June 16, 2024

China Advances Space Mission with Europe Amid Ambitious Exploration Agenda (Source: Xinhua)
The development of in-orbit detectors for a joint China-Europe space mission has been completed, and they are poised for integration into a satellite platform located in Europe within the year, according to the mission's chief scientist. The Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer (SMILE) is a joint mission between the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the European Space Agency (ESA) that aims to deepen the understanding of the Sun-Earth connection by observing the dynamic interaction between the solar wind and the Earth's magnetosphere. (6/16)

Starship’s Test 4 is a Giant Leap Toward Our Lunar Future (Source: The Hill)
That the Starship’s fourth test flight impressed the world would be to put the matter mildly. Even space observers in China, the West’s main rival in space race 2.0. were awestruck at what SpaceX accomplished. State-owned China Space News is quoted as saying that Starship “surpassed the space shuttle to become the largest and most massive re-entry spacecraft in human history.” Accolades aside, the test flight was just one small step toward the day that fleets of Starships will travel to and from the moon, Mars, and other destinations in the Solar System.

Musk is already preparing for the next Starship test, which may take place in July. Starship is awesome not just because it is impressive launching, flying in space and then landing. It is inspirational because of the future it is likely to enable. That future includes bases on the moon, a settlement on Mars and mining expeditions to the asteroids. Human beings from Earth will venture to space, not just to study its secrets, but to prospect for and bring home its abundant wealth. (6/16)

Ovzon's First Broadband Satellite Reaches Geostationary Slot (Source: Space News)
Ovzon’s first fully owned satellite has reached its geostationary position after a five-month journey in space and passed initial health checks, the Swedish broadband operator announced June 14. Per Norén, Ovzon’s CEO, said Ovzon 3 will enter service “within a few short weeks,” once manufacturer Maxar Technologies completes the remaining in-orbit tests. SpaceX launched Ovzon 3 on a Falcon 9 rocket Jan. 3, closing a chapter on years of launch and manufacturing setbacks for a satellite originally slated to fly in 2021. (6/15)

Where is the Center of the Universe? (Source: Space.com)
The universe is undeniably vast, and from our perspective, it may seem like Earth is in the middle of everything. But is there a center of the cosmos, and if so, where is it? If the Big Bang started the universe, then where did it all come from, and where is it going? Click here. (6/16)

F-22 Raptors Chase SpaceX Falcon 9 Over Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (Source: The Aviationist)
As the rocket climbed, the two F-22 Raptors escorted the Falcon 9 going vertical in full afterburner up to an altitude of 18,000 feet, providing a breathtaking and unique aerial perspective. After reaching this altitude, the two 5th generation stealth jets veered off and flew west towards the 2024 Orlando Air Show. Click here. (6/14)

Amazon, Vrio to Launch Satellite Internet in South America, Competing with Starlink (Source: Reuters)
Amazon and telecommunications firm Vrio will jointly launch a satellite internet service in seven South American countries, the two parties said on Thursday, putting them in direct competition with Elon Musk's Starlink. Vrio, the U.S. firm that manages the Latin American branch of DirecTV as well as Sky Brasil, will offer the service to customers in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. Amazon's Project Kuiper, started by a former Starlink employee, will provide internet using satellites in what is known as low Earth orbit. (6/12)

Timeline Uncertain for Next Starlink Launch Attempt (Source: UPI)
A planned Starlink mission is still grounded after SpaceX aborted a Friday launch right at liftoff. Friday afternoon seemed to be the golden opportunity, but ground control called abort just as the thrusters ignited. SpaceX has not yet confirmed when it would try again. (6/15)

The Roman Space Telescope - NASA's Next Generation Observatory (Source: Dr. Becky)
NASA’s next great observatory that’s set to launch is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (which used to be known as WFIRST). The Roman Space Telescope is the successor to Hubble with a similar wavelength range and the same size telescope mirror. But Roman has been designed to look at a much bigger region of sky at once; its field of view is 100 times bigger than Hubble’s! Roman is set to launch in 2026. Click here. (6/14) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EiTby2Lku8

