Space News and Discussions

[raklian]

By no means a small feat!

[Time_Traveller]

Blue Origin touts capabilities of Blue Ring transfer vehicle

February 2, 2024

ORLANDO, Fla. — Blue Origin is highlighting the capabilities of an orbital transfer vehicle design it announced last year, including the ability of the spacecraft to serve as a fuel depot.

The company publicly announced last October its Blue Ring vehicle, which it described as providing a wide array of “in-space logistics and delivery” services from Earth orbit to cislunar space and beyond. The company had been hinting about development of a space tug for at least a year before the announcement.

That announcement provided few details about the technical capabilities of Blue Ring, but a company executive said there has been strong interest in the vehicle. “We’re bringing Blue Ring to market to do a lot of the missions that are starting to emerge from national security, civil and eventually commercial,” said Lars Hoffman, vice president of national security sales at Blue Origin, in a presentation at the SpaceCom conference here Feb. 1.

Blue Ring, he said, has 12 docking ports, each able to accommodate payloads weighing up to 500 kilograms. A top deck on the spacecraft can carry payloads weighing up to two and a half tons. The spacecraft offers 3,000 meters per second of delta V, or change in velocity, to maneuver to different orbits.

The “core mission” of Blue Ring is to deploy satellites in their desired orbits, but the spacecraft can also be used as a bus for hosted payloads. “We can serve as a very capable bus,” Hoffman said, with a design life of three to five years initially.

https://spacenews.com/blue-origin-touts ... r-vehicle/

[weatheriscool]

Double the James Webb Space Telescope Mirror With SpaceX Starship Telescope
February 1, 2024 by Brian Wang

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/02/d ... scope.html

Felix Schlang at What About It?, ercxspace on twitter and adonaisf have rendered a space telescope built inside the structure of a SpaceX Starship. Elon Musk has said SpaceX is working on designing a Space Telescope built into a Starship.

The Hubble space telescope mirror is 2.4 meters across.
The James Webb Space Telescope’s primary mirror is 21.3 feet (6.5 meters) in diameter and is made of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-plated beryllium. The James Webb scope cost about $10 billion. The still to be built Luvoir A space telescope design would have a 15 meter mirror. Luvoir is planned for 2039.

A 9 meter telescope mirror built into the structure of a Starship could be very affordable. The SpaceX Starship upper stage will likely soon cost $20 million or less and could drop to about $2m to $3 million. The 36 mirror segments of the 10 meter Keck telescope cost $170 million.

[Time_Traveller]

Huge stadium-sized asteroid will make its closest approach to Earth for centuries today (Feb. 2)

about 5 hours ago

A "potentially hazardous" football stadium-size asteroid will zip safely past Earth on Friday (Feb. 2), and, in doing so, will reach its closest point to our planet for more than 100 years. It will also be at least several centuries before the space rock ever gets this close to us again.

The massive asteroid, named 2008 OS7, is around 890 feet (271 meters) across and will pass by Earth at a distance of around 1.77 million miles (2.85 million kilometers), according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). For context, that is more than seven times further away than the moon orbits Earth.

You can watch the asteroid flyby for yourself thanks to a live stream from The Virtual Telescope Project, which will begin at 1 p.m. EST (1800 GMT) on Feb. 2.

As it passes by Earth, the asteroid will be traveling at a speed of around 41,000 mph (66,000 kph), according to JPL.

To compare this space rock's girth to that of other asteroids, it is around half the size of asteroid Bennu, which NASA visited and took samples of, and at least 70 times smaller than the Vredefort meteor — the largest known space rock to ever hit Earth.

https://www.space.com/stadium-size-aste ... ruary-2024

[Time_Traveller]

Russian cosmonaut sets record for most time in space - more than 878 days

February 4, 202412:32 PM GMT

MOSCOW, Feb 4 (Reuters) - Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko on Sunday set a world record for total time spent in space, surpassing his compatriot Gennady Padalka who logged more than 878 days in orbit, Russia's space corporation said.

