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Trump watches SpaceX launch Starship's 6th test flight
November 19, 2024
The bond between Elon Musk and Donald Trump appears to be getting stronger.
Musk was a big supporter of Trump's campaign over the past few months, and the president-elect recently appointed the SpaceX founder and CEO to co-lead the new "Department of Government Efficiency," which aims to slash regulations and reduce government spending.
And today (Nov. 19), Trump made the trek to South Texas to watch SpaceX launch its giant Starship rocket for the sixth time ever.
"I'm heading to the Great State of Texas to watch the launch of the largest object ever to be elevated, not only to Space, but simply by lifting off the ground.
Good luck to @ElonMusk and the Great Patriots involved in this incredible project!" Trump posted today on X, the social media platform that Musk owns.
Musk gave Trump and several other VIPs a tour of mission control before the Starship launch, which occurred from SpaceX's Starbase site, near the Texas border city of Brownsville.
Trump watched the liftoff from a safe distance, taking the action in from across a decent-size body of water.
SpaceX wanted to catch Starship's first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, with the "chopstick" arms of Starbase's launch tower during today's test flight, as it did during the most recent Starship flight, on Oct. 13.
But engineers noticed something in the flight data today and called the attempt off, instead diverting Super Heavy to a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
Pretty much everything else went according to plan today, however.
For example, Starship's 165-foot-tall (50 meters) upper stage, called Starship or simply "Ship," successfully re-lit one of its engines in space, demonstrating a capability that will be needed during orbital missions down the road.
And Ship survived its return trip through Earth's atmosphere in one piece today, hitting its target splashdown zone in the Indian Ocean about 65.5 minutes after liftoff.
Trump has shown enthusiasm before for Starship, which SpaceX is developing to take people and cargo to the moon and Mars.
For instance, in a speech broadcast on election night (Nov. 5), Trump recalled watching the "chopsticks" booster catch of Super Heavy on Oct. 13
"And I called Elon. I said, 'Elon, was that you?' He said, 'Yes, it was.' I said, 'Who else can do that? Can Russia do it? 'No.' Can China do it?'
'No,'" Trump said. "'Can the United States do it, other than you?' 'No, nobody can do that.' I said, 'That's why I love you, Elon, that's great.'"
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/trump-watches-spacex-launch-starships-6th-test-flight-photos
'It's bananas:' Toy fruit becomes first zero-g indicator to fly on SpaceX Starship
November 20, 2024
An artificial banana floated peacefully in the microgravity environment of outer space on Tuesday (Nov. 19).
No longer needing its attached tethers, it just hung there, suspended in the bay of its steel spacecraft's otherwise empty cargo hold.
The fake-but-full-size fruit made history as the first zero-gravity indicator to fly on a SpaceX Starship.
"Bananas have been used for quick visual comparisons for quite some time, and our teammates thought it was time to bring the venerated yellow fruit to Starship," said Kate Tice, a quality engineering manager at SpaceX and co-host of the company's live launch webcast.
"Today, we're flying Starship's first-ever physical payload, which is, as you might have guessed, a banana."
A camera mounted in Starship's payload bay revealed the toy banana held by cables tied to its top and bottom.
More than just a visual signal that Starship had reached space on its suborbital trajectory, the banana was also a stand-in for gaining the government's approval to begin launching more purposeful payloads on future Starship flights.
"You can see our stuffed banana payload, which is doubling as today's zero gravity or zero-g indicator.
And while this payload will remain inside the vehicle at all times and will not be deployed today, it did give us a chance to do a test run of payload approval processes with the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration], and that's something that we're hoping to do next year if we start flying our first Starlink satellites on Starship," said Tice. "Godspeed, banana."
Though hard to see on the in-flight views, if the banana aboard Starship matched the toy that Tice and her co-host, SpaceX manufacturing engineer manager Jessica Anderson, had with them and which are now available to pre-order for $30 through SpaceX's online shop, the 8-inch-long (20 centimeters) yellow fruit has printed on it "(For Scale)."
