SpaceX postponed the departure of its latest Dragon cargo ship from the International Space Station on Saturday (Jan. 22) by at least a day due to bad weather at its landing site. You can watch the next undocking attempt live on Sunday, NASA said.
The Dragon CRS-24 cargo ship was scheduled to undock from the space station at 10:40 a.m. EST (1540 GMT) on Saturday and return to Earth early Monday morning. But bad weather at potential splashdown locations in the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast prevented the departure, according to SpaceX.
"SpaceX and NASA have waived off today's planned departure of an upgraded SpaceX Dragon resupply spacecraft due to high winds in the splashdown zones at the Gulf," NASA spokesperson Sandra Jones said during a NASA TV update Saturday.
You can watch SpaceX's Dragon CRS-24 spacecraft depart the space station live on this page Sunday, courtesy of NASA TV, beginning at 10:15 a.m. EST (1515 GMT). Undocking is scheduled for 10:40 a.m. EST (1540 GMT), splashdown weather permitting.
There will be no live coverage of SpaceX's Dragon splashdown, though it is expected to occur either late Monday or early Tuesday, weather permitting. Updates on splashdown will come through NASA's space station blog and SpaceX's Twitter page.
The Dragon cargo ship will return nearly 5,000 pounds (2,267 kilograms) of science to Earth when it splashes down, including a "cytoskeleton" that uses cell signaling to understand how the human body changes in microgravity. A 12-year-old light imaging microscope that is being retired after more than a decade of use studying the structure of matter and plants in orbit is also on board.
A SpaceX Dragon cargo ship is seen approaching the International Space Station to deliver tons of supplies along with Christmas gifts and food for astronauts as part of NASA's CRS-24 cargo mission on Dec. 22, 2021.(Image credit: NASA TV)
The capsule was originally targeting Friday to undock and Saturday to splash down, but the procedure was delayed by a day due to poor weather conditions for returning. If the Dragon had undocked Saturday morning, it would have splashdown in the wee hours of Monday, according to NASA.
Dragon is the only cargo ship that can fly scientific experiments back to researchers on Earth, as all other such spacecraft burn up in the atmosphere during re-entry. Dragon is often used to carry back biological samples that must be transferred to a scientific facility quickly; splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean will allow for rapid transfer of samples to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in coastal Florida, east of Orlando.
Members of the Expedition 66 crew have been packing up and organizing Dragon supplies for at least the last two weeks, according to NASA's space station blog, including swapping out science freezer components that will host the precious refrigerated science samples.
Editor's note: This story was updated to reflect the 24-hour weather delay for SpaceX's Dragon CRS-24 spacecraft undocking at the International Space Station.
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New research is converting some skeptics to the idea that tiny, icy Mimas may be full of liquid.
That’s a moon … and a waterlogged ice ball?
With a large crater carved out of its surface, Mimas, a 250-mile-wide moon of Saturn, bears more than a passing resemblance to the Death Star in “Star Wars.” (When the Millennium Falcon first encounters the Death Star, Obi-Wan Kenobi ominously says: “That’s no moon. It’s a space station.”)
For eight years, scientists have been considering that Mimas, seemingly a pockmarked ball of ice frozen hard, might be hiding a secret: an ocean flowing 14 to 20 miles below the surface.
In recent years, such ocean worlds — Europa at Jupiter and Enceladus at Saturn, to name two — have jumped to the top of the lists for scientists who are considering places in the solar system where life could have arisen. One NASA spacecraft, Juno, will swoop past Europa for a closer look this year and another mission, Europa Clipper, is to arrive for a dedicated mission there in 2030.
But unlike other icy moons known to possess under-ice oceans, Mimas has a surface that offers no hints of cracks or melting that might suggest sloshiness within. It also stretched scientific credulity that the interior of a moon as small as Mimas could be warm enough for an ocean to remain unfrozen.
A planetary scientist who thought the idea of a Mimas ocean was unlikely now finds the thermodynamics to be plausible.
“I did change my mind fairly recently,” said Alyssa Rhoden, a specialist in the geophysics of icy moons at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. “I was saying Mimas can’t have an ocean, but what I was really saying was, for Mimas to have an ocean would really challenge our intuition about Mimas. And when I realized that, I thought, well, that’s not how scientists are supposed to work. We don’t come to a conclusion without actually testing the hypothesis.”
Dr. Rhoden, along with Matthew Walker of the Planetary Science Institute, headquartered in Tucson, Ariz., devised a computer simulation to explore the tidal forces of Saturn and Mimas. They found that the heat generated by the tides, which would squeeze the moon, could be enough to maintain the hypothesized ocean.
