Issue No. 80

The Orbital Index Issue No. 80 | Sep 2, 2020 🚀 🌍 🛰

¶CubeSat interplanetary exploration is heating up. The twin MarCO 6U cubesats (3D model) made history when they flew past Mars and successfully relayed Mars InSight’s landing in real time (+ speed-of-light delay, natch). Now, many more lunar and interplanetary CubeSats are under development. From NASA comes Lunar Flashlight, Lunar IceCube, and NEAScout (a solar sailing small near-Earth asteroid explorer). ESA is working on M-ARGO, to explore small, rapidly spinning asteroids, and 2 cubesats that will tag along with their Hera mission to the Didymos/Didymoon system (which will have already been attacked by NASA’s DART kinetic impactor along with its LICIACube companion CubeSat). Caltech is working on Lunar Trailblazer to map the lunar water cycle, while University of Arizona’s LunaH-Map will perform a high resolution search for water in permanently shadowed regions on the Moon’s poles. CubeSats can also enable less resourced countries and private entities to do deep space exploration. Poland and Virgin Orbit are collaborating on a Mars cubesat. Rocket Lab is planning a mission to the Moon next year (check out Rocket Lab’s lunar site), and Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck is even investigating a private mission to Venus—the upgraded Electron should be able to deliver around 25 kg to Mars or Venus (Venus requires an additional ∆v of ~1,000 m/s according to the handy chart at the end of this issue, ignoring aerobraking). Slightly larger upcoming vehicles like Firefly's Alpha and Relativity Space’s Terran 1 “probably could put CubeSats beyond the asteroid belt, toward Jupiter or beyond.” Related: JPL’s "Honey, I Shrunk the NASA Payload" challenge recently ended with awards for miniaturized lunar payloads. Also Related: Astrobotic’s CubeRover is pretty cute. ¶Quick papers. Everywhere we look, we see the ultraviolet glow of hydrogen. In the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, we now see points of glowing hydrogen which are each galaxies too faint for even Hubble to see (paper). An exoplanet has been discovered for the first time with a radio telescope (paper). A black hole 34 billion times the mass of the Sun that consumes roughly the Sun’s mass every day (paper). Scientists revived microbes from deep beneath the seafloor that may be as old as the 101.5 million year old sediment they were found in (paper). The inner constituents of a 500 micrometer ball of Deinococcus bacteria survived for 3 years in the vacuum and radiation of space (paper). #panspermia #planetaryprotection Predicted by Pierre-Simon Laplace in the late 1700s, atmospheric normal mode pressure waves have finally been detected circling the globe (paper). Hubble observations suggest that Betelgeuse’s dimming last year was likely due to it ejecting large amounts of dense hot gases (paper), and it looks like it might be doing it again. ⭐💨 If we ever find Planet Nine, it would strongly support our Sun having originally had a now-lost binary twin (paper). How many settlers do you need on another planet for the settlement to survive (paper)? 110. Could planets (“blanets”) form in the outer accretion disks a few light years away from supermassive black holes? Maybe (paper). ¶A Busy Weekend in Launch. ULA, Rocket Lab, and SpaceX all had scheduled launches over the weekend. ULA kicked the weekend off with a Delta IV Heavy launch of an NRO spy satellite. The aging heavy lifter, which will be phased out and replaced by Vulcan over the next few years, had a T-3 sec hotfire abort complete with a dramatic fireball (video). The rocket and payload are undamaged, but launch is delayed a week or more while expendable ground systems are replaced. Next up was SpaceX, launching SAOCOM-1B into a polar orbit, the first such southward flight path from Florida since 1969 when booster debris landed on Cuba and killed a cow named Rufina 🐮. Returning to this flight path was only possible due to the Falcon 9’s automated self-destruct systems—rocket exhaust in this flight path can block manually radioed abort messages. This launch was also temporarily halted due to its overflight of ULA’s aborted NROL-44 payload (expensive!) and required last minute approval from the NRO. To cap the weekend off, Rocket Lab returned to flight with their 14th mission (and announced that they will be conducting a first soft ocean splashdown of the booster for their 17th mission). Their I Can’t Believe It’s Not Optical mission was a dedicated launch for Capella Space, a startup focused on capturing 0.5 m resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data as a service, the first of an eight satellite constellation. (Ed., amusingly, this satellite was originally supposed to launch as a rideshare with SAOCOM-1B, but when that mission was delayed, Capella switched to Rocket Lab, which was then delayed by a July 4th failure, eventually launching just a few hours after the original mission. You just can’t get ahead. 🤷‍♂️) ¶News in brief. SLS is getting even more even more expensive; NASA approved final development of the 2021 Lucy mission to explore the Trojan asteroids; NASA and Boeing are now targeting December for Starliner’s OFT-2 re-test, followed by a first crewed mission in June 2021; the EPA recently launched an investigation into a 300 metric ton methane plume in central Florida based on observations by methane tracking startup Bluefield; 星际荣耀iSpace closed a nearly RMB1.2 B (~$172 M USD) Series B round last week—this is the largest round to date for a Chinese private rocket company; and, NASA will broadcast the Artemis solid rocket booster test live this afternoon. ¶Etc. Explore Mars has released their annual Humans to Mars report detailing progress towards human exploration of the planet in the 2030s. The US Department of Education has announced a CubeSat mission design and prototyping challenge for High School students. Project submission is October 16th, with a Phase 2 scheduled for January. Chris Cassidy shared dramatic views of Hurricane Laura from the ISS. A Step-by-Step Guide to Making 3D Maps with Satellite Imagery in R. Submit new space mission ideas and concepts to ESA. Cave of the Winds (pdf) is a book about the history of NASA Langley’s Full-Scale Wind Tunnel, which was in operation for 64 years until it closed in 1995. It was “used to test everything from World War II fighters, to submarines, to the Mercury capsule to concepts for a supersonic transport.” SatNOGS DB launched with a new UI, you can use it to learn about all the satellites they track. Analysis of Handwritten Notes Inside the Cabin of Apollo 11 Spacecraft CM-107 "Columbia". The level of detail is wonderful. Software that failed based on the phase of the Moon at CERN: “A few desperate engineers discovered the truth; the error turned out to be the result of a tiny change in the geometry of the 27km circumference ring, physically caused by the deformation of the Earth by the passage of the Moon!” ¶Jobs. The newly launched SpaceTalent.org is a clearing house for finding a job in the industry, including resources for making the switch into aerospace. PLD Space, a European NewSpace startup working on reusable liquid fueled micro launchers, is hiring a Senior Propulsion Engineer. NASA is seeking their next class of Flight Directors for Human Spaceflight missions. A subway system-style map of the solar system’s delta-v requirements (plus, the all-important Kerbal version of this chart).

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