It also bears SpaceX's mission patch for Tuesday's test flight, which is a parody of the blue decal found on Dole bananas.
The banana theme extended to the exterior of Starship as well. Affixed to either side of the 165-foot-tall (50 meters) spacecraft were 4-foot-tall (1.2 m) stickers of a pixelated cartoon banana holding an actual-size banana (for scale).
"A single banana is about 1/247 of Starship," read the description on SpaceX's website.
The scale includes Super Heavy, Starship's 232-foot-tall (71 m) booster.
Fortunately, Tuesday's test flight — the sixth in SpaceX's series proving Starship is ready to fly to the moon and Mars — did not go bananas.
The mission achieved all of its main objectives, including demonstrating that Starship could relight its Raptor rocket engines once in space, a requirement for entering orbit on future launches.
The mission lifted off from SpaceX's Starbase launch facility in south Texas as scheduled at 4:00 p.m. CST (5:00 p.m. EST or 2200 GMT), setting up Starship's first daytime splashdown in the Indian Ocean about 65 minutes later.
In the interim, Super Heavy successfully made a soft water landing in the Gulf of Mexico, having been waved off from attempting another tower catch at its launch site, as first achieved on the vehicle's fifth test flight in October.
In addition to its in-space engine test, Starship was outfitted with new secondary thermal protection materials and had sections of its heat shield tiles removed where catch-enabling hardware may be installed on subsequent vehicles.
The ship also adopted a higher angle of attack in the final phase of its descent back to Earth, purposefully stressing the limits of its flap control to collect data on future landing profiles.
The flight's "It's Bananas" theme continued two traditions at SpaceX. The company was the first in the U.S. to borrow the Russian custom of flying small toys as zero-g indicators, tracing back to the first human spaceflight in 1961.
Beginning with the first flight by a Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station, SpaceX has launched a menagerie of plush dolls on its crewed missions, including a stuffed planet Earth, an Albert Einstein doll and a small but growing pack of toy dogs.
SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has also made a habit of choosing "odd" items to be the first cargo to fly on each of the company's rockets.
On Falcon 9, the first Dragon to fly to and from Earth orbit carried with it a wheel of Le Brouere cheese, a nod to a Monty Python skit.
On Falcon Heavy, Musk launched his own Tesla Roadster electric car on a trajectory that took it out beyond the orbit of Mars.
https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-test-flight-six-banana
The bomb cyclone looks monstrous from space
Wed, November 20, 2024 at 2:00 AM PST
A formidable bomb cyclone is churning off the Western U.S.
The comma-shaped storm is a suped-up mid-latitude cyclone, which is quite different than the tropical cyclones (like hurricanes) that form near the equator and are fueled by extremely warm waters.
Instead, mid-latitude cyclones are much larger (some 900 to over 3,000 miles in diameter) than tropical cyclones, and form near the boundaries of the frigid poles and the warmer air of the mid-latitudes.
These converging air masses create counter-clockwise circulating motions that can induce whirlpool-like movement. Add in the energy from some typical atmospheric instability to the mix (like rising and sinking air), and you've got a robust, spinning storm.
In this case, the storm is experiencing a rapid drop in pressure at its center, which stokes a potent cyclonic flow as winds blow toward the low pressure.
"It's a rapidly intensifying low," Joe Wegman, a National Weather Service meteorologist, told Mashable.
Conditions for a "bomb cyclone," or "bombogenesis," occur when a storm's central pressure drops by at least 24 millibars in 24 hours.
In this case, meteorologists are measuring pressure drops of seven millibars per hour, which if sustained over six hours, would be an all-time record for an extratropical storm (which is a storm created from the temperature contrast between warm and cold air masses).
"The system is deepening rapidly…possibly record setting!" Jeff Weber, a research meteorologist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, emailed Mashable as he observed the storm's evolution.
