Hubble Sees Evaporating Planet Getting the Hiccups

Life around an ill-tempered red dwarf star is no fun for accompanying newborn planets. Call it a baptism of fire. Entangled magnetic fields cause a red dwarf to spit out "super-flares" that are 100 to 1,000 times more powerful than similar flares seen on our Sun. That is coupled with blistering ultraviolet radiation requiring any of the star system's inhabitants to use "Sunscreen 5,000." One of the nearest and most violent examples is AU Microscopii. The petulant star is only 1% the age of our Sun. At a distance of 32 light-years, it is only eight times farther away than the nearest star to our Sun, Proxima Centauri (which is another red dwarf). The star beats-up the system's innermost planet, AU Microscopii b, which is about four times Earth's diameter. Orbiting just 6 million miles from the evil star's "dragon’s breath," the planet's largely hydrogen atmosphere is being stripped off, as viewed by the Hubble Space Telescope. But this happens in fits and starts. During one passage of the planet across the face if its star, Hubble detected hydrogen boiling off to create a large cloud ahead of the planet. This unexpected variability is evidence that the interaction between the planet and the red dwarf's feisty fireworks is probably more complex and unpredictable than imagined. A young planet whirling around a petulant red dwarf star is changing in unpredictable ways orbit-by-orbit. It is so close to its parent star that it experiences a consistent, torrential blast of energy, which evaporates its hydrogen atmosphere — causing it to puff off the planet. But during one orbit observed with the Hubble Space Telescope, the planet looked like it wasn't losing any material at all, while an orbit observed with Hubble a year and a half later showed clear signs of atmospheric loss.

This extreme variability between orbits shocked astronomers. "We've never seen atmospheric escape go from completely not detectable to very detectable over such a short period when a planet passes in front of its star," said Keighley Rockcliffe of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. "We were really expecting something very predictable, repeatable. But it turned out to be weird. When I first saw this, I thought 'That can't be right.'"

Rockcliffe was equally puzzled to see, when it was detectable, the planet's atmosphere puffing out in front of the planet, like a headlight on a fast-bound train. "This frankly strange observation is kind of a stress-test case for the modeling and the physics about planetary evolution. This observation is so cool because we're getting to probe this interplay between the star and the planet that is really at the most extreme," she said.

Located 32 light-years from Earth, the parent star AU Microscopii (AU Mic) hosts one of the youngest planetary systems ever observed. The star is less than 100 million years old (a tiny fraction of the age of our Sun, which is 4.6 billion years old). The innermost planet, AU Mic b, has an orbital period of 8.46 days and is just 6 million miles from the star (about 1/10th the planet Mercury's distance from our Sun). The bloated, gaseous world is about four times Earth's diameter.

AU Mic b was discovered by NASA’s Spitzer and TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) space telescopes in 2020. It was spotted with the transit method, meaning telescopes can observe a slight dip in the star's brightness when the planet crosses in front of it.

Red dwarfs like AU Microscopii are the most abundant stars in our Milky Way galaxy. They therefore should host the majority of planets in our galaxy. But can planets orbiting red dwarf stars like AU Mic b be hospitable to life? A key challenge is that young red dwarfs have ferocious stellar flares blasting out withering radiation. This period of high activity lasts a lot longer than that of stars like our Sun.

The flares are powered by intense magnetic fields that get tangled by the roiling motions of the stellar atmosphere. When the tangling gets too intense, the fields break and reconnect, unleashing tremendous amounts of energy that are 100 to 1,000 times more energetic than our Sun unleashes in its outbursts. It's a blistering fireworks show of torrential winds, flares, and X-rays blasting any planets orbiting close to the star. "This creates a really unconstrained and frankly, scary, stellar wind environment that's impacting the planet's atmosphere," said Rockcliffe.

Under these torrid conditions, planets forming within the first 100 million years of the star's birth should experience the most amount of atmospheric escape. This might end up completely stripping a planet of its atmosphere.

"We want to find out what kinds of planets can survive these environments. What will they finally look like when the star settles down? And would there be any chance of habitability eventually, or will they wind up just being scorched planets?" said Rockcliffe. "Do they eventually lose most of their atmospheres and their surviving cores become super-Earths? We don't really know what those final compositions look like because we don't have anything like that in our solar system."

While the star's glare prevents Hubble from directly seeing the planet, the telescope can measure changes in the star's apparent brightness caused by hydrogen bleeding off the planet and dimming the starlight when the planet transits the star. That atmospheric hydrogen has been heated to the point where it escapes the planet's gravity.

The never-before-seen changes in atmospheric outflow from AU Mic b may indicate swift and extreme variability in the host red dwarf's outbursts. There is so much variability because the star has a lot of roiling magnetic field lines. One possible explanation for the missing hydrogen during one of the planet's transits is that a powerful stellar flare, seen seven hours prior, may have photoionized the escaping hydrogen to the point where it became transparent to light, and so was not detectable.