At 0830 GMT Kononenko broke the record, Roscosmos said. Kononenko is expected to reach a total of 1,000 days in space on June 5 and by late September he will have clocked 1,110 days.

"I fly into space to do my favourite thing, not to set records," Kononenko told TASS in an interview from the International Space Station (ISS) where he is orbiting about 263 miles (423 km) from the earth.

"I am proud of all my achievements, but I am more proud that the record for the total duration of human stay in space is still held by a Russian cosmonaut."

The 59-year-old took the top spot from Padalka, who accumulated a total of 878 days, 11 hours, 29 minutes and 48 seconds, Roscosmos said.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/spac ... 024-02-04/

[weatheriscool]

Stoke Space Follows SpaceX Fast Steel Prototyping for Reusable Rockets
February 4, 2024 by Brian Wang

Stoke Space is following the SpaceX path of fast steel prototypes for fully reusable rockets. The will have a steel heat shield and a ring of engines around the base of a second stage.

As of October 5, 2023, Stoke Space has a total funding of $175 million, including a $100 million Series B investment. The funding round included participation from the University of Michigan, Sparta Group, Long Journey, and other investors. Steve Angel, Linde plc’s Chairman of the Board, is also on Stoke’s Board of Directors.

Space ops are still slow, expensive, and unreliable compared to every other mode of transportation…especially if you consider schedule. Rapid upper stage reusability will change the situation.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/02/s ... ckets.html

[Time_Traveller]

NASA compiling lessons learned from Artemis 1

February 5, 2024



ORLANDO, Fla. — NASA is wrapping up an effort to collect lessons learned from the Artemis 1 mission that address both technical and programmatic issues that the agency hopes to apply more broadly to the overall Artemis lunar exploration campaign.

During a panel at the SpaceCom conference here Jan. 31, NASA and industry officials discussed a wide-ranging effort to formally collect lessons from the 2022 mission that can be used to assist both future Artemis missions as well as other parts of its exploration portfolio.

“We wanted to come up with a way to capture all the lessons learned, to have Artemis 2 be as successful as possible,” said Janet Karika, principal advisor for space transportation at NASA, who is leading the effort capture lessons learned from the mission. “So, we took a new approach to lessons learned.”

That involved, she said, talking to people throughout the workforce at all levels, as well as other internal and external stakeholders. The effort also involved experts in knowledge capture to ensure that the lessons learned are, in fact, learned.

“It’s not just about documenting the lessons. It’s about the behavior and process of transferring those lessons to individuals,” said Zudayyah Taylor-Dunn, chief knowledge officer of NASA’s space operations and exploration systems development mission directorates.

https://spacenews.com/nasa-compiling-le ... artemis-1/

[Time_Traveller]

NASA Earth science mission once slated for cancellation ready for launch

February 4, 2024



WASHINGTON — A nearly billion-dollar mission to study the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere is ready to launch after surviving several cancellation attempts earlier in its development.

A Falcon 9 is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40 Feb. 6 at 1:33 a.m. Eastern. The vehicle will place into sun-synchronous orbit NASA’s Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem, or PACE, spacecraft.

PACE carries three instruments designed to study the ocean as well as clouds and aerosols in the atmosphere. Ocean Color Instrument (OCI), the primary instrument, will provide information on ocean color from ultraviolet to infrared wavelengths. It is accompanied by the Hyper Angular Research Polarimeter (HARP2) and Spectro-polarimeter for Planetary Exploration (SPEXone), which will provide data on atmospheric clouds and aerosols as well as support atmospheric correction of OCI data.

“PACE is going to so profoundly advance our understanding about how our oceans work and how they are related to the broader Earth system and the changing climate,” said Karen St. Germain, director of NASA’s Earth science division, at a Feb. 4 briefing about the mission.

