Space News | NASA's new Lunar plans, RemoveDEBRIS and saying goodbye to Oppy

This is your Space News for February 21st, 2019. Now once again, we didn't have a whole lot of traffic leaving the Earth this week, so we're going to step straight into it. And Mike brings us the latest on NASA's lunar ambitions. As the next major step to return astronauts to the Moon under Space Policy Directive 1, NASA is teaming up with American companies to design and develop reusable systems to land astronauts on the lunar surface. Briefing with reporters at NASA Headquarters on February 14th, prior to an industry day for the New Human Landing System study procurement, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine went over the agency's plan to test new human-class landers on the Moon beginning in 2024 with the goal of sending crew to the lunar surface in 2028 or sooner. This is a multi-phased approach that will first see small landers by the end of this year with scientific payloads on board. Mid-sized landers will deliver rovers, and large heavy landers will deliver people to the surface for a week trip and then back to the gateway before going home. One of the requirements of the two- to four-person lander is that it will need to be reusable. But there are a few different ways that NASA would accept any particular plan. NASA seems to be leaning towards a three-stage option where a transfer vehicle or tug would be used to assist the descent stage and the ascent stage in lunar operations. The idea is modularity and sizes that could potentially be secondary payloads on SLS flights, the Space Launch System. However, they are willing to consider alternative options as well, as long as it fits the goals. Whatever may come, NASA hopes to begin tests of a descent stage by 2024, uncrewed tests of a full system by 2026, and astronauts on the Moon again by 2028 at the latest. In the near term, NASA is seeking to fly payloads on commercial lunar landers before the end of this year, accelerating its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, where NASA will buy payload space on commercially developed landers. In November, the agency awarded contracts to nine companies, making them eligible to compete for future task orders to deliver payloads. The first of those task orders will be announced in the next month, and NASA will even offer unspecified financial bonuses. If you can fly faster, they will incentivize that. For the human landers, notices of intent from interested companies are due today, and NASA hopes to make awards in May and allow the six-month studies to begin by July. After that, NASA could select some of those concepts for additional work, including hardware development. Just a few companies I can think of that might compete for this study would be Lockheed Martin. They have their own lander concept, so does Boeing. They already have a lander concept, as well as Masten Space Systems with their Zeus lander. Heck, even SpaceX or Blue Origin could get involved with this. I hope we see as many proposals as possible. But whatever may come, we are going to see a beautiful partnership between NASA and industry in the same way that the Commercial Cargo and Commercial Crew programs have transformed modern-day spaceflight. Keep on moving onwards and upwards, everybody, and don't forget, add astra to the stars. Now, if we want to colonize the moon, we're going to need to keep the area outside of Earth free of debris. Since our first launch in 1957, we've been adding more and more space junk. Earlier this year, a satellite operator called Capella Space had a near miss with another orbital object traveling at 54,000 kilometers per hour, a velocity that would obliterate both objects and leave a path of debris in its wake. They were able to narrowly avert disaster by moving their satellite out of the way, but just barely. Not everyone's so lucky, though. This month marks the 10th anniversary of one of the largest collisions in space. Iridium-33 and Cosmos 2251 slammed into each other at a speed of 42,000 kilometers per hour. Within minutes, the debris field around the Earth was massive and would take years to safely decay back down to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere. These events create issues for satellite operators and launch service providers. It'll be very hard for us to send humans to the moon or Mars if the rockets have to navigate a deadly debris field. This is where a series of experiments called Remove Debris will come in. Remove Debris was brought up to the International Space Station on the SpaceX CRS-14 mission back in April of 2018. It consists of four experiments on a main satellite platform that was ejected from the space station's Japanese airlock on June 20th. The first of those was a net experiment. On September 16th, a small cubesat called DebrisSat-1 was ejected from the main platform at a low velocity and inflated a balloon to provide a larger target. Then, once at 7 meters distance, a net was ejected from the platform where it wrapped around the target in this epic video. Next up was a vision-based navigation system. DebrisSat-2 was ejected on October 28th, where a series of LiDAR and color cameras on the main platform tracked the object. This will be important for providing accurate distance, direction, and speed of space debris. And then recently, on February 8th, 2019, the third of these four experiments was deployed. A harpoon. A small target was extended from the main satellite platform to a length of 1.5 meters. Then a harpoon was launched at 72 kilometers per hour to strike the target. There was a small cable attached to that spear to make sure that the experiment didn't fly out of control and become deadly space debris itself. Then the final experiment is a drag sail that will be deployed from the main satellite itself this March. It's hoped that the sail will act like an air brake of sorts, bringing the entire satellite platform down to the denser layer of Earth's atmosphere where it will burn up. Hopefully, the data captured from these experiments will help us understand how to capture and safely deorbit space debris to keep the area outside of Earth clear for our future space ambitions. To help keep our on-orbit assets healthy, we also need to protect them from solar radiation. I'll hand it over to Dr. Tamatha Scove for the latest on our space weather report. Space weather may be quiet for now, but it won't last. As we switch to our front side sun, you can see some gorgeous solar tornadoes on the west limb. That's a little something special for you sun lovers, but that's not the big story. The big story is the coronal hole that's going to be rotating into the Earth's strike zone this week, and it could be sending us a solar storm that could give us aurora down to mid-latitudes over a couple days, and it could be causing GPS issues for those of you at high latitudes. On top of that, we have a bright region. You can see it on the front side sun. You can also see it on the back side. This bright region has been boosting the solar flux for amateur radio operators and