The Orbital Index

M2/RESILIENCE. The second lunar mission from ispace, named M2/RESILIENCE, heads skyward on a Falcon 9, NET December. Its predecessor crashed into the Moon at 110 m/s in April 2023 due to a software issue, but ispace is undauntedly trying again. Onboard the lander will be ispace Europe’s Hakuto-R rover, named TENACIOUS, which completed assembly in July. The 5 kg, 54-cm wide micro-rover carries HD cameras and a shovel (from Epiroc AB) to collect lunar soil for symbolic, precedence-setting ownership transfer to NASA. Also on the lander are surface experiments to be performed at the landing site in Mare Frigoris (Sea of Cold) on the near side of the Moon, including the first lunar electrolysis experiment, an algae food production experiment, a deep space radiation monitor,  and… *checks notes* an art project in the shape of a tiny red house.

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Percy labors toward the rim. Recent weeks have seen the 3 ½-year-old rover slowly making its way up to the rim of Jezero Crater, with the goal of cresting in early December and taking its first peek outside the crater. Driving over loose dust and sand that has a brittle crust has led to increased wheel slippage. This slippery terrain has reduced daily drive distances by 50% or more, with one day only clocking the rover at 20% of its planned distance. (Percy can drive at a top speed of 160 meters/hour and up to ~300 meters per day.) The rover driving team has tried several mitigation techniques, including driving backward (the video here reminds us of how Model Ts had to drive in reserve up hills due to not having a fuel pump), using switchbacks, and driving on the northern edge of the route. This last strategy improved traction the most, possibly due to more and larger subsurface rocks toward the northern geography. Along the way, Percy snapped a panorama that NASA annotated with many of the rover’s locations over the past three years, including its landing site that is now 8.7 km distant (here’s a bird's-eye view animation of the journey). The mission has been caching samples as it goes, although how those samples might be retrieved is still very much up in the air due to all the uncertainty around Mars Sample Return. To date, it has gathered and filled 24 of its sample tubes, taken an atmospheric sample in one more, and used three of its witness tubes. The rover launched with 43 tubes, and, with two witness tubes remaining and two tubes that the team has decided are off limits due to the possibility of the sample arm snagging its wiring harness while retrieving them, there are 11 tubes left to be filled and cached. Related: Perseverance also recently captured a high-resolution video of Phobos’ ~30-second transit of the Sun, which it does daily due to its near-equatorial, 7.6-hour orbit. 

Flight 6. Starship’s Flight 6 will launch as soon as November 18th (a year to the day after Flight 2). Flight 6 will follow a flight trajectory previously approved by the FAA and comes just 5 weeks after Flight 5’s stunning catch success (newly released HD highlight reel here). This next test flight will use the last of the current generation of Starships (S31) along with a Super Heavy booster (B13) that features upgrades to make it quicker to detank after catch and more redundant during boostback and catch. S31, which rolled to the pad on Tuesday, will attempt a single in-flight Raptor relight during its coast phase, a core requirement for demonstrating deorbit capabilities before Starship begins flying fully orbital trajectories. The flight will also fly with sections of the ship’s heat shield removed to test thermals where future catch hardware might be attached in future iterations. S31 will also fly at a higher angle of attack during reentry to test the control limits of its flaps. The next generation of Starship, aspirationally completing as many in 25 flights in 2025, will feature increased propellant capacity, more leeward forward flaps, and the capability to be fitted with Raptor 3 engines.

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• Gravitational wave detectors could be used to look for signatures of warp drives experiencing containment failure (paper)… if that were a thing.
• Near the center of galaxies like our Milky Way, there may be a population of stars whose hydrogen burning is augmented by the annihilation of dark matter particles (paper), massively extending these stars’ lives and possibly explaining other odd phenomena like ‘puffy G-objects.’ Future telescopes should allow observation of stars very close to the Milky Way’s center, potentially ruling out this prediction and/or revealing the nature of dark matter.
• “Between January and March 2022, crew aboard the International Space Station (ISS) performed the first archaeological fieldwork in space” (on themselves).
• Care of Avi Loeb: We should look for black holes in orbit around planets, as they would be a possible technosignature for a civilization that was using the Penrose Process to extract energy from a pet black hole (paper).
• Using engineered conductive nanowire particles to warm and terraform Mars (paper). These particles, with lengths selected to capture Mars’s thermal emission, would be 5,000x more efficient than CFCs as a Martian greenhouse gas and could use resources abundant on Mars.
• The Marsbee research program asks what everyone is wondering: “Could we replace Ingenuity with a swarm of robotic bees?”

• Wondering how the recent US elections might impact the space industry? Here’s Payload’s take, a very internet-y Reddit thread, and a look at why that might not matter if the next administration doesn’t support climate change mitigation, which is its stated intent.
• An open-source tool for processing SAR data.
• LignoSat, a Japanese satellite made partially of wood, flew to the ISS on Dragon for future deployment. Parts of the satellite are made from magnolia wood, native to Japan, and were made using traditional Japanese joining techniques without glue. The hope is that wooden satellites will be cleaner than traditional spacecraft when burning up on reentry.
• With climate change and El Niño, fires in the Amazon have become more prevalent. This article includes details and a map of South American soil water content as measured by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) satellites. Incredibly, these satellites can measure how changes in soil density from moisture content affect the Earth’s local gravitational field and change the distance of two satellites 220 km apart in orbit. 🤯(See our guest contribution way back in Issue № 118.)
• The Lenoids meteor shower is here, peaking on November 18th around 1 a.m. ET.
• In Praise of Mystery, a 150-word poem for Europa written by US Poet Laureate Ada Limón, which is engraved on an interior panel aboard Europa Clipper alongside the Drake Equation.
• The Magnus effect occurs when a spinning object moves through a fluid, generating lift and deflecting the object’s path, as with a curveball thrown in baseball. This effect was utilized by the LTA 20-1, an early 1980s aerostat created by the Canadian Magnus Aerospace Corporation, which looked like an alien ship (below).