“It works really beautifully,” Dr. Rhoden said this week.
One of the keys for explaining the lack of cracks is that the ocean, if it exists, formed relatively recently. It may also be either steady in size or getting bigger. When water freezes into ice, it expands in volume, and the upward pressure would fracture the ice above.
“The ice shell cannot be thickening today,” Dr. Rhoden said. “So Mimas has to either be warming or it has to be stable.”
The suggestion of a Mimas ocean comes from measurements by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017. Mimas’s orbit is tidally locked with Saturn: The same side of the moon always faces the ringed planet, just as we on Earth see only one side of Earth’s moon. But in 2014 scientists reported a bigger-than-expected wobble in Mimas’s rotation. That suggested either the core of Mimas was stretched out in the direction of Saturn or there was an ocean.
“Even though we suggested this, the ocean as a possibility, I personally started to lose hope that it might actually have an ocean,” said Radwan Tajeddine, the lead author of the 2014 paper, published in the journal Science. “What’s amazing about this paper is that it actually shows that if you just use reasonable ice properties and apply a more sophisticated model, you can actually have an ocean inside and surviving.”
William McKinnon, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, remains skeptical. “My short answer is that this is hard to believe,” he said in an email. “There isn’t anything about Mimas’s surface that says ‘ocean’ or ‘high heat flow,’ unlike Enceladus.”
The other possibility — a stretched solid interior — also remains plausible. Answers might have to await a future robotic probe to Saturn that could make more detailed measurements of Mimas.
“It’s another piece in the puzzle,” Dr. Tajeddine said. “This paper says that an ocean is not a crazy idea.”
Live coverage of the countdown and launch of a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket from pad 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The mission, known as USSF 8, will launch two U.S. Space Force satellites for the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program. Text updates will appear automatically below. Follow us on Twitter.
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United Launch Alliance’s first mission of the year will debut a new configuration of the company’s workhorse Atlas 5 rocket when it lifts off at 2 p.m. EST (1900 GMT) Friday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.
The rocket, featuring a wide fairing and a single solid rocket booster, will carry two U.S. military tracking and inspection satellites into geosynchronous orbit during a nearly seven-hour flight sequence.
The 196-foot-tall (59.7-meter) Atlas 5 rocket is set to take off from pad 41 at Cape Canaveral. Its RD-180 main engine and single strap-on booster will generate about 1.2 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, powering the Atlas 5 due east over the Atlantic Ocean.
You can watch our live launch coverage on this page beginning at 11:30 a.m. EST (1630 GMT).
The payloads on-board the rocket are the fifth and sixth satellites for the U.S. Space Force’s Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program.
The GSSAP satellites are designed to help the military track and observe objects in geosynchronous orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator. The first four GSSAP satellites launched in pairs on Delta 4 rockets in 2014 and 2016.
In 2017, the military confirmed it ordered two additional GSSAP satellites from Orbital ATK, now part of Northrop Grumman. Those satellites, each the size of a compact car, are mounted side by side inside the Atlas 5 rocket’s payload fairing for launch Friday.
ULA will use a unique configuration of its workhorse Atlas 5 launcher for the mission, which the Space Force has designated USSF 8.
The Atlas 5 will be fitted with one strap-on solid rocket booster supplied by Northrop Grumman, a 5.4-meter (17.7-foot) diameter payload fairing provided by RUAG Space, and a single RL10 engine from Aerojet Rocketdyne on the rocket’s Centaur upper stage.
This version of the Atlas 5 is known as the “511” configuration, with the first number denoting the size of the payload fairing, the second number representing the number of solid rocket booster, and the third digit the number of engines on the Centaur stage.
The placement of just one strap-on booster on the side of the Atlas 5’s first stage will give the rocket asymmetrical thrust as it climbs off the pad. Atlas 5 missions have flown with a single solid rocket booster before, but those flights used the smaller 4-meter-wide payload fairing option.
The Atlas 5 comes in 11 different configurations, each optimized to haul satellites of a certain size.
Tory Bruno, ULA’s CEO, calls the “511” version of the Atlas 5 the “Big Slider.” Its launch Friday will likely be the only flight of the Atlas 5-511 configuration.
