January 11, 2019

The Canadian Space Agency is Setting the Stage for Deep Space Medical Contributions (Source: SpaceQ)
It doesn’t matter what the name of any particular program is that will eventually see humans once again explore beyond low earth orbit, the stage is being set now as to who will be the leaders, and Canada is trying to define its role. One of the roles Canada is aspiring to be the leader in, is the area of space health and biomedicine.

In the fall of 2017 the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) held a National Forum on Space, Health and Innovation which followed regional information sessions held in Montreal, Toronto, Halifax, Calgary, and Vancouver. One of the key outcomes was the creation of an Expert Group on the Potential Canadian Healthcare and Biomedical Roles for Deep Space Human Spaceflight. (1/8)

Ball and SSL Win Study Contracts for Methane Emission Tracking Satellite (Source: Space News)
The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has awarded contracts to Ball Aerospace and Space Systems Loral to develop designs for a privately funded satellite to track methane emissions. EDF announced Jan. 10 that the two companies had received study contracts, with an overall value of $1.5 million, to advance concepts for MethaneSAT, a spacecraft designed to monitor human-generated methane emissions worldwide.

EDF said it selected the two companies from nearly two dozen firms that expressed an interest in the project. The companies will spend the next several months refining their designs for MethaneSAT. EDF plans to then choose one of the companies to build the spacecraft for launch in 2021, but didn’t specify when that downselect would take place. (1/10)

Shutdown Could Delay Fix for Camera on Hubble Telescope (Source: Space Daily)
The Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 has been turned off due to hardware anomalies, according to an update from NASA. "Hubble is still conducting science observations with its other instruments (one camera and two spectrographs) -- more than enough to keep the observatory active for the near future," Cheryl Gundy, deputy news chief at the Space Telescope Science Institute told UPI in an email.

There are concerns, however, that "engineers are unlikely to be able to fix the aging telescope until the ongoing U.S. government shutdown ends -- whenever that might be," according to the science journal Nature. Like many of the space telescope's instruments, the Wide Field Camera features a level of electronic redundancy that could allow engineers to recover the instrument, even if the initial problem can't be repaired. (1/9)

China Launches First in 2019, with Long March 3B Carrying Military Satellite (Source: NasaSpaceFlight.com)
China successfully launched a military communications satellite Thursday. The Long March 3B lifted off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center at 12:05 p.m. Eastern and placed the ChinaSat-2D satellite into orbit. The spacecraft is believed to be the latest in a series of second-generation military communications satellites. The launch was the first orbital mission worldwide in 2019. (1/10)

China: Lunar Mission a Complete Success (Source: Xinhua)
Chinese officials said Friday that the Chang'e-4 lunar lander mission was a complete success. Project managers said the instruments on the lander and the Yutu 2 rover were working well and showed off images from the lander, including a 360-degree panorama of the lunar landscape. The rover restarted operations Thursday after a "nap" to avoid overheating at the peak of the lunar day. (1/10)

Russia's New ISS Lab Module Delayed to 2020 (Source: TASS)
Russia now says a lab module for the International Space Station won't launch until 2020. Dmitry Rogozin, head of Roscosmos, said the Multipurpose Laboratory Module, also known as Nauka, is slated to launch to the station in early 2020. The module, which has suffered years of delays, was previously expected to launch late this year. Two additional modules, a docking node and power module, will be added to the station's Russian segment in 2022. (1/10)

SpaceX Completes Iridium -Next Constellation with California Launch/Landing (Source: Space News)
SpaceX launched the final 10 Iridium Next satellites into orbit Jan. 11, completing its first mission of the year and the last in a multi-launch contract for its largest non-government customer, Iridium Communications. The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket took off at 10:31 a.m. Eastern from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Almost an hour later, Iridium’s new 860-kilogram satellites separated from the rocket one-by-one for 15 minutes. Iridium confirmed telemetry from all 10 satellites at 11:53 a.m. Eastern.

The launch completes the $3 billion Iridium Next constellation, which now numbers 75 satellites — 66 operational units and nine spares — in low Earth orbit. The second-generation satellites, built by Thales Alenia Space and integrated by Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems, replace Iridium’s legacy fleet from Motorola and Lockheed Martin that launched about 20 years ago. SpaceX successfully landed the rocket's first stage on a drone ship downrange. (1/10)

Lockheed Martin Halts Work on GOES-T to Wait for Instrument Fix (Source: Space News)
Lockheed Martin, prime contractor for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) R Series, has halted work on GOES-T, the next spacecraft scheduled to launch, and turned its attention to successor GOES-U as it waits for Harris Corp. to complete modification of the spacecraft’s primary instrument, the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI).

“It’s nice to have all the hardware for two vehicles,” Tim Gasparrini, GOES-R program manager for Lockheed Martin Space, told SpaceNews. “I can swap it out instead of waiting.” Lockheed Martin had finished assembling the GOES-T spacecraft last year and was preparing for environmental testing when NOAA directed the company to halt work due to problems with ABI on the GOES-17 satellite launched in March 2018. During on-orbit checkout, NOAA discovered ABI’s infrared channels were not working as designed because of cooling problems. (1/10)

A Wild 'Interstellar Probe' Mission Idea Is Gaining Momentum (Source: Space.com)
New ideas for a robotic interstellar mission are percolating. Ambitious science and strategic plans are being formulated for the fastest flight ever to interstellar space — almost six times faster than NASA's record-holding Voyager 1 spacecraft, which launched in 1977 and went interstellar in 2012.

