NASA's exoplanet hunter TESS spots a record-breaking 3-star system

Using NASA's exoplanet-hunting spacecraft, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), scientists have spotted a record-breaking triple-star system so tightly bound that it could fit comfortably between the sun and its closest planet, Mercury. The system, designated TIC 290061484 contains twin stars that race around each other once every 1.8 Earth days as well as a third star that orbits this pair once every 25 Earth days. This triple star system's super-tight orbit, located just under 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, the swan, makes it a record-breaker. The previous record-holder for the tightest three-star system orbit is Lamba Tauri, which set the record in 1956 with its third star taking 33 days to orbit its inner twin stars. The discovery team included citizen scientists who met as part of the now-closed Planet Hunters project, which ran from 2010 to 2013. The amateurs joined with professional astronomers to form the Visual Survey Group collaboration, which has been operating for a decade. "Thanks to the compact, edge-on configuration of the system, we can measure the orbits, masses, sizes and temperatures of its stars," team member Veselin Kostov from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and part of the SETI Institute said in a statement. "We can study how the system formed and predict how it may evolve."

Three's company

The team thinks the star system TIC 290061484 is highly stable because the stars orbit each other in nearly the same plane. If the stars' orbits were tilted in different directions, their gravitational influences would disrupt their orbits, making the system unstable.

This stability won't last forever, though — maybe a few million years. Though that's a long time to us, it's a blink of an eye in our 13.8 billion-year-old cosmos. And as Visual Survey Group team member Saul Rappaport, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), reminds us, referring to the fate of the TIC 290061484 stars: "No one lives here."

As the twin stars at the heart of this triple star system age, they will expand outward and ultimately merge. This will trigger a massive supernova explosion in around 20 to 40 million years. Fortunately, this is unlikely to impact any life on planets around the three stars as there don't seem to be any planets close enough to the stars to support life (as we know it, at least).

"We think the stars formed together from the same growth process, which would have disrupted planets from forming very closely around any of the stars," Rappaport said.

It is possible, however, that a very distant planet could exist in the TIC 290061484 system, orbiting the three stars as if they were one.

The Roman Telescope's promise

The team spotted the record-breaking triple star system because of strobing starlight caused by the stars crossing in front of each other, as seen from our position on Earth.

The team turned to machine learning to analyze vast amounts of data from TESS to spot a pattern indicating these eclipses. They then called upon the aid of citizen scientists to further filter this data to spot interesting signals.

"We're mainly looking for signatures of compact multi-star systems, unusual pulsating stars in binary systems, and weird objects," Rappaport said. "It's exciting to identify a system like this because they're rarely found, but they may be more common than current tallies suggest."

The team thinks many more systems like this are likely to be spread across the Milky Way, waiting to be discovered. Some may even exhibit shorter orbits than the stars of the TIC 290061484 system. Current technology may be insufficient to spot these tightly bound triple stars, but help is on the way.

Set to launch no earlier than May 2027, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, or just "Roman," will provide vastly more detailed images of space than those gathered by TESS.

An illustration of the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. (Image credit: NASA)

NASA's exoplanet hunter takes a wide view of the cosmos, while Roman will take a "zoomed-in" view. To put this into perspective, an area of space that is covered by a single pixel in an image from TESS will have a whopping 36,000 pixels in an image from Roman. This will, in fact, allow Roman to gaze deep into the heart of the Milky Way, where stars are tightly packed together.

"We don't know much about a lot of the stars in the center of the galaxy except for the brightest ones," team member and Goddard data scientist Brian Powell said. "Roman's high-resolution view will help us measure light from stars that usually blur together, providing the best look yet at the nature of star systems in our galaxy."

One of Roman's main missions will be to monitor the light from hundreds of millions of stars, which should help astronomers spot the strobing effect that revealed the TIC 290061484 system.

"We're curious why we haven't found star systems like these with even shorter outer orbital periods," Powell explained. "Roman should help us find them and bring us closer to figuring out what their limits might be."

Roman may even enable scientists to spot tightly packed star systems with more than three stars, perhaps as many as six, buzzing around each other like bees in a hive.

"Before scientists discovered triply eclipsing triple star systems, we didn't expect them to be out there," team member Tamás Borkovits of the Baja Observatory in Hungary said in the statement. "But once we found them, we thought, well, why not?

"Roman, too, may reveal never-before-seen categories of systems and objects that will surprise astronomers."