The cyclone will have major impacts. There will be high winds and heavy mountain snow in the Northwest.
But, as the images below show, the cyclone is also dragging along an atmospheric river — a formidable band of moisture (sometimes dubbed a "river in the sky") tending to stream over the Pacific Ocean — that will douse Northern California by Wednesday.
That means extreme rain. Some areas of Northern California and Oregon will receive in excess of 12 inches of rain, Weber said.
A view from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's GOES-West satellite on Nov. 19, 2024 shows the comma-shaped bomb cyclone on upper left, and the atmospheric river (horizontal band of clouds) below. Credit: NOAA
Although atmospheric rivers are a crucial part of California's water supply, scientists have found that they're becoming more intense, meaning more billion-dollar flooding disasters.
The key factor driving more intense atmospheric rivers is the physics of a warming globe. More heat on the planet means more water vapor in the air.
The resulting deluges are especially amplified in the case of already strong atmospheric rivers, which deliver a colossal amount of water, many times the average flow of water through the vast mouth of the Mississippi River.
For those in California and the Northwest, heed warnings from local officials and the National Weather Service. This storm means business.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/bomb-cyclone-looks-monstrous-space-100000602.html
==India's Chandrayaan-2 moon orbiter avoids collision with South Korea's Danuri spacecraft
News==
November 19, 2024
India's Chandrayaan-2 moon orbiter maneuvered in September to avoid a close approach with South Korea's Danuri spacecraft, according to a recent report from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).
The report said the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter raised its orbit on Sept. 19 to prevent a close approach to Danuri, which was expected to occur two weeks later if Chandrayaan-2's trajectory went unchanged.
The report noted that a subsequent maneuver, which took place on Oct. 1, also helped Chandrayaan-2 avoid potential collisions with other orbiters around the moon, including NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).
Such collision-avoidance maneuvers are not uncommon around the moon.
Chandrayaan-2, Danuri and LRO all share a nearly polar orbit, so the spacecraft come close to one another over the lunar poles, where the risk of collision is very high.
In the last year and a half alone, the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), which operates Danuri, received 40 "red alarms" of potential collisions among LRO, Chandrayaan-2 and Danuri.
In 2021, Chandrayaan-2 shifted its orbit to avoid a predicted close approach to LRO over the moon's north pole.
Without the maneuver, the two spacecraft would have crossed by one another at only 1.8 miles (3 kilometers) apart, ISRO said.
Danuri itself maneuvered at least three times since it entered lunar orbit in December 2022 — once to steer clear of LRO, and another to avoid Chandrayaan-2 and to evade Japan's Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) spacecraft shortly before the latter's touchdown on the moon's near side in January, SpaceNews reported.
There is currently no international protocol to resolve collision risks.
The three space agencies — NASA, KARI and ISRO — voluntarily share data through email exchanges and teleconferences about the trajectories of their spacecraft.
"Sometimes, we did not have the contact information of the responsible personnel, and network security issues occasionally prevented email exchanges," according to a presentation by the Korea AeroSpace Administration at the UN committee meeting held in June.
"However, we ultimately resolved all collision risks through collaborative discussions."
The space agencies primarily use a platform built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory called MADCAP that calculates risk of collisions and generates warnings.
However, "right now, there's no mutually agreed-upon international consultation mechanism or protocol to resolve such collision risks," Soyoung Chung, a senior researcher at KARI's strategy and planning directorate, said at a space sustainability summit earlier this year, according to SpaceNews.
"With our experience of operating KPLO [Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, officially Danuri], we realize there is a need for an information-sharing platform and mutually agreed-upon international protocols to identify and manage the risk of collisions between the missions around the moon just like we do on the Earth."
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/indias-chandrayaan-2-moon-orbiter-avoids-collision-with-south-koreas-danuri-spacecraft
Geminid meteor shower begins tonight. Here's what to expect from one of the best meteor showers of the year
November 19, 2024
One of the most reliable meteor showers to light up our night sky each year begins tonight.
