November 28, 2022

China Launches Reconnaissance Satellite (Source: Xinhua)
China launched a reconnaissance mission Sunday. A Long March 2D rocket lifted off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center at 7:23 a.m. Eastern and placed Yaogan-36 into orbit. Chinese media described Yaogan-36 as a remote sensing satellite, but it is widely believed to be a military reconnaissance spacecraft. (11/28)

China Poses Increasing Threat in Military Space Race, Top U.S. General Says (Source: Reuters)
Rapid advancements in China’s military capabilities pose increasing risks to American supremacy in outer space, the head of the United States military’s space wing said on Monday. Nina Armagno, director of staff of the U.S. Space Force, said Beijing had made significant progress in developing military space technology, including in areas such as satellite communications and re-useable spacecraft, which allow countries to rapidly scale up their space programs.

“I think it's entirely possible they could catch up and surpass us, absolutely,” Armagno said at an event in Sydney run by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a research organisation partly funded by the U.S. and Australian governments. “The progress they've made has been stunning, stunningly fast.” (11/27)

China Names Next Crew for TSS (Source: Xinhua)
China has named the crew of its next mission to its space station, launching Tuesday. The Shenzhou-15 mission will be commanded by Fei Junlong, who will be joined by Deng Qingming and Zhang Lu. Fei commanded Shenzhou-6, China's second crewed mission in 2005, while Deng and Zhang will be making their first flights despite being selected as astronauts years ago. Launch is scheduled for 10:08 a.m. Eastern Tuesday, with the spacecraft going to the Chinese Tiangong space station, relieving the Shenzhou-14 crew there. (11/28)

China Details Lunar Plans (Source: Space News)
China has provided new details about its long-term human and robotic lunar exploration plans. China is currently working towards launch of the Chang'e-6, 7 and 8 missions between 2026 and 2028 that include a farside sample return mission and testing technology for a future lunar base. China is also now working towards a crewed lunar landing before 2030. The mission would use two launches of a new crew launch vehicle to send three astronauts to the moon, with two landing on the surface for around six hours. Those missions support the long-term goal of establishing an International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) in the 2030s. (11/28)

ESA Meeting Success (Source: Space News)
Officials declared the European Space Agency's ministerial council meeting a success last week despite falling short of funding goals. The two-day meeting wrapped up Wednesday with ESA securing 16.9 billion euros ($17.5 billion) over the next three years. That was an increase of nearly 17%, before inflation, over what ESA members provided the agency at the last ministerial in 2019, but short of the 18.5 billion euros the agency sought going into this year's meeting.

ESA officials said they secured funding for all of their key priorities, including the ExoMars rover, support for the E.U.-led IRIS² secure connectivity constellation and work on large cargo lunar landers to participate in the Artemis program. Some programs, though, may need to be scaled back to account for reduced funding. (11/28)

Boeing's Millennium Missile-Warning Satellite Design Passes Review (Source: Space Review)
Millennium Space Systems announced Wednesday its proposed satellite design for a U.S. Space Force missile-warning constellation passed a critical review. The Boeing subsidiary is developing a sensor satellite for a constellation that the Space Force plans to field in medium Earth orbit (MEO) to detect and track hypersonic missiles. Millennium Space and Raytheon in May 2021 were selected to design separate MEO satellite concepts. The Space Force plans to seek industry bids next year for as many as four MEO satellites for a projected multi-orbit architecture. (11/28)

Maxar Compensates Echostar for Satellite Production Delay (Source: Space News)
Maxar Technologies is providing compensation for production issues that have delayed the launch of Echostar's Jupiter 3 satellite to at least the first half of 2023. That compensation, Echostar said last week, includes relief on future payments and expanded recourse if there are further delays in the launch of the satellite. Maxar said it is waiving all remaining milestone payments that Echostar owed the manufacturer related to Jupiter 3, totaling about $60 million. Jupiter 3, ordered in 2017, was originally scheduled to launch in 2021. (11/28)

NASA Ingenuity Helicopter Makes Short Test Flight on Mars (Source: NASA)
NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter made its shortest flight to date last week. The helicopter flew up to an altitude of five meters, hovered and then landed on the 18-second flight. The flight was intentionally brief to test new software designed to allow the helicopter to better navigate over rockier terrain as it keeps pace with the Perseverance rover. (11/28)

Flocks of Assembler Robots Show Potential for Making Larger Structures (Source: Space Daily)
Researchers at MIT have made significant steps toward creating robots that could practically and economically assemble nearly anything, including things much larger than themselves, from vehicles to buildings to larger robots. The new work, from MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), builds on years of research, including recent studies demonstrating that objects such as a deformable airplane wing and a functional racing car could be assembled from tiny identical lightweight pieces - and that robotic devices could be built to carry out some of this assembly work.

Now, the team has shown that both the assembler bots and the components of the structure being built can all be made of the same subunits, and the robots can move independently in large numbers to accomplish large-scale assemblies quickly. The new work is reported in the journal Nature Communications Engineering, in a paper by CBA doctoral student Amira Abdel-Rahman, Professor and CBA Director Neil Gershenfeld, and three others.