Boeing needs to improve quality-control work on SLS moon rocket, NASA Inspector General finds

A scathing report from NASA's Office of Inspector General (OIG) has highlighted several critical issues related to the development of the next version of the agency's Space Launch System megarocket, which will likely delay Artemis moon missions. The report, released by NASA's internal watchdog on Aug. 8, focuses on the gigantic Space Launch System (SLS) Block 1B and its Exploration Upper Stage (EUS). Block 1B is designed to increase the amount of cargo SLS can carry to the moon. The upgraded version is key to NASA's long-term lunar plans and will be used for Artemis 4, currently scheduled to launch in 2028. The OIG found that work being done by Boeing — the prime contractor for the SLS core and upper stages, as well as the rocket's flight avionics suite — at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans does not meet international standards or agency requirements. This has led to numerous Corrective Action Requests (CARs) issued by the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA). A CAR, which can vary in level of severity, indicates that work has not conformed to specific contract requirements.

NASA's Space Launch System rocket launches the Artemis 1 mission, Nov. 16, 2022. (Image credit: Josh Dinner)

According to the OIG report, these quality-control lapses at Michoud are "largely due to the lack of a sufficient number of trained and experienced aerospace workers at Boeing." The report criticizes Boeing's inadequate training and supervision efforts, which fail to mitigate these deficiencies, thereby raising serious concerns about the safety and reliability of the SLS components.

The report also notes growing cost estimates and suggests that Artemis 4 may not hit its expected September 2028 launch date due to such issues.

"We project SLS Block 1B costs will reach approximately $5.7 billion before the system is scheduled to launch in 2028. This is $700 million more than NASA's 2023 Agency Baseline Commitment, which established a cost and schedule baseline at nearly $5 billion," the OIG report states.

"EUS development accounts for more than half of this cost, which we estimate will increase from an initial cost of $962 million in 2017 to nearly $2.8 billion through 2028."

It states that Boeing's delivery of the EUS to NASA has so far been delayed from February 2021 to April 2027. These issues, when combined with other factors, suggest further delays, which would impact Artemis 4.

Boeing's response to these issues has also been found to be ineffective, particularly regarding recurrent quality-control problems.

The OIG's recommendations include developing a compliant quality management training program for Boeing and issuing financial penalties for Boeing's noncompliance with quality standards. A detailed cost overrun analysis on Boeing's EUS development contract is also suggested. NASA agreed with three of four recommendations, but did not agree to institute financial penalties for Boeing's noncompliance with quality-control standards.

The report is another blow to Boeing, whose Starliner spacecraft is currently under scrutiny following its unscheduled, extended stay docked at the International Space Station (ISS) while tests related to problematic reaction control thrusters continue.

It is also another issue for NASA's Artemis program. The Artemis 2 and Artemis 3 missions — the latter being the planned first return of humans to the moon's surface — have this year already been pushed back to September 2025 and September 2026, respectively.

Meanwhile, Artemis' Orion spacecraft, which is built by Lockheed Martin, also faces some trouble. The NASA OIG issued a report in May on Orion heat shield issues, which could further impact the readiness for the Artemis 2 mission, which will send astronauts around the moon.

Mars Odyssey celebrates 100,000 orbits, captures epic view of solar system's largest volcano

NASA's Odyssey spacecraft, the longest-running mission at Mars, circled the Red Planet for the 100,000th time today, the mission team announced in a statement. To celebrate the milestone, the space agency released an intricate panorama of Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano in the solar system; Odyssey captured the view in March. The volcano's base sprawls 373 miles (600 kilometers) near the Martian equator while it soars 17 miles (27 kilometers) into the planet's thin air. Earlier this month, astronomers discovered ephemeral morning frost coating the volcano's top for a few hours every day, offering fresh insights into how ice from the poles circulates throughout the parched world. In Odyssey's latest image of the volcano, the bluish-white band seen grazing Olympus Mons shows the amount of dust floating in the Martian air when the image was taken, according to NASA. The thin coat of purple just above likely hints at a mixture of atmospheric dust with bluish water-ice clouds. The blue-green layer at the top-edge of the world marks where water-ice clouds reach up about 30 miles (48 kilometers) into the Martian sky, scientists say.

On March 11, 2024, NASA's Odyssey orbiter captured an intricate panorama of Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano in our solar system. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU)

To capture the latest panorama, scientists commanded Odyssey to slowly rotate such that its camera pointed toward the Martian horizon, capturing views similar to the kind International Space Station dwellers take of Earth."Normally we see Olympus Mons in narrow strips from above, but by turning the spacecraft toward the horizon we can see in a single image how large it looms over the landscape," Jeffrey Plaut, who is Odyssey's project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, said in the recent news release. "Not only is the image spectacular, it also provides us with unique science data."

