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+ ¶China’s long-term space science roadmap includes some surprises. A roadmap for Chinese space science missions up through 2050 was released on the 15th. It includes missions focusing on the extreme universe, the nature of matter, searching for habitable exoplanets, heliophysics, and human space exploration. These include programs we’ve talked about targeting this decade, like a crewed lunar landing by 2030 (c.f. Issue № 288); the Xuntian space telescope (cf. Issue № 236), which will co-orbit with the CSS; a space-based gravitational wave detection pathfinder; solar and cosmology research missions; the Tianwen-3 Mars sample return mission; and, an exoplanet telescope (c.f. Issue № 283). Further out (2028–2035) are the Tianwen-4 Jupiter and Uranus mission, a solar system boundary mission, the development of the International Lunar Research Station (c.f. Issue № 275), and a newly announced Venus atmospheric sample return mission. That last one is a particularly exciting surprise, but few details have been released at this point. Finally, the 2036–2050 part of the roadmap lists “global leadership in space science with 5-6 large-scale missions and diverse smaller projects,” which, given China’s recent track record, we’re inclined to believe.
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+ A depiction of the Xuntian space telescope, a Hubble-class telescope with a 2-meter primary mirror, 2.5 gigapixel camera, and a field of view 300-350x that of Hubble with a primary goal of sky mapping. It is intended to orbit near the Chinese space station for periodic docking, maintenance, and upgrades.
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+Yet another paper about how slime molds form filaments that look like the cosmic web, the largest scale structure in the Universe. Science does tend to rhyme.
+ - Using ‘Oumuamua as a base, a mathematical model of panspermia suggests a 0.001% chance that life on Earth evolved outside our solar system and was delivered by an interstellar object (paper). Relatedly, here’s an animation of a (very ambitious) gravity assist sequence for a proposed spacecraft to catch up with ‘Oumuamua. It feels like maaaybe we should wait to see some more samples of the population of interstellar objects before estimating probabilities. 🤷♂️
+ - Another take on panspermia, this time modeling the spread of dust from life-bearing worlds throughout the galaxy (paper). They find that over the approximately 5B years of Earth’s existence, Earth dust freed by a meteor impact or through atmospheric dust interactions with hypervelocity space particles could be pushed into interstellar space by radiation pressure and may have reached on the order of 100,000 other stellar systems. So we could be someone else’s progenitors.
+ - Observations of Mercury’s surface suggest that carbon may exist in its interior, where pressures and temperatures in the mantle could result in a stable diamond layer (paper). 💎
+ - In a previous Weird Paper section, we mentioned Project Hephaistos, an effort to use data-driven optical and infrared astronomy to look for signatures from partial Dyson Spheres. At the time, they found seven “apparent M dwarfs exhibiting an infrared excess of unclear nature” that were compatible with their Dyson sphere model. We said it was probably just dust. This paper agrees, suggesting they’re probably hot Dust-Obscured Galaxies (hotDOGs… really?), which are quasars obscured by large amounts of dust, so only IR light gets through. Really, folks, it’s always dust.
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+ ¶News in brief. After delays due to weather and extended handover tasks from Starliner, Crew-8 returned to Earth after 235 days, a new record for longest time in orbit for an American crewed spacecraft and 25 days past the NASA-certified lifetime (which will now likely be extended) ● One Crew-8 member was hospitalized directly after splashdown, for undisclosed reasons, and was later released ● Blue Origin conducted the first (uncrewed) flight of their upgraded second generation human-rated New Shepard vehicle—NS-27 included new payload capacity on the booster itself and a new GNC system, which will also be used on New Glenn ● Relatedly, Chinese startup Deep Blue Aerospace hopes to start providing suborbital tourism flights in 2027 with a similar-looking vehicle ● The struggling, now private Astra received a DOD contract with a maximum value of $44M for continued development of their Launch System 2 ● Astroforge received a deep space communications license from the FCC (the first ever granted to a commercial company) for their Odin asteroid imaging mission ● AST SpaceMobile deployed its expansive 64-square-meter communications arrays on their first five direct-to-smartphone BlueBird satellites ● The U.S. Space Force awarded SpaceX all nine of its Phase 1 launch contracts, outcompeting ULA ● Boeing might sell their space business, likely just the part that includes the ISS-related programs and Starliner (but who will want it?) ● SpaceX static fired Super Heavy Booster 13, just 11 days after catching Booster 12 ● The Republic of Cyprus and Chile signed on to the Artemis Accords, bringing the accords to 47 signatories ● All seven first stage BE-4 engines have been installed on the first New Glenn rocket—maybe still launching by the end of 2024?
