TYB
==NASA's Parker Solar Probe completes 20th close approach to the sun=
JULY 5, 2024
NASA's Parker Solar Probe completed its 20th close approach to the sun on June 30, 2024, matching its own distance record by coming about 4.51 million miles (7.26 million kilometers) from the solar surface.
The close approach (known as perihelion) occurred at 3:47 UTC (11:47 p.m. EDT on June 29), with Parker Solar Probe moving 394,736 miles per hour (635,266 kilometers per hour) around the sun, again matching its own record.
On July 2, the spacecraft checked in with mission operators at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland (where the spacecraft was also designed and built), with a beacon tone indicating it was in good health and all systems were operating normally.
The milestone also marked the midpoint in the mission's 20th solar encounter, which began June 25 and continues through July 5.
Parker will fly around the sun at the same distance and speed one more time this year—on Sept. 30—before making the first of its three final planned closest approaches on Dec. 24.
At that point, with Parker's orbit shaped by the mission's final Venus gravity assist-flyby on Nov. 6, the spacecraft will zoom just 3.8 million miles from the solar surface, moving about 430,000 miles per hour.
https://phys.org/news/2024-07-nasa-parker-solar-probe-20th.html
Hennessey Venom F5 crashes during testing at Kennedy Space Centre
July 5, 2024
Hennessey Performance was recently at the Kennedy Space Centre testing a new experimental aerodynamics package for the Venom F5. During the test, the hypercar lost control and crashed.
According to Hennessey, the Venom F5 accelerated from 0-250 mph on the same runway that NASA used to land the Space Shuttle.
The car reached 250 mph in less than 4000 ft. but lost downforce, causing the driver to lose control.
Hennessey Performance has released an official statement regarding the incident that took place on July 1, 2024.
The company stated, “The prototype Venom F5 performed strongly accelerating from 0-250 mph in just under 4,000 ft. when the vehicle lost downforce on the runway causing the driver to lose control.
Most importantly, our test driver walked away from the incident without injury.”
“Pushing the limits of speed, performance, and physics has never been easy. Our team will evaluate the aerodynamic data to determine the root cause of the issue,” John Hennessey said.
“I am very grateful to our team of engineers and technicians who have designed and built an amazingly strong vehicle.
We are also very thankful to the first responders and staff at KSC for their quick response to ensure everyone’s safety,” he added.
https://www.thesupercarblog.com/hennessey-venom-f5-crashes-during-testing-at-kennedy-space-centre/
https://spacenews.com/regulating-outer-space-after-loper-bright/
=Regulating outer space after Loper Bright
July 5, 2024
It’s been a busy few weeks for the Supreme Court. Among the decisions that are being hailed as the most significant in decades, the court issued Loper Bright v. Raimondo, overturning the 40 year old Chevron Doctrine, which directed courts to defer to an agency’s interpretation of their authorizing statutes.
What does fishing for herring (the fact pattern of Loper Bright) have to do with developing outer space? A lot, actually. While space exploration began 67 years ago with the launch of Sputnik, the rules regulating commercial activities in outer space in many ways are just now being written.
Agencies from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) all have open proceedings affecting outer space.
And without Chevron deference, all of these agency actions may be subject to challenge.
Loper Bright says that courts must determine what powers agencies hold when an authorizing statute is unclear. The decision does not say that non-expert judges will now have to make critical technical decisions, contrary to what some are saying.
Agencies will retain the ability to make factual findings in implementing statutes, especially on highly technical issues, and courts will give them great weight.
Administrative law nerds will note that agencies still retain Skidmore deference, the older cousin of Chevron, which still directs courts to provide substantial weight to an agency’s interpretation of statutes, based on the agency’s expertise, procedural due process and consistency in the way it has implemented its authority in the past.
Then there’s the Administrative Procedure Act, passed in 1946, after Skidmore but almost 40 years before Chevron, which directs courts to review rules under a relatively low bar requiring appellants to demonstrate that the agency has been arbitrary and capricious.
So agency deference is not dead, it’s just no longer a slam dunk.
This is important to the future of commercial space precisely because we’ve never had a National Space Act.
Congress has never passed a comprehensive statute clearly assigning authority to specific agencies to regulate commercial outer space development.
Agencies have been left to cobble together their authority from enabling statutes that, in many instances, were crafted prior to the space age.
And without clear congressional direction, agencies — some with sharp elbows — have crafted a regulatory regime for outer space that, as I wrote for Utah State University’s Center for Growth and Prosperity, is full of “gaps, overlaps, and stovepipes.”
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Yes, the FCC has statutory authority over allocating and licensing spectrum for space communications.