Another explanation is that the stellar wind itself is shaping the planetary outflow, making it observable at some times and not observable at other times, even causing some of the outflow to "hiccup" ahead of the planet itself. This is predicted in some models, like those of John McCann and Ruth Murray-Clay from the University of California at Santa Cruz, but this is the first kind of observational evidence of it happening and to such an extreme degree, say researchers.

Hubble follow-up observations of more AU Mic b transits should offer additional clues to the star and planet's odd variability, further testing scientific models of exoplanetary atmospheric escape and evolution.

Rockcliffe is lead author on the science paper published in The Astronomical Journal.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, in Washington, D.C.

Falcon Heavy sends Jupiter-3 broadband giant toward geostationary orbit

SpaceX launched EchoStar’s more than nine metric ton Jupiter-3 spacecraft July 28 and successfully dropped off the world’s heaviest commercial communications satellite in geosynchronous transfer orbit. The Maxar Technologies-built satellite lifted off on a dedicated Falcon Heavy at 11:04 p.m. Eastern from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, separating from the rocket about three and a half hours later. Both Falcon Heavy side boosters landed at nearby Cape Canaveral Space Force Station just over seven minutes after launch for reuse. They had supported two earlier Falcon Heavy missions, both for the U.S. Space Force: USSF-44 in November and USSF-67 early this year. The mission was delayed from July 26 to allow more time for vehicle checkouts after an abort was called with about a minute remaining in the countdown for reasons SpaceX did not detail. EchoStar’s Hughes Networks Systems subsidiary, which is set to provide Jupiter-3’s broadband services, confirmed the satellite has started sending and receiving its first signals post-launch, and that engineers had deployed its solar arrays. Jupiter-3 is set to double the capacity of the operator’s Jupiter fleet with an additional 500 gigabits per second, after reaching its 95 degrees west orbital slot and completing health checks the operator expects to wrap up in the fourth quarter. The broadband services would address rising demand over the Americas, where it has been losing subscribers as capacity constraints weigh on the business.

EchoStar's colossal Jupiter-3 satellite launches on a Falcon Heavy July 28. Credit: SpaceX

EchoStar recently said Hughes broadband subscribers are using about 15% more bandwidth on average year-on-year amid intensifying competition in the market, including from SpaceX’s Starlink broadband constellation.

Jupiter-3 enables the company “to start growing again in our key markets where we’ve been hesitant to add new customers because of the capacity limitations,” EchoStar chief operating officer Paul Gaske said, “and it also allows us the opportunity to improve plans for our existing customers.”

He said the company has a number of “pinch points” to address but its constraints are highest in the United States, where it intends to put the largest chunk of Jupiter-3’s capacity to work.

Heavyweight champions

EchoStar ordered Jupiter-3 (also called EchoStar-24) in 2017 from Space Systems Loral before it rebranded as Maxar Technologies, and had initially planned to launch it in 2021 before the pandemic led to production issues at Maxar and other satellite manufacturers.

Maxar said Jupiter-3, at about the size of a standard school bus when antennas and solar panels stowed and with a wingspan of a Boeing 737 when fully deployed, is the largest spacecraft it has ever made.

Jupiter-3 unseats Telesat’s Telstar-19 Vantage that launched in 2018 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 as the largest commercial communications satellite ever deployed.

Maxar-built Telstar-19 Vantage had a launch mass of roughly seven metric tons.

Varda waiting on FAA license to return space manufacturing capsule

A startup that launched its first mission to test space manufacturing technologies last month is waiting on a Federal Aviation Administration license to be able to bring what it produced back to Earth. Varda Space Industries launched its first spacecraft, called W-Series 1, on the SpaceX Transporter-8 rideshare mission June 12, to test the ability to produce crystals in microgravity. Those crystals would be brought back to Earth in a reentry capsule set to return as soon as July 17. However, Varda said July 20 it was delaying the capsule’s return as it works with “our government partners to ensure everyone is fully ready.” The company didn’t elaborate on those issues or estimate when it would be ready to return the capsule. In a July 24 interview, Delian Asparouhov, co-founder of Varda, said the company was still working with the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation for a reentry license for the spacecraft. That office, best known for licensing commercial launches, is also responsible for overseeing reentries by commercial spacecraft. A key issue, he said, is that Varda is the first to seek a reentry license under new FAA regulations known as Part 450. Those regulations were enacted by the FAA more than two years ago to streamline the launch and reentry licensing process. “I think a lot of the collaborations that we’ve had with the FAA have been trailblazing, and we recognize that, given we’re the first, we set the standard for what future Part 450 reentry looks like,” he said. Varda started discussions with the FAA in early 2021, shortly after the company’s founding.

