¶Transporter 8. SpaceX’s latest school bus to space launched on Monday evening, deploying 72 ridesharing payloads with 39 distinct separation events, including satellites from Spire, ICEYE, Satellogic, Launcher (now owned by Vast), Tomorrow.io, Orbital Sidekick, DARPA, and many others (video). This launch debuted a top section of the payload adapter that uses SpaceX's new plate-based rideshare architecture, supporting standalone small cubesat deployment without the need for the third-party secondary payload adapters required by their traditional ring architecture (still present for the bottom portion of the payload stack, pictured below). Some payload highlights from T8 include Starfish’s Otter Pup, deployed from Launcher's Orbiter SN3 space tug, which will re-dock with the tug as part of its rendezvous, proximity ops, and docking (RPOD) demonstration mission; AFR from Azista BST Aerospace, the first satellite off the assembly line from the Indian company’s new 2-satellite-per-week factory in Ahmedabad; Varda’s Winnebago-1 space manufacturing and re-entry capsule built on top of the first Rocket Lab Photon spacecraft bus to fly on Falcon 9; and, a dozen ¼U SpaceBEEs from SpaceX subsidiary Swarm. Notably, hyperspectral imaging is a recurring theme—it’s clearly gaining momentum in the EO industry with the number of sats featuring multi- or hyper-spectral instruments eclipsing those with SAR on the last couple Transporter missions. T8 marked the 40th SpaceX mission of 2023 and 200th all-time landing of an orbital booster (out of 239 launches), and they released an animation of Falcon’s launch timeline to celebrate. |
|
 | Transporter 8 payloads pictured just before encapsulation in their payload fairings. Credit SpaceX, with annotations by NASA Spaceflight. |
|
The Orbital Index is made possible through generous sponsorship by:
   |
|
| ¶The Orbital Index is looking for a part-time assistant editor (~4 hrs/week). Tasks would include drafting our weekly news section, sending out the newsletter each week, collecting interesting potential Etc. items, topic research, and helping with our editing process. If you'd be interested, please reply to this issue! ❤️ |
|
¶Papers- A supernova ten times more powerful than any previously known has now been visible for over three years—most last for just a few months (paper).
- Iron particles from meteorites and volcanoes on the early Earth could have acted as catalysts to convert atmospheric CO2 into hydrocarbons—specifically acetaldehyde and formaldehyde—the building blocks for fatty acids, nucleobases, sugars, and amino acids (paper).
- Seismic data from distant quakes measured by the now-retired Mars InSight lander show that Mars’s liquid iron core is smaller and denser than previously thought (paper). This is also the first direct observation of Mars’s core.
- For the first time, we’ve observed a planet being swallowed by its bloated, red giant star (via a characteristically brief increase in stellar intensity), a fate which will befall the Earth in 5 billion years or so (paper).
- Our Moon’s core is solid, and about 500 km in diameter (paper).
- JWST identified silicate clouds, as well as water, methane, CO2, and carbon monoxide, on an exoplanet 40 light-years away (paper). This is the “largest number of molecules ever identified all at once on a planet outside our solar system.” (The superlatives are getting pretty specific here.)
- JWST also peeked at Enceladus and caught it spraying out the largest plume of water vapor yet observed from the icy planet.
- Relatedly, more water worlds seem to be present in our solar system than we thought—re-analysis of Voyager data, plus simulations, suggest four of Uranus’ largest moons likely contain oceans (paper) under their icy crusts (the tilted planet has at least 27 moons).
|
|
 | "This rumpled fabric at the corner looks like evidence of ongoing tectonic activity."
XKCD #2773 |
|
| ¶The moons of Pluto. Pluto and its companion Charon form an interesting dwarf double planet orbital system. The two Kuiper belt objects—with Charon at slightly over half the diameter of Pluto (and ~12% of the mass)—create a binary system with the barycenter (center of mass) outside the radius of both objects; the pair co-orbit this point on a line in open space between them. This duo is collectively orbited by an additional four confirmed moons: Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra. The Pluto-Charon system provides a close-at-hand example case for circumbinary stellar systems, in which a planet orbits both stars in a binary star system. (Related: a circumbinary exoplanet was just discovered—with an accompanying host of Tatooine references.) N-body systems like Pluto-Charon are difficult to model—a recent paper compares an n-body numerical approach to a semi-analytic method published in 2006 for the system. Its less massive moons (Styx and Kerberos) show significant discrepancies between the two methods, suggesting a large impact on their orbits from the more massive moons. Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs) were utilized in the analysis to isolate oscillation patterns in the moons’ orbits due to this inter-moon gravitational influence, revealing perturbations over long timescales that weren’t predicted in the 2006 method. (Also, following the theme of the papers above, Charon may have had a subsurface ocean that caused cracking of the moon’s outer surface when it froze.) |
|
 | | An HST image of the Pluto-Charon system with orbits and object names annotated. Credit: NASA, ESA, and STScI |
|
| ¶News in brief. The Spaceport Company, which did some ocean-based test launches of sounding rockets from their floating spaceport recently, won a $1.5M DIU contract ● CAS Space launched their Lijian-1 solid-fueled rocket with 26 satellites on board (mostly classified, but including commercial birds for ADA Space and Spacety and an interferometric imaging SAR sat) ● Orbital rocket builder Firefly Aerospace bought orbital transport and rideshare integrator Spaceflight ● Vulcan had a successful static fire (video) ● Cheops confirmed warm mini-Neptune exoplanets closely orbiting four stars in the Milky Way ● A Kuaizhou-1A solid rocket launched, carrying the flat panel, very-Starlink-like Longjiang-3 experimental commsat (pictured below). |
|
|
