Ball Aerospace to build NOAA's Space Weather Follow On-Lagrange 1 spacecraft

On behalf of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NASA has awarded a delivery order under the Rapid Spacecraft Acquisition III (Rapid III) contract to Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colorado, for the Space Weather Follow On-Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) spacecraft. This is a firm fixed-price delivery order in the amount of $96.9 million issued under the Rapid III Spacecraft Catalog. The period of performance runs now through March 31, 2025. The contractor shall design and fabricate the SWFO-L1 spacecraft bus, integrate the government-furnished instruments and perform satellite-level testing, support and training of the Flight Operations Team, as well as in-orbit satellite check-out and mission operations support. The Rapid III contract provides a rapid and flexible means to procure spacecraft in support of the scientific and technology development goals of NASA and other federal agencies. The SWFO-L1 satellite, which is planned to launch in 2024 as a rideshare with the NASA Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, will collect solar wind data and coronal imagery to support NOAA's mission to monitor and forecast space weather events.

NOAA is responsible for the Space Weather Follow-On program. NASA is the program's flight system procurement agent, and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is the lead for this acquisition.

SwRI scientists demonstrate speed, precision of in situ planetary dating device

Southwest Research Institute scientists have increased the speed and accuracy of a laboratory-scale instrument for determining the age of planetary specimens onsite. The team is progressively miniaturizing the Chemistry, Organics and Dating Experiment (CODEX) instrument to reach a size suitable for spaceflight and lander missions. "In situ aging is an important scientific goal identified by the National Research Council's Decadal Survey for Mars and the Moon as well as the Lunar and Mars Exploration Program Analysis Groups, entities responsible for providing the science input needed to plan and prioritize exploration activities," said SwRI Staff Scientist Dr. F. Scott Anderson, who is leading CODEX development. "Doing this onsite rather than trying to return samples back to Earth for evaluation can resolve major dilemmas in planetary science, offers tremendous cost savings and enhances the opportunities for eventual sample return." CODEX will be a little larger than a microwave and include seven lasers and a mass spectrometer. In situ measurements will address fundamental questions of solar system history, such as when Mars was potentially habitable. CODEX has a precision of ) +/-20-80 million years, significantly more accurate than dating methods currently in use on Mars, which have a precision of +/-350 million years. "CODEX uses an ablation laser to vaporize a series of tiny bits off of rock samples, such as those on the surface of the Moon or Mars," said Anderson, who is the lead author of a CODEX paper published in 2020.

"We recognize some elements directly from that vapor plume, so we know what a rock is made of. Then the other CODEX lasers selectively pick out and quantify the abundance of trace amounts of radioactive rubidium (Rb) and strontium (Sr). An isotope of Rb decays into Sr over known amounts of time, so by measuring both Rb and Sr, we can determine how much time has passed since the rock formed."

While radioactivity is a standard technique for dating samples on Earth, few other places in the solar system have been dated this way. Instead, scientists have largely constrained the chronology of the inner solar system by counting impact craters on planetary surfaces.

"The idea behind crater dating is simple; the more craters, the older the surface," says Dr. Jonathan Levine, a physicist at Colgate University, who is part of the SwRI-led team.

"It's a little like saying that a person gets wetter the longer they have been standing out in the rain. It's undoubtedly true. But as with the falling rain, we don't really know the rate at which meteorites have fallen from the sky. That's why radioisotope dating is so important. Radioactive decay is a clock that ticks at a known rate. These techniques accurately determine the ages of rocks and minerals, allowing scientists to date events such as crystallization, metamorphism and impacts."

The latest iteration of CODEX is five times more sensitive than its previous incarnation. This precision was largely accomplished by modifying the sample's distance from the instrument to improve the data quality. The instrument also includes an ultrafast pulsed laser and improved signal-to-noise ratios to better constrain the timing of events in solar system history.

"We are miniaturizing the CODEX components for field use on a lander mission to the Moon or Mars," Anderson said.

"Developing compact lasers with pulse energies comparable with what we currently require is a considerable challenge, though five out of the seven have been successfully miniaturized. These lasers have a repetition rate of 10 kHz, which will allow the instrument to acquire data 500 times faster than the current engineering design."

The CODEX mass spectrometer, power supplies and timing electronics are already small enough for spaceflight. Instrument components are being enhanced to improve ruggedness, thermal stability, radiation resistance and power efficiency to endure launch and extended autonomous operations in alien environments.

Targeting several future missions, SwRI is developing two versions of the instrument, CODEX, which is designed for Mars and can measure organics, and CDEX, which is designed for the Moon, and does not need to measure organics.

NASA's Planetary Instrument Concepts for the Advancement of Solar System Observations (PICASSO) and the Maturation of Instruments for Solar System Exploration (MatISSE) programs are funding the instrument development, with previous support for CODEX/CDEX from the Planetary Instrument Definition and Development Program (PIDDP).

