Tag: Spaceflight

With orbital operations well underway, China is considering a further further expansion to its Tiangong space station as well as opening the station to both the nascent Chinese commercial space sector and international participation.

In particular, the latest 5-year plan produced by the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) and the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST) for the period 2026-2030, appears to confirm statements made in December 2022 and February 2023 that China is considering expanding the station with the addition of a fourth module.

Exactly what form the new module will take has been open to debate for several months, with initial reports suggesting it would be physically and functionally similar to the existing three modules – the Tianhe-1 core module and the Mengtian and Wentian science modules – with a mass of around 21-22 tonnes, and up to 51 cubic metres of internal habitable space.

Drawn from images captured by multiple satellites in orbit, this annotated animation provided by Australia’s HEO Robotics, a company specialising in “non-Earth imaging” (i.e. capturing images of object in space using other satellites) showcases the assembly of the Chinese Space Station from September 2021 through until the arrival of the Shenzhou-14 mission in June 2022. Credit: HEO Robotics

However, more recently, it has been suggested that the additional module would be of an entirely new design, providing as much interior space as Tianhe-1, together with a new 6-way multi-function docking adapter and support scientific payloads being mounted on its exterior.

It now appears China is leaning towards this second option, with Wang Xiang, the director of space station systems at CAST indicating the increased docking capability and internal space will achieve a three-fold design function:

• It would allow more vehicles to dock with the station together with more research space and – Wang has suggested – room for space tourists to visit the station as well.
• It would allow the station to act as a hub for the testing and development of vehicles and technologies intended to help expand China’s lunar and deep space ambitions.
• It could potentially encourage greater international participation in the Chinese space programme as well as encouraging the Chinese commercial space sector.

With regards to the latter point, Ji Qiming, an assistant director at CMSA has indicated that CMSA will be accepting proposals from the Chinese commercial space sector for vehicles capable of resupplying the station with consumables. Additionally, he indicated that China has repeated its offer to the international community to join with it in research opportunities on the station. This has been offered in two ways: cooperation in research through the provision of experiments, and the direct participation of astronauts to join Chinese tiakonauts in training for, and participating in. flights to and from the station from China.

The move towards greater international cooperation is seen by some as a significant game-changer for the Chinese space programme, further opening the door to build on agreements with a number of European nations, together with Mexico, Japan and Peru and with the UN to fly experiments on Tiangong and an agreement with Italy which includes flying astronauts to the station. In particular, China may be looking to court partnerships with India and Pacific Rim nations such as Australia and New Zealand, both of whom are looking to expand their involvement in space exploration and development.

No launch date for the module has been given, although if it is to be of an entirely new design, it would be unlikely to be ready for launch before the early 2030s.

In the meantime, and as soon as the end of 2024, Tiangong will be indirectly expanded with the launch of the Xuntian Chinese Survey Space Telescope. This is a free-flying observatory which will be placed in a co-orbit with Tiangong, allowing it to operate both independently but also periodically dock with the station for servicing.

NASA’s DSN at Risk of Collapse?

One of the most critical elements of NASA’s infrastructure is, oddly enough, one that tends to be the most taken for granted. It’s not a launch centre or mission control facility or a research centre or astronaut training facility. It’s most obvious elements are three huge communication centres located in California, Australia and Spain. It is known by the simple acronym DSN, meaning Deep Space Network – and without it, NASA would be unable to maintain contact with any of its missions beyond Earth orbit.

More than 50 years old, the core of DSN has been in service since before Apollo. While its primary function is data communications and relay, the DSN also carries out science of its own when capacity allows, in the form of radar and radio astronomy. However, while the intervening years the broader supporting infrastructure for DSN communications between its various centres has been updated, the facilities at the centres – the primary centres have been under increasing strain, whilst at the same time, the budget allocated for both DSN operations and systems development / enhancement – has been steadily decreasing year-on-year. In 2010, for example, the DSN budget was US $250 million. Ten years later, it was down to US $200 million. As a result of this, DSN’s core capabilities have been steadily degrading.