But the FCC wants to regulate major aspects of in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing (ISAM) that go well beyond simply spectrum use.
And the FAA has statutory authority over licensing launch and reentry of rockets. But the FAA wants to impose rules on rocket upper stages that will affect them after they obtain orbit, a domain over which Congress has explicitly denied the FAA authority.
Finally, NIST has been tasked by the White House to develop a framework around government march-in rights on patents developed using government grants.
Each agency was doubtless counting on courts to immunize these decisions from legal challenge under Chevron deference.
In April, TechFreedom filed comments at the FCC questioning their authority over ISAM operations.
We also filed comments at the end of June questioning whether the FCC even has statutory authority to issue orbital debris rules.
Last December, we warned the FAA that its authority over launch and reentry might not apply to what happens to upper stages left in orbit.
All of these comments contemplated what might happen after Loper Bright.
Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion also implicates Congress in this inter-branch scrum. It is up to Congress to make clear what powers it is delegating to agencies.
If it wants the agency to promulgate rules of a certain type, it needs to tell the agency to do so. And that’s exactly what Congress needs to do with regard to commercial outer space development.
We need a National Space Act that clearly assigns regulatory authority to the relevant agencies, but also provides the necessary guardrails against agencies making overlapping, or worse, conflicting rules.
Bills like H.R. 6131 are a good start but must be retooled after Loper Bright to better define agency rulemaking authority, when deference is appropriate, and how it should work. As I testified before the House Space Subcommittee last year:
Congress’s task is to find a balance on the continuum between “permissionless innovation” (where nearly anything goes), and the “precautionary principle” (where the government must micromanage and approve every activity by U.S. citizens in space).
This is a hard, but necessary, task if we wish to continue to be leaders in the cislunar economy going forward.
Here’s hoping that Loper Bright prods Congress into action to provide a clear framework for commercial development and American leadership on the high frontier.
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Connecting the Dots: From oil to orbit
July 5, 2024
Supported by one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, Saudi Arabia is stepping up efforts to become a major force in space as commercial activity in the industry rises across the Middle East.
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) announced the creation of Neo Space Group (NSG) May 27 to specifically invest in local and international commercial satellite opportunities.
The plan is to bring various capabilities in-house to build out an operating entity with expertise in satellite communications, Earth observation and navigation.
NSG would also have a satellite and space-focused venture capital fund for early-stage investments.
Spokespeople for the sovereign wealth fund said NSG would initially focus more on downstream space capabilities — and not areas such as rocket launches — although it’s unclear whether the company would seek to build its own satellites as the strategy is still being refined.
“The establishment of NSG marks an important milestone in the development of the growing satellite and space sector in Saudi Arabia,” said Omar Al-Madhi, PIF’s co-head of direct investments for the Middle East and Africa, “and the ambition to be a leading commercial player in the global satellite sector.”
Saudi Arabia’s new industry champion follows the creation of its space agency last year, and the recent launch of a government-backed accelerator program promising space startups specialized training, networking opportunities and up to around $16 million in financial support.
Like other sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East, PIF is looking to space and other growth industries to diversify its economy as the end of the oil era draws near.
YAHSAT’S TRANSFORMATION
United Arab Emirates, another major oil producer in the Middle East, recently bolstered its flagship operator Yahsat with an eyewatering $5.1 billion pledge to buy satellite broadband services until at least 2043.
The UAE government is advancing about $1 billion to Yahsat to cover its latest geostationary spacecraft, Al Yah 4 and Al Yah 5, slated to launch in 2027 and 2028, respectively.
Yahsat is a subsidiary of Mubadala, a UAE sovereign wealth fund that plans to merge the operator with a local geospatial intelligence provider called Bayanat.
Mubadala turned Bayanat into a commercial company a decade ago after carving it out of the UAE Armed Forces. Bayanat is currently majority-owned by UAE-based artificial intelligence and cloud provider G42, which Mubadala partly owns.
Subject to regulatory approvals the companies expect to get this year, the combined group would seek out synergies between satellite communications and remote sensing with the help of advances in AI.
According to Yahsat group CEO Ali Al Hashemi, the emerging market for direct-to-smartphone satellite services could help significantly expand UAE’s international space presence.
He said Yahsat has tentative plans to order and deploy a small number of prototype spacecraft as early as 2028 to test connectivity services from space directly to everyday, mass-market devices.
The company would order 150 commercial satellites if tests go well, Al Hashemi told SpaceNews in an interview. A second wave of 150 satellites to complete the network could be built in the UAE, either by Yahsat or a local partner.