A Beacon from the Early Universe

Often described as cosmic lighthouses, quasars are luminous beacons that can be observed at the outskirts of the universe, providing a rich topic of study for astronomers and cosmologists. Now scientists have announced the discovery of the second-most distant quasar ever found, at more than 13 billion light-years from Earth. UC Santa Barbara's Joe Hennawi, a professor in the Department of Physics, and former UCSB postdoctoral scholars Frederick Davies and Feige Wang, provided crucial modeling and data analysis tools that enabled this discovery. The results are currently in preprint on ArXiv and will appear in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The researchers have named the object Poniua'ena, which means "unseen spinning source of creation, surrounded with brilliance" in the Hawaiian language. It is the first quasar to receive an indigenous Hawaiian name. Quasars are incredibly bright sources of radiation that lie at the centers of distant massive galaxies. Matter spiraling onto a supermassive black hole generates tremendous amounts of heat making it glow at ultraviolet and optical wavelengths. "They are the most luminous objects in the universe," Hennawi said, "outshining their host galaxies by factors of more than a hundred." Since the discovery of the first quasar, astronomers have been keen to determine when they first appeared in our cosmic history. By systematically searching for these rare objects in wide-area sky surveys, astronomers discovered the most distant quasar (named J1342+0928) in 2018 and now the second-most distant, Poniua'ena (or J1007+2115).

The team first detected Poniua'ena as a possible quasar after combing through large area surveys. In 2019, the researchers observed the object using the W. M. Keck Observatory and Gemini Observatory on Maunakea, in Hawaii, confirming its existence and identity.

Poniua'ena is only the second quasar yet detected at a distance calculated at a cosmological redshift greater than 7.5, or 13 billion light-years from Earth. It hosts a black hole twice as large as the other quasar known from the same era. The existence of these massive black holes at such early times challenges current theories of how supermassive black holes formed and grew in the young universe.

A Cosmological Puzzle
Spectroscopic observations from Gemini and Keck show the black hole powering Poniua'ena is 1.5 billion times more massive than our Sun. "Poniua'ena is the most distant object known in the universe hosting a black hole exceeding one billion solar masses," said lead author Jinyi Yang, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Arizona.

Black holes grow by accreting matter. In the standard picture, supermassive black holes grow from a much smaller "seed" black hole, which could have been the remnant of a massive star that died. "So it is puzzling how such a massive black hole can exist so early in the universe's history because there does not appear to be enough time for them to grow given our current understanding," Davies explained.

For a black hole of this size to form this early in the universe, it would need to start as a 10,000-solar-mass seed black hole only 100 million years after the Big Bang - as opposed to growing from a much smaller black hole formed by the collapse of a single star.

"How can the universe produce such a massive black hole so early in its history?" said Xiaohui Fan, at the University of Arizona. "This discovery presents the biggest challenge yet for the theory of black hole formation and growth in the early universe." The discovery of a more exotic mechanism to form the seed black hole may be required to explain the mere existence of Poniua'ena.

The Epoch of Reionization
Current theory holds that the birth of stars and galaxies as we know them started during the Epoch of Reionization. Beginning about 400 million years after the Big Bang, the diffuse matter in between galaxies went from being neutral hydrogen to ionized hydrogen. The growth of the first giant black holes is thought to have occurred during this time.

The discovery of quasars like Poniua'ena, deep in the reionization epoch, is a big step towards understanding this process of reionization and the formation of early supermassive black holes and massive galaxies. Poniua'ena has placed new and important constraints on the evolution of the intergalactic medium in the reionization epoch.

"Poniua'ena acts like a cosmic lighthouse. As its light travels the long journey towards Earth, its spectrum is altered by diffuse gas in the intergalactic medium which allowed us to pinpoint when the Epoch of Reionization occurred," said Hennawi. The modeling and data analysis method used to infer information about the Epoch of Reionization from these distant quasar spectra was developed in his research group at UC Santa Barbara with Davies and Wang.

"Through University of California Observatories, we have privileged access to the Keck telescopes on the summit of Maunakea, which allowed us to obtain high quality data on this object shortly after it was discovered using the Gemini telescope," Hennawi said.

Finding these distant quasars is a needle in a haystack problem. Astronomers must mine digital images of billions of celestial objects in order to find quasar candidates. "Even after you identify the candidates, the current success rate of finding them is about 1%, and this involves spending lots of expensive telescope time observing contaminants," Wang explained.

Fortunately, Hennawi and his group are developing machine learning tools to analyze this big data and make the process of finding distant quasars more efficient. "In the coming years the European Space Agency's Euclid satellite and NASA's James Webb Space Telescope will enable us to find perhaps a hundred quasars at this distance, or farther," he said. "With a large statistical sample of these objects we will be able to construct a precise timeline of the reionization epoch as well as shed more light on the black hole growth puzzle."