emergency responders, and this means that radio propagation is going to remain in the marginal range easily for the next couple days. Switching to our moon, we are now passing through the full moon phase with the full moon being on the 19th, and you night sky watchers, you're going to have to take this bright companion into consideration when looking at the night sky for things like aurora or possibly meteors like this, as was seen over Europe just the other day as spring meteor season begins to pick up. And now for our LEO, MEO, GEO orbit outlook. Looking at the high energy environment, these are the penetrating particles. It looks like pretty much all orbit space is going to remain quiet for now, so we don't have any issue with internal charging. But when we switch to the low energy stuff, and this is the stuff that causes surface charging, surface charging of the spacecraft that then could cause electrical discharges and short circuits. Well, we're beginning to see some red blobs being injected into and around the GEO orbit, and as that red ring continues to grow and develop, that means we're getting some raised fluxes. And this means that surface charging here pretty soon is going to be an issue for those satellites around GEO. So you satellite operators, you need to be aware. For more details on that coming solar storm, including how it could affect your GPS, your amateur radio and shortwave radio, as well as when and where to see aurora, come visit my channel or see me at spaceweatherwoman.com. Cape Canaveral, July 7th, 2003, 42 minutes before midnight. The skies come to life as a Delta II rocket begins its journey. On board, Mars Exploration Rover B, also known as the Opportunity Rover, or as we lovingly call it, Hoppy. The twin to Mars Exploration Rover A, or Spirit, these rovers were each designed for a 90-day mission. But they gave us so much more than that. After a six-month journey in deep space, Opportunity arrived at Mars. To land, the rover would need to deploy a parachute, fire landing engines, and inflate a series of airbags that would surround the vehicles to cushion it from impact. These airbags caused the rover to bounce and roll around right into a 22-meter-wide crater, the first intergalactic hole-in-one. Right from that landing crater, Hoppy found signs of water flow on Mars. And after 90 days, the rover had fulfilled its original mission of trying to find conditions favorable to past life. From here, it was assumed that the Martian dust falling from the air would begin to cover the solar panels, choking power from Opportunity's critical systems. But something magical happened that the engineers hadn't expected. Wind would come around each season and blow off the arrays. This allowed enough light to hit the solar panels to charge the battery and keep the vehicle safe through at least the first winter. This cycle ended up being pretty reliable, and each year engineers were able to count on Martian winds to clean off their solar panels from both Spirit and Opportunity. Many think the engineers simply overbuilt the rovers. And while that is true to an extent, Spirit and Opportunity lasting longer than 90 days was indeed a bit of a happy surprise. Things didn't always go as planned, though. After first landing on Mars, the heater on the robotic arm would get stuck on. That meant every night the rover would waste valuable energy. Had that continued, Hoppy certainly would not have lasted much longer than 90 days. So the engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory got to work. They developed a process called deep sleep. Every night, all rover systems would get turned completely off, including the survival heaters. Then, when the sun came up, the rover would power back up. While it would get cold, there was just enough heat in the system to keep it alive, never passing below its allowable temperatures. They had to do this every single night that Opportunity was operational. Hoppy returned data for more than 14 years. It logged 45 kilometers of travel, or 60 times more than its original plan. It took 217,594 raw images of Mars along the way, which is nearly double of what Spirit captured. In those 14 years, Hoppy found dramatic evidence that Mars long ago stayed wet for extended periods of time. It showed that conditions could have been suitable for microbial life. It helped forge the way for the next generation of rovers to do new and exciting science on alien worlds. In June of 2018, Opportunity succumbed to a massive dust storm on Mars. The sun was blocked from the solar panels, preventing Hoppy's battery from charging. The last we ever heard from the rover was June 10, 2018. JPL's tried to communicate with the rover over a thousand times since then. They've sent commands to try and reset onboard systems just to get any sort of reply from the golf cart-sized rover sitting on a planet over 50 million kilometers away. They were greeted with a deafening silence. One theory is that the robotic arm heater bug may be what did the rover in. If the onboard clocks got reset when the system lost power, then when Opportunity woke back up, it wouldn't know what time it was and wouldn't know what time it needed to enter deep sleep. And that would leave the heater stuck on, draining away any energy that Hoppy's systems needed to survive. As of now, NASA's JPL has deemed the Mars Exploration Rover mission both complete and a huge success. I wanted to say with the completion of tonight's commanding, this concludes operations for MER-1, spacecraft ID 253. And on behalf of the entire MER project, we'd like to thank the DSN for over 15 and a half years of outstanding support from launch until tonight. That support is one of the reasons why this mission has been so successful. And once again, the DSN has helped us to make history. Thank you. And this is Station 14 on behalf of the network. Thank you for your comments. And it's a sad day for all of us. 14, you are released. And 14 copies. MER project off the net. While we're sad to see Hoppy go, we are astounded at the amazing science that it was able to bring back. And we're excited for the next adventures from the Red Planet. Now, for the near-term adventures coming up on tomorrow's space, that's our next live show, this Saturday at 1800, Coordinated Universal Time. This weekend, we're actually bringing on the space weatherwoman herself, Dr. Tamitha Scove. We'll be geeking out over space weather, how she got started, what it means to you, and her vision of the future. It'll be a great deal of fun, so don't forget to watch live. The easiest way to remember is to mash on that subscribe button and then hit the notification bell. And before we go, a heartfelt thank you to everyone who helps make Space News from Tomorrow happen. We are a crowdfunded show, so if you get value out of these weekly episodes, do please consider contributing to help keep them going. Head over to patreon.com slash tmro and contribute at whatever value you think the shows are worth. That's our show this week. Thank you so much for watching, and I look forward to talking to you tomorrow.