¶IM-2. Intuitive Machine’s second lunar mission after their partially successful lunar landing debut in February ‘24 is IM-2, carrying their Nova-C lander dubbed Athena, which hopefully launches today on a Falcon 9. IM-2 is even more ambitious than IM-1, carrying multiple rovers and a hopper and aiming for the Moon’s south pole where water ice could be within reach of the lander’s 1-meter Honeybee Robotics TRIDENT drill. Onboard are multiple science and commercial payloads and IM’s Micro Nova (µNova), a hydrazine-propelled one-meter tall hopper that carries high-resolution cameras, a neutron spectrometer to look for water as it transits permanently shadowed craters, a radiometer, and a Nokia 4G antenna. Not content with one rover, Athena will also deploy Lunar Outpost’s 10 kg MAPP rover, which has depth cameras, will collect soil samples for a symbolic transfer to NASA for $1, will test a lunar 4G/LTE network for Nokia & NASA, and even carries its own tiny rover from MIT for self-inspection called AstroAnt. As we’ve said before, this mission is pretty much just rovers all the way down. Heading for the Moon with a direct translunar injection, Athena will attempt landing NET March 6th. Riding along on IM-2 are also Lunar Trailblazer (an orbiter designed to map lunar water at high resolution), an IM-managed lunar comms satellite, and AstroForge’s Odin asteroid flyby mission. If successful, Odin will be the world’s first commercial deep space mission. It will separate from IM-2 45 minutes post-launch and spend 300 days in transit to NEO 2022 OB5, where it will image the object and survey it for potentially valuable metals. AstroForge says they built the spacecraft in just 10 months, so it is "a high-risk, by the seat-of-your-pants mission." IM-2 will be a fun one to watch! |
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 | Intuitive Machine’s µNova hopper, one of the multiple vehicles that will be deployed by the IM-2 lunar lander. |
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¶Solar Storms A-Brewing. Our Sun is at, or near, its maximum activity on its recurring 11-year cycle, meaning that there is currently a high likelihood of solar storms. The Carrington Event of 1859 was the most intense, directly observed, and well-documented geomagnetic storm in history. It caused major telegraph network malfunctions and visible aurorae at low latitudes, and it helped us begin unraveling the connection between solar storms and their impacts on Earth. Some locations on the world’s 200,000 km of telegraph lines at the time lost communication for 8+ hours as fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic fields induced currents in the wires, with reports of damaged equipment and fires. Some operators even found that they were able to disconnect the machines’ batteries and transmit messages using only the auroral currents. The flare associated with the Carrington Event may have released 10^32 erg of energy, equivalent to something like 50 million Tsar Bombas—this is consistent with the largest flares releasing energy equivalent to billions of hydrogen bombs. The associated Coronal Mass Ejection reached Earth from the Sun in ~17.6 hours. Solar storms are a vague category of related events, including solar flares—intense, rapid bursts of electromagnetic radiation from the Sun’s atmosphere resulting from 'twisted' magnetic fields, typically above sunspots, and classified according to strength (B-, C-, M- and the largest X-class); Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs)—an ejection of plasma mass from the Sun's corona; solar particle events (SPEs)—particles, mainly protons, which become accelerated in the Sun’s atmosphere during a flare or in space due to CMEs; and geomagnetic storms—rapid and temporary variations in Earth's magnetic field due to solar wind shock waves. Should another very powerful storm be directed toward Earth, things may not play out exactly as they do in apocalyptic movies, but there are growing concerns for our highly interconnected, power- and communication-dependent world. We know a large Earth-directed storm can disrupt and/or damage satellites, communication and navigation systems, oil and gas pipelines, and power grids. 38 SpaceX Starlink satellites were unable to reach their intended orbit in February 2022, an estimated $50M+ loss, due to a geomagnetic storm causing upwelling of the atmosphere (bringing denser air to higher altitudes), thereby increasing the satellites’ atmospheric drag. In 1989, two subsequent CMEs blacked out the Hydro-Québec system and caused six million people in Montreal to be without electric power for nine hours. Beyond critical systems being disabled, solar storms can increase the risk of radiation exposure to occupants of space habitats or high-altitude aircraft and even alter the instinctual migratory patterns of animals. Vital to minimizing losses, solar event forecasting continues to advance through space- and ground-based monitoring instruments and ongoing modeling efforts. For those who want to be ‘space weather ready’ this tip sheet may be informative. |
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 | A significant solar flare event in 2017, caught by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. |
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| ¶News in brief. Seems like we dodged 2024 YR4, the impact probability is now down to 0.0017% after additional observations were made in the past week ● Australian launch provider Gilmour Space plans to test their Eris three-stage rocket for the first time in mid-March, if successful it would be the first Australian rocket to reach orbit ● Rocket Lab hit 60 launches with its Electron rocket after taking BlackSky’s first Gen-3 EO satellite to LEO ● German launch company Isar Aerospace completed a nine-engine static fire test of the first stage of their Spectrum rocket, the final technical milestone before its first test flight, which is now awaiting a license ● Seattle-based startup Kapta Space emerged with $5M in seed funding to develop electronically-steered space-based radar payloads ● Jim Free, NASA’s associate administrator (the top civil-service position in the agency), is retiring ● According to an FAA notice, Starship’s 8th test flight may occur as early as this week, although details about its launch licensing remain unclear amid SpaceX’s increasing presence at the agency ● Denver-based startup Karman+ raised $20M to develop their first asteroid mining demonstration mission ● India launched a $57.7M seed fund to accelerate commercialization of space by investing in domestic businesses ● China’s Tianwen-2 spacecraft, which will collect samples from near-Earth asteroid Kamoʻoalewa and rendezvous with comet main-belt comet 311P/PANSTARRS, is ready to launch, maybe sometime in May ● The Australian Space Agency invested $3.6M in domestic companies developing lunar technologies, such as a radioisotope heater and lunar navigation systems ● Space station developer Voyager Technologies filed for IPO ● ATMOS Space Cargo received €13.1M from the EU’s European Innovation Council to advance their PHOENIX 2 re-entry vehicle designed to return a wide range of payloads from space ● A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster landed in the Bahamas, increasing its efficiency and preparing for the polar launch of Fram2—this was the first time a booster has returned to another country ● Another Falcon 9 second stage had an uncontrolled reentry, deviating from its intended Pacific trajectory, and crashed over Poland, damaging a warehouse but luckily there were no reported human injuries (concerning since this is the fourth recent incident involving Falcon 9 upper stage debris) ● Firefly’s Blue Ghost circularized its lunar orbit and is aiming for a March 2nd landing (the gorgeous videos keep coming) ● Artemis II SRB stacking is complete (although we’ll see if it ever flies). |
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 | Fully stacked twin SLS solid rocket boosters inside the Vehicle Assembly Building for NASA’s Artemis II crewed test flight around the Moon. |
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