This came to a head during the 25-day Artemis 1 mission in November / December 2022. This required dedicated DSN activity across 1774 hours – 903 hours for tracking the Artemis 1 mission, and the rest in monitoring the 8 cubesats launched as secondary payloads with the mission – the majority of which saw the DSN operating in a “search and rescue” mode, simply monitoring the cubesats in case any of them ran into problems. As a result, NASA science missions such as those operating around Mars or at the outer edge of the solar system or beyond, and so on, were almost completely denied any data communications through the DSN.

Warnings that the DSN is over-subscribed have been available for some time. As recently as July 2023, NASA’s own Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a report saying budget reductions mean that the network will remain over-extended throughout the rest of the 2020s and into the 2030s, even if work on updating it is prioritised.

Whilst attempts have been made to ease some of the load – a cloud-based data communications and data handling system was introduced to support the Goldstone, California DSN site, even these have struggled to keep pace with emerging technologies such as cubesats. This was again demonstrated during Artemis 1 when a system designed to handle some of the cubesat data load itself suffered a 33-hour outage, belatedly forcing NASA to realise that over-extending data communication through multiple additional rideshare payloads during a major undertaking such as an Artemis flight perhaps isn’t a good idea.

Even so, the demands of Artemis remains a major concern to those responsible for DSN, because it has the potential to cripple other missions; something which has led to the formation of a committee to outline a 4-point plan to help combat the issue.

When Artemis comes online, everybody else moves out of the way, and it’s an impact to all the science missions We either have to clear everybody off the network or we struggle — and our experience with Artemis 1 was struggling with trying to move everybody around.

– Suzanne Dodd, director of NASA’s interplanetary network directorate

Some of the recommendations under consideration include implementing a new suite of six 18-metre antennae called LEGS at the DSN Goldstone centre which will be used solely for use by the Artemis programme, and also the implementation of a network of relay satellites  in orbit around the Earth and Moon to handle more of the data load required by Artemis.

However, these solutions require a budget expenditure which NASA currently doesn’t have, nor is it likely to receive in the foreseeable future, and time to implement. And even then, programmes like LEGS fall short of the overall data capabilities NASA will require for long-term human operations on the Moon.

We have reached a really critical point with the DSN’s aging infrastructure. This scares us very much.  We’ve clearly gotten a five-alarm fire bell.

– Sandra Cauffman, deputy director of NASA’s astrophysics division

Both Cauffman and Dodd are members of the committee responsible for making recommendations like LEGS to NASA, so that the agency can consider options and request funding.  However, before even this can be done, the committee can do even this, the recommendations they make must be reviewed and approved by the NASA Advisory Council, which is not scheduled to meet again before November, which means NASA will likely be unable to make any formal requests for increasing DSN’s budget until fiscal year 2025.

Continue reading “Space Sunday: China’s space station, data and a rover” →

On August 23rd, 2023, India became the 4^th nation to successfully land a vehicle on the Moon, after Russia, the United States and China – and the first nation to manage to do so within the South Polar Region of the Moon.

Following its separation from the propulsion module on August 17^th, the Chandrayaan-3 lander Vikram completed a series of small adjustments to which allowed it to reduce the lowest point in its orbit to just 30km above the Moon. It was from this altitude that the lander fired all four of its landing motors to drop it into a gentle ballistic descent towards the lunar surface easing it down to an altitude of 7.2 km over a period of 11.5 minutes.

At this point the lander used its thrusters to orient itself into a vertical position in preparation for landing. Then, at 150 metres above the surface the lander held its position using two of its decent engines to hold position for around 30 seconds in order to carry out a final scan of its proposed landing area before continuing to a soft landing at 12:32 UTC.

The landing came as a source of national and international celebration – and some relief for the Indian Space Research Organisation, the mission in part being the result of the loss of the Chandrayann-2 lander / rover combination when they deviated from their planned descent to the surface of the Moon on July 22^nd, 2019, striking the Moon at an estimated 50 m/s (180 km/h / 112 mph), rather than the required 2 m/s (7.4 km/h / 4.6 mph) required for a soft landing.

