April 10, 2019

Pentagon Admits Plan to Launch 1,300 Satellites Might Not Prevent Chinese or Russian Attacks (Source: Daily Beast)
A new Pentagon space agency wants to launch nearly 1,300 small satellites and, in the process, totally reinvent the way the military operates in orbit. The goal: to help the U.S. satellite constellation survive a sneak-attack by China or Russia. With hundreds of satellites in orbit, no single satellite is critically important, or so the thinking goes. If the Chinese or Russians were to knock out one or even dozens of satellites, scores more could take their place.

But the new “mega-constellation” plan from the Space Development Agency might not actually work. The agency’s own director, Fred Kennedy, said it probably was “no panacea” against an enemy attack. It could be prohibitively expensive to deploy so many sats. Rocket launches are getting cheaper. But they might not yet be so cheap that the Pentagon could afford to conduct hundreds of them in a short span of time. (4/10)

Companies Vie to Develop Ways to Dispose of Space Junk (Source: Financial Times)
A new space race is ready for lift-off: garbage disposal.  The danger to satellites and space stations from millions of pieces of orbital wreckage after more than 60 years of space exploration has become a commercial opportunity and one of the best-funded companies in the sector is based in Asia. “Cleaning up space is critical,” said Nobu Okada of Japan-based company Astroscale. “People know about global warming. People know about ocean clean-up. But they don’t know anything about the space debris issue.”

Astroscale has raised $102m from investors including developer Mitsubishi Estate, venture capitalist SBI Investment and airline group ANA Holdings. Mr Okada said no other company with a mission solely to clean up space debris has raised as much. The company is tipped to announce further funding for its most recent investment round this week, which coincides with the opening of its US office. Astroscale, as well as the RemoveDEBRIS project in the UK and US group Rocket Lab, are pitching the destruction of discarded rocket parts and defunct satellites as a business proposal.

Estimates for the amount of space junk vary but the European Space Agency believes there are 900,000 pieces of debris larger than 1cm and most are located in low earth orbit — no further than 2,000km from the ground. That number is set to increase as one of the hottest sectors of the space industry — the race by private companies such as SpaceX and Amazon to develop lower cost rockets to deploy so-called nanosatellites into orbit — heats up.  “Debris removal is a small but growing market,” said Laura Forczyk, owner of Atlanta-based space consulting firm Astralytical. “Until recently, there wasn’t a financial incentive for companies to take on the task of removing orbital debris. Now we’re seeing this become a viable business case.” (4/10)

Air Force Pointedly Refutes SDA Call for DOD Use of Commercial LEO Constellations (Source: Space News)
Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson shot back at the new director of the Space Development Agency Fred Kennedy, who has laid out a plan to disrupt the military space business by bringing more commercial technology into space systems in order to speed up innovation in the face of competition from China and Russia. Wilson forcefully challenged the SDA vision (see story below) arguing that the military’s current constellations of satellites in higher orbits are “the best in the world” and that shifting to LEO systems would put U.S. forces at risk.

Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan has been a strong proponent of the new agency and decided to place it under the authority of Undersecretary of Defense Mike Griffin, who like Kennedy, is a strong believer that military space acquisitions must change radically and that commercial LEO systems should be leveraged as soon as possible. Wilson cited a 90-day “Space Strategy Study” that was recently completed by the Air Force and the intelligence community and concluded that LEO-based systems would be vulnerable during military conflicts and that DoD should not be taking that risk. (4/10)

Thales Alenia Space Mulls Satellite Servicing Venture (Source: Space News)
Franco-Italian satellite manufacturer and space hardware provider Thales Alenia Space says it wants to get into the satellite servicing market, provided it can secure a government customer to kickstart the business. Roberto Provera, Thales Alenia Space’s director of human spaceflight and transportation programs, said the company envisions having a servicing business by 2024 or 2025, and is currently in concept development. The company’s servicer would have a strong focus on debris removal, he said. (4/9)

If Mars Had Water, Where Did It Go? (Source: Gizmodo)
On Earth, water reacts with rocks on and below the ocean floor. Those water-altered rocks are carried into subduction zones by the motion of tectonic plates. This moves 150-300 metric tons of water a year from the surface to the interior of the Earth—a pretty efficient way to remove water from the surface. That mechanism doesn’t work on Mars because there is no plate tectonics or subduction.

