The Orbital Index

VIPER. 😖 Last week, NASA made the somewhat unexpected announcement that they will be canceling the VIPER rover, a vehicle that was to be delivered by Astrobotic’s Griffin CLPS lander and would have searched for lunar volatiles useful for ISRU. The $450M mission (c.f. Issue № 69), including future operational costs, is now projected to exceed a 30% cost overrun cap, forcing the agency to abort the rover—which ironically just completed final construction—due to legislation that curtails agency projects that exceed their overrun caps. Some of this overrun is due to delays in the development of Griffin and the rover’s need to land at the beginning of the lunar ‘summer season’, which has increased its timeline and therefore operational overhead. This cancellation, in juxtaposition to recent lunar successes from China, India, and Japan, is embarrassing enough, but to heap an extra dose of insult to the program’s cancellation, NASA had already funded the CLPS delivery of VIPER separately, so the agency will end up flying an ignominious block of non-descript mass to the surface of the lunar south pole as a simulator instead of the rover (let alone bringing mass back from the Moon like China’s lunar program just did). VIPER isn’t out of lifelines quite yet, though… it could be revived by an infusion of outside money from a scientific or commercial entity (cough Bezos cough Isaacman cough) that would bring its total cost overrun below the 30% cap, or it could be authorized to continue forward with additional funding directly by Congress. The former seems a bit more likely since it would be a (comparatively) cheap way to get hardware on the Moon and would likely build positive support within the agency. However, if no path forward for the completely assembled rover appears, it will end up disassembled and parted out, with instruments mothballed for potential use in future projects (like the Endurance nuclear-powered rover, for instance). Unfortunately, as Scott Manley astutely points out, these payload delays would likely deliver science and technology progress out of order with future NASA crewed landings, resulting in duplication of science and additional operational inefficiency. The agency needs to address both cost overruns like these as well as operational priorities as it has continued to fail at managing its budget. However, much of the issue is also appropriations micromanagement from Congress, with the broken legislative environment in the US leading to congressionally-mandated spending on unsustainable ‘jobs’ programs like SLS. We feel strongly that both NASA and Congress need to improve their management, but we also have deep respect for the many people doing amazing work at the agency.

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ESA’s Proba-3. A coronagraph is a device that is positioned between a star and a viewer such that it masks out a star’s light and allows its surroundings to be imaged without blinded glare. Telescopes fitted with internal coronagraphs are used both to study our Sun’s corona and to image circumstellar disks and exoplanets around distant stars. When the device masking out light is outside of the telescope, it’s usually called an occulter—moving it outside of the telescope reduces diffraction and scattered light compared to an internal coronagraph, as well as simplifying optics, ultimately providing higher contrast and lower detection limits. An external occulter can even be free-flying, then commonly called a starshade. Significant research has gone into starshades, and multiple missions using them have been proposed, including the New Worlds Mission and the Habitable Worlds Observatory, which could have a starshade companion (pdf). However, free-flying starshades have yet to be flown. The closest test to date was in 1975 when an Apollo capsule intentionally blocked the Sun for an observing Soyuz capsule during the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (NYT coverage of the experiment from 1975). But, during this one-off test, light scattered from the Apollo capsule’s thruster exhaust and caused poor image quality. ESA has now formally unveiled Proba-3, a space telescope and a free-flying occulter/starshade spacecraft that will position itself 150 m away with millimeter precision. It will study the Sun’s oddly hot corona, the source of the solar wind and CMEs. Proba-3 uses laser ranging to ensure accurate positioning and will fly in a highly elliptical 600 x 60,530 km orbit, capturing images at apogee when its distance from Earth results in little gravitational or atmospheric perturbation. If Proba-3 is successful once it launches this fall, it may well be the first of many missions to use a starshade, which could eventually lead to direct imaging of Earth-like exoplanets.

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• 25 years ago yesterday, on July 23rd, 1999, Space Shuttle Columbia carried the Chandra X-ray observatory to orbit with a nominal five-year mission. It’s still going strong, but is threatened by cancellation in the FY25 President’s Budget Request. See savechandra.org.
• A Guide To Attending a Launch.
• Due to shifting water mass from ice caps to oceans from climate change (paper) and some predictable natural causes, Earth is getting more oblate, i.e., thicker around the midriff, and thus is spinning more slowly. This means days are getting longer by a few milliseconds every century—while this may seem small, it has big effects on global timekeeping, GPS, digital infrastructure, etc.
• Jupiter's Great Red Spot is likely about 200 years old. Giovanni Domenico Cassini noted a dark oval at a similar latitude on Jupiter in 1665, called the “Permanent Spot,” which was observed until 1713. This was followed by a 118-year gap before the first recorded observation of what is now the Great Red Spot. Simulations suggest these storms are likely distinct (paper). Meanwhile, the current Red Spot is shrinking, possibly due to a recent decreased rate of absorbing smaller storms.
• Juno captured data on a lava lake on Io in February, including images of two volcanic plumes. The edges of the circular lake appear to be regions where molten lava is in direct contact with the vacuum of space.
• Calibrating terrestrial telescopes with a 12U CubeSat that will shine 8 low-power fiber lasers at them from GEO to provide a precisely known light source (targeting a 2029 launch).
• Space Industry Database has a comprehensive list of upcoming space and satellite industry events (Orbital Index will be at SmallSat in a few weeks, reach out!).
• Stunning posters of exoplanets for your office framing pleasure.