By snapping similar images at different times during the year, scientists can study how the Martian atmosphere changes over the planet's four seasons, which last from four to seven months each.

Scientists say the groundwork for the latest image began as early as 2008, when another NASA mission named Phoenix landed on Mars. When Odyssey, which served as a communication link between the lander and Earth, pointed its antenna at the lander, scientists noticed its camera was able to view Mars' horizon.

"We just decided to turn the camera on and see how it looked," said Steve Sanders, who serves as Odyssey's mission operations spacecraft engineer at Lockheed Martin Space in Denver, Colorado. "Based on those experiments, we designed a sequence that keeps [the camera's] field-of-view centered on the horizon as we go around the planet."

The Odyssey mission launched in April 2001 and is managed by JPL. It was NASA's first successful mission to Mars after a pair of failures two years earlier. In 1998, the Mars Climate Orbiter reportedly burned up in Mars' atmosphere after mission engineers mixed up translations between two measurement systems. A year later, the Mars Polar Lander smashed onto the Martian surface due to its engine abruptly shutting off prior to touchdown. Odyssey was therefore widely viewed as a mission of redemption.

Odyssey slid into an orbit around Mars in October 2001, and has since revealed previously hidden water-ice reservoirs just beneath the planet's surface, which may be within reach of future Mars astronauts. The spacecraft also mapped vast swaths of the planet's surface, including its craters, which have helped astronomers decode Mars' history.

The spacecraft's recent milestone of 100,000 orbits means it has covered over 1.4 billion miles (2.2 billion kilometers). The sun-powered spacecraft does not have a fuel gauge, so the mission team relies on their math skills to estimate leftover fuel that keeps the 23-year-old mission running. "Physics does a lot of the hard work for us," said Sanders. "But it's the subtleties we have to manage again and again."

Recent calculations suggest Odyssey has about 9 pounds (4 kilograms) of propellant remaining, which is sufficient to last the legacy mission until the end of 2025.

"It takes careful monitoring to keep a mission going this long while maintaining a historical timeline of scientific planning and execution — and innovative engineering practices," said Joseph Hunt, Odyssey's project manager at JPL. "We're looking forward to collecting more great science in the years ahead."

NASA confirms Dragonfly mission despite doubled costs

NASA has approved for development a mission to Saturn’s moon Titan despite a cost that has doubled since the agency selected the mission nearly five years ago. NASA announced April 16 that the Dragonfly mission had passed its confirmation review. Passing the review allows Dragonfly, a nuclear-powered rotorcraft that will travel to various locations on Titan to study the moon’s habitability, to move into full-scale development. The mission went through part of its confirmation review last fall, but the agency said in November that it would defer a final decision on the mission until the spring, after the release of the fiscal year 2025 budget proposal. NASA also announced then that the launch of the mission, previously scheduled for July 2027, had slipped a year to July 2028. The confirmation review sets a formal commitment by NASA to the cost and schedule for a mission. NASA said that it confirmed a July 2028 launch for Dragonfly and a total mission cost of $3.35 billion. That cost is far higher than what NASA approved when it selected Dragonfly in June 2019 as its latest New Frontiers mission. At that time, the mission had a cost cap of $850 million for what NASA designates as Phases A through D, which excludes launch and operations after launch. NASA, in its announcement about the confirmation, acknowledged the total lifecycle cost, which does include launch and operations, was double from what that earlier estimate. The agency blamed several factors, including replanning due to budget constraints, impacts of the pandemic and supply chain challenges, and an “in-depth design iteration.”

NASA's Dragonfly mission is now scheduled to launch in 2028 and arrive on Saturn's moon Titan in 2034. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben

In a statement to SpaceNews April 19, NASA said the costs included in that original cap increased from $1 billion in “real year” dollars, adjusted for inflation, to $2.1 billion, hence the statement that costs had doubled.

“In each of the three fiscal years following Dragonfly’s selection, NASA imposed a cost cap in the current year due to budget constraints. The cumulative impact of these early NASA-directed replans, and another after the Preliminary Design Review (PDR), are responsible for nearly two thirds of the increase in Phase A-D costs,” NASA stated.

“The Dragonfly project also conducted an in-depth design iteration prior to PDR,” NASA added. “The increased costs of that, combined with COVID-driven increases in labor rates and the costs of parts and materials, are responsible for the balance of the increase in Phase A-D costs.”

