¶New Shepard spins. Blue Origin’s New Shepard, on an uncrewed flight, performed a new trick on Feb 4th: it spun the capsule at about 11 RPM as it fell back to Earth from 104 km, creating centrifugal force on research payloads equivalent to the ⅙ g lunar gravity environment. Lunar gravity was sustained for about two minutes, in comparison to the ~20 seconds available on parabolic flights. The mission was flown for NASA’s Flight Opportunities program, with payloads from Honeybee Robotics (now owned by Blue Origin) and others. Many payloads explored lunar regolith’s physical properties and ways to move it, build on it, and process it in lunar gravity, while others looked at dust mitigation—for example, one experiment explored how lunar dust becomes electrically charged and levitates due to photoionization from UV light, something astronauts and gear will need to handle during lunar missions. |
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 | New Shepard NS-29 returning to Earth after its merry-go-round descent. |
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¶Patching an X-ray telescope. NASA Astronaut Nick Hague recently performed the first on-orbit repair of a telescope since the last Hubble servicing mission in 2009. The NICER telescope is an ISS-mounted X-ray observatory that launched in 2017 with a nominal 18-month mission to study neutron star composition, FRBs, and other energetic X-ray-producing events. More than 7.5 years later, it is currently the instrument producing the most science on the ISS. But, damage last spring created several light leaks that saturate detectors when illuminated, forcing the team to adjust operations to only occur during the ISS’s night phase. Damage was likely due to a micrometeoroid impact, ripping through the 160 nm-thin sunshades that cover the front of each of the instrument’s 56 collector mirrors, blocking IR, UV, and other non-X-ray spectra. Pie-shaped sunshade patches were developed, and pre-mission installation practice was conducted in NASA’s huge neutral buoyancy laboratory pool. After installing 9 of these patches (spacewalk livestream video; 5 planned locations with 4 more identified during the repair), the science team has measured improved performance, particularly for night-phase observations, but the instrument is still receiving more leaked light than desired and may need additional calibration or maintenance before day-phase operations can resume. There are 3 more patches available on the station, and hi-res photos taken during the repair spacewalk may point to additional damage that wasn’t previously discovered. |
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 | NICER, with its 9 new patches installed. Credit NASA |
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| ¶Papers (mostly about 💫). |
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 | Streams of objects in a simulated Milky Way. Credit: Forbes et al. |
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| ¶News in brief. 2024 YR4 is up to 2.4% impact probability ☄️ ● After canceling the VIPER program (c.f Issue № 279), NASA is again soliciting proposals from US companies to fly and operate VIPER (and hopefully provide science data) at minimal cost to the agency ● Japanese startup ArkEdge Space raised an ¥8B Series B to continue developing their standardized 6U cubesat busses ● Urban Sky, a Denver-based stratospheric balloon company, raised a $30M Series B to further commercialize their “tactical” stratosphere solutions ● Putin fired Yuri Borisov, the head of Roscosmos, and replaced him with Dmitry Bakanov, an ex-deputy minister in the transport ministry who previously also ran Russia’s Gonets communication satellite program ● French space agency CNES started seeking proposals for a reusable upper stage for a heavy-lift rocket ● Rocket Lab launched its 4th (out of 5) mission for French IoT constellation operator Kinéis (and 59th overall) ● T-Mobile announced their beta Starlink services to all (via a Super Bowl ad)—even non-T-Mobile subscribers can apply for free until July ● NASA astronaut Suni Williams, who has been on the ISS since the Starliner launch in June, set the female record for cumulative spacewalk time at 62 hours and 6 minutes after she took part in the year’s first two spacewalks with Nick Hague that repaired NICER (see above) and then a first joint spacewalk with mission compatriot Butch Wilmore ● India’s experimental docking SpaDex satellites, currently attached to each other, delayed their undocking until March due to power generation issues ● Vast began the primary structure qualification for its Haven-1 space station with tests including a proof test at 1.8x normal pressure and a leak test (lots of photos and details here); they also delayed launch from sometime this year to NET May 2026. |
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 | Vast’s Haven-1 core framework undergoing qualification testing in Mojave, California. |
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¶Etc.- A big list of Earth observation-related conferences.
- Russia unveiled a prototype plasma engine that could, at full scale, decrease Mars travel time to 1-2 months… assuming one can power it, presumably with a small nuclear reactor. With EP, it’s usually all about the power source, which is often not mentioned in the news.
- ispace’s RESILIENCE took a full disk image of the Earth as it heads to the Moon. Firefly’s Blue Ghost has taken many of their own as well.
- Blue Ghost is currently scheduled for landing on March 2nd, having recently completed its trans-lunar injection. One CLPS payload aboard is RadPC, an experimental NASA-funded highly redundant radiation tolerant processor with a 100mm x 100mm cubesat-ready form factor. While its live recovery and on-the-fly reconfiguration from single event effects (SEEs) is admirable, and its mean time between failures is a drastic improvement over other processors (e.g., NASA’s RAD750), the ~50 MIPs processing power is similar to that of a 1990s Motorola 68040. This is a decade behind existing rad hard space computers, which are themselves already 20 years behind cutting-edge processors, and so we’re unsure if it will find meaningful applications.
- Oddly, along with multinational scientific payloads, China’s upcoming Chang’e 7 lunar lander may include a flag that will flutter and wave in videos of the landing site through “closed-loop wires embedded within the flag [which] will carry alternating currents, generating magnetic fields to create the waving motion.” That’s cute, but won’t it only amplify lunar landing hoax claims if a flag is seen waving in the vacuum of space?
- These are definitely very appropriate uses of tools.
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| Hubble’s largest photomosaic to date, a 2.5 billion pixel panoramic view of the Andromeda galaxy, uses 10 years of data and over 600 overlapping photos. Andromeda’s angular size is six times the diameter of the Moon, requiring a lot of snapshots with Hubble’s tight field of view. Here’s a direct link to the 9MB and 203MB (!!) versions. |  |
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