June 4, 2024

China's Lunar Probe Could Return With Answer to Origins of Solar System (Source: Newsmax)
China's Chang'e-6 lunar probe looks set to begin its historic journey back to Earth from the moon's far side after collecting samples that scientists expect will help answer key questions about the early evolution of the solar system. After landing, Chang'e-6 had a 14-hour window to drill, excavate, and seal 2 kg of material, with the goal of being the first probe to bring back such samples from the moon's far side. This compares to the 21-hour window Chang'e-5 had in 2020.

The Chang'e-6 samples will be transferred and sealed on a rocket booster atop the lander, which will launch back into space, dock with another spacecraft in lunar orbit and transfer the samples. "To understand [the period of extremely heavy bombardment on the Moon], you need to anchor those events, and that's going to be done with samples from the lunar far side from the South-Pole Aitken Basin." (6/3)

China Collects Far Side Samples, Launches Them From Surface (Source: Space News)
China's Chang'e-6 mission has collected lunar samples from the far side of the moon and launched them into lunar orbit. The Chang’e-6 mission ascent vehicle lifted off from atop the mission lander in Apollo Crater at 7:38 p.m. Eastern, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced. The ascent vehicle will rendezvous with the Chang'e-6 orbiter, which will bring the samples back to Earth in late June. The ascent vehicle blasted off two days after the spacecraft landed. During its time on the surface, the lander collected samples and operated several other instruments, as well as deployed a small rover that took images of the lander. (6/4)

Aalto Raises $100 Million for Stratospheric 'Stratollites' (Source: Space News)
Aalto has raised $100 million to fund development of stratospheric vehicles that could compete with satellites. The investment was led by mobile operator NTT Docomo, which is looking to use Aalto’s fixed-winged Zephr drone to keep subscribers connected in areas without terrestrial connectivity that are traditionally served from space. Several other Japanese companies participated in the funding round. Aalto said it marks the start of a strategic alliance to commercialize non-terrestrial connectivity and Earth observation services across Asia using payloads attached to HAPS, or high-altitude platform stations. HAPS promise significantly lower latency than satellites in orbit because they would operate much closer to Earth. (6/4)

Vessel Tracking Now Widely Commercialized (Source: Space News)
The ability to track ships from space, once a highly classified technology, is now being widely developed commercially. That technology relies on using satellites to monitor radio-frequency (RF) emissions from ships and triangulate their positions. Interest in RF monitoring from space has soared in recent years as geopolitical conflicts disrupt vital maritime shipping lanes and supply chains, underscoring vulnerabilities. Companies have developed constellations of smallsats capable of performing that tracking, and are now looking to expand into adjacent applications, like tracking RF emitters on land. (6/4)

Congress Directs NASA to Establish Habitable Worlds Project Office (Source: Space News)
Congressional language intended to jumpstart work on a new space telescope had the side effect of forcing NASA to shut down a group assisting in its development. A provision in the fiscal year 2024 appropriations bill directed NASA to establish a project office for the Habitable Worlds Observatory at the Goddard Space Flight Center by the end of the fiscal year. That took the agency by surprise, since it had not planned to formally set up a project office for that observatory for several years.

At a meeting Monday, NASA said that a committee it chartered last year called the Science, Technology, Architecture Review Team (START) with academic and industry representatives, designed to help formulate the scientific objectives and instrument requirements for the telescope, will have to be closed to avoid conflicts of interest with future calls for the science team and instruments. Shutting down the START, NASA said, won't affect work being done by volunteer working groups on science goals for the telescope or the agency's overall strategy to focus on technology maturation first before starting design of the telescope. (6/4)

Astra Consolidates Facilities in California (Source: Space News)
Cash-strapped Astra Space is consolidating its facilities. The company, in a recent quarterly SEC filing, said it will shift satellite propulsion work being done at a facility in Sunnyvale, California, to its Alameda, California, headquarters. The company opened the Sunnyvale facility last year devoted to production of spacecraft electric thrusters, allowing its Alameda factory to focus on launch vehicle work that has since been deferred. Astra did not disclose a reason for the consolidation, but noted it remains low on cash as it works to close a deal to take the company private. (6/4)

