January 13, 2020

Balancing Astronomical Visions with Budgetary Realities (Source: Space Review)
The long-delayed James Webb Space Telescope should finally approach completion this year, as work ramps up on NASA’s next major space telescope, WFIRST. Jeff Foust reports these missions are providing lessons, good and bad, on how to manage flagship missions as astronomers weigh what should come next. Click here. (1/13)
 
You Can’t Take the Sky From Me (Source: Space Review)
Plans by SpaceX and other companies to deploy megaconstellations of satellites have alarmed astronomers, who worry that such satellites could interfere with their observations. Arwen Rimmer argues that such satellites should be a concern to anyone who looks up into the night sky, not just professional astronomers. Click here. (1/13)
 
China’s Space Dream On Track (Source: Space Review)
China’s Long March 5 rocket successfully returned to flight in late December after a failure nearly two and a half years ago. Namrata Goswami explains that this shows that that country’s lunar ambitions, including eventual human missions to the Moon, need to be taken seriously. Click here. (1/13)
 
Why Improved Registration is Essential for Public and Private Activities on the Moon (Source: Space Review)
Existing treaties may be ill-equipped to deal with the surge in both government and commercial missions to the Moon. Dennis O’Brien discusses what changes a recent white paper recommended to one agreement regarding the registration of such missions. Click here. (1/13)

A Mars Sample-Return Mission is Coming. Scientists Want the Public to Know What to Expect (Source: Space.com)
The first pristine pieces of Mars won't be coming down to Earth for at least another decade, but the time to start preparing society for the epic arrival is now, scientists say. NASA's 2020 Mars rover is scheduled to launch in July of this year and land inside the Red Planet's 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero Crater next February. The six-wheeled robot will do a variety of work once it gets there, but its headline task is hunting for signs of ancient Mars life.

Mars 2020 will do this on the ground in Jezero, which hosted a lake and a river delta billions of years ago. The rover will also collect and cache promising samples for eventual return to Earth, where scientists in well-equipped labs around the world can scrutinize them in exacting detail for any evidence of Martian organisms. (1/13)

Spaceships Don’t Go to the Moon Until They’ve Gone Through Ohio (Source: NASA)
From the South, to the Midwest, to infinity and beyond. The Orion spacecraft for Artemis I has several stops to make before heading out into the expanse, and it can’t go to the Moon until it stops in Ohio. It landed at the Mansfield Lahm Regional Airport on Nov. 24, and then it was transferred to Plum Brook Station where it will undergo a series of environmental tests over the next four months to make sure it’s ready for space. The 40-degree-and-extremely-windy weather couldn’t stop the massive crowd at Mansfield from waiting hours to see the Super Guppy land.

Families huddled together as they waited, some decked out in NASA gear, including one astronaut costume complete with a helmet. Despite the delays, about 1,500 people held out to watch the bulbous airplane touch down. After Orion safely made it to Ohio, the next step was transporting it 41 miles to Plum Brook Station. It was loaded onto a massive truck to make the trip, and the drive lasted several hours as it slowly maneuvered the rural route to the facility. The 130-foot, 38-wheel truck hit a peak speed of about 20 miles per hour. It was the largest load ever driven through the state, and more than 700 utility lines were raised or moved in preparation to let the vehicle pass. Click here. (12/11)

Washington National Cathedral dedicates Bible for newly formed U.S. Space Force (Source: Washington Post)
Religious leaders blessed a King James Bible at Washington National Cathedral on Sunday to be used by the newly formed United States Space Force, including for swearing-in ceremonies, a cathedral spokeswoman said. During the three-minute ceremony, the Right Rev. Carl Wright, the Episcopal Church’s bishop suffragan for the Armed Forces and Federal Ministries, said in part: “May this Bible guard and guide all those who purpose that the final frontier be a place where God will triumph over evil, where love will triumph over hate, and where life will triumph over death.”

The ceremony also was overseen by the Very Rev. Randolph Marshall Hollerith, dean of Washington National Cathedral, and Maj. Gen. Steven A. Schaick, chief of chaplains for the U.S. Air Force. The Space Force, the sixth branch of the U.S. military, was created in December as part of a defense bill signed by President Trump. The force is designed to defend American interests in space, such as satellites used for GPS, communications and missile defense. The Bible was donated by the Museum of the Bible in Washington. (1/12)

Mars Loses Its Water Even Faster Than Anyone Thought (Source: Space.com)
Water might escape Mars more effectively than previously thought, potentially helping to explain how the Red Planet lost its seas, lakes and rivers, a new study finds. Although Mars is now cold and dry, winding river valleys and dry lake beds suggest that water covered much of the Red Planet billions of years ago. What remains of the water on Mars is mostly locked frozen in the Red Planet's polar ice caps, which possess less than 10% of the water that once flowed on the Martian surface, prior work has suggested.