The entire mission operations right from launch until landing happened flawlessly, as per the timeline. I take this opportunity to thank navigation guidance and control team, propulsion team, sensors team, and all the mainframe subsystems team who have brought success to this mission. I also take the opportunity to thank the critical operations review committee for thoroughly reviewing the mission operations right from launch till this date. The target was on spot because of the review process.

– Chandrayaan-3 project director P. Veeramuthuvel

The mission has a number of objectives, with the lander and its small rover – called Pragyan (“wisdom”) – primarily focused on the probing the composition of the lunar surface and attempt to detect the presence of water ice and to examine the evolution of the Moon’s atmosphere. However, the mission is also about the rover itself and demonstrating India’s ability to build and operate a rover vehicle.

Following landing, and after surveying its surroundings, Vikram was ordered to extend a ramp ahead of the rover’s deployment. This occurred at 03:00 UTC on August 24^th, 2023, when – after as series of checks, the rover was released from its locked on the lander and commanded to roll down the ramp onto the lunar surface, watched over by the lander’s cameras.

Following initial deployment, the rover paused at the foot of the ramp, before commands were passed for it to roll forward several metres and commit a turn to test its steering.

In all, both lander and rover are expected to operate for a total of 15 days within landing area – the length of time the Sun will be above the horizon in order to provide energy to the solar-powered vehicles. It is hoped that the studies the mission performs will add to our understanding of the Moon’s south pole and its role in host water ice – a resource of enormous potential and importance to future aims for the human exploration of the Moon, and being planned by the US-led Artemis programme (of which India is a member through the Artemis Accords) and China.

Yutu-2 Keeps Rocking

Meantime, on the lunar far side, China’s Yutu -2 (“Jade Rabbit”) rover continues to explore Von Kármán crater more than 4.5 years after arriving, making it the longest operational lunar rover to date, and the only rover operating on the far side of the Moon.

A part of the Chang’e-4 mission, the 6-wheeled rover is operating in conjunction with the mission’s lander, with both rover and lander having far exceeded their primary missions of 3 and 12 months respectively. For the rover, which has to contend with the harsh lunar nights, this is a remarkable achievement. During its time on the Moon it has covered a distance of around 1.5 km, exploring features within the crater and probing below the surface.

Footage of Yutu-2 captured from its initial deployment on the Moon in 2019, strung together into a movie. Credit: CNSA

The latter is achieved through the use of a two-channel ground penetrating radar (GPR) capable of “seeing” to depths of around 300-350 metres. This has revealed the Moon’s surface structure under Von Kármán crater to be remarkably complex, with at least 5 layers of rock stacked one above the last in a manner of sedimentation. However, rather than the result of water action, these appear to have been the results of volcanism, with at least three of the five layers primarily comprising basalt.

This points to the region having once been a site of significant volcanism and helps in further understanding of the Moon’s early history. In addition the different degrees to which the layers spread help inform scientists on how the decreasing thermal activity within the Moon directly correlates to the loss of volcanism and the settling of lunar features.

Following missions like Yutu-2 and Chang’e-4 isn’t easy, as the Chinese space programme is mixed in terms of the information and frequency with which it makes information publicly available. However, given the fact that this study is part of broader research into the Moon’s upper layers being carried out by the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona utilising data provided by China, demonstrates the latter’s commitment to sharing the results of their robotic space research with science institutes around the world.

Continue reading “Space Sunday: roving on the Moon” →

When it comes to the Galilean moons of Jupiter, we tend to focus a lot of attention on the icy moon of Europa due to the potential of it being home to a subsurface ocean. However, Europa is not alone in being a fascinating place among these four moons; between it and Jupiter sits Io, the most geologically active place in the solar system – and that’s just one of the facts relating to it.