“We call it the ‘Big Slider’ because if you watch the launch, you’re going to see it kind of power slide off the pad because of this asymmetric torque,” Bruno said in a video posted on YouTube by ULA. “A lot of you wonder how do you fly that. That nozzle (of the solid rocket booster) is canted to pass through the average center of gravity, and the RD-180 has tremendous control authority with its thrust vector system, and it can overcome that and compensate for it, and this is just the right amount of energy to carry these two payloads to their very cool mission of space surveillance.”
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(CNN)Black holes are best known for shredding stars, devouring light and acting like massive garbage disposals in space.
In a twist, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered that these energetic celestial objects have a nurturing side, too.
Hubble's observation of a dwarf starburst galaxy, called Henize 2-10, revealed a gaseous umbilical cord stretching from a black hole at the center of the galaxy to a stellar nursery where stars are born.
A dwarf starburst galaxy is a small galaxy with an intense amount of star formation.
Star birth requires a dense cloud of gas and dust. The stream of gas provided by the black hole actually triggered a fireworks show of star birth as it interacted with the cloud, which led to a cluster of forming stars.
The galaxy is located 30 million light-years away in the Pyxis constellation. While large galaxies are known to contain a supermassive black hole at their center, galaxies like Henize 2-10 have caused astronomers to debate if the same is possible in smaller-scale cosmic settings.
Compared to the massive Milky Way galaxy and its billions of stars, Henize 2-10 only has about a tenth of the stars.
"From the beginning I knew something unusual and special was happening in Henize 2-10, and now Hubble has provided a very clear picture of the connection between the black hole and a neighboring star forming region located 230 light-years from the black hole," said study author Amy Reines, an assistant professor in the department of physics at Montana State University, in a statement.
A detailed look at the center of the galaxy shows an umbilical cord of gas 230 light-years long, connecting the galaxy's black hole and a star-forming region.
The outflow of gas from the black hole was moving about a million miles per hour when it slammed into the dense gas cloud and then spread out. New clusters of stars can be seen flourishing along its path.
It's a rare case of a black hole helping stars to form, rather than tearing them apart. In large galaxies, black holes spew out superheated jets of material that nearly reach the speed of light. Any gas clouds unfortunate enough to be in the way of these jets would become so hot, they wouldn't be able to cool down enough to form stars.
The smaller black hole inside of dwarf galaxy Henize 2-10 is releasing material at a much slower and gentler speed, creating just the right conditions for star birth.
Studying dwarf galaxies, or those that have remained small over time, could help astronomers discover how supermassive black holes came to exist early on in the history of the universe.
A satellite view of iceberg A-68A as it approached South Georgia island in late 2020.Image: MODIS from NASA Worldview Snapshots
Iceberg A-68a—the sixth largest in recorded history—released a hideous amount of freshwater near an ecologically sensitive island, according to new research chronicling the berg’s life.
Iceberg A-68a disintegrated in early 2021, but not before captivating the world with its eventful three-and-a-half year life. In a new paper published in Remote Sensing of Environment, researchers with the British Antarctic Survey and the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling chronicle the ‘berg’s life using satellites.
The long journey taken by iceberg A-68A.Illustration: Copernicus Sentinel/ESA/Antarctic Iceberg Tracking Database
Among the key findings was the rate at which the iceberg melted over time, the intense amount of freshwater spilled near the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia, and how, thankfully, the iceberg failed to damage the seafloor along the island’s sensitive coast.
The iceberg split off from the Larsen C ice shelf in July 2017. At more tha 2,000 square miles (5,180 square kilometers), the chunk of ice encompassed an area 1.6 times the size of Rhode Island. The ‘berg lost a chunk of itself almost immediately, resulting in its renaming to A68a and the naming of its offspring to A68b.
Iceberg A68a managed to rack up some serious mileage as it drifted some 2,485 miles (4,000 kilometers) northwards, and ominously, toward South Georgia island. Scientists feared that the iceberg—resembling a pointing finger—might damage the seafloor along the island’s coast, causing harm to the island’s abundant, but sensitive, wildlife.
Five different satellite missions were used to track A68a over time: Copernicus Sentinel-1, Copernicus Sentinel-3, Terra with its MODIS instrument, CryoSat, and ICESat-2. With these satellites, the team measured the thickness and area of the iceberg over the course of A68a’s entire life cycle. This took some extra work, however, as the gigantic ‘berg “had significant undulations in topography across its surface,” according to the paper.
Video showing the chronology of A-68A’s life. Credit: CPOM/GEBCO Compilation Group/WOA/Antarctic Tracking Database
As the scientists point out, A68a didn’t stray too far from its birthplace, and it didn’t melt very much, during the first two years of its life. The situation changed, however, as it moved northwards through the warmer waters of the Drake Passage.