SpaceX Informs FCC of Intent to Offer Direct-to-Smartphone Service (Source: Fierce Wireless)
SpaceX says it will be ready to start offering direct-to-smartphone satellite services this fall. The company informed the FCC last week that it expects to start offering connectivity directly to smartphones through its Starlink satellites by this fall, working with T-Mobile. That will likely involve about 300 satellites with direct-to-cell payloads, analysts estimate, a fraction of the about 2,000 satellites with those payloads SpaceX ultimately plans to operate. Starting service this fall would give SpaceX a lead of 18 to 24 months over rivals like AST SpaceMobile, which is working with AT&T and Verizon. (6/4)

Canada to Join SKAO (Source: SpaceQ)
Canada is joining the Square Kilometer Array Observatory (SKAO) radio telescope project. Canada's National Research Council said Monday it will invest $269 million Canadian ($197 million) in SKAO over the next eight years. Canada is the tenth country to join the SKAO, which is working on two large arrays of radio antennas in South Africa and Australia. Canada had been cooperating on the project for two decades before finally agreeing to formally join and contribute to the observatory. (6/4)

ESA OPS-SAT Completes Mission (Source: ESA)
ESA's first cubesat has completed its mission. The OPS-SAT cubesat reentered on the night of May 22, four and a half years after its launch. The 3U cubesat was the first cubesat owned and operated by ESA and used for a variety of technology demonstrations. The mission's end was accelerated by high solar activity that increased atmospheric drag, lowering its orbit. (6/4)

Rocket Lab CEO Knighted (Source: New Zealand Herald)
Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck is now Sir Peter Beck. He was made a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, part of birthday honors from King Charles III, for his work founding Rocket Lab and building it up to a leading company in the small launch and smallsat industries. Beck called the knighthood a "huge, humbling honor" and hoped it would be inspirational to other entrepreneurs in New Zealand. (6/4)

Time May Be an Illusion Created by Quantum Entanglement (Source: New Scientist)
Time may not be a fundamental element of our physical reality. New calculations add credence to the idea that it emerges from quantum entanglement, in which two objects are so inextricably linked that disturbing one disrupts the other, no matter how distant they are. (5/31)

Real-Life "Star Wars"-Style Spacecraft Is Preparing for Launch (Source: Futurism)
Sierra Space's Dream Chaser space plane is like no other: its retractable wings and sleek Space Shuttle-like fuselage make it look like it was yanked straight out of a "Star Wars" movie. It might sound implausible, but it's almost ready to roar into action. The intriguing spacecraft arrived at NASA's Kennedy Space Center last week in preparation for its maiden voyage to the International Space Station in September.

Dream Chaser is under contract with NASA to fly seven cargo missions to the ISS, a renewable alternative to SpaceX's Dragon cargo shuttle that can glide back through the atmosphere to land on any runway that's at least 10,000 feet in length, instead of relying on giant parachutes to make its uncontrolled descent. In fact, it's the first private spaceplane ever built, though building on an extensive legacy of US and Soviet spaceplanes. (6/3)

Could These Black Hole 'Morsels' Finally Prove Stephen Hawking's Famous Theory? (Source: Space.com)
One of the most profound messages Stephen Hawking left humanity with is that nothing lasts forever — and, at last, scientists could be ready to prove it. This idea was conveyed by what was arguably Hawking's most important work: the hypothesis that black holes "leak" thermal radiation, evaporating in the process and ending their existence with a final explosion.

This radiation would eventually come to be known as "Hawking radiation" after the great scientist. To this day, however, it's a concept that remains undetected and purely hypothetical. But now, some scientists think they may have found a way to finally change that. The team suggests that, when larger black holes catastrophically collide and merge, tiny and hot "morsel" black holes may be launched into space — and that could be the key. (6/3)

NASA Warns U.S Public To Ignore 'Parade Of The Planets' Hoax (Source: Forbes)
There will be no jaw-dropping “planet parade” on Monday, June 3—at least, not one anyone will see. NASA has taken the unusual step of debunking a much-shared news story circulating online and on social media concerning an alignment of the planets. (5/31)

Massive Magnetic Stars Detected Outside The Milky Way For The First Time (Source: IFL Science)
Magnetic fields have been detected in very large stars in the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, the first time this has been achieved for stars outside our galaxy. It is hoped the discoveries in metal-poor regions will help us understand the processes involved, given their outsized influence. (5/31)

UH Observatory Removed From Mauna Kea; CSO Will Be Next (Source: Honolulu Star-Advertiser)
The Hoku Kea Observatory, the University of Hawaii’s educational telescope on Mauna Kea, is no more. The telescope was the first of five Mauna Kea observatories slated for removal as part of the university’s Maunakea Comprehensive Management Plan and, as of the end of May, was the first to be completely removed from the summit.