A key focus of PACE will be studying phytoplankton on the ocean surface. That includes being able to differentiate among phytoplankton species, said Jeremy Werdell, PACE project scientist. “Now we’ll know where the harmful ones are, where the beneficial ones are, where the beneficial ones are moving to.”

https://spacenews.com/nasa-earth-scienc ... or-launch/

[firestar464]

A long, long time ago in a galaxy not so far away: Research unearths clues to conditions of the early universe

https://phys.org/news/2024-02-galaxy-un ... early.html

[weatheriscool]

US to launch next moon mission on Valentine's Day

This handout picture from NASA shows the Nova-C lunar lander encapsulated within the fairing of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in preparation for launch.

US companies are set to launch for the moon on February 14, less than a month since a similar mission ended in failure with the spaceship burning up in the Earth's atmosphere, NASA said Wednesday.

The upcoming attempt features a lander built by Houston-based Intuitive Machines fixed to the top of a SpaceX rocket, while the last try involved a United Launch Alliance rocket and Astrobotics lander.

https://phys.org/news/2024-02-moon-miss ... e-day.html

[Time_Traveller]

China and Russia team up to establish joint moon base --- Planned Sino-Russian joint moon base aims to overtake the US in reaping lunar strategic benefits
asiatimes.com ^ | January 3, 2022 | Gabriel Honrada
https://asiatimes.com/2022/01/china-and ... moon-base/

China and Russia plan to set up a joint moon base by 2027, eight years earlier than originally planned. The joint moon base, called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), will be a complex of experimental research facilities designed for multiple scientific activities, such as moon exploration, moon-based observation, research experiments and technology verification.

China is planning to launch the Chang’e 8 lunar exploration mission as the first step in establishing the ILRS. The mission is expected to test technology for using local resources and manufacturing with 3D printing.

Presently, China’s lunar presence includes the Chang’e 4 lander and the Yutu 2 rover, whose arrival in 2019 marked humanity’s first landings on the dark side of the moon. Both lunar craft are performing scientific experiments, with Chang’e 4 conducting a lunar biosphere experiment to see how silkworms, potatoes and Arabidopsis (a small flowering plant) seeds grow in lunar gravity, while the Yutu 2 rover is exploring the Von Kármán crater.

China and Russia’s joint moon base plans can be seen as a response to their exclusion from the US Artemis Accords, which aims to establish principles, guidelines and best practices for space exploration for the US and its partners. Its goal is to advance the Artemis Program, the name for US efforts to place itself as the first nation to establish a long-term lunar presence.

China is barred from participating in joint projects with the US in space by the Wolf Amendment, a 2011 measure prohibiting NASA from cooperating with China without special approval from Congress.

More on this: -

China wants to send plants, microbes and lunar resource experiments to the moon in 2028

published about 20 hours ago

An upcoming Chinese lunar mission will carry a small ecosystem and other payloads to test using lunar resources later this decade.

China's Chang'e 8 mission is a precursor mission for a moon base, named the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) that the country wants to build with partners in the 2030s. Chang'e 8 will test key technologies needed to make the ILRS sustainable.

The China National Space Administration (CNSA) revealed details of Chang'e 8's planned payloads in a solicitation for domestic expressions of interest in developing the payloads released on Feb. 7. Notably, these include in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) and terrestrial ecosystem experiments.

The ISRU payload will be designed to melt lunar soil using solar energy. This material will then be used to manufacture components and measure their mechanical and thermal properties. Previous reporting suggests the plan is to produce bricks, which would then be capable of being assembled by robots.

The ecosystem experiment is described as a two-chain terrestrial ecosystem containing plants and microbes. The controlled, sealed environment aims to explore the viability of biological utilization of lunar soil resources and how they potentially support life-support technology — such as food and oxygen production — for a crewed lunar base. The 2019 Chang'e 4 mission notably saw a cotton seed sprout in a container on the far side of the moon.

https://www.space.com/china-microbes-pl ... -moon-2028

[weatheriscool]

Is Kennedy Space Center ready to withstand the power of Starship?
By David Szondy
February 18, 2024

SpaceX plans to regularly launch its monster Starship booster from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and to do so it will refurbish an Apollo-era launch site and also construct a new one, according to a new environmental impact statement.

