June 28, 2020

L3Harris Wins Four NOAA Study Contracts for Future Satellite Constellation (Source: L3Harris)
L3Harris has been selected by NOAA to conduct four studies which will inform the agency’s next generation of Earth observation satellite architecture. The studies assess mission concepts, spacecraft and instruments. “With these studies, we continue bringing a fresh and innovative approach to help NOAA’s weather satellite constellation continue revolutionizing weather forecasting.”

L3Harris is the industry-leading supplier of operational weather sensors flown on U.S. and international spacecraft — developing NOAA’s Advanced Baseline Imager for the GOES-R satellite series, Cross Track Infrared Sounder for the Joint Polar Satellite System, Japan’s Advanced Himawari Imagers, and South Korea’s Advanced Meteorological Instrument. The company’s environmental monitoring instruments help provide a complete picture of our planet from space, air, and ground. (6/24)

Miami Company Wins Contract for Beach Renourishment to Protect Virginia Spaceport (Source: USACE)
The Norfolk District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers awarded a $23.7 million contract to Miami-based business Continental Heavy Civil Corp. for beach renourishment at the NASA Wallops Island Flight Facility on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. The project includes construction of breakwaters and placing 1.3 million cubic yards of sand along a four-mile stretch of the facility’s waterfront. The sand will be gathered from a borrow site located on the northern section of the Wallops Island Flight Facility.

“We are proud to be handling the oversight for this important project, which helps to reduce risk to one of the nation’s gateways to space,” said Julio Altuna, Norfolk District project manager. “This particular project is of great importance to the district as it is the first time we have renourished a beach using the backpassing method (the use of trucks to haul the sand), giving us more flexibility for future projects.

 After studying the movement of sand along Wallops Island, engineers discovered it was accumulating along the northern side of the island. They decided to forego dredging the material from the ocean floor, and use a method that excavates the sand from the northern portion of the island, and truck it back to the southern part of the island. Work began in the spring and will last about a year. (2/7)

SES Picks Northrop Grumman to Build Two C-Band Satellites (Source: Northrop Grumman)
Northrop Grumman has been selected by SES to build two C-band satellites that will operate in the upper portion of the spectrum. This award supports the Federal Communication Commission’s order to make the lower portion of C-band spectrum available to mobile network operators to further the rollout of critical 5G services in the United States. (6/23)

OneWeb – The Opportunity for the UK (Source: Catapult)
According to press reports, the UK government is a partner in a bid for OneWeb, the UK- headquartered satellite communications company which, following the well-publicised financial difficulties of a major investor, entered Chapter 11 in March. If these reports are true, and the bid is successful, then it is great news for the UK space sector and UK citizens.

OneWeb is a pioneer of a new generation of satellite communications services, built around a “mega constellation” of hundreds of satellites operating in low-earth orbit. These satellites will provide fibre-like quality of service and have a global reach and capacity that has never before been possible, via satellite or otherwise. The company has already launched 74 operational satellites, enough to secure its ITU filings through to 2026 (the only company for whom that is true), all of which are still performing well. It is tremendously significant that the UK intends to take a leading role in this transformational technology.

Satellite mega-constellations have at least as much, if not more, potential than GPS because they are so much more powerful and flexible. OneWeb satellites have been designed to be simple to build and flexible to operate. This is what gives them their lead in the market-place and enables them to be ready to adapt and respond to whatever market demand emerges. Much press attention has focused on the potential for OneWeb to offer an alternative Position, Navigation and Timing (PNT) solution for the UK, following the UK’s withdrawal from the EU and subsequent exclusion from the Galileo program. This is but one possible use of OneWeb services. (6/27)

Air Force, DoD Research Organizations Call For Space Industrial Policies to Counter China (Source: Space News)
The United States has a vibrant space industry that is poised to become both an economic engine and a national security asset. At the same time, U.S. space companies are receiving unprecedented amounts of foreign investment and are the targets of corporate and state-sponsored espionage, a new report warns, calling on the U.S. government to take action. China is by far the most concerning threat to U.S. dominance in the space technology arena, cautions a report from the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Defense Innovation Unit titled “State of the Space Industrial Base: Threats, Challenges and Actions.”