The orbiters and robots that we have sent to Mars have identified rocks and minerals that formed in the presence of water, including some of the same minerals and rocks found on Earth’s ocean floor. We know that some of these rocks and minerals only form at pressures and temperatures deep below the surface of Mars; water must have been present deep below the surface.

There must have been a thicker atmosphere and more water early in Mars history, but we still don’t completely understand how much there was or how long it was stable. So where did the water go? Some of it was lost to space (Mars doesn’t have a magnetic field to protect it from solar wind), some of the water reacted with volcanic rocks and then got trapped in minerals, and some of the water is still there today, frozen into the ice caps and in permafrost layers below the ground. (4/8)

NASA's Race to the Moon Defers Sustainability Elements (Source: Space News)
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said NASA would take a two-phase approach to its revised lunar exploration plans, focusing on speed and then sustainability. Bridenstine said the agency would initially develop only the essential capabilities needed for getting humans to the surface of the moon by 2024, the goal set two weeks ago by Vice President Mike Pence.

After that, the focus would turn to long-term sustainability of human missions to the moon. He said all the elements of the earlier plan, like the lunar Gateway and landers, would still be developed, but may be done on different schedules compared to the plan that called for a human return by 2028. Bridenstine did not give any cost estimates for the new plan, but said the agency, along with OMB and the National Space Council, will have a revised budget request ready as soon as next week to deliver to Congress. (4/10)

Scientists Photograph Black Hole for the First Time Ever (Source: Daily Beast)
A team of 200 scientists unveiled the first-ever picture of a black hole Wednesday morning—a remarkable leap in astrophysics that provides an unprecedented glimpse into the depths of the universe’s abyss. “We have seen what we thought was unseeable,” Shep Doeleman, the director of the Event Horizon Telescope project, said at a press conference Wednesday morning. “We have taken a picture of a black hole.”

The photo of a glowing, irregular orange ring surrounding a small black circle, shows a massive black hole at the center of the nearby Messier 87 galaxy. It’s impossible to actually see the black hole, because it’s so dense that they suck in all the nearby light. Instead, the picture shows the hole’s silhouette, cast against the intense brightness of the hot gases and plasma that scientists think surround it. Click here. (4/10)

Traveling to Another Dimension? Choose Your Black Hole Wisely (Source: Daily Beast)
This dense and hot singularity punches a hole in the fabric of spacetime itself, possibly opening up an opportunity for hyperspace travel. That is, a short cut through spacetime allowing for travel over cosmic scale distances in a short period. Researchers previously thought that any spacecraft attempting to use a black hole as a portal of this type would have to reckon with nature at its worst. The hot and dense singularity would cause the spacecraft to endure a sequence of increasingly uncomfortable tidal stretching and squeezing before being completely vaporized.

My team at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and a colleague at Georgia Gwinnett College have shown that all black holes are not created equal. If the black hole like Sagittarius A*, located at the center of our own galaxy, is large and rotating, then the outlook for a spacecraft changes dramatically. That’s because the singularity that a spacecraft would have to contend with is very gentle and could allow for a very peaceful passage.

The reason that this is possible is that the relevant singularity inside a rotating black hole is technically “weak,” and thus does not damage objects that interact with it. At first, this fact may seem counter intuitive. But one can think of it as analogous to the common experience of quickly passing one’s finger through a candle’s near 2,000-degree flame, without getting burned. (1/17)

A Place for Women in Space (Source: Foreign Policy)
This bias has deep roots. In 1962, commenting on whether women should be allowed in the space program, the German-American aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, a former Nazi, joked: “The male astronauts are all for it. And as my friend Bob Gilruth says, ‘We’re reserving 110 pounds of payload for recreational equipment.’”

To be sure, a half-century has moved NASA toward gender parity. The 2013 intake of new astronauts to train for space travel was split evenly between four women and four men, and the 2017 class comprised five women and seven men. Further, “Both NASA and ESA have updated their style guides to get rid of [phrases like] ‘manned spaceflight’ and moved to more inclusive terms like ‘human spaceflight,’” said Kate Arkless Gray. Yet a gendered lag persists in the design of the organization’s mission tools, which can sometimes see women struggle—literally—to fit in. That hindrance isn’t limited to spacewalks.

