The SpaceX Falcon 9 launch of over 60 smallsats previously scheduled for launch on the same day as the PSLV was postponed to next Sunday due to high altitude winds. (See earlier posting about the two missions.)
Now targeting December 2 for launch of Spaceflight SSO-A: SmallSat Express from Vandenberg Air Force Base.
Meanwhile, South Korea successfully carried out a suborbital launch of a single-staged rocket. The goal of the flight was to test a domestically developed 75 ton thrust engine that will be used for the three-stage orbital Korea Space Launch Vehicle-2 (KSLV-2). The kerosene/liquid oxygen powered engine appears to have performed as planned:
Sotheby’s on Thursday (Nov. 29) auctioned the only known pieces of Earth’s natural satellite to be collected from the lunar surface and be legally sold for $855,000. The three tiny pebbles were among a small cache of moon material that was brought back by the former Soviet Union’s Luna 16 robotic probe in 1970.
The same moon rocks — which were originally presented to Nina Ivanovna Koroleva, the widow of Sergei Korolev, the “Chief Designer” of the Soviet space program — were sold by Sotheby’s in December 1993 for $442,500. With inflation, Thursday’s sale in New York City reflected an increase of about $87,500.
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Sotheby’s is holding a Space Exploration auction in New York today. The space collectibles and memorabilia items on sale include actual material obtained from the Moon’s surface:
The top lot in the sale was originally sold in the 1993 Russian Space History Sale here at Sotheby’s – a sample of lunar rocks returned to Earth by the Russian Luna-16 unmanned mission. It was the first time a piece of another world had ever been offered for sale to the public. It remains to this day, the only known legal sale of moon rocks to have ever occurred. We look forward to once again offering this tremendously rare and historic artifact to the public.
In addition there is
a wide variety of material from both the American & Soviet space programs — from lunar & space photography, original artwork by artists such as Chesley Bonestell and Alan Bean, flown mission artefacts and hardware, items from the personal collections of astronauts, autographed items, maps & charts, signed books, models, spacesuits, and much more, with material suited for both new and seasoned collectors.
Purdue University professor, David Spencer is leading an effort to send a CubeSat up for an attempted controlled solar sailing in Earth’s orbit. Solar sailing uses reflective sails to harness the momentum of sunlight for propulsion….
This project is sponsored by the citizen-funded Planetary Society, whose CEO is Bill Nye the Science Guy.
The CubeSat, LightSail 2, is one payload as part of the Air Force’s Space Test Program-2 (STP-2) mission that will launch on the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in early 2019. Spencer’s research team will be tracking LightSail 2, receiving the signal from the spacecraft as well as commanding the spacecraft during operations, from the Space Flight Projects Lab at the Purdue Technology Center.https://engineering.purdue.edu/SFPL
“So the Marco is about double the size of RFTSat, but it’s really cool to see how NASA and JPL are also using cube sats and how NNU is using them too,” said Cox.
The Marcos being cube satellite’s used in conjunction with NASA’s InSight that landed on Mars Monday.
And engineering students at NNU are in the building stages of a satellite with similar features called RFTSat, which is also a version of a cube satellite.
An increasing number of interplanetary missions are aiming at visiting asteroids and other small bodies, since these may provide clues to understand the formation and evolution of our Solar System. CubeSats allow a low-cost solution to land on these objects, as opposed to risking a much more expensive mothership. The weak gravitational field on these small bodies may also enable the possibility of simply dropping a CubeSat from afar (i.e. ballistic landing).
However, ballistic landing of an unpowered spacecraft may be feasible solely within certain asteroid locations, and only if sufficient energy can be dissipated at touchdown. If such conditions are not met, the spacecraft will rebound off the surface. It is likely that the necessary energy dissipation may already occur naturally due to energy loss expected through the deformation of the regolith during touchdown. Indeed, previous low-velocity impact experiments in microgravity seem to indicate that this is exactly the case. However, data from past asteroid touchdowns, Hayabusa and Philae, indicate the contrary.
This paper describes the development of an experiment which aims to bridge the aforementioned disagreement between mission data and microgravity experiment; to understand the behaviour of CubeSat landing on asteroids. …
While Cal Poly’s ninth CubeSat tests a way to reduce vibrations aboard orbiting satellites, the softball-sized satellite also has been busy snapping photos of the Earth.
DAVE, or Damping and Vibrations Experiment, launched Sept. 15 from Vandenberg Air Force Base with three other small satellites, or CubeSats, as secondary payload on NASA’s ICESat-2 (Ice Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite-2) mission.
PolySat, the student-run research lab, released its first high-resolution image that was snapped just hours after the launch. The photo shows Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago located between Norway and the North Pole.
“This is one of our better pictures,” said Grigory Heaton, a senior studying aerospace engineering and physics. “Our satellite is not controlled. It’s just spinning, so we have to get lucky with the pictures. This one, we were right overhead and got almost the entire archipelago.”
iCubeSat – Interplanetary CubeSat Workshop – Milan, Italy – May 28-29, 2019.“iCubeSat 2019, the 8th Interplanetary CubeSat Workshop, will address the technical challenges, opportunities, and practicalities of interplanetary space exploration with CubeSats. The workshop provides a unique environment for open wide ranging practical collaboration between academic researchers, industry professionals, policy makers and students developing this new and rapidly growing field.”
A sampling of links to recent space policy, politics, and government (US and international) related space news and resource items that I found of interest:
** The Space Show – Sun, 11/25/2018 – Sarah Cruddas, a British space journalist, TV presenter and children’s author, talked about the Space For Humanity program that aims to enable several “non-astronauts to travel to the edge of space” on suborbital rocket flights. This segment was followed by an open lines program led by David Livingston.
NASA announced on November 19th that the multi-billion dollar 2020 Mars rover will land in Jezero crater, where it will begin the search for the signature of past life. The selection process took five years, and Briony Horgan of Purdue University was part of it all. She joins us to talk about this exciting and enticing target on the Red Planet. Planetary Society Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla prepares us for the much more imminent Mars landing of InSight. Orion in the northern hemisphere’s night sky can only mean winter is coming. Just ahead of it is a new What’s Up segment from Bruce and Mat.
**Why a lunar base is better than LOP-G – Dr. Robert Zubrin -21st Annual Mars Society Convention – A talk given in August but posted this week on the The Mars Society YouTube channel along with several other presentation videos from the meeting.