Those increases are apparent in NASA’s fiscal year 2025 budget proposal. NASA is requesting $434.6 million for Dragonfly in 2025, compared to a projection of $355.5 million for the mission in the agency’s 2024 budget request. For fiscal years 2025 through 2028, NASA is now projecting spending $1.68 billion on Dragonfly, double the projection for the same period in its 2024 proposal.

NASA also anticipates spending more on Dragonfly’s launch. NASA said it will procure a heavy-lift launch vehicle for the mission later this year that will allow Dragonfly to arrive at Titan in 2034. That is the date planned when NASA selected the mission in 2019, despite a two-year delay in its launch since then.

They agency remains supportive about the mission despite the cost challenges. “Dragonfly is a spectacular science mission with broad community interest, and we are excited to take the next steps on this mission,” Nicola Fox, NASA associate administrator for science, said in the statement about Dragonfly’s confirmation. “Exploring Titan will push the boundaries of what we can do with rotorcraft outside of Earth.”

Those cost increases, along with broader budget pressures on NASA in general and its planetary science programs in particular, have implications for future programs. Dragonfly is the fourth mission in the New Frontiers line, after New Horizons, Juno and OSIRIS-REx. NASA had planned to release a call for proposals for the fifth New Frontiers mission in 2023, but has delayed that to no earlier than 2026.

The agency has also warned of likely delays in calls for future missions in the Discovery line of planetary science missions, with lower cost caps than New Frontiers, as well as a line of planetary smallsat missions called SIMPLEx. “We have very few knobs that we can turn in order to respond to these short-term challenges in the budget,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, on delays in future calls for mission proposals during an April 15 town hall.

The budget constraints have also affected NASA’s ability to start work on a future flagship planetary science mission, a Uranus orbiter and atmospheric probe that was recommended by the most recent planetary science decadal survey.

“In the current budget environment, we’re unable to begin the studies and activities we think would be required” to start work on the mission, Glaze said at the town hall. NASA had hoped to start work on that this year or next year. “Right now, the current funding situation does not seem to support that.”

NASA optimistic about resolving Voyager 1 computer problem

A NASA official says he is optimistic that a problem with the Voyager 1 spacecraft that has kept it from transmitting intelligible data for months can be resolved. Speaking at a March 20 meeting of the National Academies’ Committee on Solar and Space Physics, Joseph Westlake, director of NASA’s heliophysics division, said it appeared possible to fix the computer problem on the nearly 50-year-old spacecraft that has disrupted operations since last November. “I feel like we’re on a path now to resolution,” he said. “They’re on the right path and I think we’re going to get to a point where Voyager 1 is going to continue, alive and kicking in space.” Spacecraft controllers first noticed a problem with the spacecraft in November, when the data transmitted by the spacecraft was unusable. Engineers concluded that the problem was with an onboard computer called the flight data system (FDS), which collects data from the spacecraft’s instruments and other spacecraft telemetry. Several factors have hampered efforts to correct the problem. Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is now more than 24 billion kilometers from Earth, which means it takes 22.5 hours for signals to travel between Earth and the spacecraft. None of the people who developed the FDS in the early to mid 1970s are available to assist now, so the project has had to turn to documentation to help identify the problem.

NASA is optimistic engineers can fix the computer problem that has kept Voyager 1 from transmitting usable data for months. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA announced March 13 progress in fixing the FDS when a command called a “poke” was transmitted to Voyager, and the spacecraft responded by sending back a readout of its memory. The agency said at the time it will compare that readout to one transmitted before the problem to help identify the issue.

Westlake said at the committee meeting that the problem appears to be a corrupted memory unit on the spacecraft. “It’s a part failure on one of the memories and they’re looking for a way to move a couple hundred words of software from one region to another in the flight computer,” he said. A word is two bytes.

He did not estimate how long it would take to make those software changes. NASA, in its latest statement about the spacecraft, said that using the FDS memory readout “to devise a potential solution and attempt to put it into action will take time.”

