July 21, 2020

Raytheon Creates New Space Unit (Source: Breaking Defense)
Raytheon’s newly constituted Intelligence & Space unit is positioning itself as a provider of the “glue” needed to hold together future systems of systems, such as those supporting all-domain operations, explains President Roy Azevedo. The idea is not to focus on selling particular Raytheon products, but helping customers — now both military and civil — to define architectures for connecting the hardware and software in a system. Raytheon Intelligence & Space is one of the four newly organized business units flowing out of the May mega-merger of Raytheon and United Technologies Corp. (UTC) into Raytheon Technologies Corporation. The other three business units are Collins Aerospace Systems, Pratt & Whitney and Raytheon Missiles & Defense. (7/20)

Astra Plans August Launch at Alaska Spaceport (Source: Space News)
Astra announced Monday that its next launch attempt will be in early August. The company said its Rocket 3.1 vehicle will launch from Kodiak, Alaska, between Aug. 2 and 7, with a three-and-a-half-hour launch window each day. The company had attempted a launch of its Rocket 3.0 in March as part of the DARPA Launch Challenge, but had to scrub less than a minute before liftoff on the last day of the competition. That rocket was later damaged during preparations for another launch attempt later in March. (7/20)

"Minibus" Spending Bill Includes DoD and NASA Funding (Source: House Approps Committee)
The full House will debate a fiscal year 2021 "minibus" spending bill next week that includes both the Pentagon and NASA. The House Appropriations Committee said that it will combine seven spending bills into a single minibus bill, including both the defense spending bill and the commerce, justice and science (CJS) spending bill, which funds NASA and NOAA. Those bills were approved by the full committee last week. The Senate has yet to start work on its version of fiscal year 2021 spending bills. (7/20)

Balloon Startup Sells Imagery, Competing with Satellite Remote Sensing (Source: Space News)
A startup planning to compete with satellite imagery using balloons is starting to sell images. Near Space Labs says it is offering images of Texas, taken from cameras on weather balloons, at prices of $10—50 per square kilometer. The company says it can offer images with a resolution of 30 centimeters and weekly updates. In Texas, Near Space Labs is focusing on major cities as well as energy production facilities and land conservation sites in rural areas. (7/20)
 
Baikonur Coronavirus Outbreak Grows (Source: Moscow Times)
There is a major coronavirus outbreak in the city of Baikonur, home to the famous spaceport. Local officials said there has been a major increase in cases, overwhelming the city's hospital. While the official death toll in the city of 40,000 is 30, the actual number of people who died of COVID-19 may be several times higher. The outbreak has not halted work at the nearby spaceport, including a Progress cargo spacecraft launch scheduled for Thursday. (7/21)
 
Active Volcanoes on Venus (Source: AFP)
There may be dozens of active volcanoes on the surface of Venus. Scientists modeling the planet conclude in a new paper that features on the surface called coronae must have been active volcanically in the last few million years if they have certain features, such as a trench surrounding the structure. Of the 133 coronae examined in radar images of Venus taken by NASA's Magellan spacecraft, 37 have those features, suggesting that they either were active in the very recent past or may still be active today. Scientists previously believed the planet was dormant geologically given a lack of plate tectonics. (7/20)

NASA’s Spacesuits Have a Gender Problem. These Women are Fixing it (Source: Christian Science Monitor)
Last fall, NASA revealed new spacesuits designed for the Artemis program, in which the agency aims to land the first woman on the moon. Those new suits, called exploration extravehicular mobility units, or xEMUs for short, will still be modular, says Ms. Aitchison, who leads the design team. But the team uses digital renderings of about 100 body shapes and sizes as a guide.

“We’re designing spacesuits for humans, not men or women specifically, just humans. But over the years, we’ve really had to evolve our thinking about what that means. It’s kind of a shift from thinking not just of men as bigger women or women as small men,” Ms. Aitchison says. “Our bodies are truly different.” Recent classes of astronauts have been roughly half women. “They’re the future of the space program,” says Amy Foster, associate professor of history at the University of Central Florida and author of "Integrating Women Into the Astronaut Corps." So systems are being designed with them in mind. (7/20)

How NASA Built a Self-Driving Car for Its Next Mars Mission (Source: WIRED)
Perseverance is significantly more autonomous than any of NASA’s previous four rovers and is designed to be what Philip Twu, a robotics system engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, calls a “self-driving car on Mars.” Like the ones on Earth, Perseverance will navigate using an array of sensors feeding data to machine vision algorithms. But whereas terrestrial autonomous vehicles are packed with the best computers money can buy, the main computer on Perseverance is about as fast as a high-end PC … from 1997. The only way Perseverance’s poky brain is able to handle all this autonomous driving is because NASA gave it a second computer that acts like a robotic driver.

On previous rovers, the navigation software had to share limited computing resources with all the other systems. So to get from one point to another, the rover would take a picture to get a sense of its surroundings, drive a little, and then stop for a few minutes to figure out its next move. But since Perseverance can offload many of its visual navigation processes to a dedicated computer, it won’t have to take this stop-and-go approach to Martian exploration. Instead, its main computer can figure out how to get Perseverance where it’s supposed to go, and its machine vision computer can make sure it doesn’t hit any rocks on the way. “We’re moving closer and closer to being able to continuously drive and think,” Twu says.

Autonomy is critical for Perseverance’s mission. The distance between Earth and Mars is so large that it can take a radio signal traveling at the speed of light up to 22 minutes to make a one-way trip. The long delay makes it impossible to control a rover in real time, and waiting nearly an hour for a command to make a round trip between Mars and the Earth isn’t practical either. Perseverance has a packed schedule—it needs to drop off a small helicopter for flight tests, then collect dozens of rock samples and find a place on the surface to store them. (A later mission will bring the cache back to Earth so it can be studied for signs of life.) If the rover has any hope of accomplishing all of this in the year allotted for its primary mission, it has to be able to make a lot of navigation decisions by itself. (7/21)