“Frequent measurements allowed us to follow every move and break-up of the berg as it moved slowly northwards through an area called ‘iceberg alley,’ a route in the ocean which icebergs often follow, and into the Scotia Sea where it then gained speed and approached the island of South Georgia very closely,” Laura Gerrish, a mapping specialist at BAS and a co-author of the study, said in a press release.
The iceberg’s position on December 17, 2020.Image: British Antarctic Survey/ESA
From the time of its birth through to early 2021, A68a thinned from 770 feet (235 meters) thick to 550 feet (168 meters), representing 32% of its total loss. The researchers confirmed in the study that the “distinct environmental conditions in the Weddell and Scotia Sea lead to rapidly increasing rates of melting and fragmentation once icebergs travel north of the Antarctic Peninsula.”
The iceberg had sufficiently melted such that, by the time it arrived at South Georgia, it was no longer deep enough to inflict extensive damage by scraping the seafloor. Ecologists were concerned at the time that if the ran aground near the island, it would prevent penguins from accessing their breeding grounds, block foraging marine animals, and disrupt ocean currents. Mercifully, A68a scraped the seafloor only very briefly; the bottom, or keel, of the iceberg reached 460 feet (141 meters) beneath the surface, whereas the main seabed is 490 feet (150 meters) below the surface. What’s more, the iceberg broke up shortly after arriving at South Georgia, greatly reducing any blocking effects.
Visualization showing the amount of freshwater released by the iceberg.Image: CPOM/ESA/Google basemap
That said, iceberg A68a released 168 billion tons of freshwater filled with nutrients in the immediate vicinity of South Georgia. That’s akin to 61 million Olympic-sized swimming pools. Simply put that’s… a lot of water. This is certain to have an effect on the local ecology, as a statement from ESA points out:
When icebergs detach from ice shelves, they drift with the ocean currents and wind, releasing cold fresh meltwater and nutrients as they melt. This process influences the local ocean circulation and fosters biological production around the iceberg.
As to the potential positive and negative effects of this process, the researchers can only guess, writing that “[m]ore research should be conducted to study the impact of this alteration on the marine life around South Georgia.”
The new paper will likely be helpful to scientists who study the movements of icebergs in this area. “As this is a common iceberg trajectory, our results could also help to predict the disintegration of other large … icebergs and to include their impact in ocean models,” the scientists wrote.
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A promotional poster for the USSF-8 mission, showing the Atlas 5’s configuration with a single solid rocket booster and a 5.4-meter (17.7-foot) diameter payload fairing. Credit: United Launch Alliance
United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 rocket has flown in 10 different configurations over 90 missions since 2002, each version optimized to haul satellites of a certain size and mass into space.
The only variant of the Atlas 5 rocket yet to fly is set to launch Friday afternoon from Cape Canaveral with a pair of satellites to help the U.S. military keep track of traffic in geosynchronous orbit.
Fitted with a single solid rocket booster to provide an extra burst of speed off the launch pad, the Atlas 5 is set to depart Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 2 p.m. EST (1900 GMT) Friday to begin ULA’s first mission of 2022.
The mission: Deliver the fifth and sixth satellites to orbit for the Space Force’s Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program.
The GSSAP satellites are designed to help the military track and observe objects in geosynchronous orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator. The first four GSSAP satellites launched in pairs on Delta 4 rockets in 2014 and 2016.
In 2017, the military confirmed it ordered two additional GSSAP satellites from Orbital ATK, now part of Northrop Grumman. Those satellites, each the size of a compact car, are mounted side by side inside the Atlas 5 rocket’s payload fairing for launch Friday.
ULA will use a unique configuration of its workhorse Atlas 5 launcher for the mission, which the Space Force has designated USSF 8.
The Atlas 5 will be fitted with a single strap-on solid rocket booster supplied by Northrop Grumman, a 5.4-meter (17.7-foot) diameter payload fairing provided by RUAG Space, and a single RL10 engine from Aerojet Rocketdyne on the rocket’s Centaur upper stage.
This version of the Atlas 5 is known as the “511” configuration, with the first number denoting the size of the payload fairing, the second number representing the number of solid rocket booster, and the third digit the number of engines on the Centaur stage.
The placement of just one strap-on booster on the side of the Atlas 5’s first stage will give the rocket asymmetrical thrust as it climbs off the pad. Atlas 5 missions have flown with a single solid rocket booster before, but those flights used the smaller 4-meter-wide payload fairing option.
