Space News | Falcon Heavy Center Core Curse & SLS Ground System Tests

Hello fellow citizens of Earth, it's me Jared coming to you from station 204 and this is your space news for July 3rd 2019 and we're gonna head on over to space traffic because oh my gosh, we have got one heck of a jam happening there Let's start off by heading on down to Kourou, French Guiana for a beautiful sunset décollage of an Ariane space Ariane 5 Carrying two communication satellites. Liftoff occurred on June 20th at AT&T's T-16 satellite to provide direct-to-home broadcasting for the Americas and Which will provide video and data services to Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Turkey Both were successfully deployed just a little over half an hour after liftoff. On the other side of the planet on June 24th China launched a Long March 3D from the Xichang Space Center at 1809 Universal Time. The rocket delivered its payload a Bidu satellite Which is one of eight satellites in the constellation that will sit in Geo Rising up from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center The first night launch of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy began at 0630 Universal Time on June 25th After booster separation the customary turn and burn saw them both successfully return to landing zone 1 and Landing zone 2. The center core attempted to land on drone ship Of course, I still love you, but diverted at the last minute to prevent an impact after losing engine gimbal control Continuing the center core curse. The second stage continued on and as a part of the STP-2 mission It carried a multitude of payloads for the United States Air Force NASA and the Planetary Society's LightSail-2 prototype solar sail Three relights of the second stage to deploy payloads into four separate orbits were successful and all payloads were deployed Wrapping up departures at the Mejia Peninsula's Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 Make it rain left the pad at 0430 Universal Time June 29th Seven satellites were carried to orbit by the Carbon Composite Launcher The largest being Global-3 for Black Sky to perform Earth imaging and several smaller satellites to test Communication systems along with ACRIX-1 a student-built CubeSat from the Melbourne Space Program based out of the University of Melbourne in Australia Switching over to an Earth arrival the return of three astronauts from the International Space Station's Expedition 58 crew on board of Soyuz MS-11 It included Roscosmos Oleg Kononenko, NASA's Anne McLean and the Canadian Space Agency's David Saint-Jacques They undocked from the Poisk module at 2325 Universal Time on June 24th After a successful engine burn and separation from the orbital and service modules The descent module entered the Earth's atmosphere and landed on the steppes of Kazakhstan at 0247 Universal Time June 25th all three astronauts exited the capsule and were in good spirits, especially Anne And here's how the week ahead is looking for upcoming departures A critical element in NASA's Space Launch System rocket is being tested this week And it's got absolutely nothing to do with space but everything to do with 3-2-1 liftoff You can't have a rocket launch without the right ground support equipment things like storage tanks for gases and fuel Pumps to move everything and electrical systems to test and power the vehicle on the ground Part of that GSE system is the diesel crawler transporter Which was originally used for Apollo and then upgraded for shuttle and is being extended for use again for the Space Launch System Every generation had its own launch platform and ground support equipment for each vehicle The mobile launcher will roll the Space Launch System rocket out of the Vehicle Assembly Building into Launch Complex 39B Keeping the vehicle perfectly level and upright all the way uphill to the pad The 6.8 kilometer trip is taken at a blistering 1.3 kilometers an hour, which is about 0.8 miles per hour They're nicknamed Hans and Franz But we're unsure which one this is and its fuel economy is about 350 liters per kilometer Which is less than 0.007 miles per gallon and it requires 11 people to drive it NASA plans to keep the mobile launcher at 39B until later this year. A three-month campaign will see tests of swing arm retractions off of their new tower Pumping the cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen through the plumbing and running the new sound suppression water system for the first time If all goes well The mobile launcher will be returned to the VAB where towards the end of the year SLS test articles will be stacked and then eventually begin work towards SLS's first launch campaign This is a critical element to the forward progress that NASA is attempting to squeeze out of SLS with the throwdown Challenge of Project Artemis landing humans on the moon once again by 2024 And now to talk about this week's space weather our very own. Dr. Tamatha Skoff Space weather from our sleepy star continues to be quiet this week as we switch to our front side Sun It's a similar story as last week We do have a couple remnant coronal holes that are going to be giving us some fast solar wind more like disturbed solar wind because they're Not going to cause much of a ruckus The only interesting thing is that we have had a couple emergences of small active regions But you know as soon as they come up they disappear and this is kind of a good reminder that we are at the very end of solar cycle 24 Before solar cycle 25 begins the good news is as we switch to our backside Sun You can see those old bright regions remnants 2740 and 2741 from G's a couple rotations ago. They are still existing and as they rotate into Earth view They will get the solar flux just a small boost. So amateur radio operators and emergency responders I know you've been starving with some very low radio propagation and it looks like you're gonna get a boost here in the next maybe three to five days Last week it was news of a meteor crater on the red planet this week It's a meteor exploding in the atmosphere of our own planet on June 22nd at 2125 UTC a large meteor broke apart and exploded in the skies just 300 kilometers south of Puerto Rico Captured by the geostationary lightning mapper GLM on the goes 16 satellite this explosion lit the skies quite vividly But it was still daylight in Puerto Rico. So there have been no eyewitness accounts Still the meteor was observed by several instruments including the advanced baseline imager ABI Which caught the meteor track in multiple bandwidths the split paths of the meteor track you see here Verify the meteor broke apart during its descent acoustic data from the infrasound array CT BTO Determined that the explosive power of this bolide was equivalent to a three to five kiloton detonation That's about a tenth of the size of the bolide that exploded over the skies in Russia back in 2013 Yet the bolide was quite sizable Estimated to be about three meters in diameter Indeed, this meteor was large enough to be observed as an asteroid prior to entering Earth's atmosphere. It was given an official designation 2019 mo because it fit the orbit of a near-earth object Identified as a 10 e o m 1 this kind of early identification of an incoming meteor is revolutionary It has only happened four times in our history and it demonstrates our improving ability for early detection of these kind of space weather threats But until we get to a point where we can predict all large meteor impacts We can be grateful that we have a thicker atmosphere at our planet than at Mars to put things in perspective This meteor was nearly the same size as the meteor that caused the new impact crater on Mars If we didn't have the atmosphere we have at Earth this bolide would surely have hit the ground and this fact should give us all something to think about as We become more spacefaring with tangible plans to colonize other worlds For more details on this week's space weather including when and where you can catch the July 2nd total solar eclipse Come check out my channel or see me at spaceweatherwoman.com We've got no show planned for July 6th and also no news for next week as we'll be doing as is per tradition here in The United States blowing things up for the July 4th Just hopefully not rockets and a big thanks to all of our patrons of tomorrow you folks without your support We really would not be able to do the live shows We wouldn't be able to do letting off steam and we wouldn't be able to do these new segments as well So if you get something out of the show and you'd like to give something back you can head on over to patreon.com Slash tmro or subscribe star comm slash tmro and if you want to still give something back, but you can't do so financially That's great as well. You can head on over to community dot tmro dot TV to find out how you can help That's our show. Thanks for watching and don't forget keep exploring