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diff --git a/index.md b/index.md
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Issue No. 291 | Oct 23, 2024
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Issue No. 292 | Oct 30, 2024
🚀 🌍 🛰
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- Optical SBSP round-up. It’s been a busy few weeks in the world of space-based solar power (SBSP) startups. Following on the heels of the public unveiling of Reflect Orbital a few weeks ago (a company that plans to encircle the Earth’s terminator line with mirrors that reflect sunlight onto solar farms and angry astronomers), Aetherflux announced intentions to develop a LEO constellation that appears to store solar power in onboard batteries and then beam it down to (likely, at least initially, defense) customers using infrared lasers. Satellites in the constellation would need to hand off power beaming in a similar way to how Starlink hands off internet customers as satellites pass overhead. Aetherflux hopes to launch its first demonstration in 2026. (SBSP using lasers is conceptually similar, but technically quite different, from the long-discussed traditional vision of SBSP, which uses massive microwave power beaming satellites in GEO.) With an entirely different use case, Montréal-based Volta Space Technologies (not to be confused with this Volta, or this one—not to mention this one that was acquired by Shell) plans to send laser power down to lunar surface craft, helping them work during the lunar night or in permanently shadowed regions. On the space-to-space side, we mentioned Star Catcher a few weeks ago, a MEO (1,500 km) point-to-point power-beaming company that is pitching power delivery to customers as a capex-to-opex exchange, allowing them to fly with smaller/lighter craft and receive additional power as needed from Star Catcher’s network. Other companies working on similar in-space power transmission include Space Power, Pulse, Photonicity, and maybe Aquila. (Disclaimer: This item was written by Ben, but Andrew is co-founder of a startup working on SBSP—more on this soon.)
+ China’s long-term space science roadmap includes some surprises. A roadmap for Chinese space science missions up through 2050 was released on the 15th. It includes missions focusing on the extreme universe, the nature of matter, searching for habitable exoplanets, heliophysics, and human space exploration. These include programs we’ve talked about targeting this decade, like a crewed lunar landing by 2030 (c.f. Issue № 288); the Xuntian space telescope (cf. Issue № 236), which will co-orbit with the CSS; a space-based gravitational wave detection pathfinder; solar and cosmology research missions; the Tianwen-3 Mars sample return mission; and, an exoplanet telescope (c.f. Issue № 283). Further out (2028–2035) are the Tianwen-4 Jupiter and Uranus mission, a solar system boundary mission, the development of the International Lunar Research Station (c.f. Issue № 275), and a newly announced Venus atmospheric sample return mission. That last one is a particularly exciting surprise, but few details have been released at this point. Finally, the 2036–2050 part of the roadmap lists “global leadership in space science with 5-6 large-scale missions and diverse smaller projects,” which, given China’s recent track record, we’re inclined to believe.
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- An Aetherflux Apex satellite in LEO.
+ A depiction of the Xuntian space telescope, a Hubble-class telescope with a 2-meter primary mirror, 2.5 gigapixel camera, and a field of view 300-350x that of Hubble with a primary goal of sky mapping. It is intended to orbit near the Chinese space station for periodic docking, maintenance, and upgrades.
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- Axiom unveils its own lunar suit. Shortly after China unveiled its lunar suit design, Axiom Space unveiled the exterior design of its AxEMU suit that will be worn by Artemis III astronauts (which could still potentially launch in 2026). Axiom, in collaboration with Prada, showed off the suit’s design in Milan at IAC for the first time—previous versions had non-final coverings over the exterior of the suit. Astronauts will don the suit through a hatch in the back, and the suit will support temperatures down to -180 °C for up to two hours during EVAs in Lunar South Pole regions, including permanently shadowed ones. AxEMU builds on NASA’s xEMU design and will feature lights, HD helmet cams, LTE comms, improved flexibility/mobility, and adjustments that accommodate a much wider range of astronaut body types/sizes.
+ Support Us› Orbital Index is made possible by readers like you. If you appreciate our writing, please support us with a monthly membership!
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- Short Papers
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- - ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter detected water frost in the caldera of Olympus Mons, Mars' tallest volcano (and the tallest in the solar system). This discovery, also validated by Mars Express, is the first time water frost has been observed near the Martian equator. The frost forms briefly after sunrise and evaporates quickly, suggesting microclimate effects in the high-altitude caldera (paper).
- - Chinese researchers successfully extracted water from lunar regolith delivered by Chang’E-5 by heating it to over 1200 K (paper).
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-Gaia data suggests numerous ancient stars in the Milky Way’s disk formed less than a billion years after the Big Bang. This is 4-5 billion years older than when the disk was thought to have formed (paper).