Previous research has also indicated that Martian water mostly escaped into space. Ultraviolet radiation from the sun breaks apart water in Mars' upper atmosphere to form hydrogen and oxygen, and much of this hydrogen then floats off into space, given its extraordinarily light nature and Mars' middling gravity (which is just 40% as strong as Earth's). Recent findings suggested that large amounts of water might regularly make rapid intrusions into Mars' upper atmosphere. To shed light on these events, scientists analyzed data from the Mars-circling Trace Gas Orbiter, which is part of the European-Russian ExoMars program. The scientists focused on the way water was distributed up and down the Martian atmosphere by altitude in 2018 and 2019. (1/9)

Virgin Galactic Enters Its Next Phase (Source: Seeking Alpha)
Virgin Galactic appears to have made it through initial post-IPO/post-SPAC skepticism. The management team have worked the analyst community to good effect, securing lofty price targets amongst tier-1 investment banks. The company is now in a period of relative capital-markets quiet before commercial operations begin. We think that approaching commercial launch, the stock will be driven by sentiment, spaceplane construction milestones, and degree of interest in ticket sales.

We have no reason to expect sentiment alone to fall. Space as a concept will we think continue to be marketed heavily through the next couple years, not least because NASA will need public support for its big spending SLS rocket, its Artemis moon program and so on. They don't quite have to sell war bonds to fund these things - Congress will supply money - but it makes Congress' life easier if there is public support behind all things space. It is no coincidence that if you walk around toy stores right now - physical and virtual - space has arisen as a theme more than at any time we can remember since the Apollo and Shuttle eras. (1/13)

Two New Satellites Will Launch This Year to Track Earth's Rising Oceans (Source: Space.com)
Two new satellites will provide more detailed information about rising sea levels and other ocean changes on Earth. Launching in November, the Sentinel-6/Jason Continuity of Service mission (Jason-CS) will be the longest-running Earth observation mission dedicated to studying the rising oceans. The spacecraft will provide the most sensitive water level measurements as it reveals details about rising oceans, helping to build nearly 40 years of sea level records.

A joint U.S.-European satellite mission, S6 follows in the footsteps of a trio of missions (TOPEX/Poseidon and Jason-1, Ocean Surface Topography/Jason-2, and Jason-3) that have measured how sea levels have risen over the past 30 years. The preceding spacecraft revealed that Earth's oceans rose by an average of 0.1 inches (3 millimeters) in the 1990s, increasing to 0.13 inches (3.4 mm) today. (1/12)

SpaceX Just Blew Up a Starship Tank on Purpose (Source: Teslarati)
Before dawn on January 10th, SpaceX technicians and engineers intentionally blew up a miniature Starship tank in order to test recently-upgraded manufacturing and assembly methods, likely to be used to build the first Starships bound for flight tests and orbit. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk quickly weighed in on Twitter later the same day, revealing some crucial details about the Starship tank test and effectively confirming that it was a success. While somewhat unintuitive, this is the second time SpaceX has intentionally destroyed largely completed Starship hardware in order to determine the limits of the company’s current methods of production and assembly.

Most notably, on November 20th, SpaceX is believed to have intentionally overpressurized the Starship Mk1 prototype in a very similar – albeit larger-scale – test, destroying the vehicle and sending its top tank dome flying hundreds of feet into the air. It’s generally believed that SpaceX (or perhaps even just Musk) decided that Starship Mk1 was not fit to fly, leading the company to switch gears and deem the prototype a “manufacturing pathfinder” rather than the first Starship to fly – which Musk had explicitly stated just a few months prior. (1/12)

Vehicle Assembly Building at KSC Designated as National Civil Engineering Landmark (Source: Florida Today)
The American Society of Civil Engineers has named the Vehicle Assembly Building at KSC as a national historic civil engineering landmark in a ceremony Friday at KSC. Click here. (1/13)

The Oldest Material on Earth Has Been Found in a Meteorite (Source: WESH)
A new study of presolar grains from the Murchison meteorite recovered in Australia has revealed "the oldest solid materials ever found, and they tell us about how stars formed in our galaxy. They're solid samples of stars." The meteorite was recovered in 1969 and presolar grains were isolated from it. "It starts with crushing fragments of the meteorite down into a powder," said Jennika Greer, study co-author and a graduate student at the Field Museum and the University of Chicago. "Once all the pieces are segregated, it's a kind of paste, and it has a pungent characteristic. It smells like rotten peanut butter."

Dissolving the paste in acid reveals the presolar grains, allowing the researchers to determine their age and the type of star they once belonged to. The researchers were able to measure the exposure of the grains to cosmic rays, highly energized particles zipping through our galaxy. Many of the grains recovered were between 4.6 and 4.9 billion years old, while others were older than 5.5 billion years.

They also learned that seven billion years ago, more stars began forming. "We have more young grains than we expected," Heck said. "Our hypothesis is that the majority of those grains, which are 4.9 to 4.6 billion years old, formed in an episode of enhanced star formation. There was a time before the start of the solar system when more stars formed than normal." Astronomers have argued about the rate of star formation. Some believe it's steady and unchanging, while others believe there are peaks and dips. (1/13)

Rand Study: Air Force Should Pick Three Launchers (Source: Space News)
An independent study concluded the U.S. Air Force should support three, rather than two, launch companies in the near future. The study by the Rand Corporation does not recommend that the Air Force change its decision to award national security launch contracts to just two providers later this year, but concludes that the Air Force should find a way to keep a third company in the market in the event of delays in development of new vehicles. Four companies are competing for the contracts, three of which are offering new launch vehicles. The report said that historical data suggests that the first launches of those vehicles could slip by a year or more. The Rand report also noted that uncertainty about the size of the commercial launch market could warrant keeping a third company in the mix. (1/13)