Varda Space Industries' W-Series 1 spacecraft includes a capsule designed to return pharmaceutical experiments. The company is waiting on an FAA license to be able to return the spacecraft. Credit: Varda Space Industries

For the commercial launch industry, the Part 450 regulations have become an area of concern. Only a handful of Part 450 launch licenses have been issued to date as the FAA begins a transition to the new regulations, but those licenses have taken longer to complete than expected, in some cases missing a 180-day statutory deadline. Industry officials raised the issue at a July 13 hearing of the House Science Committee and at a July 11 meeting of an FAA advisory group, the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee.

“Part 450 is a new regulatory regime that obviously comes with challenges,” he said. “But we’re also excited to hopefully help set the standard for what this should look like on the reentry side of things.”

Asparouhov said his company didn’t have a firm date for returning the 120-kilogram capsule but was making plans for a potential reentry in early to mid August. In addition to the FAA reentry license, Varda has to coordinate with the FAA’s air traffic organization on airspace closures and with the Defense Department’s Utah Test and Training Range, where the capsule will land.

There are no pressing technical issues that require the capsule to return by a specific deadline, but the company would like to bring the capsule back sooner rather than later. “There’s no reason why you’d want to add on risk by extending a mission beyond what it was designed for,” he said. “Our goal is to bring it home as quickly as possible given the positive business and technical implications for it.”

During its time in orbit, the spacecraft tested the ability to produce crystals of a drug called ritonavir used to treat HIV/AIDS. Telemetry from the spacecraft indicates the experiment went as planned, but the company wants to get the crystals back to verify it did produce the expected crystals.

Varda has “a lot of very eager customers” in the pharmaceutical industry interested in the results from this mission, Asparouhov said. The company will also sell data collected during the capsule’s return to Earth for government customers.

“We are a startup and delaying day by day burns capital day by day,” he said. “I prefer to make progress in shorter periods of time.”

The company is working on its second spacecraft that, like the first, will be manufactured by Rocket Lab using that company’s Photon bus. That spacecraft will launch on the Transporter-10 rideshare mission late this year or early next year.

Future spacecraft will carry more sophisticated equipment for producing crystals for pharmaceutical applications. “This first mission on board had the equivalent of a toaster in terms of like pharma manufacturing capabilities. We definitely need to build the convection oven, the blender and the mixer, a ton more capabilities to satisfy our clients,” he said. “But we’re super happy that we managed to make a little bit of toast.”

First Astranis satellite sidelined by post-deployment glitch

The first Astranis-built satellite won’t be able to provide commercial broadband over Alaska for local telco Pacific Dataport because it can’t keep solar arrays pointed at the sun, the Californian manufacturer’s CEO John Gedmark said July 20. Despite the failure of both solar array drive assemblies on Arcturus, used to position solar panels that power the satellite, Astranis estimates it can get six to 12 hours a day of service from the spacecraft. While that is not enough to provide continuous broadband over Alaska as intended, Gedmark said the spacecraft could still be used as an in-orbit test bed or another alternative mission. He said fixing the component issue through software and hardware changes on other Astranis satellites in production should only delay its next batch of four satellites — known as Block 2 — by a couple of months. Among these Block 2 satellites Astranis still hopes to launch on a Falcon 9 before the end of the year is a previously undisclosed spacecraft called UtilitySat, which Gedmark said can serve as a partial Arcturus replacement until a dedicated satellite for Pacific Dataport can be launched in 2025. Gedmark said he is unwilling to give technical details about the component issue because it is one of a small portion of spacecraft parts it does not build in-house. He also declined to discuss the component’s provider, flight history, or whether the issue is covered by the insurance the company took out on the satellite, designed to provide 7.5 gigabits per second (Gbps) of throughput in Ka-band.

A rendering of an Astranis small geostationary satellite. Credit: Astranis

Viasat’s 6,400-kilogram ViaSat-3 Americas satellite was Falcon Heavy’s primary passenger and has not been able to deploy a critical antenna needed to start its promised terabit broadband services. Gedmark said Astranis has not seen anything suggesting a connection between the two incidents.

A third communications satellite on the Falcon Heavy mission, a smaller cubesat from Washington-based Gravity Space, has passed all health checks and is preparing to enter service in the coming weeks, its CEO Mark Thompson said.

Arcturus backup

UtilitySat is equipped with transponders in Ka, Ku, Q, and V band spectrum to serve a variety of mission needs and has customers lined up globally, Gedmark said, although it will now focus on providing connectivity over Alaska.

The same size as a typical Astranis satellite at around 400 kilograms, and also with an eight-year design life, UtilitySat’s flexibility means it is not capable of the same level of throughput as a dedicated spacecraft from the manufacturer.