Hoku Kea was built in 1968 by the U.S. Air Force and was transferred to UH in 1970 and to UH Hilo in 2003. But it has not actually functioned as an observatory for more than a decade. A new telescope installed in 2010 was found to be faulty and was never operational. Because repairing the telescope would be too expensive, the faulty instrument was removed in 2018.

A new teaching observatory was considered to be sited at Mauna Kea, but that plan has been put on hold, said Greg Chun. With a new state agency, the Maunakea Stewardship and Oversight Authority, taking over management of the Mauna Kea summit, Chun said any decisions about the replacement observatory will wait until the new managers have a concrete management plan for the area. (6/3)

Space-Based Monitoring of Electronic Signals is Now a Commercial Battleground (Source: Space News)
The once highly-classified ability to detect and pinpoint the locations of radio frequency (RF) emissions from space is rapidly transitioning to the commercial sector — giving companies new powerful capabilities for all sorts of surveillance and intelligence gathering. Interest in RF monitoring from space has soared in recent years as geopolitical conflicts disrupt vital maritime shipping lanes and supply chains, underscoring vulnerabilities. (6/3)

Why do Astronomers Look for Signs of Life on Other Planets Based on What Life is Like on Earth? (Source: The Conversation)
Have you ever played hide-and-seek in a new place? It’s much harder than playing at home. You only know the obvious hiding spots: under the bed, in the closet, behind the couch. The trick is trying to think of hiding spots you can’t even imagine. How do you search in places you never thought could be hiding spots?

That is kind of what scientists like me do when we look for alien life; we’re trying to think of new ways to look for life. In the meantime, we’re looking for life by looking for life like us because that’s what we can imagine. (6/3)

Starlink Connects and Divides Brazil’s Marubo People (Source: New York Times)
As the speeches dragged on, eyes drifted to screens. Teenagers scrolled Instagram. One man texted his girlfriend. And men crowded around a phone streaming a soccer match while the group’s first female leader spoke. Just about anywhere, a scene like this would be mundane. But this was happening in a remote Indigenous village in one of the most isolated stretches of the planet.

The Marubo people have long lived in communal huts scattered hundreds of miles along the Ituí River deep in the Amazon rainforest. They speak their own language, take ayahuasca to connect with forest spirits and trap spider monkeys to make soup or keep as pets. They have preserved this way of life for hundreds of years through isolation — some villages can take a week to reach. But since September, the Marubo have had high-speed internet thanks to Elon Musk.

The 2,000-member tribe is one of hundreds across Brazil that are suddenly logging on with Starlink, the satellite-internet service from Space X, Mr. Musk’s private space company. Since its entry into Brazil in 2022, Starlink has swept across the world’s largest rainforest, bringing the web to one of the last offline places on Earth. Click here. (6/2)

Mars' Subsurface Ice Could be a Key to Sustaining Future Habitats on Other Planets (Source: Space Daily)
To survive on other planets, water is, of course, critical. We need it to drink, sustain crops and even create rocket fuel. But on spaceflights, checked luggage is exorbitantly expensive. Anything heavy, especially liquids like water, is bulky and costly to haul by rocket, even to our closest interplanetary neighbors. The best plan, then, is to find water at the spacecraft's destination.

Purdue University planetary scientist Ali Bramson's research is laying the foundation for future extraterrestrial exploration. She is focused on finding ice deposits beneath the barren surfaces of the moon and Mars, providing a buried resource important for future human habitats and even space travel itself. Subsurface ice also is a compelling target for astrobiology, climatology and geology research. (6/4)

MDA Space Secures Contract for Square Kilometre Array Project (Source: Space Daily)
MDA Space announced a contract with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) to support the Square Kilometer Array Observatory (SKAO) project. This international effort aims to enhance understanding of the universe's formation and evolution.

The SKAO is an extensive ground-based astronomy initiative involving multiple countries to build and operate two telescopes for global scientific use. Canada recently joined the SKAO as its tenth member, alongside Australia, China, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK. (6/4)

Ongoing Gyroscope Problem Forces Hubble Telescope to Pause Operations (Source: Space Daily)
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope again has suspended operations after entering safe mode because of an ongoing gyroscope issue that has affected the craft for the past year, according to NASA. The telescope automatically entered the safety stage Tuesday, the agency said Friday. Gyros measure the telescope's slew rates as part of the system that determines and controls precisely the direction the telescope is pointed. (6/3)

Rogue Planets May Originate From 'Twisted Tatooine' Double Star Systems (Source: Space.com)
Star Wars fans will definitely get a kick out of binary star systems nicknamed "Tatooine" systems — a reference to the planet Luke Skywalker stands on to gaze up at twin suns in Star Wars: A New Hope. As it turns out, some of the planets in the real-life versions of these systems may have been getting a much more literal kick out of them, too.