Metal 3D Printing Accomplished on Space Station, Marking New Era in Orbital Manufacturing (Source: 3D Print.com)
Astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) can now 3D print metal parts. After the successful installation of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) metal 3D printer last January, the first test part has been produced. Developed by Airbus under an ESA contract, the printer uses stainless steel wire and a high-power laser to create parts. This breakthrough allows astronauts to manufacture essential tools and parts directly in space, reducing the need to supply materials from Earth and boosting mission flexibility. (6/11)

NASA Rover Discovers Mysterious Mars Boulder Unlike Any Others (Source: Mashable)
Though this region may look like a barren desert, it was once an ancient river channel that fed into the Jezero crater billions of years ago. As Perseverance traversed the inlet, the rover came upon a hill covered in boulders, with one in particular attracting the science team's attention: a light speckled rock amid a sea of dark lumps.

The boulder is so exceptional, scientists have said it's in a league of its own. Closer analysis with the rover's instruments shows it is likely an anorthosite, a rock type never seen before while exploring Mars, Stack Morgan said, though there have been signs such rocks should exist. Not even the Curiosity rover, which has observed more variety in Gale Crater, has seen one quite like this. (6/15)

SpaceX Pays for Rocket Parts That Fell to Farm of Canadian (Source: Futurism)
Earlier this year, massive pieces of a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft that had delivered four astronauts to the ISS came crashing down on a farm in rural Saskatchewan, Canada. Farmer Barry Sawchuk, who stumbled upon the chunks of space junk, promised at the time to sell the unusual treasure to raise money for a hockey rink that's being built in the town of Ituna, Saskatchewan, where he was born and raised.

Sawchuk can now make good on his promise. Two SpaceX employees showed up at his farm in a U-Haul truck to cart the pieces away, without offering any comment. While Sawchuk didn't reveal how much money he had gotten in return, he's still excited to share the proceeds with his community. "We got something for the skating rink in Ituna and that's what it was always about," he said. (6/13)

Countdown To Summer: Three Landmark Rocket Launches You Must Watch (Source: Forbes)
Expect a rare outing for SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, a debut launch of a new workhorse rocket and an attempt to send astronauts farther into space than at anytime since NASA’s Apollo missions in the early 1970s. Here’s everything you need to know—and dates for your diary. Click here. (6/15)

Hypervelocity Star Spotted Racing Through the Milky Way at 1.3 Million MPH (Source: SciTech Daily)
Thanks to the efforts of a citizen science project called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 and a team of astronomers from around the country, a rare hypervelocity L subdwarf star has been found racing through the Milky Way. More remarkably, this star may be on a trajectory that causes it to leave the Milky Way altogether. The research, led by University of California San Diego Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics Adam Burgasser, was presented today at a press conference during the 244th national meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Madison, Wisconsin. (6/13)

Study Confirms Rotation Of Earth's Inner Core Is Slowing Down, It Began Decreasing (Source: NDTV)
Scientists from the University of Southern California (USC) have confirmed that the Earth's inner core is rotating more slowly than the planet's surface. The ground-breaking research raises important questions about planetary mechanics and may have a significant effect on both the stability of Earth's magnetic field and the duration of our days. The study published in Nature provides evidence that the inner core began to decrease its speed around 2010, marking the first time in approximately 40 years that it is moving slower than the Earth's mantle. (6/16)

Moon Ice in the Artemis Era: What We Still Don't Know (Source: Space News)
A hot topic for moon researchers is whether water ice is an easily accessible resource at the lunar south pole, as experts have long assumed. The search for exploitable water ice is a high priority on NASA’s Artemis agenda as the agency seeks to establish a sustainable human presence on the moon.