The May 30 report, written by Thomas Cooley and Col. Eric Felt, of AFRL; and Col. Steven Butow, of DIU, summarizes the conclusions of a March seminar held in Silicon Valley. The report paints an alarming picture of the state of play in the burgeoning space industry. The most concerning trends are China’s stealth investments in U.S companies, and the country’s coordinated public-private efforts to dominate markets and advance space technology ahead of the U.S. The theft of intellectual property from American companies is rampant, the report says. The Chinese are penetrating American companies to “obtain and further exploit U.S. technology or to influence those companies in a direction that serves China’s domestic space priorities.” (6/17)

Space Force More Receptive to Reusable Rockets as it Continues to Review SpaceX Missions (Source: Space News)
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 to date has performed 86 launches, in 47 of which the rocket’s first stage landed back on earth. While rocket landings have become the norm for SpaceX launches, none has been done yet in a national security mission. SpaceX is about to make its first attempt to recover the booster after launching a military satellite. The company on June 30 is scheduled to launch a Global Positioning System satellite from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

This will be SpaceX’s second GPS launch. The first was in December 2018 but that mission used an expendable rocket with no legs or grid fins because the Air Force determined the vehicle could not perform the required mission trajectory and also bring the first stage back. The second GPS launch was originally contracted to use an expendable rocket as well, but over the past year launch managers at the U.S. Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center negotiated a deal with SpaceX to allow the company to recover the booster. (6/28)

Beyond Pluto: the Hunt for Our Solar System's New Ninth Planet (Source: Guardian)
In most of the astronomy community there is a palpable excitement about finding the theorized Planet X within our solar system. Much of this excitement centers on the opening of a giant new survey telescope named after Vera C Rubin, the astronomer who, in the 1970s, discovered some of the first evidence for dark matter. Scheduled to begin its full survey of the sky in 2022, the Rubin observatory could find the planet outright or provide the clinching circumstantial evidence that it’s there.

Discovery of the planet would be a triumph, but also a disaster for existing theory about how the solar system was created. “It would change everything we thought we knew about planet formation,” says Sheppard, in another characteristic understatement. In truth, no one has a clue how such a large planet could form that far from the sun. Click here. (6/28)

A Mysterious Rhythm Is Coming From Another Galaxy (Source: The Atlantic)
For about four days, the radio waves would arrive at random. Then, for the next 12, nothing. Then, another four days of haphazard pulses. Followed by another 12 days of silence. The pattern—the well-defined swings from frenzy to stillness and back again—persisted like clockwork for more than a year. Dongzi Li at the University of Toronto started tracking these signals in 2019.

She works on a Canadian-led project, CHIME, that studies astrophysical phenomena called “fast radio bursts.” These invisible flashes, known as FRBs for short, reach Earth from all directions in space. They show up without warning and flash for a few milliseconds, matching the radiance of entire galaxies. Astronomers don’t know what makes them, only that they can travel for millions, even billions, of years from their sources before reaching us.

In the past decade, astronomers managed to detect about 100 of them before they vanished. Li was monitoring FRBs, tracking their arrival times at a radio telescope in British Columbia, when she noticed that unusual pattern from one FRB source—four days on, 12 days off. (This is, perhaps, the purest definition of radio silence.) The FRB, known by the bar-code-esque designation 180916.J0158+65, is the first to show this kind of regular cadence. Astronomers traced the source to a spiral galaxy about 500 million light-years away, where it’s still going strong. (6/26)

Satellite Data Shows How Covid-19 Has Changed The World (Source: IFL Science)
Three of the world's space agencies have teamed up to create an interactive dashboard map that displays the planet-wide changes brought by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 Earth Observation Dashboard was created by NASA, ESA, and JAXA to analyze the recent changes in air quality, water quality, measures of climate change, economic activity, and agriculture. Using a wealth of data gathered from their combined satellite fleets, the dashboard is designed to explore how the environment and human life have been profoundly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, looking at everything from air quality in Los Angeles to asparagus harvests in Germany. Click here. (6/26)

Canadian Government Taps MDA to Build Canadarm3 for Artemis (Source: SpaceQ)
The government today announced through a news release that it intends to sign a contract with MDA to build the Canadarm3. The Canadarm3 is meant to be Canada’s next-generation robotic arm that will incorporate advanced software, including artificial intelligence allowing the robotic arm to function independently after receiving commands from Earth based ground stations or by astronauts on the Lunar Gateway. There may be more than one Canadarm3 attached the Lunar Gateway. NASA has stated interest in a potential arm being located inside the Gateway. While still only a concept, it is something that may be pursued in the future. (6/26)

NASA Extends Deep Space Atomic Clock Mission (Source: NASA)
As the time when NASA will begin sending humans back to the Moon draws closer, crewed trips to Mars are an enticing next step. But future space explorers will need new tools when traveling to such distant destinations. The Deep Space Atomic Clock mission is testing a new navigation technology that could be used by both human and robotic explorers making their way around the Red Planet and other deep space destinations.

