Space News | Reusable Spaceships and a mysterious Lunar lump

Hello fellow citizens of Earth, welcome to Station 204 and your space news for June 13, 2019. And now let's go ahead and head somewhere that rockets and spacecraft really don't like, the ocean. Our singular launch this week comes to us from the Yellow Sea, and no, it's not a return of sea launch themselves, but it is a sea launch of a Chinese Long March 11 rocket, with seven satellites lifting off from a specially converted barge on June 5th at 4.06.01 Universal Time. Two of the satellites will perform technology experiments, the other five are commercial customers. The Long March 11 successfully placed them into low Earth orbit. This is the Long March 11's first launch from a sea-based platform. I personally think this is cool because the ability to launch on demand, like the Long March 11 provides, is pretty damn awesome. And here's how the week ahead is looking for upcoming departures from Earth. Presently, if you want to send something into space, you have multiple choices, but to get something back, you're very limited. But the European Space Agency is developing a vehicle that will help you expand your choices. It's called SpaceRider, standing for Reusable Integrated Demonstrator for Europe Return. It's an uncrewed vehicle that will be launched from Arianespace's launch facilities in Kourou, French Guiana, which will allow for immediate access to experiments returning from space. SpaceRider will be Europe's first reusable spacecraft, built on the work done by the earlier Intermediate Experimental Vehicle, which flew a suborbital mission in early 2015 to test a multitude of systems Rider will now use. In addition, the upper stage of the Vega rocket, known as the Attitude Vernier upper module, is used to help speed up development and lower costs, along with the European Space Agency using commercial off-the-shelf parts anywhere they can. Rider is capable of carrying 800 kilograms of payload and a 1,200 liter cargo bay to an altitude of 450 kilometers, along with the ability to provide power, data, and telemetry to experiments on board. A critical key to Rider is its landing method. After a standard atmospheric reentry, it will deploy a parafoil, which will allow for a guided soft landing. This means experiments can be delivered to a specific point exactly where they need to be accessed. So if Belgium flies an experiment, it can land in Belgium as close as possible to where it's needed. I thought the community of tomorrow would like this because I know a lot of you are scientists, and this can allow you to fly your payloads to space and get them back quickly and immediately for faster analysis than we've ever been able to do before. Earth won't be the only thing that Rider will be able to study. It also has applications for studying things within our own solar system, such as space weather. And to talk about our current interplanetary forecast for our local area, here's our own space weather correspondent, Dr. Tammy Fusco. Space weather this week continues to be a bit interesting. As we switch to our front side sun, you can see those bright regions, and then there's a finger-like coronal hole just to the east of them. Now, that region is rotating into the Earth strike zone now, and it's going to be sending us some fast solar wind over the next couple days. This could bump us up to storm levels, especially at high latitudes, and could bring a little bit of aurora over the next couple days, maybe down to mid-latitudes, but it won't last very long before things kind of retreat back north. And then after that, we're pretty much looking at unsettled conditions. Now, also, back to those bright regions, they are going to be rotating off of the sun's west limb here in the next few days, and that means solar flux is going to tank for amateur radio operators and emergency responders. As we switch to our backside sun, you can see those regions leaving STEREO's west limb view, and you can see there's absolutely nothing behind them. So, unfortunately, when the solar flux tanks, we're going to hit low radio propagation on Earth's day side, and the look from STEREO tells us that these conditions will continue easily over the next two weeks. Have you checked your nighttime skies lately? You might see some unusually bright cloud formations that seem to glow with an eerie light. These are called noctilucent clouds. Now, they used to be a rare occurrence visible only at high latitudes near the north and south poles, but they are becoming a much more common sight at mid-latitudes. Originally thought to be associated only with meteor dust, more and more scientists are beginning to believe that these beautiful opalescent clouds may actually be a sign of our deep solar minimum. This is a time when cosmic ray penetration from interstellar space is at its peak. This increased cosmic ray flux is actually helping to form noctilucent clouds far brighter and far closer to the equator than we've ever seen before. In fact, over this last week, these clouds have been seen in the night skies over Germany and France, and also as far south as Oklahoma, Utah, and even central California in the United States. But be sure to catch these stunning clouds over the summer, because once the new solar cycle kicks in, they will likely retreat back to their home at high latitudes. For more details on this week's space weather, including when and where you can see aurora, and how radio propagation and GPS reception is going to fare, check out my channel, or please see me at spaceweatherwoman.com. If we're going to colonize the moon and the solar system, we're going to need water and building materials. Now we already know that there is water on the moon, but now we think that there may be a lump of metal. One of the largest craters in our solar system lies at the south pole of the moon. It's called the South Pole-Aitken Basin, and data from NASA's GRAIL mission has us taking a closer look at it. GRAIL, standing for Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, was a mission that orbited two spacecraft around the moon in 2012 to map the moon's gravitational field. And the GRAIL data is possibly showing us something incredible. A metallic lump roughly five times the size of the Big Island of Hawaii may be sitting under the surface. Computer modeling suggests it's hundreds of kilometers below the surface and primarily composed of iron or nickel, what we'd expect to be the core of an asteroid that made the Aitken Basin. There's also other ideas as to how that lump may have formed, but they're quite unlikely to have actually occurred, so we're just going to skip them. We're unsure of what the lump is, so sending a mission to sample the area would help us see if our computer models are correct. There's been plenty of missions proposed, but none have been funded, so hopefully this helps them get some traction. This would be tremendously advantageous. We already know that there's water ice around the moon's south pole, so finding an even richer area of iron and nickel would be perfect for lunar construction, which would lower needed payload weights to the lunar surface, which would lower costs, which could potentially enable wider exploration of our closest celestial neighbor, or maybe even tomorrow's studio on the moon. Now to announce the winners of our Apollo 11 sweepstakes, let's go to Lisa. Thanks to NBCUniversal, we were able to run a sweepstakes for all of you in celebration of the Apollo 11 documentary. So here are the winners. The Celestron Telescope was won by Matthew P. The Cyan Lithograph goes to Kavon M. The Theatrical Poster was won by Cameron M. And the DVD pack goes to Robert A. So if you haven't seen the Apollo 11 movie, I recommend you go and see it, because to me it was one of the greatest documentaries of a moment that changed humanity 50 years ago. That wraps up Space News. Thank you so much for watching, and of course we want to thank our patrons of Tomorrow. These folks, well, we wouldn't be able to do the show without them. So if you got something out of this show and you'd like to contribute something back, you can head on over to patreon.com.tmro or subscribestar.com.tmro. But if you can't do anything financially, that's fine as well. You can head on over to community.tmro.tv. There's a multitude of ways for you to help out, and you can find out about them there. So, until next time, keep exploring.