Artist’s rendering of solar electric propulsion for moving an asteroid to cislunar orbit.
The Air Force Small Business Innovation Research program is soliciting proposals so support operations beyond geosynchronous Earth orbit. Cislunar operations is one of three space-focus areas in a pre-solicitation notice released Dec. 10 by the Air Force technology accelerator known as AFWERX.
Space News reports that the Air Force wants: payloads for providing space domain awareness from the lunar surface, lightweight sensors for space-based space domain awareness; methodologies for orbit determination and catalog maintenance in cislunar space; concepts for providing position, navigatiion and timing solutions for cislunar space operations; visualization of cislulnar orbits; and terrestrial-based concepts for achieving space domain awareness of cislunar space.
The near-term business model of SpaceX is to build a constellation of satellites to deliver cheap, space-based broadband service. The biggest obstacle may not be putting the 100-plus satellites into orbit, reports CNN. It may be connecting with the ground.
The big question is how customers will access the network. Customers of the Starlink service would need high-tech antennas they can stick on the roofs or yards to establish an Internet connection. The technology exists. But SpaceX needs to build terminals that are affordable, reliable and low maintenance.
The company is putting “a lot of engineering” resources into developing the terminals, said Gwynne Shotwell in a recent meeting with reporters. “Because if we don’t get it right, we’re in deep doo-doo.”
In the 1990s several well-funded ventures attempted to build satellite constellations to service roughly half the world’s population lacking access to traditional Wi-Fi and cell services. All of them changed plans, went bankrupt or liquidated after realizing it would be impractical. Antenna technology has come a long way since the 1990s, but observers predict it will be difficult for SpaceX to build terminals at price points needed to grow the market enough to turn a profit.
Telecom services like Dish Network rely upon satellites in geosynchronous orbit about 20,000 miles from Earth. The drawback is that traveling 20,000 miles and back creates frustrating delays for users. SpaceX would solve the latency issue by using satellites that orbit about 340 miles overhead. But that creates a new problem. The antennas on the ground have to maintain connections with the satellites as they streak across the sky.
Bill Milroy, chief technology officer at U.S.-based antenna maker ThinKom, thinks it could get the price of a terminal down to $1,000, about the price of an iPhone 11. But attracting customers in poor regions of the globe at that price would be difficult. SpaceX would need to get the price down to $150 a piece to make significant inroads.
Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin, unveiled a lunar land last week that he said will transport equipment and possibly human beings to the south pole of the Moon by 2024.
In a a presentation in the state of Washington, Bezos said the lander can transport 3.6 metric tons to the lunar surface. Under development for the past three years, the lander will be capable of carrying scientific instruments as well as rovers for exploration, reports Republic World.
Bezos also unveiled the company’s BE-7 rocket engine, which he declared will be test-fired soon. Many parts of engine were 3D printed.
Said Bezos: “We were given a gift — this nearby body called the moon. The moon is a good place to being manufacturing in space due to its lower gravity than the Earth. Getting resources from the moon takes 24 times less energy to get it off the surface compared to the Earth, and that is a huge lever.” more “Blue Origin Unveils Lunar Lander”
While Earth-based entrepreneurs work on developing reusable launch vehicles to reduce the cost of boosting people and material into space, NASA researchers are working on what a Tech Crunch.describes as robotic “pallet lander” concept to make lunar landings as reliable and cheap as possible,.
“This lander was designed with simplicity in mind to deliver a 300 kilogram rover to a lunar pole,” said Logan Kennedy, the project’s lead systems engineer in a NASA press release. “We used single string systems, minimal mechanisms and existing technology to reduce complexity, though advancements in precision landing were planned to avoid hazards and to benefit rover operations. We keep the rover alive through transit and landing so it can go do its job.”
“While most subsystems use off-the-shelf parts, one emerging technology needed for a lander like this would be Terrain Relative Navigation used for precision landing,” said Kennedy. “Testing is under way!” more “NASA Noodles Concept of Robotic Pallet Lander”
These NASA images show distribution of surface ice at the Moon’s south and north poles.
A paper published in the January 2020 issue of Icarus examines the relationship between the age of lunar craters and the abundance of surface ice. Surface ice at the lunar south pole is found predominantly in ancient craters, 3.1 billion years or older. Some smaller, newer craters also host surface water. But surface icy is “very patchy” in spatial distribution, suggesting high overturn or destruction rates by meteor and micrometeor bombardment.
“The majority of surface ice is contained in old craters ≥∼3.1 Gyr, where the majority of cold-trapping area on the pole exists. The ice [in] these ancient craters is very patchy in surficial distribution, occupying <11.5% of cold-trapping surface area available in individual craters. This patchy distribution of ice in old craters is likely to be due to impact bombardment and regolith overturn within the polar regions. more “Correlating Water Resources with Crater Age”
The Parker Solar Probe has yielded considerable insight into the formation and structure of solar winds, providing scientists that hopefully will help them better predict when mammoth ejections of solar material will occur. Coronal mass ejections can disable communications and defense satellites and can harm astronauts outside of Earth’s protective electromagnetic field.