Lunar water ice is believed to reside within permanently shadowed regions, or PSRs, contained within super-chilly cold traps, where gasses can freeze to their solid form. However, experts at the Space Resources Roundtable held June 4 through 7 on the campus of the Colorado School of Mines here brought attention to the scarcity of data supporting the prospect of utilizing water ice on the moon. While there appears to be strong evidence that water is present, myriad questions remain that, left unanswered, represent challenges to the assumption that explorers will be able to make use of it. (6/14)

JWST Detects the Earliest, Most Distant Galaxy in the Known Universe—And It's Super Weird (Source: Scientific American)
The record-breaking galaxy, named JADES-GS-z14-0, appears to us as it existed 290 million years after the big bang, when the universe was a mere 2 percent of its present 13.8-billion-year age. This places it well within a mysterious epoch called the cosmic dawn—when the universe’s first stars began to shine and galaxies coalesced.

If it was an early galaxy, JADES-GS-z14-0 was abnormally large and unusually shaped. “At that point I had been looking at thousands of little smudgy galaxies,” Hainline says. “But then this one came along, and I sent it first to my colleague Jake Helton [of the University of Arizona] and said, ‘This is seriously weird.’ And after looking into it more for some time, I knew we had to get a spectrum on it.” (6/14)

Private Space-Junk-Inspection Probe Spots Discarded Rocket in Orbit Up Close (Source: Space.com)
The rocket body was imaged up close on May 23 by the ADRAS-J satellite, which was designed by private Japanese company Astroscale to approach and study a non-communicative, uncontrollable piece of orbital debris.

Images and data collected during these inspections record the condition of the dead satellite, including how structurally intact it is after drifting in the harsh space environment for years. The satellite does not transmit GPS signals to Earth, so by closely approaching, imaging and potentially removing it from orbit in the future, ADRAS-J proves technologies that on-orbit services can be used for things like satellite maintenance or  capturing and deorbiting space debris objects, according to Astroscale. (6/14)

Starship Environmental Challenges at KSC? (Source: BGR)
SpaceX wants to bring Starship to Kennedy Space Center’s pad 39A. The space center is iconic in the space community, having hosted many of the biggest space launches in history. However, comments from nearby residents about growing Starship environmental concerns could cause some problems for SpaceX’s plans.

Some residents around the Cape are concerned about the damage that Starship launches could cause to the Indian River Lagoon, which is already imperiled. One resident claims she moved onto the river in 2011 and that within three years, the waterfront had gone from thriving and “brackish, coastal waterfront” to being dead with no grass, plants, or manatees.

One resident says that rumblings from SpaceX Falcon 9 launches over the past year have caused the plaster in the ceiling and walls of his 105-year-old historic house to crack. He says others in the area have also voiced similar concerns about the structural damage that could be done to their homes if Starship and Super-Heavy boosters start launching from pad 39A. (6/14)

Webb Does the “Impossible” – Space Telescope Captures First Glimpse of an Exoplanet's Interior (Source: SciTech Daily)
James Webb Space Telescope data reveals WASP-107 b has significantly less methane than expected and a surprisingly large core, providing key insights into its atmospheric chemistry and internal dynamics. A surprisingly low amount of methane and a super-sized core hide within the cotton candy-like planet WASP-107 b.

The revelations, based on data obtained by the James Webb Space Telescope, mark the first measurements of an exoplanet’s core mass and will likely underpin future studies of planetary atmospheres and interiors. (6/14)

Milky Way’s Last Major Collision Was Surprisingly Recent (Source: ESA)
Our galaxy has collided with many others in its lifetime. ESA’s Gaia space telescope now reveals that the most recent of these crashes took place billions of years later than we thought. The Milky Way has grown over time as other galaxies have approached, collided with, and been torn apart and consumed by our galaxy. Each collision triggered wrinkles that still ripple through different families of stars, affecting how they move and behave in space.