The annual Geminid meteor shower runs from Nov. 19 through Dec. 24, with the peak coming overnight on Dec. 13-14, according to the American Meteor Society.
During the peak, over 100 Geminid meteors can be seen per hour under the right conditions. The Geminids are somewhat rare in that they are produced by debris from an asteroid, known as 3200 Phaeton.
Most other meteor showers, on the other hand, are produced by the leftover bits of comets.
The Geminids are one of the best and most reliable annual meteor showers, according to NASA, making the next month one of the best times to get out at night and catch a glimpse of one of these "shooting stars."
Want to see the Geminids for yourself? Here's what you need to know.
Bill Cooke is a NASA astronomer who leads the agency's Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Cooke previously told Space.com that the Geminids are one of the top three meteor showers to look out for in 2024.
However, a bright waxing gibbous moon will be just above the twins of Gemini on Dec. 13, which will interfere with the peak of this shower.
Still, even while the moon lights the night sky, a large number of bright meteors should be visible during the peak.
As their name implies, the Geminid meteor shower originates from the Gemini constellation.
Gemini remains visible throughout the night for the northern hemisphere over the next month, just above the raised arm of the Orion constellation.
If you aren't familiar with the Gemini constellation, now is the perfect time to look for its two most distinctive stars: Castor and Pollux, known as the "twins" of Gemini.
If you need help locating it, you could always use a stargazing app.
The constellation is most often depicted as a pair of brothers holding hands or placing their hands on one another's shoulders.
According to Greek mythology, Castor and Pollux were the twin sons of Leda, Queen of Sparta. Castor was the son of Tyndareus, king of Sparta, while Pollux was the son of the powerful god Zeus.
After the mortal Castor fell in battle, Pollux prayed to Zeus to make his brother immortal.
The only way this could be done would require Pollux to give up his immortality, so Zeus transformed the pair into the stars we now see in the night sky.
https://www.space.com/stargazing/meteors-showers/geminid-meteor-shower-begins-tonight-heres-what-to-expect-from-one-of-the-best-meteor-showers-of-the-year
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Solar_Orbiter/New_full_Sun_views_show_sunspots_fields_and_restless_plasma
New full Sun views show sunspots, fields and restless plasma
20/11/2024
Zoom into Solar Orbiter's four new Sun images, assembled from high-resolution observations by the spacecraft's PHI and EUI instruments made on 22 March 2023.
The PHI images are the highest-resolution full views of the Sun's visible surface to date, including maps of the Sun's messy magnetic field and movement on the surface.
These can be compared to the new EUI image, which reveals the Sun's glowing outer atmosphere, or corona.
No object in the Solar System is as dynamic and multifaceted as the Sun. The ESA-led Solar Orbiter mission watches the Sun with no less than six imaging instruments.
Together, these allow the spacecraft to peel away the Sun's many layers and reveal its many faces.
Today, the mission reveals the highest-resolution full views of the Sun’s visible surface (photosphere) to date.
They are assembled from images made by the spacecraft's Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI).
This instrument not only takes images in visible light, but also measures the direction of the magnetic field, and maps how fast and in which direction different parts of the surface are moving.
PHI's measurements of the photosphere can be directly compared to a new image of the Sun's outer atmosphere (the corona) assembled from high-resolution images taken by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument on the same day in March 2023.
EUI images the Sun in ultraviolet light.
"The Sun's magnetic field is key to understanding the dynamic nature of our home star from the smallest to the largest scales.
These new high-resolution maps from Solar Orbiter's PHI instrument show the beauty of the Sun's surface magnetic field and flows in great detail.
At the same time, they are crucial for inferring the magnetic field in the Sun's hot corona, which our EUI instrument is imaging,” notes Daniel Müller, Solar Orbiter's Project Scientist.