Launched in August 2018, the probe has passed closer to the sun than at any previous spacecraft in history. The vessel is equipped with a suite of high-tech instruments engineered to withstand the sun’s blistering heat — it will pass within 15 million miles of the sun, compared to the 36 million miles of Mercury’s orbit. Instruments include five antennas, an image maker, and devices that measure the energies of different particles.
The mission’s goal is to “understand the sources and structure of the solar wind up close right as it leaves the sun,” said physicist Stuart Bale of the University of California-Berkeley, in the press conference reported by Popular Mechanics. “What Parker has done has got us closer than ever to the Sun and now we can really see a lot of structure and we can see in this case we can clearly see a source of the wind.”
Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle Assembly. Photo credit: NASA
Dr. Michael Hawes, vice president and Orion program manager for Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, sees the settlement of the Moon as a proving ground for the ultimate goal of reaching Mars and conducting other deep-space explorations.
The first destination is the Moon, he said at a luncheon hosted by the Webster Business alliance Wednesday, as reported by the Houston Chronicle. “NASA talks about the space around the moon as being the proving ground.” But the ultimate goal is Mars. Said Hawes:
“That’s the horizon goal of deep space exploration. We want to get to Mars but we have to learn how to do a lot of things along the way, Just as we built capability from Mercury through Gemini to Apollo to demonstrate the a lunar landing, we have to do a lot of demonstration of a much broader sense than we did back then to get to Mars. We’re going to do that building from the moon out.”
“We may build a small station on the far side of the moon. We could do science from there. We can actually see the sun and the earth so we could still get power and communications. We’ll go out and look at asteroids. NASA has an asteroid re-direct mission that they’re looking to define that would take a robotics spacecraft to go get a large boulder off an asteroid and bring it back into orbit around the moon. Then, Orion would take the crew out to do the research on the asteroid on that mission.”
The Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle is NASA’s first spacecraft designed for deep space exploration.
Lena Okajima, founder of Japanese startup ALE, dreams about creating manmade shooting stars as a form of mass entertainment and scientific research, reports Japan Brandvoice in Forbes.
Okajima, who earned a PhD in astronomy at the University of Tokyo and worked at Goldman Sachs for a year, began researching the idea in 2009 after witnessing the Leonids meteor shower. Today ALE has about 30 staff and has raised some $26 million from Hong Kong-based Horizons Ventures and other investors.
ALE has developed microsatellites that will release 1-centimeter particles that will ignite as they move through the atmosphere. Up to 20 particles will burn in different colors, and the display will be visible on the ground within an area measuring 200 kilometers across — much large than the typical 10 kilometers for fireworks. The shooting stars can be deployed anywhere in the world.
“Our shooting stars can last longer than natural ones because they may be slower,” says Okajima. “It will be entertainment on an unprecedented scale.”
ALE is preparing for its first near-space testing with a rocket launch from New Zealand. In the meantime, ALE is developing another business — gathering information about the mesosphere (which lies between the thermosphere and the stratosphere) — and working with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on a satellite tether system to mitigate the growing problem of space debris.
Among the clients ALE hopes to work with: theme parks, cruise lines, and large-scale event organizers.
Made in Space, developer of technologies for manufacturing in space, will test its Archinaut One spacecraft with the help of $73.7 million in NASA funding. The craft will 3D print two 32-foot-long beams in Earth orbit, one on either side of the spacecraft, which will then unfurl solar arrays that can generate five times more power than traditional panels used by similar-sized spacecraft.
As NASA anticipates putting humans on the Moon by 2024, the agency hopes to develop a manufacturing capability on the lunar surface, according to Space.com. “This is how we see in-space manufacturing moving forward,” said Raymond Clinton, NASA associate director of science and technology. “And as the agency has said, we are going to the surface of the moon to demonstrate the technologies we will need when we go to Mars. That is the next step.”
Lave tube where the entrance caved in. Source: Daily Mail
NASA engineers have proposed sending autonomous drones to the Moon to explore the potential of using lava tubes and caves for human habitation. It is theorized that ancient lava flows from volcanoes left miles of lava tubes up to 30 feet across, reports the Daily Mail.
Meanwhile, researchers at the Morgridge Institute for Research in Madison, Wisc., are developing camera technology to explore the tubes from an orbiting satellite.
States project leader Andreas Velten:
Geologists are interested because they would provide access to subsurface geology without actually having to dig, which would be very difficult. What’s interesting for space travel is you can’t have people on the surface for long periods because of the temperature extremes, and because of radiation. But in these caves, people could survive for a long time with consistent temperatures and no radiation. Some of these may actually be quite deep, under 50-60 metres of rock.
Earlier these year, says the Daily Mail, NASA announced its Periscope Project, with the goal of mapping the tubes by peering into the 200 or so “skylights” that have been discovered so far.
