Space News | Orbex's new rocket, MarCO falls silent, Curiosity and Ultima Thule

This is your Space News from Tomorrow for February 13th, 2019. Now, we had a little bit more activity this last week, so I'm going to hand it over to Mike to give you this week's Space Traffic Report. Hello, everyone. Welcome to our first Space Traffic Report. And to get things started, Arianespace had their first rocket launch of the year, an Ariane 5 rocket that launched on Tuesday, February 5th at 21.01 UTC from Ariane Launch Area No. 3 at the Corot Space Center in French Guiana. This launch was a dual-satellite launch of communications satellites headed for geostationary orbit. The first satellite is actually a shared satellite called Saudi Geostationary Satellite-1 slash Helisat-4. The Saudi Geostationary Satellite-1 communications portion is going to provide advanced Ka-band spot beam communications for the Middle East, while Helisat-4, on the other hand, will offer Ku-band regional beam communications for Europe. The other satellite on board the Ariane 5 is the GSAT-31, an Indian Space Research Organization or ISRO communications satellite, providing services in the Ku-band for a lifetime greater than 15 years. And now it appears that Iran has attempted a launch of their Safir rocket, a small rocket that they first launched 10 years ago in 2009. The launch occurred from the Semnan Space Center in Iran on Tuesday, February 5th at an unknown time. And it appears that the rocket failed to place a small payload into orbit because orbital tracking has no new objects on February 5th other than the two Ariane 5 payloads. Iran, even though they officially announced that the launch was coming, hasn't acknowledged that the launch has even occurred yet. The only indication that we have that the launch has occurred is these images from DigitalGlobe's WorldView-3 remote sensing satellite that took photos the next day and the pad has scorch marks on it and the rocket is no longer there. But there's no video that we can find of this particular launch on February 5th. For the rest of the world, China and the United States are tied at two rocket launches apiece, successful launches, and now Europe has one rocket launch joining India and Japan for one rocket launch apiece. Meanwhile, at the International Space Station, a cargo craft has departed, specifically a commercial Cygnus resupply ship. It departed the International Space Station on Friday for an extended mission to deploy five nanosatellites and conduct other experiments before re-entering the atmosphere and burning up with more than two tons of trash on board. After unberthing, the Cygnus spacecraft fired thrusters to depart the vicinity of the station and then was expected to raise its orbit to an altitude of 500 kilometers, or 300 miles, for the separation of four of those tiny nanosatellites. The cargo craft was designated NG-10 for the 10th Cygnus resupply mission, now operated by Northrop Grumman, formerly Orbital ATK, and NG-10 was also christened the SS John Young in honor of the late Gemini, Apollo, and Space Shuttle astronaut. The SS John Young arrived at the space station on November 19th of 2018, last year, two days after being launched on board an Antares rocket from Wallops Island, Virginia, and it delivered 3,273 kilograms of experiments, hardware, spare parts, food and supplies for the station and its crew. And that is your up-to-date space traffic report. My name is Space Mike, and in the future, we'll not only be bringing you rocket launches from the ground, but visiting vehicles at the International Space Station, lunar activities, and interplanetary traffic as well. The list of available launchers is going to be expanding soon because another small rocket launcher is coming online in 2021, the Orbix Prime. Orbix unveiled their new rocket facility in the Scottish Highlands this last week. That facility will design, integrate, and operate their new rocket, known as Prime. While they were showing off their new digs, they also gave us a glance at their engineering prototype of the Prime second stage. This rocket has many new and unique takes on a traditional launcher. First off, the engine is 3D printed and could quite possibly be the world's largest flying 3D printed engine when the vehicle comes to market. Typically, when you join multiple 3D printed parts together or weld different pieces of metal together, you end up with certain areas that might be weaker than the original area. But by 3D printing the entire engine chamber as a single piece as Orbit will be doing, those joins and welds can be eliminated, in theory creating a stronger and more resilient engine. The thing to point out is that the chamber is that single piece. The engine bell is actually attached to that chamber as a second piece, so you're really just looking at this middle section right in here as the 3D printed part, but that's still really quite impressive. And since Prime is designed to be a reusable rocket with six engines on its first stage, the stronger and lighter the engine, the better. Orbix is also using a non-traditional fuel for Prime. It's known as Bio-LPG or liquefied petroleum gas. This can reduce the carbon footprint of a traditional fossil hydrocarbon engine, such as RP-1, which is what SpaceX and Rocket Lab use, by up to 90%, making it a very green vehicle. The rocket itself will be 19 meters tall and 1.3 meters in diameter. It's two stages, with both of those stages using the same liquid oxygen Bio-LPG propellants and has an estimated 150 kilograms mass to low Earth orbit. Now, that's about the same size and payload capacity as the Rocket Lab Electron. And actually, Peter Beck on Twitter even mentioned that Rocket Lab may be interested in also flying from that same Scottish launch port. So we could actually end up with two small launchers from this same facility, although due to their fuel differences, probably