This release follows on from one two years ago, when the mission released full images of the Sun taken by the spacecraft's EUI and Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instruments on 7 March 2022.
Sunspots and a messy field
Zooming into PHI's detailed visible light image reveals the Sun's ‘surface’ for what it is: glowing, hot plasma (charged gas) that is constantly moving.
Almost all radiation from the Sun is emitted from this layer, which has a temperature between 4500 and 6000 °C.
Beneath it, the hot, dense plasma is churned around in the ‘convection zone’ of the Sun, not unlike magma in Earth's mantle.
As a result of this movement, the Sun's surface takes on a grainy appearance.
However, the most striking features in the images are the sunspots. In the visible light image, these look like dark spots, or holes, in the otherwise smooth surface.
Sunspots are colder than their surroundings, and therefore give off less light.
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PHI's magnetic map, or ‘magnetogram’, shows that the Sun's magnetic field is concentrated in the sunspot regions. It either points outward (red) or inward (blue) wherever the sunspots lie.
The strong magnetic field explains why plasma inside sunspots is colder.
Normally, convection moves heat from inside the Sun to its surface, but this is disrupted by charged particles being forced to follow the dense magnetic field lines in and around the sunspots.
The speed and direction of movement of material at the Sun's surface can be seen in PHI's velocity map, also known as a ‘tachogram’.
Blue shows movement towards the spacecraft, while red indicates movement away from the spacecraft.
This map shows that while the plasma on the surface of the Sun generally rotates with the Sun’s overall spin around its axis, it is pushed outward around the sunspots.
Finally, EUI's image of the Sun's corona shows what happens above the photosphere. Above the active sunspot regions, glowing plasma is seen protruding out.
The million-degree plasma follows magnetic field lines sticking out from the Sun, often connecting neighbouring sunspots.
Stitched together
The images were taken when Solar Orbiter was less than 74 million kilometres from the Sun.
Being so close to the Sun meant each high-resolution image taken by PHI and EUI only covers a small portion of the Sun.
After each individual image was taken, the spacecraft needed to be tilted and rotated until each part of the Sun's face was imaged.
To obtain the full-disc images presented here, all images were stitched together like a mosaic.
The PHI and the EUI mosaic are composed of 25 images each, captured over a period of more than four hours.
The Sun's disc has a diameter of almost 8000 pixels in the full mosaics, revealing an incredible amount of detail.
The image processing required to obtain the PHI mosaics was new and difficult.
Now that it has been done once, processing the data and assembling mosaics will go faster in the future.
The PHI team expects to be able to provide such high-resolution mosaics twice a year
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Hidden pollution of 'dark shipping' revealed from space
November 20, 2024
A fleet of “dark vessels” linked to clandestine oil trading from Iran and Russia is producing a small country’s worth of previously uncounted carbon emissions, the Cop29 climate summit has heard.
Ships spotted in satellite images after failing to “ping” their location gave out 375 million tonnes of CO2 last year, according to new estimates.
Vessels in the “shadow fleet” are believed to sail in poor condition and run the risk of oil spills by transferring fuel at sea.
Insurers say dark vessels have flourished since Russian oil sales were restricted over the war in Ukraine, and have also been used by Iran and Venezuela to circumvent sanctions.
They operate outside international rules at a time when the maritime industry is under pressure to marshal global efforts to clean up.
Ships must be subject to “concrete, binding regulations” to achieve a goal of carbon-neutral shipping by 2050, Camille Bourgeon, a technical officer at the International Maritime Organisation, told delegates at the Cop29 talks on Wednesday.
The emissions figures from Climate Trace, a tracker co-founded by Al Gore, are thought to be the first estimate of the dark fleet’s CO2 footprint.
“We are seeing a rise in ships that are deliberately turning off their safety equipment, called dark vessels, in order to avoid embargoes; or illegal fishers will often do this,” said Gavin McCormick, a fellow co-founder of Climate Trace.