The Atlas 5-511 rocket will take off with 1.2 million pounds of thrust from the single solid-fueled booster and the first stage’s kerosene-fueled RD-180 main engine. According to ULA, the Atlas 5-511 can carry up to 11,570 pounds (5,250 kilograms) to an elliptical geostationary transfer orbit. Its capacity to low Earth orbit is roughly 24,250 pounds (11,000 kilograms), according to ULA performance data.
An Atlas 5 rocket rolls out to pad 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station with two GSSAP satellites for the U.S. Space Force. Credit: United Launch Alliance
Tory Bruno, ULA’s CEO, calls the “511” version of the Atlas 5 the “Big Slider.” Its launch Friday will likely be the only flight of the Atlas 5-411 configuration.
“We call it the ‘Big Slider’ because if you watch the launch, you’re going to see it kind of power slide off the pad because of this asymmetric torque,” Bruno said in a video posted on YouTube by ULA. “A lot of you wonder how do you fly that. That nozzle (of the solid rocket booster) is canted to pass through the average center of gravity, and the RD-180 has tremendous control authority with its thrust vector system, and it can overcome that and compensate for it, and this is just the right amount of energy to carry these two payloads to their very cool mission of space surveillance.”
The Atlas 5 rocket was designed by Lockheed Martin to fly in up to 20 different configurations, giving engineers the ability to “dial” the rocket’s power and payload volume to meet the needs of each specific mission. Mission planners have the option of flying a four-meter or five-meter diameter payload fairing, and can fly the Atlas 5 with up to five strap-on solid boosters, or none if the mission doesn’t need them.
The Atlas 5’s Centaur upper stage can fly with one or two RL10 engines, depending on mission requirements. So far, all but one Atlas 5 launch has flown with the single-engine Centaur upper stage.
The exception is on launches with Boeing’s Starliner capsule, which launches with a dual-engine Centaur stage. There are no other missions on the Atlas 5 launch schedule confirmed to use the dual-engine Centaur stage.
The addition of the unique Atlas 5 configuration for Starliner missions and the lack of use of other dual-engine Centaur variants effectively leaves 11 Atlas 5 versions that will have flown at least once before the rocket’s retirement.
Lockheed Martin merged its Atlas rocket program with Boeing’s Delta family in 2006 to create United Launch Alliance.
The most-used version of the Atlas 5 to date is the “401” variant with a four-meter fairing and no solid boosters. The Atlas 5-401 has flown 40 times, including the first Atlas flight in 2002.
There have been six flights of the Atlas 5-411 configuration with a sole solid booster.
With asymmetrical thrust countered by steering from the Atlas 5’s RD-180 main engine, the Atlas 5-511 and -411 configurations are unique among launchers currently in service. The ability to add a single booster allows customers to pay for just enough capacity for their payloads, rather than buying a more larger, more expensive Atlas 5 variant.
ULA is developing the upgraded Vulcan Centaur rocket to replace the Atlas and Delta rocket families.
There are 26 more Atlas 5 rockets remaining in ULA’s inventory, including the launch vehicle awaiting liftoff Friday afternoon. All have been allocated to future missions for the Space Force, NASA, and Amazon’s Kuiper internet satellite constellation.
There are just three Delta rockets left to fly, and all are assigned to carry classified cargo into orbit for the National Reconnaissance Office, the U.S. government’s spy satellite agency.
ULA’s ground crew at Cape Canaveral transferred the 196-foot-tall (59.7-meter) Atlas 5 rocket from the company’s Vertical Integration Facility to launch pad 41 Thursday. Technicians began stacking the Atlas 5 inside the vertical hangar Dec. 18 with the lifting of the first stage, followed by attachment of the solid rocket booster, the Centaur upper stage, and finally the GSSAP 5 and 6 satellites inside their payload shroud Jan. 10.
The 1,800-foot (550-meter) rollout took about an hour Thursday morning. After the rocket’s arrival at the launch pad, teams started loading rocket-grade kerosene fuel into the Atlas 5’s first stage.
The launch day countdown will begin seven hours before liftoff, and the Atlas 5 will be loaded with cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants beginning around 12 p.m. EST (1700 GMT) Friday. The hydrogen and oxygen will feed the Centaur upper stage’s RL10 engine, while the oxygen will be consumed by the first stage’s RD-180 main engine in combination with kerosene fuel.
After a final readiness check at T-4 minutes, the Atlas 5 countdown will resume from a built-in hold to target launch at 2 p.m. EST.
