Space News | Catching up on Launches and NASA's Artemis Shakeups

Hello fellow citizens of Earth, it's Jared coming to you from Station 204. This is your space news for July 24th, 2019, and I hope you enjoyed your vacation because holy moly, we have a lot of things to talk about in our space traffic. On July 1st at 1100 Universal Time, the Orion Ascent Abort-2 mission launched. A three-minute test flight designed to confirm the validity of the Orion capsule's abort system operating at the region of flight where aerodynamic loads are at their highest, also known as Max-Q. This occurred at 50 seconds after the ignition of the converted Peacekeeper booster with the vehicle at 9,500 meters traveling at Mach 1.08. The abort system worked and the data from 900 sensors is being reviewed. A Soyuz 2.1b rocket left its pad at the Vostoshny Cosmodrome in Russia at 0541 Universal Time on July 5th. The primary payload was a new Meteor-M2-2 weather satellite that will be used by Roscosmos, and it was successfully deployed in an 800-kilometer orbit. 33 secondary payloads were then deployed in two batches, one at 580 kilometers and then another grouping at 530 kilometers. One of those payloads was a test cubesat for Momentous Space, who we had previously interviewed in Episode 12.10 just a few months ago. Above the test range of Edwards Air Force Base in California on July 10th, Virgin Orbit's Cosmic Girl Boeing 747-400 performed a drop test with a full-scale test article of their Launcher 1 rocket filled with water and antifreeze. Climbing at a 25-degree angle through 11,000 meters, the release occurred at 1613 Universal Time. The 26,000-kilogram test article released and reports indicated that the test was a success. Heading back to Russia on July 10th at 1714 Universal Time, a single-stick Soyuz 2-1V lifted off from the Pleistocene Cosmodrome. The payload was four satellites for the Russian Ministry of Defense for testing spacecraft on orbit and military radar calibration. And that's all we know. Slipping down towards the equator, on July 11th at 0153 Universal Time, an Ariane Space Vega rocket created some rumble in the jungle, carrying a surveillance satellite for the United Arab Emirates. The DDO has called out separation of the first stage, coming right on time, and ignition of the second stage. Around second stage ignition, a problem occurred, and Ariane Space shortly declared a loss of mission. At present, the cause of the anomaly is not known. Out of an abundance of caution, Ariane Space has delayed the next Ariane 5 launch to allow for checks of its systems. At 1230 Universal Time on July 13th, a Russian proton lofted the Spectre-RG X-ray telescope, a collaboration between Russian and German scientists. Two hours after launch, the 2,700-kilogram space observatory was released on a trajectory to take it to the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point, which will allow Spectre-RG to stay put thanks to the balance of gravity between the Earth and Sun and allow the four-year all-sky survey in X-ray wavelengths to avoid looking at the Earth or Sun. On July 19th, after a successful three-year test flight, China's Tiangong-2 space station was sent on a targeted re-entry to fall into a remote area of the South Pacific Ocean between New Zealand and Chile. Hitting the atmosphere at 1306 Universal Time, footage from re-entry showed a cloud of ionized gases building up around the module, which was not designed to survive re-entry. The China Manned Space Engineering Office cited not wanting to generate orbital debris as the reason for deorbiting Tiangong-2 and the loss of control over Tiangong-1 in 2018. On the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11's landing and moonwalk, three astronauts were launched to the International Space Station from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on July 20th at 1628 Universal Time. Commander Alexander Svortsov of Roscosmos and Flight Engineers Luca Parmitano of the and NASA Flight Engineer Drew Morgan had a smooth trip docking to the International Space Station at 2251 Universal Time. And here's your upcoming departures from Earth for the next week. This last week was the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, which is the greatest achievement in the history of humanity. But, been there, done that. We have to do it better, and India is going to be taking those first steps. NASA has a goal of landing humans back on the moon by 2024. But before we can do that, we need to build a lunar base. And before we can do any of that, we need to find the one thing that humans can't live without, water. And we need a lot of it. Both NASA and other space agencies have found water on the moon before, but one upcoming mission is going to specifically explore water reserves for the purpose of human habitation on the moon. India's ISRO, or Indian Space Research Organization, was set to launch the Chandrayaan-2 on July 14th, but the liftoff was called off due to a technical snag. The launch is currently set for July 22nd. India's lunar lander and rover is built to land on the moon's south pole and deploy a rover to explore water deposits on the Big Rock. The Chandrayaan-1 mission orbited the moon in 2008 and helped to confirm the presence of water on the moon. If successful, India will be the fourth country to land on the moon, after the U.S., Russia, and China. But India will be the first to perform a soft landing on the moon's south pole. This past January, China performed a soft landing on the far side of the moon, a bit north of India's planned landing spot. Now, with so many countries set to land both