Gedmark said Astranis plans to deploy a full replacement for Pacific Dataport in early 2025 under a commercial arrangement he declined to discuss.

“That satellite will have significantly more capacity than Arcturus” was designed to have, he said, by “rolling in all the improvements we’ve done over just the last couple of years.”

While replacing a traditional large geostationary satellite following an in-orbit anomaly would historically cost hundreds of millions of dollars and many years, he said Astranis satellites can be built faster and in higher quantities to mitigate any shortfall.

U.S.-based mobile satellite connectivity specialist Anuvu ordered two other satellites joining UtilitySat as part of Block 2, and cellular backhaul provider Andesat of Peru has bought the other.

Astranis also plans to launch another five satellites as part of Block 3 next year on an undisclosed dedicated rocket.

Customers for three of these have been disclosed so far: Two for Mexican telco Apco Networks and one for Orbits Corp, the satellite services arm of Philippine internet service provider HTechCorp.

Gedmark said Astranis plans to have multiple UtilitySats on orbit at any given time, enabling the company to respond to unexpected surges or changes in connectivity demand.

ESA preparing for “assisted reentry” of Aeolus spacecraft

The European Space Agency is in the final stages of performing an “assisted reentry” of an Earth science spacecraft, an effort that will attempt to bring the satellite down over the ocean in a little more than a week. A series of maneuvers will lower the perigee of the Aeolus spacecraft to enable a reentry, projected over the Atlantic Ocean, on July 28. The maneuvers are intended to minimize any chance that debris from the spacecraft that survives reentry would land in populated areas. The first set of maneuvers is scheduled for July 24 and will lower the spacecraft’s perigee from 280 to 250 kilometers, said Isabel Rojo, Aeolus operations director, during a July 19 briefing. A second set of maneuvers on July 27 will further lower the perigee to 150 kilometers. A final maneuver on July 28 will lower the perigee to 120 kilometers. “After the execution of that last maneuver, the satellite is then expected to reenter within five hours,” she said. That last maneuver is timed to have reentry take place during a track the spacecraft’s sun-synchronous orbit takes over the Atlantic Ocean. Limitations of the spacecraft, though, mean that ESA can’t target a specific area for the reentry. “This spacecraft was designed and developed just before any guidelines came in place” mandating a controlled reentry, said Holger Krag, head of ESA’s Space Safety Office. That led to what the agency calls an “assisted reentry” approach, which lacks the precision of a controlled reentry but avoids an uncontrolled reentry. “It will further reduce the risk, which is already small, on the ground that is posed by the reentry,”

Aeolus, launched in 2018, collected wind data using a lidar instrument through April 2023. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab

ESA expects up to 20% of Aeolus, which weigh about 1,100 kilograms excluding propellant, to survive reentry. The agency said that the assisted reentry approach, if successful, would reduce the risk of debris hitting someone, already extremely small, by a factor of 42.

Krag said this is the first time he is aware of any satellite operator attempting an assisted reentry. The closest comparison he offered is the reentry of NASA’s Skylab space station in 1979, where spaceflight controllers turned off gyros to make the spacecraft tumble in an effort to control the reentry location.

ESA officials billed the assisted reentry as part of a broader commitment to space safety by the agency. That included an announcement during the Paris Air Show June 22 that ESA would work with several European satellite manufacturers on a “Zero Debris Charter” where signatories would commit, by 2030, to deorbiting their satellites at the end of their lives or hiring companies that provide active debris removal services to deorbit them.

“I think ESA has always been a responsible actor and, with that action on Aeolus, we are demonstrating once more that we are willing to achieve anything, even with a space system that was not originally prepared for this,” Krag said.

The reentry will mark the end of Aeolus, launched in 2018 on what was originally planned as a three-year mission to demonstrate the ability of a lidar to measure wind speeds globally. Science operations of Aeolus formally ended in April.

“After almost five years, it has exceeded all the expectations and gone beyond what were the original objectives,” said Tommaso Parrinello, Aeolus mission manager. That included using Aeolus data in operational weather forecasting and filling in gaps in wind data when commercial airline traffic, also used to collect wind data, dropped significantly during the onset of the pandemic.

At ESA’s November 2022 ministerial meeting, member states approved plans for a two-satellite follow-on mission, Aeolus 2, slated to launch at the end of the decade in cooperation with Eumetsat. “This decision taken last year is the most tangible and most solid demonstration of the value of the success of this mission, which perhaps was not obvious at the beginning,” he said.

Simonetta Cheli, ESA’s director of Earth observation, said at the briefing that Aeolus was often called the “impossible mission” because of the many technical challenges it faced in development. “It’s a real success story.”

