¶Firefly prepares for the Moon. Even as Intuitive Machines’s IM-2 prepares for a late February launch (c.f. Issue 295), Firefly’s first CLPS lunar lander, Blue Ghost, has completed pre-launch testing and is preparing for its own NET mid-January launch on a Falcon 9. The mission is heading to Mare Crisium, a mid-latitude, very flat, 176,000 square kilometer mare (large, dark plains initially mistaken for seas) where ancient basaltic lava filled an impact basin. The lander will carry 10 NASA payloads, one of which is Honeybee Robotics’s PlanetVac, a prototype low-cost regolith sampling system attached to one of the lander’s legs. PlanetVac was partially funded by The Planetary Society and could fly on future sample return missions. Another payload of note is LEXI, an X-ray imager that will look back at Earth, capturing its magnetosphere as it interacts with the solar wind. Blue Ghost will also attempt NASA’s first GPS positioning lock from the Moon. |
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¶NISAR in detail. Last week, we mentioned the upcoming NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission in our 2025 space preview. NISAR aims to deliver super-high-resolution Earth observation data for climate science, disaster response, and ecosystem monitoring. Slated for launch in March on a GSLV Mk II rocket contributed by ISRO, it will end up in a 747-km sun-synchronous orbit. NISAR’s unique radar system, equipped with the largest deployable reflector ever launched for SAR (12 m diameter!) and dual-wielding L-band (24 cm wavelength) and S-band (12 cm) radars—a first for SAR—will enable precise measurements over time of changes in Earth’s surface as small as 0.5 cm. It will revisit each location every 6 days on an upward and then downward pass. The spacecraft weighs 2,800 kg and will operate for at least three years (but packs 5 years of consumables), generating as much as 85 terabytes of data per day (140 petabytes in total), all openly available. This quantity of data has required new data storage and capture systems as well as ground station upgrades—with the requirement of downlinking at least 26 terabits daily (for comparison, NASA’s entire EO archive was 22 PB in 2017). NISAR is arguably the world's most expensive Earth Observation satellite, likely crossing $1.5B in total cost (and running 4.5 years past its original launch date of 2020). NASA will end up covering the vast majority of this cost, with ISRO shouldering a cost of something in the neighborhood of ₹1,000 crore ($116M)—however, this is quite hard to nail down and could be significantly higher, or a bit lower, depending on how you account for meeting GSLV Mk II certification requirements from NASA. The mission will contribute critical insights into glacier dynamics, deforestation, groundwater levels, and natural hazards like earthquakes and tsunamis. |
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¶Weird Papers- Could the topology of the Universe be a closed 3-torus, basically a hyperdonut? (We might suggest calling it the everything hyperbagel…) The ‘Collaboration for Observations, Models and Predictions of Anomalies and Cosmic Topology,’ more compactly known as Compact, is surveying possible topologies and studying the Cosmic Microwave Background for evidence of repeated objects that would suggest a finite universe looping back on itself. However, as no evidence of such repetitions has been observed, if our Universe is closed, it must be very large indeed.
- “By growing mycelium into the electronics of a robot, we were able to allow the biohybrid machine to sense and respond to the environment” (paper). This can only go well.
- Get yourself a millisecond pulsar (a spinning neutron star) and a small companion star, and make a stellar engine where the neutron star consumes the low-mass companion star as fuel, moving the whole system (and your civilization) wherever you want to go (paper).
- Storing samples of endangered species at cryogenic temperatures in lunar craters (paper). This is the cislunar version of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
- Being a Martian astronaut might suck if this (possibly roman inspired) approach to making Mars concrete from astronaut blood takes off. 😱 (They do note that doing weekly astronaut blood plasma extraction to source human serum albumin for making regolith biocomposites might be ‘potentially detrimental to crew wellbeing.’ They go on to suggest using recombinant spider silk instead, which we assume would come from engineered yeast or cell-free techniques, but we secretly hope someone proposes bringing millions of genetically engineered spiders to Mars instead.)
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 | That’s… a lot of spiders. 🕷️ |
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| ¶News in brief. Eutelsat restored services across its OneWeb network following a two-day outage caused by their ground segment software failing to account for 2024 as a leap-year (cf. this list of falsehoods programmers believe about time) ● This week, SpaceX might launch the seventh Starship test flight, aiming to deploy 10 Starlink simulators (on the same sub orbital trajectory), along with many vehicle upgrades, such as redesigned avionics, expanded propellant tanks, multiple improved heatshield test tiles, and reoriented forward flaps ● New Glenn’s inaugural launch is scheduled for 1 am ET on Jan 10 ● Elon Musk shared his vision for space exploration that would have us head straight to Mars, bypassing the Moon as “a distraction” ● The FCC formally allocated additional spectrum for commercial launch and reentry vehicles on a secondary basis, requiring launch operators to avoid causing interference with aircraft and missile communications ● Russia launched the 2,000th Semyorka rocket from the "R-7" family of boosters, with the first variant flying on an IBCM in 1957 (the 2,000th was a Soyuz-2.1b launched on Christmas day) ● French launch startup HyPrSpace completed the first test of their second hot fire test campaign for their subscale Terminator first stage demonstrator ● A 500 kg ring-shaped metallic object fell from the sky onto a village in Kenya, which the Kenyan Space Agency said is likely a fragment from a space object (probably a separation ring) but that it has yet to determine its source (prompting skepticism and searches for objects that have recently re-entered, ISRO’s PSLV being a possible candidate). |
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 | The 500 kg ring that fell from the sky and crashed into Mukuku village in Kenya. Credit: KSA |
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¶Etc.- A video showing simulations of one theory around the formation of Mars’s moons, Phobos and Deimos. In this alternative model to existing capture and impact theories, an asteroid passed too close to Mars and broke apart due to tidal disruption, forming a ring structure, which then later coalesced into the moons.
- Polaris has only been the North Star since about 500 AD. Due to stellar proper motion and the precession of the equinoxes, there was no clear north star between about 2,000 BC and 500 AD, with Greek navigator Pytheas describing the celestial pole as devoid of stars in 320 BC. 5,000 years ago, the Egyptians would have (barely) seen Thuban as the north star. During the advent of agriculture, it would have been Vega, which will return to be humanity’s (or our successors’) north star in about 12,000 years as the 25,770-year equinoctial precession repeats.
- The best NOAA 2024 satellite imagery.
- Outgoing NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has recently emphasized the importance of maintaining the Artemis lunar exploration program to ensure the continuity of long-term goals such as Mars exploration (despite Elon’s suggestion that the Moon is ‘a distraction’ and others feeling like there isn’t a significant shared tech tree). Nelson urged his successors to prioritize consistency and bipartisan support in advancing this vision—we’ll soon see if he has any takers.
- pISSStream, a “macOS menu bar app that shows how full the International Space Station's urine tank is in real time,” for some reason. 🤔
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“Recorded during 2024, this year-spanning series of images reveals a pattern in the seasonal drift of the Sun's daily motion through planet Earth's sky. Known to some as an analemma, the figure-eight curve was captured in exposures taken only at 1 pm local time on clear days from Kayseri, Turkiye.” Credit: Betul Turksoy |  |
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