As the 4^th largest Moon in the solar system and the third largest of the Jupiter’s Galilean moons, Io is slightly larger than our own Moon and has more than 400 active volcanoes across its surface. In addition, it has both the highest density and strongest surface gravity of any moon in the solar system. Its extreme volcanism is powered by gravitational flexing, the result of Io constantly being pulled in different directions by the gravities of Jupiter and the other three Galilean moons generating tidal heating deep in Io’s core, the same mechanism which is thought give Europa it’s possibly liquid water ocean. but on a much hotter and more violent scale.

Io’s volcanism is such that the almost constant lava flows mean the moon’s surface is constantly being re-formed outside of its volcanic peaks, whilst the allotropes and compounds of sulphur carried to the surface by both eruptions and lava flows give rise to the moon’s unique colouring. In addition, many of the volcanoes pump material high enough above Io to form a strange, tenuous atmosphere, noticeably more dense around such eruptions than elsewhere. This ejecta also gives rise to a large plasma torus around Jupiter.

The Jovian system has been the subject of extensive study by NASA’s Juno mission since it originally arrived in its extended orbit around the planet in July 2016. Since then, the vehicle had made more than 50 complete passes around the planet in a roughly polar orbit, and some of those have periodically allowed the spacecraft to observe the major moons of Jupiter, including Io. Two of the most recent of these flybys – in May and July 2023 – focused on Io, once again revealing the moon is incredible detail.

The May 16^th, 2023 flyby brought the Juno spacecraft to just 35,500 km of Io, allowing the imagers on the spacecraft to capture the moon simultaneously in both visible light wavelength and in the infrared, revealing a stunning amount of details on the moon’s volcanism.

In July, Juno passed even closer, at just 22,000 km from the moon’s surface. This allowed an actual eruption to be imaged by the spacecraft – not the first time this has happened, but one which captured Io’s “old faithful” once again in action.

“Old faithful” is the name given to the Prometheus Patera, a volcanic pit on the side of the moon facing away from Jupiter (Io is tidally locked to Jupiter), an area given to near-continuous eruptions which have been observed by both of the Voyager spacecraft, together with  Galileo, and New Horizons, as well as Juno. Outflow from the eruptions in the pit covers an area of almost 7,000 square km, and it causes an observable plume of material rising up to 100 km above the moon’s surface.

What is particularly remarkable about Juno’s images of Io and the other Galilean moons is not only the amount of information they are providing, but the fact the spacecraft wasn’t ever designed to study them; its instruments were specifically designed to uncover secrets of Jupiter’s atmosphere and interior. But as remarkable as these images are, they are just a foretaste of what is to come.

Three more even closer flybys of Io will come in October and December before the spacecraft makes its closest approach of the mission to date, passing just 1,500 km above the Moon’s surface. Meanwhile, to mark Juno’s May and July 2023 flybys, NASA released a video offering a “starship captain’s” view of Io as the spacecraft passed around Jupiter’s limb. The music featured in the video is from Juno to Jupiter, by Vangelis. This was the Greek composer’s last studio album prior to his passing in May 2022, and the last of a series of albums and shorter pieces he wrote for both NASA and ESA between 2001 and 2021 and born of his almost life-long passion for science and space exploration.

Russia Heads Back to the Moon

At 23:10 UTC on August 10^th, 2023 (09:10, August 11^th, local time) a Soyuz 2.1b/Fregat booster lifted-off from Russia’s far eastern Vostochny Cosmodrome to mark the first lunar mission Russia has undertaken in 47 years. Originally called Luna-Glob, the mission is designed to place a robust lander within the crater Boguslawsky in the lunar South Polar Region.

Initial concepts for the mission started in 1998, and Russia had planned to garner international involvement, looking to partner with (at various times) the likes of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the European Space Agency and the Swedish National Space Agency (SNSA) and the project gradually matured. However, given the 20+ year gestation for the mission, ISRO and JAXA switched to their own lunar-focused programmes whilst SNSA eventually partnered with China, flying their LINA-XSAN instrument aboard Chang’e 4 in 2019. ESA also withdrew from cooperation with Russia as a result of the invasion of Ukraine.