One of Gaia’s aims is to unravel the history of our galaxy by studying these wrinkles – something it’s doing by pinpointing the positions and motions of over 100 000 stars near to our own. (6/6)

Missile Defense Agency Satellites Track First Hypersonic Launch (Source: C4ISRnet)
The Defense Department’s advanced missile tracking satellites logged their first views of a hypersonic flight test this week, according to the Missile Defense Agency. MDA didn’t disclose the date of the flight, which took off from Wallops Island in Virginia.

“Initial reports show the sensors successfully collected data after launch,” the agency said in a June 14 statement. “MDA will continue to assess flight data over the next several weeks.” The two Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor satellites are part of the Space Development Agency’s constellation of spacecraft designed to detect and observe hypersonic weapons or vehicles, which can travel at speeds of Mach 5 or higher. (6/14)

Is There Life on One of Saturn’s Moons? Scientists Plan a Mission to Find Out (Source: The Guardian)
It is a tiny world, a mere 310 miles in diameter, and was considered until recently to be one of the least interesting moons in the solar system. But Enceladus, one of 146 moons that orbit Saturn, has become a hot astronomical attraction – scientists have discovered that it offers one of the best prospects of finding life on another world in our solar system.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced it has begun planning a mission to take a robot probe across a billion miles of space to investigate. It will be an extraordinarily taxing project. Apart from the colossal distance the probe will have to travel, it will need huge reserves of fuel to maneuver itself into orbit around Enceladus and then land on the ice-coated surface. (6/15)

Japan's Space Agency Helps to Target Advertising with Satellite Photos of Crops (Source: The Register)
Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and marketing agency Dentsu have developed a means to use snaps captured by satellites to smooth out agricultural supply chains and enhance advertising. As explained in a Thursday announcment, JAXA and Dentsu worked with the Tsumagoi Village Agricultural Cooperative Association to assess the growth of crops by analyzing images captured from orbit.

Those efforts accurately predicted the volume of 2023's cabbage harvest in one village. Next steps in the project will see weather data added to the mix, to enable predictions of when the harvest will come in. Dentsu plans to use those predictions to improve forecasted shipping dates for produce, and guess at prices. (6/14)

State Air Guard Units Could Be Moved to Space Force Despite Governors' Opposition Under Senate Proposal (Source: Military.com)
The Senate Armed Services Committee has included a provision in its version of a must-pass defense bill that would allow the Air Force to bypass state governors in transferring certain space-focused National Guard units into the active-duty Space Force, but with some exceptions.

The bill "requires the U.S. Air Force to transfer certain space functions of the Air National Guard to the U.S. Space Force," but adds it "shall not reduce the end strength for the affected state Air National Guard organizations." The Senate committee passed its version of the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, on Thursday evening, but it still faces a long journey of negotiations with the House and votes before becoming law. (6/14)

Physicists Measured Earth’s Rotation Using Quantum Entanglement (Source: Science News)
Scientists sent pairs of photons through a device called a quantum interferometer. Inside, the photons could traverse loops of optical fiber either clockwise or counterclockwise. The photons were entangled with one another, a type of quantum correlation that links the states of two particles. In this case, the entanglement meant the two photons took the same path. And rather than picking one direction or the other, the pair took on a strange state called a superposition, traversing a combination of the two paths.

Due to Earth rotating underneath, the two different paths corresponded to slightly different travel distances. That made the photons’ two superposed components slightly out of sync when they exited the labyrinth, causing quantum interference. Measuring that interference implied a rotation speed that agreed with Earth’s known rotation rate. (6/14)

NASA-Led Mission to Map Air Pollution Over Both U.S. Coasts (Source: NASA)
This summer between June 17 and July 2, NASA will fly aircraft over Baltimore, Philadelphia, parts of Virginia, and California to collect data on air pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions. The campaign supports the NASA Student Airborne Research Program for undergraduate interns. (6/14)

AFWERX taps LeoLabs to Demo Radar for Monitoring Sats in Very Low Orbits (Source: Breaking Defense)
The Air Force’s innovation hub, AFWERX, has awarded LeoLabs a contract to demonstrate a new radar system aimed at tracking objects in very low Earth orbit (VLEO). Dan Ceperley said that VLEO — typically defined as between 150 and 350 kilometers in altitude — is increasingly being used, including by Russia and China.