The RD-180 engine will flash to life at T-minus 2.7 seconds. Moments later, the single solid rocket booster will ignite and send the Atlas 5 downrange on course due east from Cape Canaveral over the Atlantic Ocean.
The Atlas 5-511 vehicle is the last of 11 versions of United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 rocket to have never flown. That will change with the USSF-8 mission. Credit: United Launch Alliance
The rocket will exceed the speed of sound in 58 seconds, and the strap-on booster will burn its pre-packed fuel supply before its release from the Atlas 5’s first stage at T+plus 2 minutes.
The payload fairing will jettison at T+plus 3 minutes, 30 seconds, followed by shutdown of the RD-180 first stage engine at T+plus 4 minutes, 21 seconds. Six seconds later, the Atlas 5’s first stage will separate to clear the way for ignition of the Centaur stage’s RL10 engine at T+plus 4 minutes, 37 seconds, for an eight-and-a-half minute burn.
After reaching a parking orbit with the twin GSSAP satellites, the Centaur stage will coast most of the way around the world before reigniting its RL10 engine for a four-minute burn over the Pacific Ocean northeast of Australia. That will send the upper stage and the GSSAP satellites into an elongated transfer orbit stretching as far as 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) from Earth.
A final burn of the RL10 engine, lasting nearly two minutes, is scheduled six-and-a-half hours into the mission, once the rocket reaches the proper altitude for deployment of the two GSSAP spacecraft. The two satellites will separate one at a time at T+plus 6 hours, 35 minutes, and T+plus 6 hours, 45 minutes.
The GSSAP satellites will unfurl their solar panels and contact ground stations, allowing military personnel to confirm each spacecraft’s health and status following launch. After a period of checkouts and commissioning, the satellites will enter operational service for the Space Force.
The GSSAP satellites lurk near the ring of geosynchronous satellites that fly around Earth at the same speed of the planet’s rotation, allowing craft to remain over a fixed geographic location. Commercial companies and defense agencies use the orbit for communications, missile warning and signals intelligence missions.
Not only can the surveillance platforms help the Air Force track objects in geosynchronous orbit — a capability needed to manage traffic and avoid collisions — the GSSAP spacecraft can adjust their orbits to approach and image other satellites using sharp-eyed optical cameras.
The GSSAP satellites’ ability to maneuver around other spacecraft gives military officials data on the location, orbit and size of other objects in geosynchronous orbit, according to the Space Force, “enabling characterization for anomaly resolution and enhanced surveillance, while maintaining flight safety.”
“Data from GSSAP uniquely contributes to timely and accurate orbital predictions, enhancing our knowledge of the geosynchronous orbit environment, and further enabling space flight safety to include satellite collision avoidance,” officials wrote in the Space Force’s official GSSAP fact sheet.
The GSSAP program, which was classified until 2014, produces data that helps military and other government satellites “navigate freely and safely” in geosynchronous orbit, according to the Space Force’s Space Systems Command.
“The first four GSSAP satellites have performed remarkably well,” said Lt. Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of Space Operations Command. “These next two satellites will add to that capability and enable us to understand more completely things that occur in the geosynchronous orbit. It’s a key piece in the puzzle for space domain awareness.”
“The way I describe it is a neighborhood watch capability,” said Gen. John “Jay’ Raymond, the chief of space operations and the highest-ranking officer in the Space Force. “It allows us to better understand what’s going on in the domain, especially in a really critical orbit like geosynchronous orbit.”
Artist’s concept of two GSSAP spacecraft in orbit. Credit: U.S. Air Force
The Air Force sent one of the GSSAP satellites to the aid of a crippled U.S. Navy communications satellite in 2016. The Navy’s fifth MUOS relay satellite ran into propulsion trouble after launch, forcing it to use backup thrusters to climb into its perch in geosynchronous orbit.
The GSSAP satellite changed course to capture imagery of the MUOS 5 spacecraft to give engineers insight into its status and condition, the Air Force said.
“Historically, the way we have surveilled or had awareness of the domain is we’ve taken observations from radars or optical capabilities, and we’ve come up with an address in space, if you will, of objects,” Raymond said Tuesday in a virtual discussion hosted by the Mitchell Institute.
Cataloguing satellites and space debris has been the a chief goal of the military’s space-related efforts for decades. But with countries like China and Russia fielding increasingly sophisticated military spacecraft, including anti-satellite capabilities, the Space Force needs the GSSAP satellites to add a new dimension in its tracking of objects in orbit.