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-Supermassive black holes seem to regulate the rate of star formation in galaxies, generating pressure ripples that prevent them from burning their hydrogen too quickly and extending their lives (paper).
- - A recent paper finds, via modeling and simulation, that the observed coastlines of lakes and seas on Titan are likely shaped by erosion from waves (of liquid methane and ethane… because it’s Titan).
- - Those previously reported, surprisingly large galaxies seen by JWST may be normal size, just harboring brightly glowing black hole accretion disks whose light makes the galaxies appear larger (paper).
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-ESO’s ALMA captured images of gas bubbles on the surface of massive star R Doradus, a first for a star other than our Sun (paper). The hot bubbles are each 75x the width of the Sun. nbd.
+Yet another paper about how slime molds form filaments that look like the cosmic web, the largest scale structure in the Universe. Science does tend to rhyme.
+ - Using ‘Oumuamua as a base, a mathematical model of panspermia suggests a 0.001% chance that life on Earth evolved outside our solar system and was delivered by an interstellar object (paper). Relatedly, here’s an animation of a (very ambitious) gravity assist sequence for a proposed spacecraft to catch up with ‘Oumuamua. It feels like maaaybe we should wait to see some more samples of the population of interstellar objects before estimating probabilities. 🤷♂️
+ - Another take on panspermia, this time modeling the spread of dust from life-bearing worlds throughout the galaxy (paper). They find that over the approximately 5B years of Earth’s existence, Earth dust freed by a meteor impact or through atmospheric dust interactions with hypervelocity space particles could be pushed into interstellar space by radiation pressure and may have reached on the order of 100,000 other stellar systems. So we could be someone else’s progenitors.
+ - Observations of Mercury’s surface suggest that carbon may exist in its interior, where pressures and temperatures in the mantle could result in a stable diamond layer (paper). 💎
+ - In a previous Weird Paper section, we mentioned Project Hephaistos, an effort to use data-driven optical and infrared astronomy to look for signatures from partial Dyson Spheres. At the time, they found seven “apparent M dwarfs exhibiting an infrared excess of unclear nature” that were compatible with their Dyson sphere model. We said it was probably just dust. This paper agrees, suggesting they’re probably hot Dust-Obscured Galaxies (hotDOGs… really?), which are quasars obscured by large amounts of dust, so only IR light gets through. Really, folks, it’s always dust.
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- The first images of gas motion on another star. Hot gas bubbles, each 75x the size of our Sun, are seen on the red giant star R Doradus by ESO’s ALMA.
+ A pizza slice depiction of the hypothesized diamond layer between the outer core and silicate mantle of Mercury.
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- News in brief. ASA will use Crew Dragon for Crew-10 and 11, delaying Starliner’s first operational flight ● Intelsat 33E, a GEO communications satellite, broke up into 20 pieces (as confirmed by SDA) losing all power and communications, ending its mission ● LA-based startup Inversion Space received an FAA license for reentry of their demonstrator Ray cargo capsule (scheduled to launch on Transporter-12) over the Pacific Ocean near California ● Meanwhile, Varda Space, who was previously granted a reentry license from the FAA, received authorization from the Australian Space Agency for multiple capsule reentries that utilize an Australian partner ● Munich-based OroraTech raised a $27.2M Series B to develop their wildfire-detecting satellite constellation ● SpaceX launched 20 internet satellites for Starlink-competitor Eutelsat OneWeb ● Constellation Technologies, a French startup, received $10.1M in seed funding to build the first two satellites of its planned VLEO internet constellation ● NASA will stop onboarding new missions onto its Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) system (which will continue to operate into the 2030s) as it seeks a commercial replacement ● ESA secured funding to expand Copernicus with six additional missions that will build upon Europe’s EO capabilities for climate monitoring and environmental data collection ● Kepler Communications won a $39.1M contract to develop the LEO segment of ESA’s High Throughput Optical Network (HydRON) ● The US government announced long-awaited changes to export control rules for space technologies, easing restrictions on exports from commercial companies to allies ● D-Orbit won a $131M ESA contract to develop an in-orbit servicing vehicle for GEO spacecraft ● Airbus reduced its workforce within its space and defense division ● China launched a second batch of 18 satellites for its Thousand Sails internet mega constellation ● Blue Origin has twice-postponed the launch of its brand-new New Shepard vehicle ● Canadian hyperspectral remote sensing startup Wyvern raised $6M to expand into the US ● After a year of silence, Roscosmos provided updates on its Orel next-generation crew capsule designed to replace Soyuz ● SpaceX released buoycam footage of Starship performing a soft landing in the Indian Ocean, and more catch photos and videos just keep dropping—Flight 6 could take place before the end of the year as a proposed flight profile was approved in Flight 5’s FAA launch license.
