November 24, 2022

Colossal Exoplanet Is One of The Most Massive Super-Earths Ever Discovered (Source: Science Alert)
A newly found exoplanet just 200 light-years away could shed new light on one of planetary science's strangest mysteries. At around 1.8 times the radius of Earth, the object named TOI-1075b ranks among the biggest examples of a super-Earth exoplanet we've found to date. It also sits solidly in what we call the small-planet radius gap; a seeming deficit of planets between 1.5 and 2 Earth radii.

Slightly smaller rocky super-Earths have been found. So have slightly larger worlds bulked up with puffy atmospheres, known as mini-Neptunes. But in between, it's something of a desert. That added girth isn't all puff, either. TOI-1075b's mass is 9.95 times that of Earth's. That's way too hefty for a gaseous world; at the inferred density, the exoplanet is likely to be rocky, like Mercury, Earth, Mars, and Venus. This peculiarity makes it an ideal candidate for probing theories of planetary formation and evolution. (11/24)

As Never Seen Before: NASA’s Webb Reveals an Exoplanet Unlike Any in Our Solar System (Source: SciTech Daily)
WASP-39 b is a planet unlike any in our solar system – a Saturn-sized behemoth that orbits its star closer than Mercury is to our Sun. When NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope initially began regular science operations, this exoplanet was one of the first to be examined. The exoplanet science community is buzzing with excitement over the results.

Webb’s incredibly sensitive instruments have provided a profile of WASP-39 b’s atmospheric constituents and identified a plethora of contents, including water, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, sodium, and potassium. The findings bode well for the capability of Webb’s instruments to conduct a broad range of investigations of all types of exoplanets, including small, rocky worlds like those in the TRAPPIST-1 system. (11/23)

EchoStar and Maxar Amend Agreement for Hughes JUPITER 3 Satellite Production (Source: Yahoo Finance)
EchoStar Corp. announced an amended agreement with Maxar Technologies for production of the EchoStar XXIV satellite, also known as JUPITER 3. The satellite, designed for EchoStar's Hughes Network Systems division, is under production at Maxar's facility in Palo Alto, CA. The amended agreement compensates EchoStar for past production delays by providing relief on future payments and expands EchoStar's recourse in the event of any further delays. The satellite is currently planned to launch in the first half of 2023. (11/22)

Aerojet Rocketdyne Plans Massive New 379,000-Square Foot Defense Facility in Huntsville (Source: AL.com)
Aerojet Rocketdyne, which makes rocket engines and motors for the aerospace and defense industry, will expand its Huntsville operations with more jobs in a 379,000-square foot manufacturing facility near Huntsville International Airport, the aerospace and defense contractor said today.

Operations in the leased building will begin in 2023 and “allow Aerojet Rocketdyne to increase manufacturing capacity for the nation’s defense production needs,” the company said. It will take some work from the company’s Camden, Ark., location but the amount was not specified. The move “better positions the Camden site to support continued growth of vital energetics capabilities for defense programs across multiple domains,” the company said. (11/21)

Crashed Meteor May Have Been A UFO, Scientists Say (Source: MSN.com)
A Harvard professor believes that a meteor that crashed into the ocean near Australia in 2014 might have actually been a UFO. Now, Professor Abi Loeb is leading a $2.2 million scientific expedition (per 7 News in Australia) into the middle of the southwestern Pacific Ocean in order to recover the mysterious space object. For many, life in space is an unquestionable reality, while others find the idea of aliens hard to believe. While many believe the limited knowledge we have of life on other planets is due to the government conspiracies covering up UFO sightings, others believe that we just haven't received enough evidence here on earth yet.

Nearly a decade ago, the meteor crashed into the Pacific Ocean, about 160km off the coast of Papua New Guinea, an island country in Oceania just north of the coast of Queensland, Australia.

The material that formed the meteor is tougher than iron, which has led scientists to wonder if the body of space matter is simply an unusual rock or perhaps something more unusual-a bit of a spacecraft created by an alien species from a developed civilization far, far away from our planet. This expedition has been created to discover which one it is. Whether unusual rock or UFO, we will soon find out. (11/23)

European Space Agency Names First Disabled Astronaut (Source: DW.com)
The European Space Agency (ESA) unveiled its newest recruits on Wednesday, with two women and three men and the world's first "parastronaut" making up the new class. According to the ESA, no major Western agency has ever sent a "parastronaut" to space. The new class includes "astronauts with a physical disability" that "will start a 12-month basic training at ESA's European Astronaut Center in spring 2023," the agency said. ESA  said it appointed British Paralympic sprinter John McFall to take part in a feasibility study during astronaut training.