“We’ve been worried about making sure two things don’t collide, that we can keep that domain safe for all, which is critical. But it’s not sufficient,” Raymond said. “If you move into a war fighting domain, you have to have more knowledge than just where something is. You have to have some insights into what those capabilities are ,and this neighborhood watch capability has provided us a fuller look at what’s in space, specifically in the geosynchronous domain.”
The fifth and six satellites will provide “additional capacity” for the GSSAP network to better cover the large volume of space in the geosynchronous belt, Raymond said in response to questions from Spaceflight Now.
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NASA just opened a challenge seeking ways to go to Mars and back with a minimum of wasted materials.
The agency's tournament lab, along with crowdsourcing platform HeroX, have launched a "Waste to Base" challenge looking for ideas to recycle trash, waste, carbon dioxide and foam packaging materials during a two- to three-year crewed Red Planet mission.
Competitors have until March 15 to enter the challenge, and several prizes of up to $1,000 each will be awarded for novel ideas, out of a total purse of $24,000. The winner should be announced by April 22, according to the challenge website.
"This challenge is all about finding ways to convert waste into base materials and other useful things, like propellant or feedstock for 3D printing," the website stated.
"The challenge is looking for your ideas for how to convert different waste streams into propellant, and into useful materials, that can then be made into needed things and cycled through multiple times. While a perfectly efficient cycle is unlikely, ideal solutions will result in little to no waste."
Full eligibility requirements are available on the contest website; generally speaking, anyone in the world 18 years of age or older may participate individually or as a team, as long as their jurisdiction is not under United States federal sanctions, HeroX said.
An artist's conception of an astronaut on Mars.(Image credit: dottedhippo via Getty Images)
The winning ideas are expected to be put into a whitepaper as "part of the roadmap for future technology development work" for NASA's logistics reduction project, which is working on matters such as new spacecraft and future settlements, the challenge description noted.
While NASA hasn't yet set a firm timeline for putting humans on Mars, the agency speculated in recent years that it may be able to get there by the mid-2030s. In the shorter term, the agency is hoping to put Artemis astronauts on the moon by the mid-2020s. Moon missions may help inform the design for future Mars missions.
A unique archaeological study of crew culture within the International Space Station (ISS) will focus on the orbiting habitat as a "microsociety in a miniworld."
This inside look at the ISS, called the International Space Station Archaeological Project (ISSAP), is expected to supply new insight into human life in space and issues of habitation design. The findings could prove useful for other mini working cultures here on Earth, such as Antarctic research stations and long-deployment nuclear submarines, as well as for future Mars missions.
The project began in 2015 and was awarded a $244,400 Discovery Grant from the Australian Research Council. The venture is led by space archaeologists Alice Gorman, of Flinders University in Australia, and Justin Walsh, of Chapman University in California.
Watch this space! Archaeological research is underway in orbit.(Image credit: NASA)
Human adaptation
Space archaeology is a pioneering new subfield that extends the traditionally Earth-centric discipline to space. Central to the ISSAP is valuing the evolving cultural, social and material structures of the ISS, which has been occupied continuously since early November 2000. The orbiting outpost also serves as a novel locale to gather data about human adaptation to a completely new environment. The ISSAP takes a new approach to this area of study.
"It's not that the ISS and how people live on it hasn't been studied extensively; there's a huge amount of research into what they call 'human factors,' Gorman told Space.com. "A lot of it is biomedical or psychological, with a few sociological studies. But no one has taken an archaeological approach before."
The project is looking at how ISS crewmembers interact with objects and their physical environment and how these interactions change over time, Gorman said.
"The advantage of archaeology is that it shows us what people actually do, rather than what they think, or say, they do," she said. "We're looking for patterns that develop over years or decades."
Humans have adapted to major climate changes, migrated across the world and experienced radical transformations in society and technology over the eons. The aims of the research, Gorman said, are to examine how space fits into these adaptations and to determine the next stage of adaptation.
NASA astronaut Kayla Barron at the seven-windowed cupola that is a "window to the world" on the International Space Station.(Image credit: NASA)
New questions and approaches
Given the breadth of the ISSAP project, some research topics may turn out to be surprising, Walsh said.
"It's my favorite part of what we are doing — trying to come up with new questions and new approaches and methods," Walsh told Space.com.
One such avenue, according to Walsh, is to recognize what work the crew could do that would reveal aspects of the crew's material culture and help future habitat designers do their work better.
"For example, there have already been several studies of the acoustic environment of [the] ISS — which modules are quiet, which are loud, etc.," Walsh said. "We know the crew is often bothered by the noise, and they wear earplugs a lot. What nobody knows yet is how that noise affects other aspects of the lived experience of people in space, like privacy — how far do you have to go away from other people to have a private conversation, whether it's with another crewmate or with loved ones back on Earth?"