Hubble telescope captures stunning shot of spiral galaxy (photo)

A dazzling new photo from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a distant galaxy that hosted a supernova explosion not long ago. The featured galaxy, known as UGC 11860, is located roughly 184 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. It's a spiral galaxy like our own Milky Way, exhibiting the telltale arms that curve out from its dense, bright central region. UGC 11860 appears to float serenely in space in the new Hubble photo, which NASA shared on July 7. However, it recently hosted an almost "unimaginably energetic stellar explosion," according to a statement from the space agency. When a massive star reaches the end of its life, it dies in a dramatic explosion called a supernova. Supernovas are incredibly luminous and powerful, blasting large amounts of material into space and creating expanding shells of gas and dust that can be observed as a supernova remnant. "The hugely energetic processes during supernova explosions are predominantly responsible for forging the elements between silicon and nickel on the periodic table," NASA officials said in the statement. "This means that understanding the influence of the masses and compositions of the progenitor star systems is vital to explaining how many of the chemical elements here on Earth originated."

Hubble photo of the spiral galaxy UGC 11860, which is located roughly 184 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. (Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Filippenko, J. D. Lyman)

The observations of UGC 11860 were taken in 2014, using Hubble's Wide Fi

eld Camera 3. Data from the space telescope has allowed astronomers to study the aftermath of the stellar explosion and lingering remnants in the galaxy. Observations of supernova remnants like the one in UGC 11860 can help astronomers learn more about the star systems that fuel such cosmic explosions.

House and Senate appropriators cut NASA’s budget

House and Senate appropriators have drafted bills that would give NASA slightly less money in 2024 than it received in 2023, rather than the significant increase the administration requested. The Senate Appropriations Committee advanced a commerce, justice and science (CJS) spending bill for fiscal year 2024 on a 28–1 vote during a July 13 markup. That bill funds NASA as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Science Foundation, among other agencies. The committee had not released the text of the bill or accompanying report as of early July 14, but a bill summary by the committee stated it provided $25.0 billion for NASA. That is below the $25.384 billion the agency received in fiscal year 2023 and significantly less than the $27.185 billion the agency requested for 2024. That summary did not include a full breakout of funding for the agency in the bill, but it noted that NASA’s exploration programs would get $7.74 billion, less than the $7.97 billion requested for 2024 but more than the $7.47 billion those programs received in 2023. That amount, the summary stated, fully funded Orion, the Space Launch System and ground systems while providing “sufficient funding to continue progress on the Artemis Campaign Development,” including the Human Landing System awards to SpaceX and Blue Origin. In brief comments at the markup, senators said that exploration was their highest priority. The bill funds “the tools for NASA to return astronauts to the moon, including the first woman and person of color, and to maintain U.S. leadership in space,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), chair of the CJS appropriations subcommittee.

House and Senate spending bills prioritized funding for NASA's exploration program while cutting some science programs. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

“We were able to protect the most important national priority within NASA’s budget, at least in my view, which is to return humans to the moon and maintain our strategic advantage in space,” said Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), ranking member of the CJS subcommittee.

The bill summary also noted that NASA’s Earth science, astrophysics and heliophysics divisions would be funded at or slightly above 2023 levels. That included restoring a $54 million cut proposed for heliophysics in the 2024 budget request.

The summary was silent on planetary science, but a draft of report language circulating online suggested strong concern by Senate appropriators about the status of Mars Sample Return (MSR). That draft allocated only $300 million for MSR, less than a third of the $949.3 million requested, citing delays and fiscal impacts on other NASA science programs. That comes amid NASA reviews that featured scenarios where the cost of MSR would be roughly double previous agency estimates.

Moreover, that report draft directed NASA to provide the committee with a cost estimate of MSR that would fit in a cap of $5.3 billion, a level recommended by the planetary science decadal survey published last year. If NASA cannot, the draft stated, MSR would be canceled and its funds reallocated to other science mission as well as Artemis.

House appropriators, meanwhile, published their CJS spending bill for fiscal year 2024 ahead of a July 14 subcommittee markup. That bill provides $25.367 billion for NASA in 2024, just under the 2023 spending level but again well below the request for 2024.

The bill would provide full funding for all exploration programs, at $7.97 billion. Science would get $7.38 billion, $880 million below the request and $415 million less than what they received in 2023. The bill did not break out science spending by division.

The funding in both the House and Senate bills are below the request in large part because of the debt ceiling deal reached at the end of May, where Congress and the White House agreed to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for capping non-defense discretionary funding, which includes NASA, at 2023 levels for 2024.

Moran said at the markup that the budget caps affected NASA among other agencies. “They will have significant challenges in continuing all of their programs. I’m disappointed by that,” he said of NASA. “These deep and painful cuts were inevitable under the deal the Speaker [of the House] and the President cut.”