As a national mission, the project and its lander were renamed Luna 25, intended to suggest a direct lineage back to 1976’s Luna 24 sample return mission. It was launched very much in the public eye: Russia Television broadcast and streamed the event live in a 90-minute programme which featured the launch itself, coupled with a strange mix of a choir of young children singing under a huge photograph of Yuri Gagarin, a candlelit display.

Filmed at the Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy, Moscow, this portion of the programme also featured interviews with cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev and Oleg Blinov and more music, this time from Russian rock/pop group UMA2RMAN.

The mission is seen as the starting point for Russia’s own renewed lunar aspirations. A prime aim of the spacecraft is to test new landing technologies and systems which could be used in future missions to the Moon, including those by crews – in this respect, Artemyev and Blinov discussed the development of lunar habitats from a small-scale outpost (with artwork supplied by Roscosmos) through to a large-scale base (with a rendering by Russia Television, rather than anything official).

As well as lander research, the 1.7-tonne lander will conduct studies of  the upper layer of the lunar regolith, appraise the ultra-thin lunar atmosphere and search for signs of water ice in the south pole region. To achieve this, the upper platform of the lander contains 30 kg of science payload. The landing itself is scheduled for August 21^st, 2023, after a spiral cruise out to the Moon, and which means that Luna 25 should touch down some two days ahead of India’s Chanrayaan-3 lander launched in July and which achieved its initial orbit around the Moon on August 6^th.

Continue reading “Space Sunday: volcanoes, going to the Moon and a helicopter” →

Due to launch in just under 2 months, on or shortly after October 5th, 2023, NASA’s Pysche mission is intended to explore the origin of planetary cores by studying the metallic asteroid of the same name.

The 14th mission in NASA’s Discovery programme, the spacecraft is currently going through the last of its pre-launch preparations, the latest being the installation and folding of its massive solar arrays.

With a total span of almost 25 metres and covering a total area of 75 square metres, these are among the largest arrays used on a NASA deep-space mission. They will be capable of generating 20 kilowatts of power during the early phases of the mission as the spacecraft departs Earth, where they will be primarily used for the purposes of vehicle thrust. However, Psyche is so far from the Sun that by the time the craft arrives, they will only be able to generate around 2 kilowatts – enough to boil two kettles side-by-side.

For propulsion, the spacecraft will use four Hall-effect thrusters (HETs). Based on the discovery by Edwin Hall after whom they are named, these are a form of ion propulsion in which the propellant – most often  xenon or  krypton gas – is accelerated by an electric field. They provide an efficient thrust-to-propellant load ratio, allowing the spacecraft utilise a minimum propellant load – around a tonne – for the 5 year 10 months transit to asteroid 16 Psyche and the 21-month primary science mission.

The overall thrust produced by the HETs is equivalent to holding a single AA battery in the hand. However, as they can run for extended periods, they will be able to gently accelerate the spacecraft to 200,000 km/h during the 4 billion kilometre cruise out to the asteroid belt. They will also provide sufficient thrust to allow the spacecraft to slow itself and enter orbit around the asteroid in readiness to start its science mission.

16 Psyche is the heaviest known M-type asteroid – those with higher concentrations of metal phases (e.g. iron-nickel) than other asteroids – in the solar system. It was in 1852 by Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis, who named it for the Greek goddess Psyche, with the “16” prefix indicating it was the sixteenth minor planet to be discovered.

Initially, it was thought that asteroid was the exposed iron core of a protoplanet, exposed after a violent collision with another object that stripped off its mantle and crust. However, more recent studies lean heavily towards ruling this out – but it still might be a fragment of a planetesimal smashed part in the very earliest days of the solar system’s creation. As such, studying the asteroid might answer questions about planetary cores and the formation of our own planet.With the solar arrays installed and stowed, the next significant milestone for the mission will be the loading of the xenon propellant, which will occur over a two-week period starting in mid-August. This will be followed by the spacecraft being mated with its payload mount and then integrated into the upper stage of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy which will launch the mission from Kennedy Space Centre’s Pad 39B.