“About 7 per cent of shipping emissions, or something as large as the emissions of the nation of Ireland, are now from dark vessels.”
Large cargo ships normally carry transponders that ping their location to base stations on the mainland, in what is known as an Automatic Identification System (AIS) that prevents them colliding at sea.
Scientists can work out a vessel's CO2 footprint from the path it takes and the specifications of its engine, which show how much power it must have used.
Where no pings were received, analysts at Climate Trace and Global Fishing Watch drew on images from the European radar satellite Sentinel-1 to spot ocean-faring vessels, work out their length and how many did not match with AIS tracking, and use that data to estimate the carbon footprint of the missing "dark" ones.
The spacecraft takes an image of Earth's entire surface every 12 days.
Hundreds of ships making up as many as one in five of the world’s oil tankers are part of the “dark fleet”, according to the insurer Allianz, which said in a May briefing that Russia's shadow tankers had emerged in response to Western sanctions over Ukraine.
Data can sometimes be lacking because of a lack of AIS coverage rather than because of any clandestine activity, and turning off transponders can be a legitimate anti-piracy tactic when passing through dangerous waters.
However, the US Treasury Department wrote in a memo to fuel carriers in September that vessels carrying petroleum to Syria "have been known to intentionally manipulate their AIS transponders to mask their movement".
Last month it ordered sanctions on six vessels believed to be part of a "shadow fleet" exporting oil despite international sanctions on Tehran.
The European Parliament last week accused Russia of trading oil on “unsafe and uninsured vessels” with “no regard for international safety or the potential for irreversible environmental damage” from an oil spill.
It said the "scale and sophistication" of Russia's operations "set it apart" from similar tactics used by Iran, Venezuela and North Korea.
Countries exposed to environmental disasters, such as Fiji and Barbados, are using Cop29 to lobby for a CO2 levy on shipping to raise funds for the climate fight.
“International shipping is committed to do more on climate action,” Arsenio Dominguez, secretary general of the International Maritime Organisation, told an event in Baku on Wednesday.
In the switch to clean fuel for ships “we need standards, we need them to be consistent across jurisdictions”, said Lais de Souza Garcia, the head of a renewable energy division in Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“If we have fragmented rules, it’s going to be impossible to tell a business they are going to be able to scale production.”
Maritime unions are meanwhile using Cop29 to lobby for proper training on green vessels.
Singapore plans to train 10,000 personnel in the coming years in operating refitted ships.
Concerns have been raised about a shortage of seafarers and the safety of handling alternative fuels such as methanol.
"There’s a huge trade coming in and out of South Africa, but there are very few jobs," said Zazi Nsibanyoni-Mugambi of the National Union of Metalworkers.
"African workers in the shipping industry need to capture a meaningful stake in this transition."
https://www.thenationalnews.com/climate/2024/11/20/hidden-pollution-of-dark-shipping-revealed-from-space/
Link 16, Lasers Provide Top Comms on Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture
Nov. 19, 2024
As the Space Development Agency continues to build out the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, the agency's director, Derek Tournear, said Link 16 will continue to be the top option for communications provided by that satellite constellation because it's the foundation that American soldiers and U.S. allies rely on the most.
"One of our operating modes in SDA is that we do not require a lot of changes to user equipment," Tournear said. "I said … we're going to field a few 100 satellites, [so] let's take the onus on ourselves to modify those satellites so they can go down to legacy radios, so we don't force the Army, Navy, Air Force, to field tens of thousands of new radios, because that's very difficult."
The PWSA system will eventually include hundreds of satellites, delivered in tranches every two years, with each tranche providing more capability than the last.
The network of hundreds of optically connected satellites will deliver two primary capabilities to warfighters on the ground.
The first is beyond line-of-sight targeting for ground and maritime time-sensitive targets, which includes mobile missiles and ships, for instance.