The default human form is assumed by designers and inventors across industries to be male. Because work environments are set up to accommodate an average male body, women operate to a constant disadvantage. Women wear safety gear designed for men, handle machinery built for men, use man-sized surgical tools, work in offices set to temperatures that suit men—and which can cause illness for women—suffer greater exposure to harmful chemicals, and use gadgets (such as phones) designed to fit men’s hands. These gadgets also carry male-biased software such as voice recognition, which is more likely to register male speech. (4/8)

Gravitational Observatories Hunt for Lumpy Neutron Stars (Source: Scientific American)
Gravitational waves—the ghostly ripples in spacetime first predicted by Einstein and finally detected a century later by advanced observatories—have sparked a revolution in astrophysics, revealing the otherwise-hidden details of merging black holes and neutron stars. Now, scientists have used these waves to open another new window on the universe, providing new constraints on neutron stars' exact shapes. The result will aid researchers in their ongoing quest to understand the inner workings of these exotic objects.

So far, 11 gravitational-wave events have been detected by the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) interferometers in Washington and Louisiana and the Virgo gravitational-wave observatory in Italy. Of these events, 10 came from mergers of binary black holes, and one from the merger of two neutron stars. In all cases, the form of the waves matched the predictions of Einstein's theory of general relativity.

For the binary black hole events, the passing waves lasted less than a second; for the merging neutron stars, the emissions occurred for about 100 seconds. But such rapid pulses aren't the only types of gravitational waves that could be streaming through the universe. In particular, solitary neutron stars might be emitting detectable gravitational waves as they spin—signals that could reveal important new details of the stars' topography and internal composition. (4/8)

This Single Mission Could Solve 2 of the Biggest Mysteries of the Universe (Source: Live Science)
What in the world is dark energy, the name we give to the driving force behind the observed accelerated expansion of the universe? And on the opposite end of the scale, what exactly are neutrinos, those ghostly little particles that zip and zoom through the cosmos without hardly interacting with anything? At first glance, these two questions seem so radically different in terms of scale and nature and, well, everything that we might assume that we need to answer them.

But it might be that a single experiment could reveal answers to both. A European Space Agency telescope is set to map the dark universe — looking as far back in time, some 10 billion years, when dark energy is thought to have been raging. One particularly intriguing ingredient is the neutrino. Since the neutrino is so light, it travels at nearly the speed of light. This has the effect of "smoothing out" structures in the universe: Gravity simply can't do its work and pull neutrinos into compact little balls. So, if you add too many neutrinos to the universe, things like entire galaxies end up not being able to form in the early universe.

This means that we can use the cosmic web itself as a giant laboratory of physics to study neutrinos. By examining the structure of the web and breaking it down into its various parts (clusters, voids and so on), we can get a surprisingly direct handle on neutrinos. ESA's Euclid mission will help uncover both neutrino and dark energy properties. The Euclid satellite will map the locations of millions of galaxies, painting a very broad portrait of the cosmic web. And within that structure lie hints to the history of our universe, a past that depends on its ingredients, like neutrinos and dark energy. (4/8)

Space Is Poised for Explosive Growth. Let’s Get It Right. (Source: Wall Street Journal)
In the 19th century, urban planners wrangled the chaotic metropolises of Paris and New York into “planned cities,” turning warrens of streets into orderly grids, building sewage systems and transit lines, and allowing for new types of architecture, such as apartment buildings. Today, we face a similar inflection point in developing the nearest reaches of space. Click here. (4/8)

SpaceX’s First Dedicated Starlink Launch Announced as Mass Production Begins (Source: Teslarati)
SpaceX has announced a launch target of May 2019 for the first batch of operational Starlink satellites in a sign that the proposed internet satellite constellation has reached a major milestone, effectively transitioning from pure research and development to serious manufacturing.

R&D will continue as SpaceX Starlink engineers work to implement the true final design of the first several hundred or thousand spacecraft, but a significant amount of the team’s work will now be centered on producing as many Starlink satellites as possible, as quickly as possible. With anywhere from 4400 to nearly 12,000 satellites needed to complete the three major proposed phases of Starlink, SpaceX will have to build and launch more than 2200 satellites in the next five years, averaging 44 high-performance, low-cost spacecraft built and launched every month for the next 60 months. (4/8)

The "Space Nation" Warns That an Asteroid Could Wipe out Humanity (Source: Futurism)
The leader of Asgardia, which styles itself as humanity’s first “space nation,” has a warning for world leaders: a life-threatening asteroid impact is “inevitable” unless we do something to stop it. “In the last 100 years, the Earth has been hit at least three times by space objects, each with an explosive power many times greater than the Hiroshima atomic bomb,” Igor Ashurbeyli said. “Future life-threatening impacts are inevitable unless defenses are built.” (4/8)