Euclid Arrives at L2 and Starts Commissioning Tests

The European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Euclid space telescope has arrived in orbit around the Earth-Sun L₂ Lagrange point, and commissioning of its science instruments has commenced.

As I noted in Space Sunday: a “dark” mission, recycling water and a round-up, Euclid is a mission intended to aid understanding of both dark matter and dark energy – neither of which should be confused with the other. Euclid will do this by creating a “3D” map of the cosmos around us, plotting the position of some two billion galaxies in terms of their position relative to the telescope and the redshift evident in their motion.

From this, astronomers will be able to study the clustering effects of dark matter, the cosmic expansion of dark energy, and how cosmic structure has changed over time. It will be the largest and most detailed survey of the deep and dark cosmos ever done.

Following a 30-day transit from Earth, Euclid entered into orbit around the Earth-Sun L₂ Lagrange point, 1.5 million km from Earth, at the end of July, and commissioning of its instruments – which had undergone power tests whilst en-route – commenced almost at once, with early result being released.

Over the next 6 years, Euclid will observe the extragalactic sky (the sky facing away from the bulk of our own galaxy) in what is called a “step and stare” method: identifying a section of sky and training both of its camera systems, one of which images in visible wavelengths and the other in infrared, before moving on to the next, generating “strips” on imaged squares.

In doing so, Euclid will capture light from galaxies that has taken up to 10 billion of the universe’s estimated 13.8 billion-year lifespan to reach us. In doing so, it will measure their shape and the degree of red shift evident, whilst also using the effects of gravitational lensing on some to reveal more data about them.

The data gathered is intended to help astrophysicists construct a model to explain how the universe is expanding which might both explain the nature and force of dark energy and potentially offer clues as to the actual nature of dark matter – the mass of which must be having some impact on dark energy as it pushes a the galaxies.

In all, it is anticipated that Euclid will produce more than 170 petabytes of raw images and data during its primary 6-year mission, representing billions of stars within the galaxies observed. This data will form a huge database that will be made available globally to astronomers and researchers to help increase our understanding of the cosmos and in support for current and future missions studying the universe.

Curiosity Celebrates 11 Years on Mars by Completing Tough Challenge

Since arriving on Mars in February 2021, the Mars 2020 mission with Perseverance and Ingenuity has tended to overshadow NASA’s other operational rover mission on Mars, that of the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity, which arrived within Gale Crater on August 6^th, 2011.

In that time, the mission has scored success after success, doing much to reveal the water-rich history of the crafter – and the history of Mars as a whole. For the last several years the rover has been slowly climbing “Mount Sharp” – the 5 km tall mound at the centre of the crater – and officially called Aeolis Mons – revealing how it is the result of the crater being the home of several lakes during Mars’ ancient history.

Most recently, the rover has faced its toughest challenge yet: attempting to ascend a ridgeline setting between it and an area of geological interest dubbed “Jau”. From orbit, the ridge appeared to be difficult, but not impossible for the rover. However, it combined three obstacles which proved troublesome: a steep slope averaging 23^o and which comprises a mix of sand dunes and boulders large enough to pose a threat to the rover’s already battered wheels.

Initial attempts to get over this ridge in April and June resulted in the rover hitting “faults”:  stoppages triggered automatically as the wheels start slipping, either as a result of the ground beneath them being too soft to offer traction meeting a resistance such as a too-large boulder they could not overcome. These forced the mission team to take a chance on a 300 metre diversion to try a point on the ridge which appeared to be less challenging.

The diversion proved worthwhile; despite taking several weeks to plan and execute, Curiosity managed to reach “Jau” – an area of multiple impact craters in close proximity to one another – in early July, and has been studying it at length.

Overcoming the ridge is a significant achievement for the rover, and clearly it means Curiosity should have something of a smoother passage to its next destination.

Continue reading “Space Sunday: mini mission updates” →