The system will provide the ability to detect those targets, track them, calculate a fire control solution and deliver that solution down to a weapons platform so the target can be destroyed.
The second capability is similar to the first but for enemy missiles already in flight.
Link 16 will be a big part of the PWSA, Tournear said. Link 16 is a radio system broadly used by the United States and its allies across the globe.
"There are tens of thousands of these terminals already out there," he said. "Our uniform personnel are already [trained], already know how to use these systems.
We designed our system to primarily go down to that tactical radio."
But the U.S. military and its allies have need for greater bandwidth than what Link 16 provides, Tournear said, and that's where laser communications come in.
"There's a lot of missions that need higher data rate than Link 16," he said. "In the future, you're going to want to have a lot of aircraft that want to move a lot of data.
You're going to want to have ground systems that have this low latency connectivity, that want a lot of data connected, that you're not able to get with Link 16 or other systems.
That's where the laser [communications] comes in. It's not ever going to be as prolific a user base as Link 16 … but we do see it growing, and you'll have thousands of those laser comm terminals in the future."
Early on in development of the PWSA, Tournear said, laser communications has been part of the plan.
Demonstration satellites launched in 2021, he said, successfully demonstrated space-to-space laser communication, for instance.
They also demonstrated the ability to do space-to-ground communications as well.
"In Tranche 0 and then operational in Tranche 1, those laser comm systems are going to be used for space-to-space, space-to-ground and space-to-air," he said.
Tournear said tradeoffs were made to optimized laser communications for both space-to-space and space-to-air communications.
"We did that because we recognize that the spectrum is contested. … The enemy gets a vote in contesting spectrum, as well as just getting spectrum approval — much more difficult in the [radio frequency] realm than in the optical realm," he said.
"We chose to go with that standard. And that's our future going forward."
https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3972095/link-16-lasers-provide-top-comms-on-proliferated-warfighter-space-architecture/
NASA Tests Swimming Robots for Exploring Oceans on Icy Moons
Nov 20, 2024
A futuristic NASA mission concept envisions a swarm of dozens of self-propelled, cellphone-size robots exploring the oceans beneath the icy shells of moons like Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus, looking for chemical and temperature signals that could point to life.
A series of prototypes for the concept, called SWIM (Sensing With Independent Micro-swimmers), braved the waters of a competition swim pool at Caltech in Pasadena, California, for testing in 2024.
The prototype used in most of the pool tests was about 16.5 inches (42 centimeters) long, weighing 5 pounds (2.3 kilograms).
As conceived for spaceflight, the robots would have dimensions about three times smaller — tiny compared to existing remotely operated and autonomous underwater scientific vehicles.
Led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the SWIM project was supported by NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program under the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate.
Work on the project took place from spring 2021 to fall 2024.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sz0SWy7bCzU
Fly around Ares Vallis on Mars
Nov 20, 2024
Explore the immense power of water as ESA’s Mars Express takes us on a flight over curving channels, streamlined islands and muddled ‘chaotic terrain’ on Mars, soaking up rover landing sites along the way.
This beautiful flight around the Oxia Palus region of Mars covers a total area of approximately 890 000 km2, more than twice the size of Germany.
Central to the tour is one of Mars’s largest outflow channels, Ares Vallis. It stretches for more than 1700 km and cascades down from the planet’s southern highlands to enter the lower-lying plains of Chryse Planitia.
Billions of years ago, water surged through Ares Vallis, neighbouring Tiu Vallis, and numerous other smaller channels, creating many of the features observed in this region today.
Enjoy the flight!
After enjoying a spectacular global view of Mars we focus in on the area marked by the white rectangle.
Our flight starts over the landing site of NASA’s Pathfinder mission, whose Sojourner rover explored the floodplains of Ares Vallis for 12 weeks in 1997.
Continuing to the south, we pass over two large craters named Masursky and Sagan.
The partially eroded crater rim of Masursky in particular suggests that water once flowed through it, from nearby Tiu Vallis.