“NASA will have a lot of work to do to figure out how to continue on the programs they are currently planning,” he added.

NASA officials had acknowledged since the passage of the debt ceiling deal that the agency’s funding for 2024 would fall short of its request. “It’s really challenging right now when we look at where we ended up” after the deal, said NASA Associate Administrator Bob Cabana during a July 12 talk at the Future Space 2023 conference.

“The president recommended $27.2 billion. We’re going to end up with less than that as we move forward,” he said. “It’s going to require some hard decisions on our part. It may move things out a little bit longer. It may mean some things have to be stopped.”

Astranis to deliver GEO broadband satellite for the Philippines next year

Astranis has sold a small broadband satellite launching to geostationary orbit next year to a telco in the Philippines looking for support from the country’s government, the Californian manufacturer announced July 11. Orbits Corp, the satellite services arm of Philippine internet service provider HTechCorp, plans to sell at least some of the capacity to the government to help connect up to two million people across 5,000 remote and rural communities in the archipelago. Only 11,000 of the country’s 42,000 local communities are covered by fiber, and the government has identified many of those left unconnected as Geographically Isolated and Disadvantaged Areas (GIDA). The Philippines has made connecting GIDA communities a major priority, Astranis CEO John Gedmark said, and the companies are seeking ways to help the government bring internet to areas where people make less than $5,000 a year on average. “Most of the internet penetration in the Philippines is confined to the metropolitan areas,” said Atty Augusto Baculio, a former legislator for the Philippines who now leads Orbits Corp. “Outside of that, going to the inner villages, over mountains, across islands — that’s when you have intermittent access to connectivity, or none at all.”

Astranis said its latest satellite to be announced would cover the more than 7,000 islands that form the Philippines. Credit: Astranis

The companies did not disclose government commitments or financial details about a satellite they say would be the first dedicated to providing internet services to the country.

Last year, the Philippines permitted SpaceX to provide services from its global Starlink broadband network in low Earth orbit to help bridge the country’s digital divide.

Astranis operates its satellites on behalf of customers, who lease the capacity over their eight-year lifetimes.

At around 400 kilograms, the company’s dishwasher-sized satellites are smaller than typical geostationary spacecraft that weigh thousands of kilograms and are scaled for smaller, regional coverage.

The satellite for the Philippines is one of five slated to launch together in 2024 on a dedicated rocket Astranis has not disclosed. A pair of satellites for Mexican telco Apco Networks is joining this mission, which Astranis calls Block 3, and customers for the other two remain undisclosed.

Later this year, Astranis is slated to deploy four satellites on a dedicated SpaceX Falcon 9 mission as part of Block 2. It has only revealed customers for three of these: two satellites for

U.S.-based mobile satellite connectivity specialist Anuvu and one for cellular backhaul provider Andesat of Peru.

First deal following inaugural launch

Eight-year-old Astranis launched its debut satellite April 30 as a secondary payload to a SpaceX Falcon Heavy carrying the 6,400-kilogram ViaSat-3 broadband satellite to orbit.

Called Arcturus, this inaugural satellite was sold to Alaska-based telco Pacific Dataport Inc., meaning Astranis has disclosed customers for seven of the 10 satellites it says are on order.

Gedmark said May 24 that Arcturus was performing at speeds of around 9 gigabits per second (Gbps) in early tests, despite being specced for 7.5 Gbps. The company, which had expected at the time to have completed calibration and health checks by mid-June so the satellite could enter service, declined to give an update on its roll-out.

Merger rumors swirl around Dish and EchoStar

Satellite TV broadcaster Dish Network is rumored to be considering recombining with internet-focused sister company EchoStar to strengthen its financial resources. The companies have engaged advisers to flesh out a potential deal, reported news publication Semafor July 6, citing people familiar with the matter. Dish and satellite fleet operator EchoStar — both controlled by billionaire Charlie Ergen — declined to comment on the speculation. A deal would need to navigate starkly contrasting financial standings following their split into separate companies and stocks back in 2008.Dish has been investing heavily to meet regulatory deployment deadlines for expanding a terrestrial 5G network across the United States, putting its balance sheet under strain as its core satellite TV business bleeds subscribers. Meanwhile, EchoStar is sitting on $1.7 billion in cash and is poised for subscriber and revenue growth from Jupiter 3, its long-awaited broadband satellite that Maxar recently delivered for a Falcon Heavy launch in the coming months. EchoStar sold underperforming broadcast satellite services assets to Dish in 2019, seemingly doubling down on the strategy to keep their businesses apart. Still, rumors about a potential recombination have periodically resurfaced in the market over the years, according to Raymond James analyst Ric Prentiss. Notably, EchoStar CEO Hamid Akhavan’s Feb. 17, 2022, employment offer letter includes a clause covering the possibility of Dish owning more than half of EchoStar’s voting stock.

