ACRUX-1 was designed and built by engineering students, with the support of regulatory and business teams as well as professional development and marketing teams.
The Melbourne Space Program is a not-for-profit education organisation run entirely by volunteers – students from universities across Melbourne with a vision to launch the next generation of technology pioneers.
“ACRUX-1 is MSP’s inaugural cubesat and marks a significant crux for the organisation. Credit: Blake Fuller, MSP.”
A team of University of North TexasCollege of Engineering seniors have created an energy efficient system for controlling solar panels on CubeSats using a nickel-titanium shape memory alloy.
Their design beat out teams from nine other universities to take first place at the CASMART 3rd Student Design Challenge in Germany. The international engineering competition for undergrad and graduate students asked teams to create innovative technologies using shape memory alloy.
…
The system designed by Ayers, and fellow Department of Mechanical and Energy Engineering students Brittany Thurstin, Kelsa Adams, Jordan Barnes, Robert Boone and David Evers opens, closes and moves a CubeSat’s solar panels in space using just 20 watts of battery power.
“For this project, we developed three separate shape memory alloy mechanisms for our CubeSat, named Penny, a retention mechanism that holds the solar panels in place during launch, a deployment mechanism that extends the solar panels into space and an actuator that moves the panels to follow the sun,” said Thurstin. “Applying a minimal amount of electricity provides all the mechanical energy needed to get the satellite up and running. We actually built a CubeSat to show just how the shape memory alloy system would work.”
is making a next-generation CubeSat, a small satellite that can fit in the palm of your hand. His satellite parts will cost 10-100x less than usual, using smartphone technologies. By substantially lowering prices to affordable levels for schools and individuals, Geffen plans to democratize space.
Noteworthy: Geffen designed a CubeSat mission to one of Saturn’s moons, leading him to become the only high-schooler invited to an academic space conference in China. Last year, at 16, he left school to pursue his passion for building satellites at a local laboratory. He’s also currently working on a program to tell where (on Earth) a satellite picture was taken.
Here is this week’s episode of NASA’s Space to Ground reports on activities related to the International Space Station:
** NASA honors the women featured in the Hidden Figures book and film:
Thanks to new signage, visitors to NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. will be reminded of the contributions of the “hidden figures” essential to the success of early spaceflight. The renaming honors Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, who were featured in Margot Lee Shetterly’s book – and the movie – Hidden Figures, as well as all women who honorably serve their country, advancing equality, and contributing to the United States space program. News release: https://go.nasa.gov/HiddenFiguresWay On June 12, Administrator Jim Bridenstine joined U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson and author Margot Lee Shetterly for the renaming of the street in front of NASA Headquarters in Washington – E Street SW – to “Hidden Figures Way.” Learn about NASA’s hidden and modern figures: https://www.nasa.gov/modernfigures
** The latest episode of NASA Johnson’s Spacecast Weekly program
SpaceCast Weekly is a NASA Television broadcast from the Johnson Space Center in Houston featuring stories about NASA’s work in human spaceflight, including the International Space Station and its crews and scientific research activities, and the development of Orion and the Space Launch System, the next generation American spacecraft being built to take humans farther into space than they’ve ever gone before.
** Canadian media speaks with astronaut David Saint-Jacques of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA):
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 Heracles lander will target a previously unexplored region near the lunar South Pole as an interesting area for researchers. A lander with a rover inside and ascent module on top will land there. Monitored and controlled from the lunar Gateway, the rover will scout the terrain in preparation for the future arrival of astronauts, and collect samples. The ascent module will take off from the surface and fly to the Gateway with the samples taken by the rover.
When the ascent module carrying the sample container arrives, the Gateway’s robotic arm will capture it and extract the sample container. The sample container will be received by the astronauts via a science airlock and pack it in NASA’s Orion spacecraft that is powered by the European Service Module. Orion will fly to Earth with astronauts and land with the Heracles lunar samples for analysis in the best laboratories on Earth.
A mysterious large mass of material has been discovered beneath the largest crater in our solar system — the Moon’s South Pole-Aitken basin — and may contain metal from an asteroid that crashed into the Moon and formed the crater, according to a Baylor University study.
“Imagine taking a pile of metal five times larger than the Big Island of Hawaii and burying it underground. That’s roughly how much unexpected mass we detected,” said lead author Peter B. James, Ph.D., assistant professor of planetary geophysics in Baylor’s College of Arts & Sciences.