The Masurky Crater is filled with jumbled blocks, and you can see many more as we turn north to Hydaspis Chaos.
This ‘chaotic terrain’ is typical of regions influenced by massive outflow channels.
Its distinctive muddled appearance is thought to arise when subsurface water is suddenly released from underground to the surface.
The resulting loss of support from below causes the surface to slump and break into blocks of various sizes and shapes.
Just beyond this chaotic array of blocks is Galilaei crater, which has a highly eroded rim and a gorge carved between the crater and neighbouring channel.
It is likely that the crater once contained a lake, which flooded out into the surroundings.
Continuing on, we see streamlined islands and terraced river banks, the teardrop-shaped island ‘tails’ pointing in the downstream direction of the water flow at the time.
Crossing over Ares Vallis again, the flight brings us to the smoother terrain of Oxia Planum and the planned landing site for ESA’s ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover.
The primary goal of the mission is to search for signs of past or present life on Mars, and as such, this once water-flooded region is an ideal location.
Zooming out, the flight ends with a stunning bird’s-eye view of Ares Vallis and its fascinating water-enriched neighbourhood.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IgTG_CqdtI
Global Unity: US, Australia, Canada and UK
Nov. 19, 2024
In an era defined by rapid technology advancements and with a worldwide platform saturated with Great Power Competition, the Distributed Mission Operations Center on Kirtland Air Force Base, hosted its Virtual Flag: Coalition exercise, Oct. 21–Nov. 4.
VFC is continuing to grow as one of the Department of Defense’s biggest exercises held in a virtual theater-level joint combat environment in an Indo-Pacific area of responsibility.
By enhancing collaboration and readiness among allied and joint forces, it addresses the growing complexities of modern warfare and ensure the U.S. and its partners are prepared to respond effectively to emerging threats.
Operational and tactical warfighters from the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, U.S. Marines, U.S. Navy, U.S. Space Force, Utah National Guard and Utah Air National Guard, Royal Australian Air Force, Australian Army, Royal Canadian Air Force, Royal Canadian Navy, Canadian Army, U.K. Space Agency, Royal Air Force and Royal Navy, train with simulated real-world threats focused on today’s adversaries.
“This exercise is key!” exclaims RCAF Maj. Gary Stone, RCAF head of delegation. “It’s all about coalition partnerships; partners and allies.
We are a proud part of that warfighting integration team. This exercise is a testament to that idea.”
America’s joint forces and its international allies come together annually to execute VFC. Over 400 plus coalition and joint warfighters are engaged in active simulated combat scenarios using air, land, space, cyber and maritime.
“Our DOD policy is, if we were to go to war- we are not going alone,” said U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. David Jones, 705th Combat Training Squadron and DMOC commander “We are going to go with our allies and partners, and we have got to make sure that we can communicate through the right systems, have the same operational mindset and tactical vernacular.”
“Conducting this exercise helps us bring together our joint and coalition forces to learn how we are really going to command and control them,” Jones explains.
“Working with our international allies tests and improves how effectively we are able to communicate and strategize with each other.”
By understanding each branch’s specific roles and capabilities, effective coordination is ensured to respond decisively when it matters most.
VFC is a long-standing exercise that has grown and evolved continuously. Each year it has improved by adding additional scenarios or challenges that accurately mimic today's real-world adversaries' tactics and strategies.
“Canada has participated in this exercise since 2009,” Stone recalls. “Every year, it has continued to evolve and develop to accurately reflect who our present adversaries are and what tactics or types of battle we are facing.”
VFC is just one example of the many ways in which the U.S. and its allies are working together to prepare for potential conflicts and challenges.
By fostering strong partnerships and improving their ability to work together, these nations can better protect their interests and maintain stability in the Indo-Pacific region and beyond.
https://www.spaceforce.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3971590/global-unity-us-australia-canada-and-uk/