Mars Sample Return science continues amid budget uncertainty

THE WOODLANDS, Texas — Efforts by scientists to use a Mars rover to collect samples are continuing even as NASA wraps up a new assessment of when and how those samples will be brought back to Earth. The Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in February 2021, has filled 26 of its 43 sample tubes, scientists involved with the mission said in presentations at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference (LPSC) here March 12. The rover is climbing up the remains of a river delta that once flowed into Jezero Crater. Of those 26 tubes, 20 contain rock cores, said Meenakshi Wadhwa, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University who serves as principal scientist for Mars Sample Return (MSR) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Two contain regolith and another holds a sample of the atmosphere, while the other three are “witness tubes” that serve as controls to identify any terrestrial contamination in the other tubes. Two of the remaining 17 tubes are also witness tubes, leaving 15 that can be filled with other samples. Scientists are planning next phases of the rover’s traverse, she said, such as to the crater rim, which promises what she called “an incredible diversity” of rocks of different ages and exposed to different processes, “including materials of astrobiological potential.” That work is ongoing as NASA enters the final phases of a review of the overall MSR architecture, including the schedule and design of the mission that will collect those sample tubes and return them to Earth. After an independent review board, or IRB, concluded that the agency’s existing approach could not meet cost and schedule goals, NASA commissioned an MSR IRB Response Team (MIRT) in October to evaluate alternative approaches.

A sample tube on the Martian surface in the shadow of the Perseverance rover. Perseverance is continuing to collect samples as NASA develops a new plan for returning them to Earth. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

“Much of the work is already complete” by the MIRT, Wadhwa said. The MIRT is expected to complete its work by the end of the month, with NASA releasing its revised MSR plans, and proposed budget, as soon as April.

That has put not just MSR but also NASA’s overall planetary science portfolio in limbo. NASA’s fiscal year 2025 budget proposal, released March 11, left MSR funding as TBD, or to be determined. At the same time, the agency must also develop an operating plan for fiscal year 2024 funding provided by an appropriations bill passed March 8 that instructed NASA to spend at least $300 million, and as much as $949.3 million, on MSR in 2024.

The TBD in the fiscal year 2025 budget request for MSR reflects the uncertainty about the plans for carrying out the program, said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, during a town hall meeting at LPSC March 11. “We’re trying to give the response team the time they need to complete their assessment and provide the recommendation,” she explained.

Once that work is done, NASA will amend its budget request to seek specific funding for MSR in 2025, but at the expense of the allocations requested for other planetary programs in the original proposal. “I do not expect the top level of the planetary budget to go up above the $2.73 billion” in the original request, she said, which is already fully allocated to other programs. “We need to think about how we support Mars Sample Return within a balanced planetary portfolio and within that $2.73 billion top line.”

NASA faces similar challenges for determining MSR funding in 2024 within the limits set by the appropriations bill. “This is going to be the heart of a very difficult process,” she said.

While providing little information about what the new MSR architecture, and its cost and schedule, will be, NASA officials at the conference reemphasized the scientific value of the program.

“Mars Sample Return is one of the highest priorities in the past two decadal surveys. It is an agency priority,” said Lindsay Hays, acting lead scientist for MSR at NASA Headquarters, during a March 12 presentation. The samples, she said, can serve as a “Rosetta Stone” to decode the early history of terrestrial planets.

Those officials acknowledged, though, the uncertainty about MSR was affecting science planning. That includes potential surveys beyond the crater rim by Perseverance to collect samples. “We’re awaiting to see what the MIRT results are,” Hays said. “The MIRT is going to help us understand what is our future architecture and future schedule.”

She added that “maximizing sample number and simple diversity is absolutely key” for the mission, a point Wadhwa also made.

“We are currently awaiting the outcome of the MIRT in terms of what the timeline is going to look like,” Wadhwa said, which will shape what kind of traverse Perseverance will take to collect additional samples at and beyond the crater rim. “We have an amazing set of rocks awaiting us in those regions.”

NASA cancels OSAM-1 satellite servicing technology mission

NASA has canceled a multibillion-dollar project to demonstrate satellite servicing technologies that had suffered extensive delays and cost overruns. In a brief statement March 1, NASA announced it was ending the On-Orbit Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing (OSAM) 1 mission. OSAM-1 was being developed to refuel the Landsat 7 spacecraft and then perform the in-orbit assembly of a Ka-band satellite antenna. NASA said it was canceling OSAM-1 “due to continued technical, cost, and schedule challenges, and a broader community evolution away from refueling unprepared spacecraft, which has led to a lack of a committed partner.” The agency said that, after formal congressional notifications of its decision, it would start the process for an orderly shutdown, which would include transferring hardware and “pursuing potential partnerships or alternative hardware uses.” NASA said it would also review how to mitigate the impact of the cancellation on the workforce at the Goddard Space Flight Center, which was leading OSAM-1. NASA spokesperson Jimi Russell said there are approximately 450 NASA employees and contractors working on OSAM-1, and that NASA “is committed to supporting project workforce per plan through fiscal year 2024.” OSAM-1 started about a decade ago as Restore-L, with the goal of launching as soon as 2020 to refuel Landsat 7. The mission was renamed OSAM-1 in 2020 with the addition of payloads to perform in-space assembly and manufacturing activities.