A fully autonomous self-replicating robot assembly system capable of both assembling larger structures, including larger robots, and planning the best construction sequence is still years away, Gershenfeld says. But the new work makes important strides toward that goal, including working out the complex tasks of when to build more robots and how big to make them, as well as how to organize swarms of bots of different sizes to build a structure efficiently without crashing into each other. (11/28)

How a Solar Storm Could Bring Your Plane Crashing Down (Source: Daily Beast)
A passenger jet is flying steadily over Alaska when the pilot notices that the coordinates on the console look incorrect. After a few seconds, the radiation counter begins to tick up. Almost simultaneously, a warning from the local air traffic control arrives, letting flights know that an intense solar event has started. The pilot realizes that the plane should move a few thousand feet lower and asks the traffic control for permission, only to find that communication has cut out. Dozens of other pilots are experiencing the same issue in their own cockpits at the moment.

This is a hypothetical scenario—as far as has been documented by modern aviation records, nothing of this sort of impending disaster has ever actually happened. But according to reports by aviation regulators, the issue is not whether it will happen, but when. Eruptive events on the sun’s surface do not directly affect life on Earth but they are a known threat to aviation and other technologies. “The largest solar radiation storms can result in enhanced radiation at aviation flight levels,” said Hazel Bain, a research scientist at NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center. (11/28)

Meet the Host of NASA's First Spanish-Language Podcast (Source: NPR)
The teams at NASA make discoveries and explore galaxies — and soon the agency will have a new venture here on Earth, piloting a full season of its first Spanish-language podcast in 2023. Host and producer Noelia González tells NPR's Michel Martin that Universo Curioso de la NASA began as a bonus episode — in Spanish — for a series on the 2-year-old flagship podcast Curious Universe about last year's launch of the James Webb Space Telescope.

The podcast is part of the "NASA en Español" mission to include the voices of Spanish-speaking scientists and engineers as well as share science with the Spanish-speaking community. Members of the team are looking to compete in the podcasting space next year with more episodes and with consistent release dates that don't rely on other mission timelines, like the Artemis I launch earlier this month or the DART project. (11/28)

Planetary Defense: NASA's Arsenal for Protecting Earth From Potential Killer Asteroids (Source: Florida Today)
An asteroid the size of Texas hurtles straight toward Earth, threatening to kill most living things on the planet. Small teams of scientists scramble to alert world leaders that repeatedly dismiss the warnings. But when it becomes clear that the scientists were right, space agencies race to hastily launch rockets armed with nuclear warheads to blow the asteroid apart in a last-ditch effort to save humanity.

Thankfully, experts say, this is a scenario strictly reserved for big-budget Hollywood films. The reality is the nation's leaders are very aware of the threat of such a collision and have tasked NASA with defending the planet from wayward space rocks. Researchers worldwide contributed to the first-ever planetary-defense mission in September when a NASA spacecraft managed to nudge an asteroid into a new orbit. While that tiny asteroid posed no threat to Earth, the mission proved for the first time that the trajectory of a space object could be artificially altered.

Given the vastness of space and our ability to constantly scan the skies for such threats the chance of a planet-killer taking us out by surprise is extremely slim. NASA and a global community of skywatchers relentlessly keep a worldwide network of large telescopes busy 24/7, hunting for whatever threats may be lurking in our solar system or even beyond. And some of them are closer than you might think. "We have asteroids that come closer (to Earth) than the moon on a regular basis," Johnson said. (11/27)

Equipment Defect Delays First Commercial Vega C Flight (Source: Space News)
Arianespace said Nov. 25 it is delaying the first commercial flight for Europe’s upgraded Vega C rocket by nearly a month to replace defective equipment. The company discovered the defect on the medium-lift rocket as it was being armed in Kourou, French Guiana, to launch the final two satellites for Airbus’ Pléiades Neo Earth-imaging constellation Nov. 24. Vega C and the high-resolution Pléiades Neo 5 and 6 satellites are in a safe condition, Arianespace said in a short statement. (11/25)

Hubble Telescope Observes Surreal Galactic Collision (Source: Gizmodo)
The James Webb Space Telescope has been getting all the attention these days, but Hubble, in space since 1990, continues to make stunning astronomical observations. The latest Hubble image shows Arp-Madore 417-391, a galactic merger located 670 million light years from Earth. The celestial spectacle can be seen from the southern hemisphere in the Eridanus constellation. As NASA explains, the “two galaxies were distorted by gravity and twisted into a colossal ring, leaving their cores nestled side by side.” (11/25)

India's First Private Rocket Company Looks to Slash Satellite Costs (Source: Reuters)
The startup behind India's first private space launch plans to put a satellite into orbit in 2023 and expects to be able to do so at half of the cost of established launch companies, the founders of Skyroot Aerospace told Reuters. The Hyderabad-based company, backed by Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, GIC, says the $68 million it has raised will fund its next two launches. Skyroot has been in contact with more than 400 potential customers, it says.

Thousands of small satellite launches are planned in coming years as companies build out networks to deliver broadband services like SpaceX's Starlink and to power applications like tracking supply chains or monitoring offshore oil rigs. Skyroot faces both established and up-and-coming rocket launch rivals that also promise to bring down costs. In China, startup Galactic Energy put five satellites into orbit last week in its fourth successful launch.

In Japan, Space One, backed by Canon Electronics and IHI Corp,  plans to launch 20 small rockets per year by the middle of the decade. But Skyroot, which launched a test rocket last week, expects to cut the cost of a launch by 50% compared with current pricing for established competitors like Richard Branson's Virgin Orbit and California-based Rocket Lab. (11/26)