two different pads. Prime is made of carbon fiber and aluminum composite. Orbix expects their new design to be about 30% lighter and 20% more efficient than other vehicles in their same category. That'll be tough to do since Electron is also a carbon composite vehicle. Although, Electron does take a pretty nasty weight penalty for those batteries, so we'll see how it all plays out. You may have noticed I mentioned this facility was in Scotland. It's actually going to launch from the UK's first spaceport on the north coast of Scotland in Sutherland, which should be perfectly situated for polar and sun-synchronous orbits. UK's really stepping it up. We have a UK rocket company launching a vehicle designed and built in the UK from a UK launch pad. Now, smallsats don't need to just fly on small rockets or even in just polar orbits. They can go to other planets as well. And that's exactly what JPL did with the InSight lander. They sent a couple of smallsats. And for a quick history lesson and an update on that project, I'll hand it on over to Jared. Marco, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Mars Cube-1 project was a huge success, but did you know that it was actually born out of a major failure? Mars' polar lander was to be NASA's first lander specifically dedicated to the polar regions of Mars. But on December 3, 1999, the expected day of entry, descent, and landing, no signal was heard, and the lander was eventually declared lost. During entry, descent, and landing, no data was sent. There was an expectation that there wasn't a need for that data in real time. But without that data, NASA couldn't conclusively determine what had actually happened to Mars' polar lander. And to this day, it's still just speculation. A mandate was then put in place for future missions that live telemetry for entry, descent, and landing on Mars needed to be provided. But transmitting requires potent radio systems to do so, which increases weight, which decreases just how much payload you can place on the surface of Mars, which means your science returns and your other elements of your mission are reduced in capacity. You can use spacecraft in orbit, like the aging 2001 Mars Odyssey or Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, to relay those signals, but that requires the spacecraft on orbit to be in the correct place at the correct time. And this can end up wasting precious attitude control fuel and shorten the spacecraft's lifespan in orbit around Mars. Leave it to the brilliant minds at JPL to solve a problem while taking a leap forward. MARCO, two six-unit CubeSats, the first interplanetary CubeSats. They would be a technology demonstration mission, and one that could relay entry, descent, and landing data in real time using miniaturized UHF and X-band comms packages, along with antennas, cold gas thruster propulsion systems, star trackers, and cameras. Launched with the Mars InSight lander on May 5, 2018, they worked above and beyond JPL's expectations. The two MARCO CubeSats remained in contact with ground controllers, which allowed tests of their various experimental systems to occur on the way to Mars. If something went wrong, InSight would not have been affected by either the loss of one or both of those MARCO CubeSats. And on November 26, 2018, the two MARCO CubeSats relayed data of InSight's entry, descent, and landing back to the Deep Space Network with perfect accuracy at a much higher bitrate than InSight itself or any orbiters could do. And it gave us some photos of Mars. Incredible, considering that these spacecraft were not even a foot long. Even though this technology demonstration mission had met all of its objectives and was considered a success after relaying InSight's landing data back home, NASA continued to use the Deep Space Network to communicate with the CubeSats, which the engineers at JPL had nicknamed Eve and WALL-E, after the two main characters from Disney's WALL-E animated film. Last heard from in early January, NASA is officially declaring the two MARCO spacecraft dead for now, but they're leaving the potential for attempts to recontact them later. But what an incredible demonstration of the future CubeSats have in interplanetary spaceflight. Now, let's turn our attention over to our sun and its influence on our local solar system. Tamitha Scove has this week's space weather report. Space weather this week continues to quiet down. As we switch to our front side sun, you can see we actually did have a couple solar storms that launched off of the sun's west limb, but they're not Earth-directed, nor are they headed toward any NASA spacecraft, so we're in the clear. As we switch to our back side sun, it's a little bit more of an interesting story. We have old region 2733 that continues to be active, and it fires off a solar storm, but this one actually might graze Parker Solar Probe. Luckily, with the solar minimum that we're near, these storms are pretty weak, so it shouldn't pose a problem. Meanwhile, we also have a finger-like coronal hole that's going to be rotating into Earthview here in the next couple days, and the fast wind from that coronal hole could bring us some aurora in about two weeks. Switching to our moon, this week we are passing through the half-moon phase, and by the 16th, the moon should be about 80% illuminated, and this could affect the viewing of dim objects, so you night sky watchers, be sure to check your horizon set times. And now for your LEO, MEO, GEO orbit outlook. The radiation environment continues to be a bit enhanced due to the lingering fast wind that caused a solar storm about a week ago. You can see we do have an enhancement at the outer zone right around GEO orbits, and in the inner zone around LEO orbits, but at least the MEO orbit has cleared out. Now if we switch to the GEO orbits, we can see that right now things look pretty good. There's not a huge risk right