The crater itself is oval-shaped, as wide as 2,000 kilometers — roughly the distance between Waco, Texas, and Washington, D.C. — and several miles deep. Despite its size, it cannot be seen from Earth because it is on the far side of the Moon.
Many other space scientists have claimed that the materials of such bodies were vaporized on impact and thinly spread over the Moon and thus not accessible by standard mining techniques.
Designed to explore a metal asteroid that could be the heart of a planet, the Psyche mission is readying for a 2022 launch. After extensive review, NASA Headquarters in Washington has approved the mission to begin the final design and fabrication phase, otherwise known as Phase C. This is when the Psyche team finalizes the system design, develops detailed plans and procedures for the spacecraft and science mission, and completes both assembly and testing of the spacecraft and its subsystems.
“The Psyche team is not only elated that we have the go-ahead for Phase C, more importantly we are ready,” said Principal Investigator Lindy Elkins-Tanton of Arizona State University in Tempe. “With the transition into this new mission phase, we are one big step closer to uncovering the secrets of Psyche, a giant mysterious metallic asteroid, and that means the world to us.”
The mission still has three more phases to clear. Phase D, which will begin sometime in early 2021, includes final spacecraft assembly and testing, along with the August 2022 launch. Phase E, which begins soon after Psyche hits the vacuum of space, covers the mission’s deep-space operations and science collection. Finally, Phase F occurs after the mission has completed its science operations; it includes both decommissioning the spacecraft and archiving engineering and science data.
The Psyche spacecraft will arrive at Asteroid Psyche on Jan. 31, 2026, after flying by Mars in 2023.
The mission will also test laser communications with deep space probes:
Diagram of tests of the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) package on the Psyche spacecraft.
So far, multiple devices have been placed on the surface and an explosive was set off as well. A prime goal of the mission is to return a surface sample to Earth. One sampling was made in February.
Sampling Ryugu: “The moment that Hayabusa2 contacted asteroid Ryugu, it fired a bullet through its sampler horn (center) to knock material loose from the surface and then immediately fired its thrusters to ascend. This photo sequence, taken from an altitude of up to about 15 meters, demonstrated the success of the bullet; dark-colored fragments tumble in Hayabusa2’s shadow in the space beneath the craft.” Credits: JAXA and the Planetary Society
As this article goes to press, we are deciding whether to collect a second sample from a region close to the crater or from a second site on the asteroid. This second sample will likely be our last since by July, Ryugu will be nearing the perihelion of its orbit, and its surface will become too warm for touchdown operations.
Hayabusa2 will then continue to examine Ryugu remotely until the end of the year and return to Earth with the samples at the end of 2020. It is going to be a busy few years!
This week the spacecraft made a “Low descent observation operation“, that is, it came in close and successfully dropped a target marker on the surface of the asteroid.
Preparations for the descent began on June 11 and the descent will begin on June 12 at 11:40 JST (on-board time) with the spacecraft descending at a speed of 0.4m/s. The speed will be reduced to 0.1 m/s at 22:00 JST on the same day. The spacecraft will read an altitude of about 35m on June 13 at 10:34 JST and then begin to ascend from 10:57 JST. The schedule of the operation is shown in Figure 1. Please be aware that the actual operation time may differ as the times shown are the planned values.
Low altitude sequence for PPTD-TM1B. Credit: JAXA.
A view of Ryugu as the spacecraft closed in on it:
A view of Ryugu on June 13th from Hayabusa2 as it approached the surface.
Newly-built planet-finding instrument installed on Very Large Telescope, Chile, begins 100-hour observation of nearby stars Alpha Centauri A and B, aiming to be first to directly image a habitable exoplanet
Breakthrough Watch, the global astronomical program looking for Earth-like planets around nearby stars, and the European Southern Observatory (ESO), Europe’s foremost intergovernmental astronomical organisation, today announced “first light” on a newly-built planet-finding instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope in the Atacama Desert, Chile.
The instrument, called NEAR (Near Earths in the AlphaCen Region), is designed to hunt for exoplanets in our neighbouring star system, Alpha Centauri, within the “habitable zones” of its two Sun-like stars, where water could potentially exist in liquid form. It has been developed over the last three years and was built in collaboration with the University of Uppsala in Sweden, the University of Liège in Belgium, the California Institute of Technology in the US, and Kampf Telescope Optics in Munich, Germany.
ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has recently received an upgraded addition to its suite of advanced instruments. On 21 May 2019 the newly modified instrument VISIR (VLT Imager and Spectrometer for mid-Infrared) made its first observations since being modified to aid in the search for potentially habitable planets in the Alpha Centauri system, the closest star system to Earth. This stunning image of the VLT is painted with the colours of sunset and reflected in water on the platform. While inclement weather at Cerro Paranal is unfortunate for the astronomers using it, it lets us see ESO’s flagship telescope in a new light.
** Starshades would enable space telescopes to image earth-like exoplanets by masking out the light of their stars. NASA’s Starshade Technology Development program (ExEP) has come up with techniques for maintaining the extremely precise alignment needed between the starshade and the telescope, which will reside tens of thousands of kilometers apart: Starshade Would Take Formation Flying to Extremes | NASA.
“We can sense a change in the position of the starshade down to an inch, even over these huge distances,” Bottom said.
But detecting when the starshade is out of alignment is an entirely different proposition from actually keeping it aligned. To that end, Flinois and his colleagues developed a set of algorithms that use information provided by Bottom’s program to determine when the starshade thrusters should fire to nudge it back into position. The algorithms were created to autonomously keep the starshade aligned with the telescope for days at a time.
Combined with Bottom’s work, this shows that keeping the two spacecraft aligned is feasible using automated sensors and thruster controls. In fact, the work by Bottom and Flinois demonstrates that engineers could reasonably meet the alignment demands of an even larger starshade (in conjunction with a larger telescope), positioned up to 46,000 miles (74,000 kilometers) from the telescope.
…
A starshade project has not yet been approved for flight, but one could potentially join WFIRST in space in the late 2020s. Meeting the formation-flying requirement is just one step toward demonstrating that the project is feasible.
Nestled within this field of bright foreground stars lies ESO 495-21, a tiny galaxy with a big heart. ESO 495-21 may be just 3000 light-years across, but that is not stopping the galaxy from furiously forming huge numbers of stars. It may also host a supermassive black hole; this is unusual for a galaxy of its size, and may provide intriguing hints as to how galaxies form and evolve.
Nestled within this field of bright foreground stars lies ESO 495-21, a tiny galaxy with a big heart. ESO 495-21 is just 3000 light-years across, a fraction of the size of the Milky Way, but that is not stopping the galaxy from furiously forming huge numbers of stars. There are also indicators for a supermassive black hole in its centre – an unusual component for a galaxy of its size.
Next summer, NASA is launching the Mars 2020 robotic rover to the Red Planet, loaded with equipment to search for signs that there once was life on Mars. One device, called the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals (SHERLOC) instrument, will be used to detect chemicals on the Martian surface that are linked to the existence of life. To keep the instrument working well, a team from the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) division at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) recently built a new calibration device for the rover to check SHERLOC’s function and properly tune it during the upcoming mission.
“SHERLOC is pretty complicated, and we came up with a list of 11 things that all have to be calibrated on this instrument,” said Marc Fries, ARES planetary scientist and Mars 2020 instrument co-investigator. “This sophisticated calibration device is also going to be used for a lot of other scientific and engineering investigations, and we’re really excited that it’s JSC’s contribution to the Mars 2020 rover.”
When a female astronaut first sets foot on the Moon in 2024, the historic moment will represent a step toward another NASA first: eventually putting humans on Mars. NASA’s latest robotic mission to the Red Planet, Mars 2020, aims to help future astronauts brave that inhospitable landscape.
While the science goal of the Mars 2020 rover is to look for signs of ancient life – it will be the first spacecraft to collect samples of the Martian surface, caching them in tubes that could be returned to Earth on a future mission – the vehicle also includes technology that paves the way for human exploration of Mars.
*** Ghost dunes on Mars – A “Star Trek Federation” logo feature is created by winds blowing on sand dunes:
Cool image time! The Mars Reconnaissance (MRO) science team today released a captioned image of several ghost dunes on Mars. The image [below] is cropped and reduced to highlight one of those ghosts, which the scientists explain as follows.
Long ago, there were large crescent-shaped (barchan) dunes that moved across this area, and at some point, there was an eruption. The lava flowed out over the plain and around the dunes, but not over them. The lava solidified, but these dunes still stuck up like islands. However, they were still just dunes, and the wind continued to blow. Eventually, the sand piles that were the dunes migrated away, leaving these “footprints” in the lava plain.