The Starship booster has been in the news off and on in recent years – not the least for the fiery end of its first two attempts to reach orbit. However, if familiarity breeds contempt, it also tends to kill a sense of scale. SpaceX's new flagship rocket isn't just a display of new technology or cool retro lines; it is an absolute monster of a space vehicle.

To put it directly, Starship is the largest, most powerful rocket ever to fly. The fully stacked first and second stages stand 394 ft (120 m) where the Apollo Saturn V that sent the first astronauts to the Moon is only 363 ft (111 m). Moreover, Starship's 33 Raptor engines punch out over 16 million pounds of thrust, or twice that of the Saturn V.

It even towers over NASA's Space Launch System (SLS), which stands at 371 ft (114 m) and still has twice the thrust. As to payload, Starship can put 150 tonnes into orbit with both stages returning to Earth for reuse. The SLS can only handle 95 tonnes in its current configuration and is a one-and-done booster.

https://newatlas.com/space/kennedy-spac ... ip-rocket/

[firestar464]

The Solar System's Missing Planet Has Only One Place Left to Hide

https://www.sciencealert.com/the-solar- ... ft-to-hide

[weatheriscool]

[Time_Traveller]

China launches classified military satellite towards geostationary belt

February 23, 2024

HELSINKI — China launched the TJS-11classified satellite early Friday as the country continues to build its geostationary capabilities.

A Long March 5 lifted off from Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on Hainan island at 6:30 a.m. Eastern (1130 UTC), Feb. 23.

The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., (CASC), announced launch success just under an hour after launch. The announcement also provided the first official statement on the payload: TJS-11 (Tongxin Jishu Shiyan-11). The satellite is described as being mainly used to carry out multi-band, high-speed satellite communication technology verification.

Neither CASC nor Chinese state media provided further details on the satellite which belongs to a series of classified geosynchronous satellites for the Chinese military. TJS satellites are thought by observers to serve a range of purposes including early warning, signals intelligence and more.

Buildup to the mission was shrouded in secrecy, despite the open location of the coastal launch. There were no official reports of the rollout of the rocket, in contrast to previous missions. Notably it is the shortest time between launches of the Long March 5, at 70 days since the launch of Yaogan-41. Like the Yaogan-41 launch, the TJS-11 mission used an elongated 18.5-meter-long, 5.2-meter-diameter payload fairing. Standard fairings are 12.3 meters long.

https://spacenews.com/china-launches-cl ... nary-belt/

[weatheriscool]

Japans Will Launch Mission to Mars Moons – Phobos and Deimos in 2024 With Samples Returned in 2029
February 24, 2024 by Brian Wang
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/02/j ... -2029.html

Japan’s space agency (JAXA) is sending a mission to travel to Mars which will survey the Red Planet’s two moons, Phobos and Deimos. The spacecraft will explore both moons and collect a sample of Phobos and bring it to Earth. This will be a major dedicated mission to Phobos and Deimos. MMX is scheduled to be launched in 2024, and will return to Earth five years later.

Phobos has been photographed in close-up by several spacecraft whose primary mission has been to photograph Mars. The first was Mariner 7 in 1969, followed by Mariner 9 in 1971, Viking 1 in 1977, Phobos 2 in 1989, Mars Global Surveyor in 1998 and 2003, Mars Express in 2004, 2008, 2010 and 2019, and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2007 and 2008. On 25 August 2005, the Spirit rover, with an excess of energy due to wind blowing dust off of its solar panels, took several short-exposure photographs of the night sky from the surface of Mars, and was able to successfully photograph both Phobos and Deimos.

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

[firestar464]

https://phys.org/news/2024-03-james-web ... tures.html

James Webb Space Telescope captures the end of planet formation

[weatheriscool]