristine remnant from the early days of our solar system.
https://youtu.be/QunVAWABQSc

1. IT’S VERY, VERY DARK...
Bennu is classified as a B-type asteroid, which means it contains a lot of carbon in and along with its various minerals. Bennu’s carbon content creates a surface on the asteroid that reflects about four percent of the light that hits it — and that’s not a lot. For contrast, the solar system’s brightest planet, Venus, reflects around 65 percent of incoming sunlight, and Earth reflects about 30 percent. Bennu is a carbonaceous asteroid that hasn’t undergone drastic, composition-altering change, meaning that on and below its deeper-than-pitch-black surface are chemicals and rocks from the birth of the solar system.

2. ...AND VERY, VERY OLD.
Bennu has been (mostly) undisturbed for billions of years. Not only is it conveniently close and carbonaceous, it is also so primitive that scientists calculated it formed in the first 10 million years of our solar system’s history — over 4.5 billion years ago. Thanks to the Yarkovsky effect -- the slight push created when the asteroid absorbs sunlight and re-emits that energy as heat -- and gravitational tugs from other celestial bodies, it has drifted closer and closer to Earth from its likely birthplace: the Main Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter.

3. BENNU IS A “RUBBLE-PILE” ASTEROID — BUT DON’T LET THE NAME TRICK YOU.
Is Bennu space trash or scientific treasure? While “rubble pile” sounds like an insult, it’s actually a real astronomy classification. Rubble-pile asteroids like Bennu are celestial bodies made from lots of pieces of rocky debris that gravity compressed together. This kind of detritus is produced when an impact shatters a much larger body (for Bennu, it was a parent asteroid around 60 miles [about 100 km] wide). Bennu, for contrast, is about as tall as the Empire State Building. It likely took just a few weeks for these shards of space wreckage to coalesce into the rubble-pile that is Bennu. Bennu is full of holes inside, with 20 to 40 percent of its volume being empty space. The asteroid is actually in danger of flying apart, if it starts to rotate much faster or interacts too closely with a planetary body.

4. ASTEROIDS MAY HARBOR HINTS ABOUT THE ORIGIN OF ALL LIFE ON EARTH...
Bennu is a primordial artifact preserved in the vacuum of space, orbiting among planets and moons and asteroids and comets. Because it is so old, Bennu could be made of material containing molecules that were present when life first formed on Earth. All Earth life forms are based on chains of carbon atoms bonded with oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and other elements. However, organic material like the kind scientists hope to find in a sample from Bennu doesn’t necessarily always come from biology. It would, though, further scientists’ search to uncover the role asteroids rich in organics played in catalyzing life on Earth.

5. ...BUT ALSO PLATINUM AND GOLD!
Extraterrestrial jewelry sounds great, and Bennu is likely to be rich in platinum and gold compared to the average crust on Earth. Although most aren’t made almost entirely of solid metal (but asteroid 16 Psyche may be!), many asteroids do contain elements that could be used industrially in lieu of Earth’s finite resources. Closely studying this asteroid will give answers to questions about whether asteroid mining during deep-space exploration and travel is feasible. Although rare metals attract the most attention, water is likely to be the most important resource in Bennu. Water (two hydrogen atoms bound to an oxygen atom) can be used for drinking or separated into its components to get breathable air and rocket fuel. Given the high cost of transporting material into space, if astronauts can extract water from an asteroid for life support and fuel, the cosmic beyond is closer than ever to being human-accessible.

6. SUNLIGHT CAN CHANGE THE ASTEROID’S ENTIRE TRAJECTORY.
Gravity isn’t the only factor involved with Bennu’s destiny. The side of Bennu facing the Sun gets warmed by sunlight, but a day on Bennu lasts just 4 hours and 17.8 minutes, so the part of the surface that faces the Sun shifts constantly. As Bennu continues to rotate, it expels this heat, which gives the asteroid a tiny push towards the Sun by about 0.18 miles (approximately 0.29 kilometers) per year, changing its orbit.

7. THERE IS A SMALL CHANCE THAT BENNU WILL IMPACT EARTH LATE IN THE NEXT CENTURY.
The NASA-funded Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research team discovered Bennu in 1999. NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office continues to track near-Earth objects (NEOs), especially those like Bennu that will come within about 4.6 million miles (7.5 million kilometers) of Earth’s orbit and are classified as potentially hazardous objects. Between the years 2175 and 2199, the chance that Bennu will impact Earth is only 1-in-2,700, but scientists still don’t want to turn their backs on the asteroid. Bennu swoops through the solar system on a path that scientists have confidently predicted, but they will refine their predictions with the measurement of the Yarkovsky Effect by OSIRIS-REx and with future observations by astronomers.

