¶Vera Rubin. After 24 years of development and 11 years of construction, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory (neé LSST) is coming online. The telescope’s first images arrived a few weeks ago and have already led to the discovery of 2,104 new asteroids. Rubin, located high in the Chilean Andes, is a wide-field survey telescope with an 8.4-meter primary mirror and the largest digital camera ever constructed—3,200 megapixels, cooled to -100 °C, and weighing over three tons. The telescope is named for US scientist Dr. Vera Rubin, who helped find the first strong evidence for dark matter through her research into galactic rotation curves. The Rubin Observatory's approach is to just… look at everything. With a 3.5-degree-diameter field of view, it revisits the whole southern sky every few nights, effectively creating a decade-long time-lapse of a huge swath of the visible Universe. This approach of looking for change from day to day (‘time-domain astronomy’) is expected to detect numerous new asteroids and observe fleeting transient events that we’d otherwise miss (like novae, supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, and lensing events). It will also provide tremendous amounts of data—20 TB every 24 hours, more data in year one than all telescopes in history combined—for computational astronomy and cosmology, helping us understand stellar and galaxy dynamics, dark matter, and dark energy. Processing all of this data is a huge challenge, expected to require 250 teraflops of compute and well over 60 PB of storage, along with some complex software engineering—the code is on GitHub. Over its initial ten-year survey, Rubin will catalog 20 billion galaxies. The ongoing proliferation of LEO satellites poses a significant challenge for ground-based astronomy, especially wide-field telescopes, where bright satellite streaks pollute images. Rubin takes 30-second exposures, and removing or avoiding satellites will be a constant and growing challenge. We’re deeply excited about what Vera will see. Much of scientific progress happens when advancing measurement instruments allow access to new domains of observation—looking more persistently, wider, deeper, and further than ever before. It’s for this reason that the Vera Rubin Observatory holds so much promise, because we don’t know what we’ll see. |
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 | A render of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s telescope, dome, and support building. The camera alone weighs three tons. |
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¶South Korean space ambitions. South Korea, or officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is striving for a lunar landing, reusable rockets, and international space prominence. In 2024, ROK established the Korea AeroSpace Administration (KASA) to serve as a central governing body, aimed at unifying components of existing national aerospace projects. ROK aims to position itself as one of the top five global space leaders by engaging in varied initiatives, including the creation of ultra-high-resolution imaging satellites, Korean Space Launch Vehicle (KSLV) variants, domestic vehicles for landing on the Moon by 2032 and Mars by 2045, as well as international and commercial partnerships. In May 2022, ROK became the 10th signatory of the Artemis Accords, with ongoing NASA-KASA lunar exploration feasibility studies and work on the joint NASA-KASA Lunar Space Environment Monitor (LUSEM) experiment. LUSEM is expected to fly on Intuitive Machines’ IM-3 mission in 2027 and observe the near-surface lunar high-energy particle environment. ROK’s first mission beyond Earth was the 2022-launched Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO), also known as Danuri. The probe continues to operate in lunar polar orbit with its five Korean payloads and NASA’s ShadowCam. An agreement signed with the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) in October marked the beginning of Phase 2 for the national lunar project, which involves building a lunar lander. The preliminary design of the 1.8-ton lander is planned to be completed by 2027. A flight model of the lander (without science payloads) would fly to the Moon in 2031 and, following success, the full-scale lander would launch in 2032, carrying a 15-kg rover. Korean startup Unmanned Exploration Laboratory hopes to be the provider of that rover. In addition, Hyundai is developing a larger rover (~70 kg) with assistance from Kia and six Korean aerospace research organizations, aiming for 2027 launch readiness. ROK’s lunar missions (and future multipurpose KOMPSAT and GEO-KOMPSAT satellites) will be launched by the KSLV-III rocket, which is being constructed in partnership with Hanwha Aerospace. By 2035, KSLV-III could be reusable. Other prominent commercial entities in ROK include launch companies Innospace and Perigee Aerospace, satellite services provider SPACEMAP, orbital transport vehicle developer Intergravity, and the Boryung-Axiom Space joint venture BRAX Space Corporation. |