New research suggests "rogue planets" that wander the Milky Way — aka, planets that are isolated from parent stars and live as cosmic orphans — may be getting kicked out of double, or binary, star systems. But there's a twist (literally)! The team found that rogue planets are more likely to be ejected from "twisted Tatooine" systems specifically. (6/3)

NASA Backs 12 Innovative Studies to Enhance Mars Exploration (Source: SciTech Daily)
NASA has enlisted nine U.S. companies to conduct 12 studies on applying commercial services to Mars science missions. These studies, focusing on areas like payload delivery and communications, aim to establish a new paradigm for cost-effective, frequent Mars missions through public-private partnerships.

Nine U.S. companies have been selected by NASA to perform a total of 12 concept studies of how commercial services can be applied to enable science missions to Mars. Each awardee will receive between $200,000 and $300,000 to produce a detailed report on potential services — including payload delivery, communications relay, surface imaging, and payload hosting — that could support future missions to the Red Planet. (6/1)

Scientists Just Made a Breakthrough For Interstellar Travel (Source: Popular Mechanics)
The eponymous Alcubierre warp drive hypothetically contracts the spacetime in front of a spaceship while expanding the spacetime behind it, so that the ship moves from Point A to Point B at an “arbitrarily fast” speed. By distorting spacetime—the continuum enfolding the three dimensions of space and time—an observer outside the ship’s “warp bubble” would see the ship moving faster than the speed of light, even though observers inside the craft would feel no acceleration forces.

However, the Alcubierre drive has a glaring problem: the force behind its operation, called “negative energy,” involves exotic particles—hypothetical matter that, as far as we know, doesn’t exist in our universe. Described only in mathematical terms, exotic particles act in unexpected ways, like having negative mass and working in opposition to gravity (in fact, it has “anti-gravity”).

For the past 30 years, scientists have been publishing research that chips away at the inherent hurdles to light speed revealed in Alcubierre’s foundational 1994 article published in the peer-reviewed journal Classical and Quantum Gravity. Now, researchers at the New York City-based think tank Applied Physics believe they’ve found a creative new approach to solving the warp drive’s fundamental roadblock. Along with colleagues from other institutions, the team envisioned a “positive energy” system that doesn’t violate the known laws of physics. (6/3)

SpaceX Chips Away at Starlink Latency With New Record (Source: PC Magazine)
Ongoing Starlink improvements should translate to better latency, says SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. On Sunday, Musk tweeted that Starlink had "achieved a new internal median latency record" of 28 milliseconds. This comes nearly seven months after Ookla put the median latency for US Starlink users closer to 60ms. SpaceX VP for Starlink Engineering Michael Nicolls credited the latency improvements to the company expanding the ground infrastructure for Starlink and refining the networking routing and software. (6/3)

India Launches Nation's 1st 3D-Printed Rocket Engine (Source: Space.com)
Indian space startup Agnikul Cosmos successfully launched the nation's first 3D-printed rocket engine on Thursday (May 30), paving the way for reduced time and costs associated with building rockets and boosting the country's spacefaring capabilities. (6/3)

Boeing Should Dump Spaceships to Focus on Airplanes (Source: Bloomberg)
It wasn’t a surprise that Boeing Co.’s launch of its CST-100 Starliner capsule was postponed on Saturday. It would have been the company’s first mission carrying astronauts to the the International Space Station since NASA awarded contracts in 2014 to Boeing and startup SpaceX to do the job. Boeing has been plagued with delays and numerous missteps since it took up the challenge to wean US dependence on Russia to ferry NASA crews and equipment to the space station.