SpaceX scrubs Starlink launch with two BlackSky satellites

SpaceX scrubbed Friday's plan to launch additional Starlink satellites in a mission that had another paying customer on board - what SpaceX calls its ride-share program. The change in plans was not weather-related. "Standing down from Friday's Starlink mission; team needed additional time for pre-launch checkouts, but Falcon 9 and the satellites are healthy. Will announce new target launch date once confirmed on the Range," SpaceX said in a tweet. A Falcon 9 rocket was set to lift off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying 57 Starlink communications satellites for Elon Musk's SpaceX, along with two small Earth observation satellites for Seattle-based BlackSky Global. SpaceX also postponed the launch Thursday, but didn't give a reason. Eventually, SpaceX aims to launch thousands of Starlink satellites. Launching Starlink regularly means SpaceX can take other paying customers, such as BlackSky, along for the ride - and for revenue. SpaceX launched three small imaging satellites for San Francisco-based Planet, formerly Planet Labs, earlier this month. Industry observers have said SpaceX's plan for more frequent, regularly scheduled ride-sharing launches will unleash new growth in the small-satellite industry, leading to easier and cheaper rollouts for new communication networks. There will be a lot of opportunities for government agencies, universities and provate enterprise to piggyback their satellites aboard a SpaceX rocket.

SpaceX has 30 rocket launches in 2020 and 2021 that can accommodate small satellites. Its customers can buy space on the missions for as low as $1 million - which would allow a launch up to 440 pounds - a previously unprecedented price to put a satellite into orbit.

Reserving an entire launch on the company's Falcon 9 rocket costs at least $50 million.

The small-satellite market is poised to generate $1 billion a year over the next decade, according to Northern Sky Research, which is based in Cambridge, Mass., and specializes in the satellite and space markets.

The SpaceX schedule for small satellites is in addition to its regular missions to the International Space Station or for large customers like the U.S. military.

SpaceX has noted that dedicated ride-share missions will not be delayed by trouble with another passenger's schedule.

"If you are ready to fly during the scheduled launch period, you will fly," the company said.

Customers who run into delays that prevent them from launching can book another launch with a 10 percent rebooking fee, SpaceX said.

BlackSky offers images and monitoring from space for industries that include defense, energy, construction and research. BlackSky obtained a $50 million investment in 2019 from Luxembourg-based Intelsat, a communications satellite service, to build a new constellation of Earth-imaging satellites.

A successful launch would boost BlackSky's space network to six satellites, with a short-term goal of 16 satellites in orbit. They weigh about 120 pounds each and are designed to last only a few years before they need replacement.

SpaceX also hopes to generate significant revenue from its fledgling Internet service.

SpaceX began sign-ups June 12 for users who want to try the Starlink Internet in what the tech community calls a beta test - a validation of new technology in a small sample of the targeted eventual user.

Starlink will be available to any individual or organization, the company said, but the cost of the service hasn't been announced.

"Private beta testing is expected to begin later this summer, followed by public beta testing, starting with higher latitudes," SpaceX said in an email sent to those who signed up.

Scientists develop new tool to design better fusion devices

One way that scientists seek to bring to Earth the fusion process that powers the sun and stars is trapping hot, charged plasma gas within a twisting magnetic coil device shaped like a breakfast cruller. But the device, called a stellarator, must be precisely engineered to prevent heat from escaping the plasma core where it stokes the fusion reactions. Now, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have demonstrated that an advanced computer code could help design stellarators that confine the essential heat more effectively. The code, called XGC-S, opens new doors in stellarator research. "The main result of our research is that we can use the code to simulate both the early, or linear, and turbulent plasma behavior in stellarators," said PPPL physicist Michael Cole, lead author of the paper reporting the results in Physics of Plasmas. "This means that we can start to determine which stellarator shape contains heat best and most efficiently maintains conditions for fusion." Fusion combines light elements in the form of plasma - the hot, charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei - and generates massive amounts of energy in the sun and stars. Scientists aim to replicate fusion in devices on Earth for a virtually inexhaustible supply of safe and clean power to generate electricity. The PPPL scientists simulated the behavior of plasma inside fusion machines that look like a donut but with pinches and deformations that make the device more efficient, a kind of shape known as quasi-axisymmetric.

The researchers used an updated version of XGC, a state-of-the-art code developed at PPPL for modeling turbulence in doughnut-shaped fusion facilities called tokamaks, which have a simpler geometry. The modifications by Cole and his colleagues allowed the new XGC-S code to also model plasmas in the geometrically more complicated stellarators.

The simulations showed that a type of disturbance limited to a small area can become complex and expand to fill a larger space within the plasma. The results showed that XGC-S could simulate this type of stellarator plasma more accurately than what was previously possible.

"I think this is the beginning of a really important development in the study of turbulence in stellarators," said David Gates, head of the Department of Advanced Projects at PPPL. "It opens up a big window for getting new results."

The findings demonstrate the successful modification of the XGC code to simulate turbulence in stellarators. The code can calculate the turbulence in stellarators all the way from the plasma core to the edge, providing a more complete picture of the plasma's behavior.

"Turbulence is one of the primary mechanisms causing heat to leak out of fusion plasmas," Cole said. "Because stellarators can be built in a greater variety of shapes than tokamaks, we might be able to find shapes that control turbulence better than tokamaks do. Searching for them by building lots of big experiments is too expensive, so we need big simulations to search for them virtually."

The researchers plan to modify XGC-S further to produce an even clearer view of how turbulence causes heat leakage. The more complete a picture, the closer scientists will be to simulating stellarator experiments in the virtual realm. "Once you have an accurate code and a powerful computer, changing the stellarator design you are simulating is easy," Cole said.