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 | The Republic of Korea hopes to have a lunar lander, rover, and flag on the Moon by 2032. Credit: Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) |
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| ¶News in brief. The US House of Representatives and Senate both proposed similar budget bills to allocate $29.9B for NASA, essentially maintaining a flat budget, as an attempt to reverse the original 25% budget cuts (c.f. Issue 317) - a final budget bill is months away from being passed but this would be a huge save if it happens ● Relatedly, Democrat congress members wrote a letter citing the illegality of NASA’s reduction of staff and resources before the budget passed through Congress ● Also relatedly, JPL is currently planning to sell off some of its satellite inventory ● SES closed its $3.1B acquisition of Intelsat, giving SES command over a constellation of 120 sats across GEO and MEO and strategic access to sats in LEO ● Felix Baumgartner, extreme skydiver who dove from a capsule 39 km above the Earth in 2012, sadly passed away from a paragliding accident ● Apolink raised a $4.3M seed to build a real-time connectivity constellation in LEO for LEO satellites ● York Space Systems plans to acquire Atlas Space Operations to expand ground station capabilities for their spacecraft missions ● California-based startup Auriga Space raised $6M to develop an electromagnetic launch track to accelerate small rockets to 6x the speed of sound ● NASA won’t publish major climate change reports on its website, as originally promised after these reports were removed from other government websites ● Blue Origin now plans to launch NASA’s ESCAPADE mission in late 2025 - the mission has been updated to a more complex trajectory where the spacecraft will remain at L2 for a year before heading to Mars ● Amazon launched 24 more Kuiper satellites aboard a Falcon 9, bringing their total to 78 satellites in orbit ● Per the ESA’s Launcher Exploitation Declaration, the launch operations for Vega C transferred from ArianeSpace to Avio, the rocket’s builder ● The largest Mars meteorite on Earth, a 25 kg rock found in Niger in 2023, sold for $5.3M at Sotheby’s. |
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 | The largest Mars meteorite on Earth (found in Niger after an asteroid likely hit Mars and sent it toward Earth in the past) displayed in New York where it sold at auction for $5.3M |
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¶Etc.- Our sponsor Allspice.io is hiring for three exciting roles: Sr./Principal Technical Product Manager (AI), Solutions Engineer, and Jr-Mid Software Engineer (Parsing and Data Structures). Check them out!
- Rumors have emerged of SpaceX entering the orbital manufacturing business.
- Telescopes that open new domains for observation take a long time to develop. ESA has started construction of LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, which will hopefully open up new parts of the gravitational wave spectrum for observation in 2035 when the trio of spacecraft measure the positions of their solid gold-platinum cubes to the diameter of a helium atom, over a distance of 2.5 million km.
- Rubin might see things that the US would rather keep hidden, at least temporarily. The telescope will issue alerts “within 60 seconds of observation, about objects that have changed brightness or position relative to archived images of that sky position. Transferring, processing, and differencing such large images within 60 seconds (previous methods took hours, on smaller images) is a significant software engineering problem by itself. This stage of processing will be performed at a classified US government facility in California so events that would reveal secret assets can be identified; these will be temporarily edited out before an unredacted release after three days, by which time the data are less sensitive.”
- If we want to cool (and/or warm) the planet, we could just hope for a nearby supernovae or a stellar flyby.
- Pulsar wind nebulae could be ‘PeVatrons’: a likely source for some of the highest energy cosmic rays.
- The sub-kilometer temporary quasi-satellite of Venus 524522 Zoozve (and the Radiolab episode about its naming)
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Astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy caught the ISS crossing in front of an emerging solar flare on June 15th in this stunning photo. Photo credit: Andrew McCarthy |  |
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