Russia’s “zombie sat“, Resurs-P, that suddenly in 2022 woke up after years of inactivity and began maneuvering, “was technically at kind of the upper end of VLEO [at] like 330 kilometers,” he said. China’s Shiyan-25 Earth observation technology demonstrator launched in June 2023 and the new Chutian-001 experimental remote sensing satellite launched on May 21 likewise are stationed in VLEO, he said. But Ceperley noted that the company first became concerned about keeping tabs on VLEO back in 2019 when India tested an anti-satellite missile that destroyed one of the country’s own birds at about 283 kilometers. (6/13)

Falcon 9 Shuts Down Swiftly After Engines Ignite (Source: Florida Today)
As the SpaceX webcast announcer counted down the final 10 seconds of Friday's Falcon 9 launch attempt, he said "ignition" when the clock struck zero. And fast-moving fumes and smoke billowed from beneath the 230-foot-tall rocket at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. But the Falcon 9 flight computers — which take control of launch countdowns during the last minute before liftoff — swiftly shut down the engines. "Abort," the announcer said three seconds after T-0.

After the unusual 5:07 p.m. EDT post-ignition scrub, SpaceX announced, "a new target launch date will be shared once available." No further information was publicly released. SpaceX's thrice-delayed Starlink 10-2 mission got postponed Wednesday and scrubbed Thursday amid poor weather. (6/14)

A Wild Plan to Avert Catastrophic Sea-Level Rise (Source: The Atlantic)
The loss of Thwaites would be catastrophic. If it goes, it would likely lead to the loss of much of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. That would raise sea levels by up to 10 feet. Even five feet of sea-level rise would erase hundreds of islands from the Earth’s surface. Subglacial watersheds channel glacial meltwater into hidden streams and rivers that lubricate the glacier's slide into the sea. Some pool into lakes that eventually discharge as the ice above them moves.

Satellite-laser scans have recently revealed more than 400 areas across Antarctica that pulsate faintly in time lapse, like subwoofers, as the lakes deep beneath them fill and drain. Some are as large as Lakes Erie or Ontario. Slawek Tulaczyk wants to intervene at the glacier. His is only one of the preservation schemes that glaciologists are considering. He imagined drilling down to its subglacial lakes to pump the water out of them. The remaining water underneath the ice would likely flow toward the empty lakes, drying out portions of the glacier’s underside.

With luck, a cooling feedback loop would be triggered. Thwaites would freeze in place. Catastrophic sea-level rise would be avoided. “The beauty of this idea is that you can start small,” Tulaczyk told me. “You can pick a puny glacier somewhere that doesn’t matter to global sea level.” This summer, Martin Truffer, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, will travel to the Juneau Icefield in Alaska to look for a small slab of ice that could be used in a pilot test. (6/14)

Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex is Making Room for ‘Next Big Thing’ (Source: MyNews 13)
The Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex (KSCVC) is currently planning a 15-year development project which aims to relocate and construct a new administrative building, build a new warehouse, and create a new experience labeled the "Next Big Thing."

According to the proposal, KSCVC plans to construct a new 50,000-square-foot administrative building to accommodate the growth of the park and staff needs. This new building will be nearly twice the size of the current administrative building and will include offices, break rooms, utilities, and storage areas.

It will be relocated to the current site of Parking Lot 2, a surface lot used for parking. Construction of the new administrative building is anticipated to begin in the summer of 2024 and is expected to be completed within 12 months. KSCVC also seeks to attract additional visitors with the “Next Big Thing” (NBT) experience, where park goers can enjoy an “enhanced interactive environment of NASA’s past and future.” (6/13)