A constellation contract like this would be a significant development for the UAE’s Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre, which has only developed a handful of LEO Earth observation satellites since its creation in 2006.
Yahsat announced June 10 it had contracted two LEO satellites from Europe’s Airbus as part of its order for Al Yah 4 and Al Yah 5.
Al Hashemi said Yahsat has not finalized a plan for the 150-kilogram LEO spacecraft, but that they could be used to test direct-to-smartphone capabilities.
Yahsat currently provides mobile voice and data services to specialized handsets from Europe to the Asia Pacific via two aging L-band satellites.
SpaceX is due to launch the Thuraya 4-NGS satellite this year to significantly upgrade Yahsat’s mobile satellite service network, which Yahsat acquired in 2018 when it snapped up fellow Emirati operator Thuraya.
It would be the first satellite launched for the Thuraya service since 2008. Other oil-rich countries in the region also seek a larger piece of the global commercial space industry, but success will require more than financial investment alone.
“It’s clear the Middle East sovereign wealth funds can bring a lot of money, and space is expensive,” said Armand Musey, a satellite industry analyst and founder of advisory firm Summit Ridge Group.
“However, as shown by the relative success of the European space industry and SpaceX, today’s space industry also requires real ingenuity that money alone does not provide.”
https://spacenews.com/connecting-the-dots-from-oil-to-orbit/
Mars orbiter captures Red Planet scar that's longer than the Grand Canyon
July 5, 2024
New images published by the European Space Agency have captured a 600-kilometer-long (373-mile-long) snaking scar on Mars' surface in greater detail than ever before.
The Red Planet is full of scratches and scars, and this one, named Aganippe Fossa, is another of these ditch-like grooves with steep walls — more specifically, however, Aganippe Fossa is what's called a "graben."
"We're still unsure of how and when Aganippe Fossa came to be, but it seems likely that it was formed as magma rising underneath the colossal mass of the Tharsis volcanoes caused Mars’s crust to stretch and crack," ESA officials wrote in a recent press release.
As is common in planetary nomenclature, the name "Aganippe Fossa" has its roots in classical mythology. Aganippe, daughter of the river Termessos, was a nymph associated with a spring found at the base of Mount Helicon in Greece.
In homage to its naming origins, Aganippe Fossa appears at the base of one of Mars' largest volcanoes, Arsia Mons.
"Fossa" is then derived from the Latin term for ditch or trench, and refers to a long, narrow depression on the surface of a planet or moon.
The recently published images owe themselves to ESA's Mars Express, Europe's first mission to the Red Planet, which has been orbiting Mars since 2003.
Although its lander, Beagle 2, was lost, the orbiter remains conducting a global investigation of Mars.
It maps minerals, studies the atmosphere, probes beneath the crust and investigates the planet's blob-shaped moons, Phobos and Deimos.
Mars Express captured the new images of Aganippe Fossa with its high resolution stereo camera and revealed the varied surface features of Mars in great detail, showing both clustered, uneven hills and smooth, gently sloping cliffs covered in debris — referred to as hummocky and lobate terrains, respectively.
These terrains are characteristic of Arsia Mons's ring-shaped "aureole," the ESA press release states, in reference to a 100,000-square-kilometer (38,610-square-mile) disk around the base of the volcano, possibly associated with ancient glaciers..
"Intriguingly," the statement continues, "this aureole has only built up on the northwestern flank of the volcano, likely due to prevailing winds from the opposite direction controlling where ice settled over time."
The team also describes windblown dust and sand dynamics of this region of Mars, which create "zebra-like" patterns on the planet's surface as a result of darker material getting deposited on lighter ground.
"The surface here also shows evidence of lava flows, dating from when the volcano was active." the scientists wrote.
Aganippe Fossa is one of many classical albedo features on Mars, which refers to the light and dark features that can be seen on the planet through even an Earth-based telescope.
With space-based orbiters, astronomers have been given unprecedented views of the planet's surface and its intriguing topography.
"The mission has been immensely productive over its lifetime, creating a far fuller and more accurate understanding of our planetary neighbor than ever before," ESA scientists said.
https://www.space.com/esa-mars-express-red-planet-scar-image
Meteor lights up the sky across Turkey
Jul 6, 2024
A meteor was spotted crossing the sky in Turkey.
The green fireball was spotted in many across the country including Istanbul and Ankara.
The Turkish Space Agency confirm that the bright light travelling the sky was a meteor.
It explained that colourful light occurs when meteors enter the atmosphere.
The colour varies depending on several factors, such as the chemical composition of the meteor, its speed, and the gases present in the Earth's atmosphere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxR6zbS9wnI