The OSAM-1 satellite servicing technology demonstration mission suffered significant cost and schedule overruns. Credit: NASA

The mission, though, suffered significant cost overruns and delays. As of April 2022, the mission’s total cost, once projected to be between $626 million and $753 million, had grown to $2.05 billion and its launch delayed to December 2026. NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), in an October 2023 report, concluded the project would likely suffer additional overruns, with an estimated cost at completion as high as $2.17 billion and a launch of between March and June 2027.

A key factor in OSAM-1’s problems, the report concluded, was the performance of Maxar, which is supplying both the spacecraft bus as well as the robotics payload, called Space Infrastructure Dexterous Robot (SPIDER), under contracts with a combined value of nearly $316 million. Maxar delivered the OSAM-1 bus in September 2023, two and a half years behind schedule, and was running more than two years late with the deliveries of SPIDER components, OIG found.

Maxar acknowledged in the report that they had “significantly underestimated the scope and complexity of the work” modifying one of its 1300-series satellite buses, designed for commercial geostationary orbit communications satellites, for use on OSAM-1 in low Earth orbit. The company also had technical problems with SPIDER as well as issues managing subcontractors. NASA said in September 2023 it has removed one element of SPIDER called MakerSat, which would have manufactured a composite beam, to focus on its servicing and assembly technologies.

That report traced the problems with the OSAM-1 bus and SPIDER to the use of fixed firm price contracts that, OIG concluded, gave NASA no means to incentivize the company’s performance. NASA at times stepped in, providing an estimated $2 million in labor to help with the OSAM-1 bus in 2022 and 2023.

“In our discussions with Maxar officials, they acknowledged that they were no longer profiting from their work on OSAM-1,” OIG noted in its report. “Moreover, project officials stated that OSAM-1 does not appear to be a high priority for Maxar in terms of the quality of its staffing.”

Maxar spokesperson Eric Glass said the company had delivered to NASA a pallet for the SPIDER payload, as well as one of its three robotic arms, with the other two robotic arms planned for delivery later this year. “While we are disappointed by the decision to discontinue the program, we are committed to supporting NASA in pursuing potential new partnerships or alternative hardware uses as they complete the shutdown,” he said.

One problem OSAM-1 did not have was funding. Congress regularly exceeded NASA’s requests for funding for the mission. The OIG report noted that NASA requested $808.5 million for OSAM-1 between 2016 and 2023 but Congress appropriated more than $1.48 billion. NASA requested $227 million for OSAM-1 for fiscal year 2024 and both the House and Senate versions of spending bills fully funded the mission.

OSAM-1’s cancelation comes as many companies are commercially pursuing satellite servicing technologies, in many cases using more cooperative approaches such as designing satellites with refueling ports that reduce the complexity of refueling. At the annual meeting of CONFERS, a satellite servicing industry group, in October 2023, an audience member noted there had been little discussion about OSAM-1 in conference presentations.

Bo Naasz, who leads satellite servicing capability development at NASA, acknowledged the difficulty in developing a spacecraft designed to refuel a spacecraft “not prepared” for servicing. “It’s really hard,” he said. He argued the value of OSAM-1 was to demonstrate robotic technologies that could be transferred for other applications while gaining experience in satellite servicing.

“We can help convince the consumer that we know how to do this and that it’s ready,” he concluded. “I think it is, but I also think it’s hard.”