“These curious chevron shapes in southeast Hellas Planitia are the result of a complex story of dunes, lava, and wind.” – HiRISE at Univ. of Arizona
*** The Martian North Pole – A tour of the many weird features of the Martian north pole area:
Since the very beginning of telescopic astronomy, the Martian poles have fascinated. Their changing sizes as the seasons progressed suggested to the early astronomers that Mars might be similar to Earth. Since the advent of the space age we have learned that no, Mars is not similar to Earth, and that its poles only resemble Earth’s in a very superficial way.
Yet, understanding the geology and seasonal evolution of the Martian poles is critical to understanding the planet itself.
Xplore and the Arch Mission Foundation partner to fly Arch™ Libraries to the Moon, Mars, Venus and Asteroids Arch™ Libraries will fly on Xplore missions beginning in 2021 to cislunar and interplanetary destinations.
June 11, 2019, Seattle, WA – Xplore and the Arch Mission Foundation today announced that Xplore spacecraft will host specially designed Arch Libraries on its planned missions to the Moon, Mars, Venus and Near-Earth Asteroids starting in 2021.
“Our civilization’s knowledge is precious. Helping distribute Arch™ Libraries in space is an important way to secure this valuable data. The Xplore team is proud to host the Lunar Library™ payload on our missions,”
said Jeff Rich, CEO of Xplore.
“These archives provide a personal connection to space,” said Jeff Rich. As an Arch Strategic Advisor, Mr. Rich’s image was etched into nickel and included on the Arch™ Lunar Library in 2019. “It is humbling to know my image is likely intact on the Moon’s surface. Soon we will enable everyone to bring their life into space as millions of individuals can include photos and stories in the Arch™ Libraries.”
[ Nova Spivack, Co-founder and CEO of the Arch Mission Foundation, said,]
“We are thrilled to work with Xplore, and join their mission to expand human knowledge through scientific space explorations,” […] “Partnering with Xplore enables us to continue expanding our Lunar Library™, and establish new Arch Libraries throughout our solar system as part of our Billion Year Archive. We are thankful to generous partners like Xplore who believe in our mission and are willing to help us achieve it.”
The Billion Year Archive™ is a solar system-wide collection of Arch Libraries that can preserve, connect, and share humanity’s knowledge for billions of years, and serve as a backup of planet Earth. Xplore and the Arch Mission Foundation are enabling new demonstration missions that expand the Billion Year Archive™ throughout the solar system. Together they will develop technologies that ensure the Arch Library’s 30 million pages of contents are detectable and functioning after extended time periods in deep space.
About Xplore: Xplore is a privately-funded commercial space company focused on the scientific exploration of our solar system. The mission of Xplore is to expand human knowledge beyond Earth via continuous commercial Xpedition™ missions to the Moon, Mars, Venus, and Near-Earth Asteroids. Xplore has been building its strategy, team and spacecraft since 2017 and is planning missions beginning in 2021.
Xplore provides hosted payload Xpedition™ services for scientific instruments, branding, technology demonstrations, tributes, memorials, art and custom payloads, opening up interplanetary space to national space agencies, researchers, companies, non-profit organizations and individuals. Visit: www.xplore.com
About The Arch Mission Foundation: Co-founded by Nova Spivack and Nick Slavin, the Arch Mission Foundation is a non-profit organization that maintains a backup of planet Earth, designed to continuously preserve and disseminate humanity’s most important knowledge across time and space. Visit: www.archmission.org
“Nanofiche can also store up to 2,000 analog pages of text at 150 dpi, per square centimeter. For example a 20 x 20 mm nickel Nanofiche sheet can hold up to 8,000 pages of text rendered at 150 dpi. At this resolution, a letter size page of Nanofiche would hold up to 1.2 million analog images and pages of text!” – Arch Mission
The Arch Lunar Library™ represents the first in a series of lunar archives from the Arch Mission Foundation, designed to preserve the records of our civilization for up to billions of years. It is installed in the SpaceIL “Beresheet” lunar lander, which crashed on the Moon in April of 2019.
Currently it is believed that the Lunar Library survived the crash of Beresheet and is intact on the Moon according to our team of scientific advisors based on imagery data provided by NASA’s LRO.
The Lunar Library contains a 30 million page archive of human history and civilization, covering all subjects, cultures, nations, languages, genres, and time periods.
Another archive is on a Tesla that travels between Mars and Earth.
, and “the Moon through the eyes of a teenager, Woodstock, peer interest in space, the new space program, returning to the Moon and going to Mars plus more”.