While his recruitment is a first, McFall still has a long way to go to be part of a space mission. He has been selected to assess the conditions needed for people with disabilities to take part in future missions, the 22-nation agency said. McFall has worked as a trauma and orthopedic specialist in the south of England. He had his leg amputated after a motorcycle accident. He subsequently went on to represent Britain as a Paralympic sprinter at the 2008 event in Beijing involving athletes with a range of physical disabilities. (11/23)

King of Rockets, NASA’s SLS Could Soon be Usurped by SpaceX’s Starship (Source: Orlando Sentinel)
NASA’s Space Launch System roared off the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center and into the record books, for now. The SLS rocket, using a combination of two solid rocket boosters with a core stage consisting of four repurposed RS-25 engines from the space shuttle program, produced 8.8 million pounds of thrust to lift the Orion spacecraft into orbit and help send it on its way to the moon for the uncrewed Artemis I mission.

Its success makes it the most powerful rocket to ever blast into space, besting the power of the Saturn V rockets used during the Apollo moon missions five decades ago, which produced 7.5 million pounds of thrust. The Soviet Union attempted to launch a rocket called the N-1 on four attempts from 1969-1972 that produced 10.2 million pounds of thrust, but they all failed midflight and never made it to space.

The future, though, could see Elon Musk’s in-development Starship with Super Heavy booster for SpaceX not only take the title of most powerful rocket to make it to orbit but also be considered as an alternative for crew and cargo launch capability. Using 33 of SpaceX’s new Raptor 2 engines, the Super Heavy booster will produce 17 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, which is nearly double that seen, heard and felt on the Artemis I launch. (11/23)

Einstein Industries Ventures joins ESA Investor Network (Source: Space Daily)
ESA's Investor Network continues to grow, with Einstein Industries Ventures as its latest member via the signature of a collaboration agreement. Over the next ten years, Einstein Industries Ventures' management team targets a fund worth euro 300 million to invest in Europe's leading growth-stage New Space downstream technologies, Earth observation and sensor technology.

In line with ESA's Agenda 2025 to commercialize space, one of the main goals of ESA's Commercialisation department is to mobilise a pool of influential financial market participants to develop and integrate informed space investment decision-making capacity in the space domain thereby increasing and facilitating access to finance for European space companies. Einstein Industries Ventures is an independent venture capital company based in Germany. It finances start-up companies during their critical growth phase. Its primary focus is on industrial value creation. (11/21)

NOAA Adopts Finland's CubeSat-Proven Space Weather Monitor (Source: Space Daily)
An advanced X-ray monitoring instrument tested for space aboard an ESA CubeSat will serve as an operational space weather payload on the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Next Lagrange 1 Series satellite, currently planned for launch in 2028, which will operate 1.5 million km from Earth, keeping watch for eruptions from our Sun. Made in Finland, the X-ray Flux Monitor was launched aboard the Sunstorm CubeSat - about the size of a big, thick, paperback book - by Europe's Vega rocket in August last year.

This stripped-down version of the full-scale XFM instrument, formally known as XFM-CS, has since amassed more than a year's worth of data, observing hundreds of X-ray flares, dozens of them being associated with the occurrence of coronal mass ejections (CMEs). CMEs are huge explosions involving ejections of up to a billion tons of coronal plasma from the Sun at a time, which intensify the solar wind and are leading drivers of space weather. (11/21)

Whatnot Offers Black Friday Deal for Blue Origin Suborbital Flight (Source: BusinessWire)
Whatnot, the largest live shopping platform in the U.S., today announced the kickoff of its biggest Black Friday shopping event ever, ending with an out-of-this-world opportunity to win a flight to space with Blue Origin. Among the items available is an opportunity to win a flight to space on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket.