Another study under development looks at how crewmembers place, use and move restraints — such as Velcro, bungee cords, handrails and resealable bags — over time to help them recreate situations in microgravity, Walsh said. The restraints allow astronauts to create "gravity" in a microgravity environment — a concept Gorman dubbed "gravity surrogates."
"And when we see lots of Velcro placed on a wall, that means that the crew decided that this area really needed gravity, while other areas may not, due to the kinds of activity happening there," Walsh said.
Some data for the project was just sitting there, waiting to be used — like 8,000 photos of the ISS interior posted on NASA's Flickr site. Those photos come with metadata, like the date and time each photo was made, who is shown in each one and where on the station the photo was taken.
"All of that has been great for training our machine-learning algorithms to recognize the people and places," allowing the ISSAP researchers to do an analysis of visual display practices and to produce, for the first time, an approximation of the way different groups of people —men and women, people from different countries and people from different space agencies — are distributed around the ISS, Walsh said.
Earth-orbiting habitats like the ISS serve as testing grounds for building crewed habitats at more distant locations. (Image credit: NASA)
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Social and cultural components
Walsh hopes the ISSAP work will show that the social sciences can be immensely valuable to long-term life in space. NASA's quest to send people on a three-year round trip to Mars underscores how a better understanding of the crew culture in a space habitat can help to achieve a more successful mission.
"For every technical problem that engineers and physical scientists are trying to solve, there are social and cultural components to those problems," Walsh said. "If you don't address those components, too, you're going to end up with suboptimal solutions."
While the ISS has served as the habitat for the initial ISSAP work, the orbiting lab will eventually cease to exist. In the meantime, there are several space stations being planned for Earth orbit and one for lunar orbit. "So I think we're going to keep going until we can do the first archaeological study of a habitat on Mars," Gorman said.
This is only the beginning of the work to come in this emerging field. "It feels like we're only starting to get off the ground, and there are so many questions and possibilities," Gorman said. "There's much more coming in 2022, including the first archaeological experiment in space, so stay tuned!"
Leonard David is author of "Moon Rush: The New Space Race" (National Geographic, 2019). A longtime writer for Space.com, David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades.
The Chinese lunar rover Yutu-2 has been exploring the far side of the Moon for three years, making it the longest lunar surface mission in history. In a paper published today in Science Robotics, the Yutu-2 team reports on the rover’s progress and what it has revealed so far about the Moon’s far side.
Yutu-2 landed on the Moon in January 2019 as part of the Chang’e-4 mission, the first to ever land on the Moon’s far side. The mission’s goals are to study the composition of the basalt rocks on the Moon’s far side and to compare those volcanic rocks to the rocks on the near side of the Moon. Since its landing, the rover has traveled some 3,300 feet, analyzing the geology of our nearest celestial neighbor along the way.
The Moon’s far side, as seen by Apollo 16 in 1972.Image: Wikimedia Commons
The new paper documents the locomotive capabilities of the rover (as proven by its trek across the surface to date) as well as the scientific work of the robot’s first two years on the Moon. Two points of interest actually intersect: one of the findings from the recent paper is that the Moon’s far side has soil that appears a bit stickier than the soil on the near side. The researchers discovered this because clods of lunar soil were sticking to Yutu-2’s wheels, suggesting that the surface on the far side is more consolidated and loamy than on the near side.
Yutu-2 also found a lot of craters that were relatively small. Of the 88 craters the team documented in the paper, 57 were less than 10 meters (32.8 feet) across. Only two were over 60 meters (196 feet) across. Some of those smaller craters, based on their location and size, are thought to be secondary craters of the larger Zhinyu crater near which the rover landed, rather than from individual impacts.
There are more craters on the Moon’s far side than on the near side, but that’s not because it gets more impacts. Rather, it’s that the near side has seen more volcanic activity, which has washed away craters like a drawing on an Etch-a-Sketch.
The recent research is just the latest update from this industrious rover. Just a few months after Yutu-2 was deployed, data from the rover revealed that material from the Moon’s mantle was sitting on the far side’s surface. The rover’s most recent achievement was visiting what looked from afar like a “mysterious hut” but, of course, turned out to be merely a rock.
Future insights from Yutu-2 can now be compared to the Moon rocks brought to Earth by the Chang’e-5 mission, the successor to the one that brought this rover to the Moon.