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+ News in brief. After delays due to weather and extended handover tasks from Starliner, Crew-8 returned to Earth after 235 days, a new record for longest time in orbit for an American crewed spacecraft and 25 days past the NASA-certified lifetime (which will now likely be extended) ● One Crew-8 member was hospitalized directly after splashdown, for undisclosed reasons, and was later released ● Blue Origin conducted the first (uncrewed) flight of their upgraded second generation human-rated New Shepard vehicle—NS-27 included new payload capacity on the booster itself and a new GNC system, which will also be used on New Glenn ● Relatedly, Chinese startup Deep Blue Aerospace hopes to start providing suborbital tourism flights in 2027 with a similar-looking vehicle ● The struggling, now private Astra received a DOD contract with a maximum value of $44M for continued development of their Launch System 2 ● Astroforge received a deep space communications license from the FCC (the first ever granted to a commercial company) for their Odin asteroid imaging mission ● AST SpaceMobile deployed its expansive 64-square-meter communications arrays on their first five direct-to-smartphone BlueBird satellites ● The U.S. Space Force awarded SpaceX all nine of its Phase 1 launch contracts, outcompeting ULA ● Boeing might sell their space business, likely just the part that includes the ISS-related programs and Starliner (but who will want it?) ● SpaceX static fired Super Heavy Booster 13, just 11 days after catching Booster 12 ● The Republic of Cyprus and Chile signed on to the Artemis Accords, bringing the accords to 47 signatories ● All seven first stage BE-4 engines have been installed on the first New Glenn rocket—maybe still launching by the end of 2024?
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- A fantastic multi-shot composite of Flight 5 takeoff and landing. Here’s a video about its production. Credit: Andrew McCarthy
+ Blue Origin’s first New Glenn flight article, featuring seven freshly installed BE-4 engines
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Etc.
- - SpaceX’s Dragon capsule can now (after years of development) propulsively land with its SuperDraco thrusters in case of parachute failure (this feature was enabled on Crew-8 and Polaris Dawn but thankfully was not used). This scenario would most likely result in a soft water landing, but potentially could be used on land in the future.
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-A visual article about telescopes at the European Southern Observatory in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile and its forthcoming Extremely Large Telescope, which will be the most powerful optical/near-IR telescope ever built, by a large margin. With an incredible 39 m primary mirror, composed of 798 hexagonal panels (each able to adjust with three pistons to adapt to atmospheric turbulence), the telescope will collect 15x the light of the next largest optical telescope on Earth (and about 40x JWST’s 6.5m mirror).
+NASA, NOAA, and the International Solar Cycle Prediction Panel announced that the Sun has reached its 11-year solar maximum. The maximum of Solar Cycle 25 may last for about a year. This page has lots of cool videos of a spinning Sun and magnetic field lines.
+ - The Shenzhou-18 Crew shared a video showcasing life and work on the CSS.
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+Zoom into the first page of ESA Euclid’s cosmic atlas. This first data represents 260 observations taken between March 25th and April 8th, covering 132 square degrees of the Southern Sky.
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+Can SpaceX land a rocket with ½ cm accuracy? No. But they don’t need to. (Also, there’s been some speculation that they may have meant ½ meter accuracy, which is perhaps more easily believable.)
+ - Doritos sent along some "Zero Gravity Cool Ranch’ chips aboard Polaris Dawn, which had flavoring applied via an oil rather than the usual powder to prevent dust from floating around the cabin.
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-A quick look at some of the control systems approaches required for catching the largest rocket ever built with large mechanized arms and 17 cm long catch fittings after it plummeted out of the sky.
- - An image of the Sun created by neutrinos passing through the Earth (over 500 days). While photons take 100,000 years or more to work their way through the Sun (and then 8 minutes to reach Earth), neutrinos don’t interact and leave the sun immediately, allowing us to compare the Sun’s output now to thousands of years ago and observe (fortunately) consistent energy output.
- - A long form article about JPL.
- - Oklo, Gabon is the only known location where self-sustaining natural fission reactions are known to have occurred (off and on again for a few hundred thousand years, around 1.7 billion years ago).
+A walking table! Check out the delightful video at the end.
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- “Not again…”
+ The North American Aurora Borealis, as seen during a severe geomagnetic storm several weeks ago, by NOAA-20’s Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument. (Related: here’s a video of a solar eruption taken by the new Compact Coronagraph imager on GOES-19, launched on June 25th.) Credit: CSU/CIRA & NOAA
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