# The Orbital Index

Issue No. 44 | Dec 24, 2019

🚀 🌍 🎄 🛰
 Happy Holidays from The Orbital Index!
 Starliner’s “off-nominal” orbital insertion. Boeing's Starliner Orbital Flight Test (OFT) launched last Friday on an Atlas 5 N22. The launch itself went smoothly, putting the Starliner second-stage into a suborbital trajectory designed to allow for safe aborts. However, Starliner’s thrusters, which were supposed to fire 31 minutes after liftoff, did not. An internal timer that tracks the Mission Elapsed Time was set incorrectly—it was 11 hours off because it read the wrong parameter from the APIs provided by Atlas—causing the spacecraft to believe that it was at a different altitude and fire thrusters to maintain an alignment that wasn’t required, wasting fuel. Ground control operators recognized the problem but corrective commands didn’t reach the spacecraft in time due to a gap in TDRS communications coverage. They were eventually able to boost the craft from its suborbital trajectory (with a perigee of 76 km) to a 180 km perigee stable orbit, but could not reach the ISS safely. NASA has stressed that, had there been crew on board (instead of just Rosie), they would have been both safe and able to return to Earth, and perhaps could have overridden the erroneous burn. The capsule did successfully return to Earth on Sunday in White Sands, New Mexico using its three-parachute system. It’s currently unknown if NASA will require another OFT test before crewed flights—their contract says an ISS docking demonstration is required. With this week’s Starliner issues (despite NASA giving Boeing $2 billion more than SpaceX), delays and cost overruns on SLS of another$2 billion, halted production on the 737 Max and their CEO resigning after two deadly crashes, and federal inquiries into their Dreamliner production line, this has not been Boeing's best year. (Next up for the Commercial Crew Program is the final inflight abort test for SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, scheduled for NET Jan 11th.)
 News in brief. JPL is helping ESA build ExoMars’ new parachutes (extraction test video), and the timeline is super tight; two more satellites for China’s Beidou GPS system launched over the beautiful mountains of the Xichang Satellite Launch Center—it needs just 2-4 more satellites (launching next year) to complete global coverage; rocket startup Vector filed for bankruptcy due to loss of funding; a Soyuz launched the CHEOPS exoplanet-characterizing space telescope into orbit last Tuesday—it will perform ultra-high precision photometry of stars already known to host exoplanets; Mars 2020 drove for the first time; Yutu 2 is now the longest active lunar rover in history; a bipartisan deal established the Space Force as a new branch of the US armed services (here come the Space Cadets); and, Apple is rumored to have assembled a small team to explore satellite technology.
 Etc.Two feats of astronomical measurement over incredible distances: first, using relativistic ray tracing of x-rays to see details on the surface of a neutron star (video), and second, planetary-mass objects discovered in other galaxies through gravitational lensing.An honest analysis of the failures encountered on the KRAKsat nanosat mission from the team that built it (via Weekly Robotics).A new kind of explosion on the Sun, called a forced magnetic connection, may explain why the sun’s corona is much hotter than its surface. This, along with last week’s results from the Parker Solar Probe, demonstrate how important the Sun’s magnetic field is to its behavior.A new model of how protoplanetary dust clouds can clump together to form planets includes static electric forces. Charged dust particles polarize each other and stick together, accentuating the effects of gravity, and helping to explain planet formation.‘Yeah, I Totally Wore These On The Moon,’ Says Buzz Aldrin Selling Old Pair Of Gym Socks To Complete Sucker For \$500,000A really important piece from The Atlantic on the massive underwater mining operations about to begin with little regard to the hidden ecosystems that they will destroy. Some operations may approach hadal depth—for a sense of the extreme depths involved, see this interactive visualization.