Of those eligible to win, one lucky individual will be selected and go through further qualification screenings, adhering to the flight standards, before being named the official winner. In addition to a select winner, Whatnot will also send a handful of collectible items that will be auctioned off at a later date. (11/22)

Space Firms Want White House Fix for Regulatory Tangle, but Disagree on How (Source: Breaking Defense)
Commercial space firms working on new types of orbital technologies took the opportunity during a recent White House talk to beseech the National Space Council to overhaul the current messy regulatory regime and help eliminate the confusion, and costly licensing delays, that they say it’s causing.

At stake is the question of what agency is responsible for what is now known as “mission authorization,” a term of art first proposed by the Obama administration but also embraced by the Trump White House’s 2020 National Space Policy, for oversight of non-traditional space activities. It’s essentially who gives the final green light to private firms for projects in space — a simple concept with a complicated reality.

“Mission authorization has come to mean an additional regulatory authority that does not currently exist and would address the ‘gap’ that currently exists between new commercial space activities and the three existing licensing processes,” Weeden explained. Filling that gap is important because the 1967 Outer Space Treaty binds the US government, like all signatories, to ensuring “authorization and continuing supervision” of all non-government space activities — and at the moment it isn’t clear what federal agency is supposed to be doing that for operations that do not fall squarely into one of the current regulatory baskets. (11/22)

Europe Looks to Commercialize Lunar Exploration Efforts (Source: Space News)
The European Space Agency is looking to create a more sustainable path for space, starting with growing commercial partnerships in lunar exploration. Bernhard Hufenbach, commercialization and innovation team leader at ESA, said his team has a very simple vision “to extend the economy into space to boost the benefits space exploration delivers.”

“We’re trying to stimulate demand for the services by customers and then either supporting them to deliver the business cases and to try to attract and help industry to attract third party funding… So instead of procuring spacecraft hardware, we are procuring services.”

One of these initiatives centers on setting up services to assist lunar exploration. ESA will buy communications services and fly payloads on Lunar Pathfinder, a small communications satellite that ESA and Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL) plans to launch in 2024. (11/22)

NASA Awards Launch Services Task Order for TROPICS CubeSats Mission (Source: NASA)
NASA has selected Rocket Lab USA Inc. of Long Beach, California, to provide the launch service for the agency’s Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation Structure and Storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) mission, as part of the agency's Venture-class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) launch services contract.

Rocket Lab is one of 13 companies NASA selected for VADR contracts in 2022. NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, manages the VADR contracts. As part of VADR, the fixed-price indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts have a five-year ordering period with a maximum total value of $300 million across all contracts.

The TROPICS mission consists of four CubeSats intended for two low-Earth orbital planes and is part of NASA’s Earth System Science Pathfinder Program. Rocket Lab will launch the TROPICS satellites into their operational orbits during a 60-day period (first insertion to final insertion). (11/23)

China Open to Space Exchanges, Cooperation (Source: Space Daily)
President Xi Jinping reiterated on Monday China's wish to work with other nations to carry out space exploration and development. Xi wrote in a congratulatory letter to the United Nations/China 2nd Global Partnership Workshop on Space Exploration and Innovation that the country is willing to deepen its cooperation and exchanges with other nations to advance space exploration and the peaceful use of outer space and to make better use of space technology for the interests of all people around the world.

In the letter, which was read at the workshop's opening ceremony in Haikou, capital of Hainan province, the president noted that China has been active in space exploration and has conducted a number of remarkable missions including the Chang'e lunar programs, the Tianwen 1 Mars expedition and the Tiangong space station program. These Chinese programs have served to expand mankind's understanding and knowledge about the universe and boost the common welfare of all people on the planet, he said. (11/23)

With New Supplies, ISS Astronauts to Research Mending Broken Bones (Source: Space Daily)
New research on the International Space Station will include implantable drug delivery devices and an adhesive that can stimulate bone growth. SpaceX will launch a resupply mission as early as Tuesday to deliver a payload of items developed by commercial companies that need to be tested in orbit. The launch window opens at 3:54 p.m. EST.

It will be the 26th commercial resupply service mission by SpaceX and NASA. The Falcon 9 rocket is to be launched from the Cape Canaveral Spaceport. The bone-mending injectable adhesive, called Tetranite, was developed by medical device company RevBio. The adhesive is intended to speed bone growth after breaks and fractures. The research will focus on how Tetranite performs in microgravity. (11/21)