scientific missions and manned spacecraft on the moon, the race is on. The U.S. has a goal of landing humans back on the moon by 2024 through the Artemis program, while Prime Minister Modi of India has his country's deadline for 2022 for their first manned spacecraft. While we look back at humankind's achievements this past week, we must also look forward at what we can achieve and what is still to come. International collaboration and the sharing of scientific knowledge is what will allow humanity to reach for the stars, land humans back on the moon, and eventually explore other planets. NASA's Artemis program has reinvigorated interest in sending humans back to the moon. Now, it's not just astronauts and engineers that help make a program successful. Also, the oft-overlooked administration is critically important to making sure that a program actually is executed successfully. But at NASA right now, shakeups are starting to occur in its administration, and that's starting to raise some serious doubts as to whether they will be able to pull off that deadline of 2024. Bill Gerstenmaier has been NASA's Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations since 2005. During that time, he's worked with three separate executive branches under the supervision of three separate NASA administrators. But on July 10th, Gerstenmaier was removed, Placed into his position in an acting capacity is Ken Bowersox, a five-flight shuttle veteran including a 159-day stint on the International Space Station. Jim Bridenstine, the current NASA Administrator, cited needing to make the goal of landing a human back on the moon by 2024 with the Artemis program as the reasoning behind the decision to move Gerstenmaier out of his present position to become a special advisor to NASA's Deputy Administrator. Noting in a letter to NASA employees, in an effort to meet this challenge, I have decided to make leadership changes to the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. With very little details about NASA's Artemis program being concrete, the right leadership is paramount to making that occur. And with several other officials at NASA also being swapped around or removed from their positions, especially well-regarded officials, one has to wonder how rocky a road Artemis has before it. And now to talk about this week's weather in space, here's Dr. Tabitha Scove. Space weather this week is definitely keeping us on our toes. As we switch to our front side, Sun, you can see we've had a two-part coronal hole rotating in through the Earth's strike zone this week and it has bumped us up to storm levels with the fast solar wind it's been sending us. We've actually bumped up to storm levels twice and we've got an aurora as far south as Wyoming in the United States. But believe it or not, that's not the biggest story. The biggest story is the new region that has emerged on the Earth-facing Sun. It's region 2744 and it's a Solar Cycle 25 sunspot. This means that Solar Cycle 25 is still coming. It's on its way, despite whatever reports you've seen in the news lately. And now for a closer look at that new Solar Cycle 25 sunspot that's emerged on the Earth-facing disk. You can see when it emerges, it emerges very, very quickly. It even fires off a couple B-class flares as it emerges. And we actually had some really high hopes that it might start getting some decent activity. But it has not managed to do much more. It's kind of receded a little bit, yet it is still hanging in there. And you can see from all those blue-tipped magnetic field lines that it is definitely at high latitudes in the southern hemisphere. And with the polarity it has, it definitely belongs to Solar Cycle 25. So this is unambiguous for a Solar Cycle 25 sunspot. And as we take a closer look at the Sun's magnetic field, we can actually use models to help us determine where the magnetic equator is. And this is very important to determine whether or not a sunspot is at high latitude or low latitude. Here you can see all these dashed lines. These are where the magnetic equator is according to the models at different altitudes in the Sun's atmosphere. And you can see that sunspot, that new sunspot from Cycle 25 is definitely far away from that equator. And that means it's high latitude. And that's just one more indicator that this is definitely a sunspot from Solar Cycle 25. For more details on this week's space weather, including some info on that hyped solar storm, when it hit, how much aurora was seen, and when we will get another chance to see more aurora, check out my channel or come visit me at spaceweatherwoman.com. Thanks for watching Space News this week. And of course, we want to give a huge thank you to all of the citizens of tomorrow. You are helping us make this show and our live shows on Saturday possible. Without you, we wouldn't be able to do any of this. And if you'd like to help contribute financially to tomorrow, you can head on over to patreon.com slash tmro, or you can now go to youtube.com slash tmro slash join, and you can contribute as little as $1 a month to us. Now, if you can't contribute anything financially, but you'd still like to help out the show, you can head on over to community.tmro.tv. Thanks for watching Space News. Until the next one, keep exploring. This is Murph. Hi, Murph. Murph, did you know that there's been a couple rocket launches? You want to hear about them? At present, the cause of the anomaly is not known. Out of an abundance of caution, Ariane Space has delayed the next Ariane 5 launch to allow for checks of its systems. Do you care? No? Okay. Get out of here. It's okay. Good.