In less than a year of operations, the mission has passed its primary goal to become one of the most stable clocks to ever fly in space; it is now at least 10 times more stable than atomic clocks flown on GPS satellites. In order to keep testing the system, NASA has extended the mission through August 2021. The team will use the additional mission time to continue to improve the clock's stability, with a goal of becoming 50 times more stable than GPS atomic clocks. (6/24)

Astronomers Find Mystery Object in Mass Gap (Source: University of Portsmouth)
For decades astronomers have been puzzled by a gap that lies between neutron stars and black holes, but a major new discovery has found a mystery object in this so-called ‘mass gap’. When the most massive stars die, they collapse under their own gravity and leave behind black holes. When stars that are a bit less massive die, they explode in a supernova and leave behind dense, dead remnants of stars called neutron stars.

Gravitational waves are emitted whenever an asymmetric object accelerates, with the strongest sources of detectable gravitational waves being from the collision of neutron stars and black holes. Both of these objects are created at the end of a massive star’s life. The heaviest known neutron star is no more than two and a half times the mass of our sun, or 2.5 solar masses, and the lightest known black hole is about five solar masses. The reason these findings are so exciting is because we’ve never detected an object with a mass that is firmly inside the theoretical mass gap between neutron stars and black holes before.

The new study from the National Science Foundation's Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the Virgo detector in Europe, has announced the discovery of an object of 2.6 solar masses, placing it firmly in the mass gap. "The mystery object may be a neutron star merging with a black hole, an exciting possibility expected theoretically but not yet confirmed observationally. However, at 2.6 times the mass of our sun, it exceeds modern predictions for the maximum mass of neutron stars, and may instead be the lightest black hole ever detected." (6/24)

Catalog of Astronomical "Exotica" Released (Source: Breakthrough Initiatives)
Breakthrough Listen, the initiative to find signs of intelligent life in the Universe, today released an innovative catalog of “Exotica” – a diverse list of objects of potential interest to astronomers searching for technosignatures (indicators of technology developed by extraterrestrial intelligence). The catalog is a collection of over 700 distinct targets intended to include “one of everything” in the observed Universe – ranging from comets to galaxies, from mundane objects to the most rare and violent celestial phenomena.

The comprehensive new catalog is the first in recent times that aims to span the entire breadth of astrophysical phenomena, from distant galaxies, to objects in our own Solar System. The Listen team developed it conceptually, compiled it, and shared it with the astronomical community in the hope that it can guide future surveys – studying life beyond Earth and/or natural astrophysics – and serve as a general reference guide for the field. Click here. (6/22)

UK Spaceport Plans Approved Despite Hundreds of Objections (Source: Belfast Telegraph)
The UKs first spaceport is one step closer to being built, after plans were approved by Highland Council. The spaceport would launch up to 12 times a year, sending small satellites into space, with launches taking place from as early as 2022. Highland Councillors approved the decision, saying launches could bring a lot of tourism to Sutherland.

Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) called the spaceport part of a “national jigsaw puzzle” to get the UK involved in space travel. David Oxley, director of business growth with HIE, said: “Gaining planning approval from the council is a huge step forward for Space Hub Sutherland. “A vertical launch spaceport is a key piece of the national jigsaw, along with the design and manufacture of satellites and launch vehicles, that will ensure Scotland can derive maximum economic benefits from this growing and exciting sector. (6/26)

Spacewalking Astronaut Loses Mirror, Newest Space Junk (Source: Orlando Sentinel)
A spacewalking astronaut added to the millions of pieces of junk orbiting the Earth on Friday, losing a small mirror as soon as he stepped out of the International Space Station for battery work. Commander Chris Cassidy said the mirror floated away at about a foot per second. Mission Control said the mirror somehow became detached from Cassidy's spacesuit. The lost item posed no risk to either the spacewalk or the station, NASA said.

While millions of pieces of space debris orbit Earth, more than 20,000 items including old rocket parts and busted satellites are big enough to be tracked in order to safeguard the space station and functional satellites. Spacewalking astronauts wear a wrist mirror on each sleeve to get better views while working. The mirror is just 5 inches by 3 inches, and together with its band has a mass of barely one-tenth of a pound. (6/26)

Mars Rover to Honor Pandemic Medical Workers (Source: Orlando Sentinel)
NASA’s next Mars rover is honoring all the medical workers on the front lines of the coronavirus battle around the world. With just another month until liftoff, the space agency on Wednesday revealed a commemorative plate attached to the rover, aptly named Perseverance. The rover team calls it the COVID-19 Perseverance plate, designed in the last couple months. The black and white aluminum plate — 3-by-5 inches — shows planet Earth atop a staff entwined with a serpent, a symbol of the medical community. The path of the spacecraft also is depicted, with its origin from Cape Canaveral. (6/26)