First Intuitive Machines lunar lander mission set for Feb. 14 launch

Intuitive Machines and SpaceX have confirmed plans to launch the IM-1 lunar lander mission as soon as Feb. 14, pending a fueling test on the pad later this week. In a Feb. 5 statement, Intuitive Machines announced it was targeting a launch of its lander in a “multi-day window” that opens Feb. 14. Liftoff of the Falcon 9 from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A is scheduled for 12:57 a.m. Eastern that day. The announcement came hours after a SpaceX official, speaking at a briefing about the upcoming launch of NASA’s PACE Earth science mission on another Falcon 9, confirmed that Feb. 14 date, which had been widely known in the industry but which neither NASA nor Intuitive Machines would disclose at a Jan. 31 briefing about the agency’s payloads on the lander. “Our Intuitive Machines launch is targeting Feb. 14, Valentine’s Day,” said Julianna Scheiman, director of civil satellite missions at SpaceX, at the Feb. 5 briefing. “We’re tracking well to a Feb. 14 launch.” One final milestone before that launch is a fueling test, or wet dress rehearsal, scheduled for Feb. 7. That is important for IM-1 since the lander needs to be loaded with liquid oxygen and methane propellants while on the launch pad shortly before launch, a procedure that required modifications to the infrastructure at LC-39A. “We’ll be performing essentially a tanking test, or wet dress rehearsal, for that spacecraft on Feb. 7,” she said, to confirm that the spacecraft can be fueled on the pad.

Intuitive Machines says its IM-1 lunar lander mission is scheduled for launch as soon as Feb. 14, with a tanking test scheduled for Feb. 7. Credit: SpaceX

While Intuitive Machines said in its statement that it had a multi-day window, Scheiman said the mission had a three-day window, with launch opportunities Feb. 14 through 16. Intuitive Machines previously stated that a launch any day in that window would set up a landing attempt on Feb. 22.

The 675-kilogram lander, called Odysseus by the company, is carrying six payloads for NASA through a Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) award valued at $118 million. It is also carrying six commercial payloads, ranging from sportswear company Columbia to artist Jeff Koons. The commercial payloads also include Eaglecam, a camera developed by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University that will eject from the lander during its final descent to the surface to attempt to photograph the landing.

If IM-1 is successful, it will be the first private mission to land softly on the moon after three previous failed attempts. The Beresheet lander by Israel’s SpaceIL crashed during its descent to the lunar surface in 2019, and the HAKUTO-R M1 lander from Japanese company ispace crashed attempting a landing in April 2023. Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander suffered a propellant leak hours after its Jan. 8 launch that prevented the spacecraft from attempting a lunar landing.

NASA workshop to examine options for Apophis asteroid mission

NASA is hosting a workshop later this month to learn about options for low-cost missions to an asteroid that will make a close approach to the Earth in 2029, a move that has confused some scientists who believe a shelved smallsat mission can meet NASA’s needs. The Apophis 2029 Innovation Listening Workshop, to be held Feb. 7 at NASA Headquarters, will study what the agency calls “innovative approaches for a low-cost mission” to Apophis, a near Earth asteroid. Apophis will make a close flyby of the Earth in April 2029, passing closer to the Earth than the geostationary belt but posing no impact risk. The workshop will feature a public briefing followed by one-on-one discussions with interested organizations. NASA added that there are no solicitations or even a formal request for information associated with the workshop. The workshop is not being led by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, which hosts its planetary science activities as well as the Planetary Defense Coordination Office, but instead by NASA’s chief technologist within the Office of Technology, Policy and Strategy. Lindley Johnson, NASA’s planetary defense officer, said at a Jan. 30 meeting of the Small Bodies Assessment Group (SBAG) that his office was supporting the workshop. “Their objective is to engage the public and private sectors in innovative, low-cost missions during the Earth flyby of Apophis,” he said. The focus of the workshop will be the one-on-one meetings, he said, for “small companies, nontraditional partners with NASA to present their ideas about how this could be done in a low-cost approach.”

NASA will put the completed Janus spacecraft into long-term storage with the hopes of potentially flying them on a future mission. Credit: Lockheed Martin

NASA already has one mission to study Apophis. After the OSIRIS-REx mission delivered asteroid samples to Earth in September, the main spacecraft flew by Earth on an extended mission rechristened OSIRIS-APEX. It will rendezvous with Apophis immediately after the April 2029 flyby, studying it for the next 18 months. However, there is interest in sending a mission to Apophis before the Earth flyby to better understand what changes the gravitational forces of the flyby made to the asteroid.

One proposal is to repurpose the two smallsats built for Janus, a NASA mission that would have sent the spacecraft on flybys of binary asteroids. Janus, part of the agency’s Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) program, was to launch as a secondary payload on the Psyche asteroid mission in 2022.

However, when problems with Psyche delayed its launch by more than a year, Janus could no longer carry out its original mission. With no viable alternative missions possible launching with Psyche, NASA removed Janus from that launch and formally canceled the mission in July.

The two spacecraft, already assembled and going through final testing when Psyche was delayed, are being prepared to go into long-term storage at NASA’s Langley Research Center, said Dan Scheeres, principal investigator for Janus at the University of Colorado, in an SBAG presentation Jan. 31. That involves partially disassembling the spacecraft to store batteries, solar panels, propulsion system and instruments separately: “You just can’t put it into a box and ship it.”