The Jupiter 3 satellite in its launch configuration at Maxar Technologies' manufacturing plant in Palo Alto, California. Credit: Credit: Hughes Network Systems

Prentiss said he was unsurprised to see the speculation resurface again because of how challenging it is to borrow money to finance Dish’s wireless plans in the current economic climate.

A combination could also put perennial rumors to rest about another attempt to merge Dish with its satellite broadcast rival DirecTV, majority owned by U.S. telecoms giant AT&T.

Earlier this year, Dish was also said to be one of a handful of U.S. companies in talks about selling wireless services through Amazon, according to reports including Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.

Citing people familiar with the situation, Bloomberg reported June 2 that Amazon was looking into offering a low-cost or free nationwide mobile service to Amazon Prime subscribers.

Amazon, which is working toward providing initial broadband services next year from its proposed Project Kuiper satellite constellation, said in response that it was not currently planning to add wireless service to its Prime offering.

Its package of Amazon Prime services includes online TV streaming, which has contributed to the decline of the satellite broadcast market.

Ariane 5 launches for the final time

One chapter in European access to space came to a close July 5 with the final launch of the Ariane 5, but the beginning of the next chapter faces additional delays. An Ariane 5 lifted off from the European spaceport at Kourou, French Guiana, at 6 p.m. Eastern. The launch had been scheduled for June 16 but was postponed a day in advance after Arianespace concluded that three pyrotechnical transmission lines used for the separation of the rocket’s solid rocket boosters needed to be replaced. The company rescheduled the launch for July 4, only to delay it an additional day because of strong upper-level winds. As with so many Ariane 5 missions, this launch, designated VA261, carried two communications satellites destined for geostationary transfer orbit. Nearly 30 minutes after liftoff, the rocket deployed Heinrich-Hertz-Satellit, a spacecraft built by OHB for the German Space Agency on behalf of other German government agencies. The 3,400-kilogram satellite will test advanced communications technologies. About three and a half minutes later, the rocket deployed the other payload, the Syracuse 4B satellite for the French military. The 3,570-kilogram satellite was developed by a consortium of Airbus Defence and Space and Thales Alenia Space, using an Airbus Eurostar 3000 bus.

An Ariane 5 lifts off for the final time July 5 carrying two European government communications satellites. Credit: ESA-CNES-Arianespace/Optique video du CSG/P. Piron

“It is a success for ‘Team Europe’ tonight with this last and final Ariane 5,” Stéphane Israël, chief executive of Arianespace, said on the company’s webcast of the launch after confirmation of successful payload deployment.

“Thanks for ArianeGroup, Arianespace and CNES. It was a wonderful launch, even if it is the last one,” said Gen. Michel Sayegh, director of space programs for the French armaments agency DGA during the launch webcast.

The launch was the 117th and final flight of the Ariane 5 over 27 years. The vehicle made its first, unsuccessful launch in June 1996, and suffered a partial failure on its second launch in October 1997 before an unqualified success on its third launch in October 1998. The rocket’s ability to carry two large geostationary communications satellites at once made it a key vehicle for many years in the commercial space industry during an era when geostationary communications satellites dominated the market.

The European Space Agency also regularly used the rocket for several science missions as well as the launch of five Automated Transfer Vehicle cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station between 2008 and 2014. In perhaps the rocket’s highest-profile launch, it successfully launched the James Webb Space Telescope for NASA on Christmas Day 2021, delivering it on a trajectory so accurate it had the effect of significantly increasing the spacecraft’s lifetime by reducing the amount of propellant needed for trajectory correction maneuvers.

“Ariane 5 is now over, and Ariane 5 has perfectly finished its work and really is now a legendary launcher,” Israël said. “But Ariane 6 is coming.”

Waiting on Ariane 6

In the lead up to the final Ariane 5 launch, Arianespace has advertised a “spaceflight continuum,” of past and future rockets, but that continuum is not necessarily continuous. The Ariane 5 overlapped with the end of the Ariane 4 rocket, which made its last launch in 2003. ESA had originally planned for a similar overlap between the end of the Ariane 5 and the introduction of its successor, the Ariane 6.

However, the development of Ariane 6 has been plagued by delays that have pushed out its first launch, once planned for 2020, by several years. In October 2022, ESA said it projected the first launch to take place in the fourth quarter of 2023, but it is increasingly likely the launch will slip into 2024.

Executives with OHB, a supplier on the Ariane 6 program, said in an earnings call in May that they expected the first Ariane 6 launch to take place in early 2024, and no later than May 2024. “I am getting more and more confident we will see the first launch of Ariane 6 early next year,” Marco Fuchs, chief executive of OHB, said during the call.