8. SAMPLING BENNU WILL BE HARDER THAN WE THOUGHT.
Early Earth-based observations of the asteroid suggested it had a smooth surface with a regolith (the top layer of loose, unconsolidated material) composed of particles less than an inch (a couple of centimeters) large — at most. As the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft was able to take pictures with higher resolution, it became evident that sampling Bennu would be far more hazardous than what was previously believed: new imagery of Bennu’s surface show that it’s mostly covered in massive boulders, not small rocks. OSIRIS-REx was designed to be navigated within an area on Bennu of nearly 2,000 square yards (meters), roughly the size of a parking lot with 100 spaces. Now, it must maneuver to a safe spot on Bennu’s rocky surface within a constraint of less than 100 square yards, an area of about five parking spaces.

Captured on Aug. 11, 2020 during the second rehearsal of the OSIRIS-REx mission’s sample collection event, this series of images shows the SamCam imager’s field of view as the NASA spacecraft approaches asteroid Bennu’s surface. The rehearsal brought the spacecraft through the first three maneuvers of the sampling sequence to a point approximately 131 feet (40 meters) above the surface, after which the spacecraft performed a back-away burn.
Credits: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona
Full story
9. BENNU WAS NAMED AFTER AN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN DEITY.
Bennu was named in 2013 by a nine-year-old boy from North Carolina who won the Name that Asteroid! competition, a collaboration between the mission, the Planetary Society, and the LINEAR asteroid survey that discovered Bennu. Michael Puzio won the contest by suggesting that the spacecraft’s Touch-and-Go Sample Mechanism (TAGSAM) arm and solar panels resemble the neck and wings in illustrations of Bennu, whom ancient Egyptians usually depicted as a gray heron. Bennu is the ancient Egyptian deity linked with the Sun, creation and rebirth — Puzio also noted that Bennu is the living symbol of Osiris. The myth of Bennu suits the asteroid itself, given that it is a primitive object that dates back to the creation of the Solar System. Themes of origins and rebirth are part of this asteroid’s story. Birds and bird-like creatures are also symbolic of rebirth, creation and origins in various ancient myths.

10. BENNU IS STILL SURPRISING US!
The spacecraft’s navigation camera observed that Bennu was spewing out streams of particles a couple of times each week. Bennu apparently is not only a rare active asteroid (only a handful of them have been as of yet identified), but possibly with Ceres explored by NASA’s Dawn mission, among the first of its kind that humanity has observed from a spacecraft. More recently, the mission team discovered that sunlight can crack rocks on Bennu, and that it has pieces of another asteroid scattered across its surface. More pieces will be added to Bennu’s cosmic puzzle as the mission progresses, and each brings the solar system’s evolutionary history into sharper and sharper focus.

This view of asteroid Bennu ejecting particles from its surface on January 19, 2019 was created by combining two images taken on board NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Other image processing techniques were also applied, such as cropping and adjusting the brightness and contrast of each image.
Credits: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona/Lockheed Martin
Full story
Goddard provides overall mission management, systems engineering, and the safety and mission assurance for OSIRIS-REx. Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, Tucson, is the principal investigator, and the University of Arizona also leads the science team and the mission’s science observation planning and data processing. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built the spacecraft and is providing flight operations. Goddard and KinetX Aerospace are responsible for navigating the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. OSIRIS-REx is the third mission in NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which is managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information about NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, visit:

www.nasa.gov/osiris-rex

 

[Administrator]

[Impact]Dragon Crew-1 capsule, with 4 astronauts aboard, on way to ISS[/Impact]
Drama-free countdown marks a major success for NASA and SpaceX
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Sunday in a spectacular evening liftoff that came days after the company’s Dragon capsule became the first privately owned and operated spacecraft to be certified by NASA for human spaceflight.

SpaceX earned that designation and the right to undertake what NASA hopes will be regular missions to the space station and back after it completed a test flight of two astronauts earlier this year. That May launch was the first of NASA astronauts from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, forcing the United States to rely on Russia for flights to orbit for nearly a decade.

With Sunday’s launch, NASA took another step toward a new era in human spaceflight in which private companies partner with the government to build and design spacecraft and rockets. And it marked a coming-of-age moment for SpaceX, the California company founded by Elon Musk that was once viewed as a maverick start-up but is now one of the space industry’s stalwarts and one of NASA’s most significant partners.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket ignited its nine engines and lifted off at 7:27 p.m. Eastern time from launchpad 39A, the historic swath of space real estate that hoisted the crew of Apollo 11 — Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins — to the moon in 1969, as well as many space shuttle missions.

The launch was punctuated less than 10 minutes later, when the rocket booster returned to Earth and landed on a ship at sea so that it could be reused on another mission.

On board the SpaceX spacecraft were three NASA astronauts, Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, as well as a Japanese astronaut, Soichi Noguchi. Though the space shuttle was capable of flying as many as eight people, Sunday’s flight was the first time four astronauts have ever flown in a capsule.

The crew will stay on board the space station for about six months, joining American Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov. The mission comes as NASA and its international partners this month are celebrating 20 years of continuous human presence on the space station, an orbiting laboratory about 250 miles above Earth.

If all goes according to plan, the four astronauts aboard the capsule should reach the space station at about 11 p.m. Monday.