With the goal of reaching 90 billion miles from the sun, the proposed robotic explorer would push the limits of engineering know-how and space technology, advocates say. Current thinking about going interstellar begins with an "interstellar precursor" mission — a spacecraft capable of traveling to perhaps 1,000 astronomical units (AU) using current and near-term technology. (One AU is the Earth-sun distance — about 93 million miles, or 150 million km).

This approach is a good one, both because of its potential science return and its impact on driving propulsion, communications and sensor technologies forward, said Paul Gilster. "We can't even think of missions to more distant targets without mapping the immediate terrain to learn about hazards that could affect equipment, disrupt communications or even destroy the spacecraft," Gilster said. (1/9)

International Space Station Telescope Makes Amazing Observation of Black Hole Eating Stuff (Source: Gizmodo)
A telescope on the International Space Station made an incredible high-resolution measurement of the x-rays resulting from a black hole sucking up matter that could have important implications for astronomers’ understanding of these mysterious objects.

Scientists know that black holes emit high-energy x-rays when they eat up matter, but how and from where has been a matter of discussion. The ISS’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explore, or NICER, has allowed scientists to observe these x-rays like never before. This observation could help scientists better understand not just black holes a few times the mass of the Sun like the one observed here, but perhaps the billion-solar-mass behemoths at galactic centers as well. (1/9)

Astronomers Announce First Exoplanets Discovered by NASA’s TESS Mission (Source: SpaceFlight Now)
Six months into its mission scanning the sky for planets around other stars, NASA’s orbiting TESS observatory has found three previously-undiscovered worlds and hundreds candidates requiring follow-up observations, the first batch of a potential haul of up to 10,000 exoplanet detections over TESS’s planned two-year mission, astronomers announced this week.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite launched in April 2018 and started scientific observations in July. TESS is the space agency’s latest exoplanet-hunting space telescope, following the Kepler mission which ended its search for worlds around other stars when it ran out of fuel last year. (1/9)

Astronomers Just Detected a Mysterious Repeating Cosmic Radio Burst—Again (Source: Gizmodo)
Canadian scientists have detected 13 new fast radio bursts, those mysterious, split-second, high-energy pulses that reach us from unknown origins billions of light-years away. Intriguingly, one of these newly documented bursts is a repeater, becoming just the second-known repeating fast radio burst among the 60 documented so far. First detected in 2002, fast radio bursts (FRBs) continue to mystify astronomers, who have struggled to understand the sources of these powerful emissions.

FRBs last for just a few milliseconds, and their unpredictable displays make observations notoriously difficult. Incredibly, these radio waves originate from distant galaxies, traveling at high energies through the cosmos for literally billions of years. Popular explanations for FRBs include rapidly spinning neutron stars with strong magnetic fields (known as magnetars), mergers of highly dense objects, collapsed stars, supermassive black holes, and—much more speculatively—extraterrestrial civilizations. (1/9)

SSTL Making Progress on GEO Satellite (Source: Space News)
British smallsat manufacturer Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) has completed its first geostationary satellite platform. The company built the platform for Eutelsat Quantum, a telecom satellite that will carry a reconfigurable payload capable of changing coverage, bandwidth, power and frequency. SSTL said it will now transfer the platform from its facility in Guildford, U.K., to parent company Airbus, which will finish assembly and testing of the satellite in Toulouse, France.

Eutelsat Quantum features technology developed through the European Space Agency’s Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems program, with support from the U.K. Space Agency. SSTL Managing Director Sarah Parker said the satellite platform’s completion “represents our first venture into the global commercial telecoms satellite market.” (1/9)

A Star Fell Into a Black Hole, Revealing Its Super-Fast Spin (Source: Gizmodo)
Scientists have measured a fundamental property of a supermassive black hole—how fast it spins—by measuring a star slamming into it. It can be hard to measure black holes unless they actually do something, like when they slam together or spew jets of matter. But the scientists behind the new result were able to measure the mass and spin of a quite massive black hole, demonstrating that these brief star-eating events, called tidal disruption events, could offer another way to understand black holes.

“There have already been measurements of spins from black holes that are actively accreting,” or acquiring more matter under the influence of gravity, the study’s first author Dheeraj Pasham, Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow at the MIT Kavli Institute, told Gizmodo. “This measurement is different in the sense that we were able to measure the spin of a black hole that was dormant,” at least until the tidal disruption event occurred.

An automatic sky survey called the All-Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae, or ASASSN, spotted the flash on November 22, 2014. The flash, called ASASSN-14li, looked just like your typical black-hole-gravity-shredding-a-star-to-bits event, happening near the center of a host galaxy. The scientists immediately searched for “quasi-periodic oscillations,” regularly repeating but changing patterns of x-rays that vary in their power and are thought to originate from very close to the black hole. They found what they were looking for in data from two x-ray space telescopes. (1/10)