ESA and Arianespace have declined to provide an updated launch date for that inaugural mission. “Today it would be speculative to mention a launch date,” ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said during a press briefing June 29 after an ESA Council meeting in Stockholm. “We have to go through a number of technical milestones over the summer period but I promise, after the summer in September, we will indicate a period which is the target period for the Ariane 6.”

Those milestones include a hot-fire test of the Ariane 6 upper stage scheduled for July at a test facility in Lampoldshausen, Germany, which will be followed by a second test in the fall to test its performance in what ESA calls “degraded cases.” Assembly of the first flight model of the Ariane 6 is planned to begin in November in French Guiana, according to an ESA update published June 8.

Falcon 9 launches ESA’s Euclid space telescope

A European mission to unravel some of the biggest mysteries in the universe is underway thanks to a launch from an American rocket. A SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off at 11:12 a.m. Eastern July 1 from Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40. The rocket deployed its payload, the European Space Agency’s Euclid spacecraft, 41 minutes later after placing it on a trajectory to the Earth-sun L-2 Lagrange point. The rocket’s booster, on its second flight after launching the Ax-2 private astronaut mission in May, landed on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean. “It was really a fantastic launch,” said ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher at a post-launch briefing. “This is a very important mission for the European Space Agency.” The two-ton Euclid spacecraft, built by Thales Alenia Space, will spend a month traveling to the L-2 point, 1.5 million kilometers from the Earth in the direction opposite the sun. Once there, it will undergo a two-month commissioning period before beginning its science mission. Carole Mundell, ESA’s director of science, said that commissioning work includes turning on the two main instruments on the spacecraft and calibrating the data, while also confirming the thermal stability of the system. “The optics are so precise we should have diffraction-limited images, so we want to make sure we are getting that quality of images and that our spectra are as we expect.” The 1.4-billion-euro ($1.5 billion) mission will spend six years conducting a detailed survey of one third of the sky using a visible camera and near-infrared spectrometer and photometer. Astronomers will use those observations of millions of galaxies to test the validity of various models for dark matter and dark energy, which together comprise 95% of the universe.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 lifts off July 1 carrying ESA’s Euclid cosmology spacecraft. Credit: SpaceNews/Jeff Foust

Scientists involved with the mission are optimistic that Euclid’s observations will help them understand the nature of dark matter and dark energy. “It’s a really great time to be a cosmologist,” said Henk Hoekstra, a member of the 2,000-person Euclid Consortium of scientists and engineers who have worked on the mission, during a pre-launch briefing June 30. “The launch of Euclid really changes cosmology into the future.”

Euclid will collect a massive amount of data: an estimated 170 petabytes (one petabyte is 1,000 terabytes) over its planned six-year mission. That will be augmented by complementary surveys by several ground-based telescopes. Nine data centers, eight in Europe and one in the United States, will archive the data.

Although Euclid was developed for cosmology, project scientists say the data should be useful for a wide range of other studies, from objects in our solar system to the evolution of galaxies. “This dataset will be transformational across a huge range of astrophysics projects,” said Jason Rhodes, chair of the Euclid Consortium Board. “This is data that is going to be mined by astrophysicists for decades to come.”

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, under development for launch in 2027, will perform dark energy studies similar to Euclid. “It will be doing similar science but in a different way,” said Nicola Fox, NASA associate administrator for science, after the launch. She said the two missions should be complementary in much the same was as NASA’s Parker Solar Probe and ESA’s Solar Orbiter missions to study the sun. “The partnership with Euclid and Roman is going to unlock so much of our dark universe.”

While NASA is a partner with ESA on Euclid, providing infrared detectors for one of its instruments, the launch took place from Florida because of a contract ESA signed with SpaceX. ESA turned to the Falcon 9 after losing access to the Soyuz rocket, originally selected to launch the mission, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year.

“We owe them a huge thanks. Without them our satellite would be sitting on the ground for two years,” Mike Healy, head of science projects at ESA, said of SpaceX before the launch.

The first discussions with SpaceX were in May of 2022, he said, followed by feasibility studies and testing to ensure Euclid was compatible with the Falcon 9. While ESA announced in October its intent to launch Euclid and another mission, Hera, on the Falcon 9, the agency did not sign a final contract with SpaceX until the end of January.

“We had to squash what we normally do in three years into five months,” he said of the switch to the Falcon 9. That required dealing with a number of challenges ranging from technical issues of integrating the spacecraft with the rocket to dealing with U.S. export control policies.

“I’m very happy with the relationship we have with SpaceX,” said Giuseppe Racca, Euclid project manager at ESA, before the launch. “They are incredibly skilled in problem solving. It’s a most valuable experience.”