Boeing should carve out its space business and combine it with a bold, entrepreneurial space company (with the backing of deep-pocketed venture capital firms whose principals dream about going to space). The unit desperately needs a shake-up to compete and can no longer rest on the laurels of its heyday when the Saturn rocket powered the Apollo missions to the moon. The goal should be to match SpaceX’s success and help drive down the cost of space launches as NASA seeks to put people on Mars with the moon as a way station. (6/3)

Star-Crossed Liner (Source: Space Review)
After years of delays, Boeing and NASA appeared ready to finally launch astronauts on the company’s Starliner spacecraft, until they ran into another set of problems. Jeff Foust reports on the latest delays for a program that has suffered more than its share of problems. Click here. (6/3)
 
Power Politics Transcends Space Security (Source: Space Review)
There has been little progress at the United Nations on space security issues, as seen in a pair of recent Security Council debates. Ajey Lele argues that space security is being held hostage to geopolitics among China, Russia, and the United States. Click here. (6/3)
 
Space Resources 2024: In Search of the Grand Bargain (Source: Space Review)
Two meetings earlier this year examined governance issues regarding space resources. Dennis O’Brien offers his notes from those meetings and the potential for coming to agreement on a regime covering their use. Click here. (6/3)

Virginia County Awards $100K Grant to Spaceport Company (Source: Prince William Times)
Three companies took home $100,000 each last week as part of Prince William County's IGNITE startup grant program. The Spaceport Company, which has developed an innovative tracking system for space launches that is assembled in transportable containers that can be taken anywhere they are needed to support launches of missions into space. The Spaceport Company, based in Woodbridge, has more than 30 years of combined experience in space and infrastructure industries. 

The pilot IGNITE program, funded by the federal CARES Act in 2020, awarded $600,000 in grants in 2021 and 2022. The grant program was relaunched in 2023 using money from the American Rescue Plan Act. An award category of up to $100,000 was added and awarded to local companies based on performance metrics. (6/1)

Wormholes Could Blast Out Blazing hot Plasma at Incredible Speeds (Source: Space.com)
Wormholes that are surrounded by matter, like the ring that gathers around a black hole, could create strange rotating clouds of hot plasma. Anything that falls in one end could shoot out the other at 200 million kilometers per hour, or even faster if the wormhole is enormous. (5/31)

Software Engineers, Not Astronauts, are the Heroes of Today's Space Industry (Source: Washington Post)
The robotic spacecraft spun wildly. The first mission of Trevor Bennett’s feisty space company seemed doomed. But then Bennett, co-founder of Starfish Space, and his team started doing the math. Over several weeks, they drew algorithms on whiteboards, ran computer simulations and hardware tests, and came up with a solution: by reprogramming the satellite’s software, they could could generate a magnetic current that would push against Earth’s magnetosphere and ultimately slow its rotation.

And thus, Early one morning last July, they pressed send and shot the software fix from Starfish headquarters in Seattle to a ground station in Norway to the spacecraft 335 miles above Earth — hoping it would work. In a previous generation, the stars of the space age were the astronauts – John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, Alan Shepard – men with military training and “Right Stuff” behavior. Today, it’s software engineers and computer scientists who drive the space economy from behind their laptops. (6/2)

Why NASA's Europa Clipper Mission to Jupiter's Icy Moon is Such a Big Deal (Source: Space.com)
The Europa Clipper mission, which aims to reach Europa by 2030, is stacked with a number of instruments that can help scientists understand the moon's complex geology and composition — ultimately, researchers want to use these tools to get a better idea of Europa's habitability. In other words, they want to learn whether this moon has favorable conditions for life to exist (life as we know it, at least). (6/2)

Amazon in Talks with Icasa About Bringing Starlink Rival Project Kuiper to South Africa (Sources: News24, TechPoint Africa)
Starlink, the most established satellite internet provider, is at an impasse with getting regulatory approval in South Africa. Amazon is engaging with the SA's communications regulator over its Project Kuiper satellite internet service ahead of a proposed launch in the next two years. As soon as Amazon's production satellites go live, Vodafone, Vodacom, and Project Kuiper will start rolling out services in Africa. Additionally, Amazon and Vodafone are looking into more enterprise-specific products like connectivity extensions for distant infrastructure and backup services for unplanned events. (6/3)

Russian Inspector Satellite Gets Up Close and Personal with a Spacecraft in Orbit (Source: Space.com)
A Russian military satellite named Luch-2 was found closely approaching a geostationary satellite last month, a maneuver that follows in the footsteps of its predecessor that was found eavesdropping on other nations' satellites on multiple occasions since 2014. Aldoria, a French startup that tracks satellites in orbit using a network of ground-based telescopes, alerted satellite operators in May 2024 that it had detected "a sudden close approach" by the Russian Luch-2 to a satellite positioned in geostationary orbit. (6/3)