now for internal charging or for surface charging of the spacecraft, so things look a little bit worse than they are, but things are actually going to continue to get better here over the next few days, so you satellite operators, you should be in the clear. For more details on this week's space weather forecast, including impacts on GPS, aviation, amateur radio, and emergency communications, come take a look at my channel or visit me at spaceweatherwoman.com. Now let's take a journey from the sun over to Mars. Sarah joins us for the first time on news to give us an update on some of the visitors on the red planet. We have a bit of news from one robotic inhabitant of the red planet. Unfortunately, not that one. In mid-January, NASA's Curiosity rover left Vera Rubin Ridge after more than a year of exploring that odd edifice. Vera Rubin Ridge, named for the astrophysicist whose study of galactic spin led to the concept of dark matter, is the pale bend that curves from top left to top center in this Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter image. The ridge is a dense, raised formation of hematite that eroded more slowly than the rest of the sedimentary material that forms the base of Aeolus Mons, or, more familiarly, Mount Sharp. Hematite is an iron-rich mineral that typically forms in the presence of liquid water, and Curiosity confirmed its presence at Gale Crater way back in 2014. The great part of this story is that Gale Crater was chosen as Curiosity's landing site partly because the presence of hematite was predicted by MRO's Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars, or CRISM. And CRISM detected hematite veins in Vera Rubin Ridge, so Curiosity drilled to confirm. But Curiosity found hematite in places not detected by MRO, so the teams are now able to use Curiosity's updated and up-close data to fine-tune MRO and CRISM for much more accurate mapping of the rest of Mars. And that is key, since all the rovers combined have explored a total of just over 70 linear kilometers of a planet with a surface area of over 89 million square kilometers. But the fun doesn't stop there. Scientists from Johns Hopkins and Caltech have figured out a way to make Curiosity's navigation systems into a gravimeter analog. The Rover Inertial Measurement Units, or RIMUs, monitor the rover's movements during every drive period, and each RIMU contains gyros and accelerometers. The team analyzed Curiosity's movements from Sol 60 to Sol 1743, and once they reduced the noise, they were left with gravimeter data similar to that gathered by the Apollo 17 astronauts bouncing around on the surface of the Moon in the lunar buggy. What has Curiosity's joyriding shown us? That the base of Mount Sharp is far more porous than we expected. This puts the current model of Mount Sharp's formation in question. Before these data, the prevailing idea was that Gale Crater filled with sediment and wind eroded the surrounding basin, leaving the sedimentary mountain in the middle. But the team have said that if these sediment layers had supported a deposit 5 kilometers thick, the density would be much higher. All right, back to the drawing board. But all is not lost. Lead author Kevin Lewis said, I think this study shows the promise of making gravity measurements on the surfaces of other planets. So, even though Curiosity will only ever explore a tiny fraction of the surface of Mars, the things that we learn at Gale Crater are helping us better understand the entire rest of the planet, and even, perhaps, other worlds. And now let's venture even further out than Mars, to the furthest explored object in our solar system. I'll hand it back over to Jared for more. The furthest object ever explored in our solar system, Ultima Thule, was truly an unknown until New Horizons flew past it on January 1st, 2019. Nearly 13 years after launch, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft was designed to visit a faraway place. It first explored Pluto and its system of moons in 2015, returning stunning pictures and showing us that a place we expected to be the cosmic equivalent of a smooth cue ball was actually recently geologically active, defying all expectations with its chaotic beauty. And with the flyby of Ultima Thule on January 1st, 2019, another unexplored world was revealed, and the twin-lobed Kuiper Belt object could no longer hold its secrets. The larger lobe is nicknamed Ultima, with the smaller lobe nicknamed Thule, and plenty of references to its snowman-like appearance were made. But now we know that spherical shape of the lobes is actually an incorrect assumption. But how do we know that? Well, New Horizons turned around to face Ultima Thule as it flew outbound from the encounter, and it saw the crescent shape of the illuminated side, allowing a shape to be determined from the backlit view by subtracting the stars in the view from what was blocked by Ultima Thule's unlit side. That crescent helped the team determine that Ultima Thule's lobes are not spherical but flat, kind of like pancakes in their shape, an interesting and unexpected shape. And from this, we'll be able to begin the work of determining just how the planets in our solar system formed. And that really is an incredible parting shot. Taken 6.6 billion kilometers away from the Earth, that's pure, pristine, untouched material from the formation of our solar system 4.6 billion years ago. It's us. It's what we were before we came to be. That's our show this week, but the conversation continues with our live show this Saturday at 1800 Universal Time. This week, we're welcoming back returning guest Rod Pyle, who'll be talking about his two new books, Interplanetary Robots and Space 2.0. He is always a ton of fun, so don't forget to subscribe on YouTube now and hit that bell icon so you get notified whenever we're live with amazing guests. 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