The Janus team has looked at alternative missions for the spacecraft that include going to Apophis. Several options are available, he said, with trajectories that take the spacecraft out to the Earth-sun L-2 Lagrange point followed by a lunar flyby to set up an Apophis flyby “well in advance” of the asteroid’s close approach to the Earth. “It’s still in our wheelhouse,” he said.

The Janus spacecraft carry optical and infrared instruments designed for “fast flyby science” that would include Apophis, he said, comparing it to the flyby of a small main belt asteroid, Dinkinesh, by NASA’s Lucy spacecraft in November. Once in storage, the spacecraft could be reassembled, tested and launched in about 18 months.

The challenge, he and other said at the SBAG meeting, was funding. NASA’s planetary programs are in what Scheeres called a “no new start” situation where the agency is not starting any new missions, including one that would use the repurposed Janus spacecraft.

“We recognize that the 2029 close approach of Apophis really presents a unique opportunity,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, at the SBAG meeting Jan. 30. “Our budget situation is really, really challenging, and that is a reality that we have to live within.”

She said that the Janus team had briefed her on using the spacecraft for an Apophis flyby. “That is one of the many ideas that have come to us,” she said, but returned to the budget issues. “You can have the will, but without the funding it makes it really challenging.”

Some scientists at the SBAG meeting wondered why, given the Janus option but also the budget constraints, why NASA was holding the workshop at all, rather than find a way to repurpose Janus for an Apophis flyby.

Thomas Statler, a program scientist in the planetary science division, said at SBAG Jan. 31 that the agency knows there are multiple ideas for an Apophis flyby mission. “The agency doesn’t want to take a stance where it appears unreceptive to a good idea,” he said. “That is the motivation for the listening workshop.”

Scheeres said he planned to attend the Apophis workshop and meet with agency officials to “make sure they are fully aware of what they will be sitting on.”

Cygnus ready for first launch on Falcon 9

A Cygnus cargo spacecraft is set to launch on a Falcon 9 rocket for the first time, a combination that required more changes to the rocket than to the spacecraft. NASA announced at a Jan. 26 briefing that it was targeting Jan. 30 at 12:07 p.m. Eastern for the launch of the NG-20 cargo mission from Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40. That is a one-day slip from previous plans, which the agency said was to “accommodate launch pad readiness.” If Cygnus launches that day, it will arrive at the International Space Station early Feb. 1. The launch marks the first time Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus cargo spacecraft has flown on Falcon 9. All previous launches of Cygnus have been on Northrop’s own Antares launch vehicle with the exception of two missions that launched on United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 after an Antares launch failure in 2014. Northrop plans to launch at least three Cygnus missions on Falcon 9 rockets as it works with Firefly Aerospace on a new version of the Antares, replacing the Ukrainian-built first stage powered by Russian engines with a stage developed by Firefly using its own engines. That vehicle, the Antares 330, is slated to begin launches as soon as mid-2025. The shift to the Falcon 9 has been relatively smooth for Northrop. “We didn’t really have to make any modifications to the Cygnus,” said Cyrus Dhalla, vice president and general manager of tactical space systems at Northrop Grumman, during the briefing. The company did make minor changes to the cargo loading process, which he attributed to doing it in a new facility with different equipment.

The NG-20 Cygnus cargo spacecraft being encapsulated for launch on a Falcon 9. Credit: SpaceX

The shift in launch vehicles doesn’t alter the capabilities of the Cygnus, he added. The NG-20 mission will carry a little more than 3,700 kilograms of cargo, the capacity of the current version of the vehicle.

SpaceX, though, did have to make changes to accommodate Cygnus, specifically its ability for “late load” of cargo within 24 hours of launch. The Antares has a “pop top” opening at the top of the rocket’s payload fairing, allowing access to the Cygnus inside for cargo loading after the spacecraft has been encapsulated.

To provide a similar late load capability for Falcon 9 launches of Cygnus, SpaceX created what Bill Gerstenmaier, vice president of build and flight reliability at SpaceX, called a “gigadoor” in the fairing of the Falcon 9. That is a door 1.5 by 1.2 meters in the side of the fairing that can be opened to provide environmentally controlled access to the Cygnus inside.

“This will be the first time we’ve done that,” he said, as SpaceX’s own Dragon spacecraft launches without a fairing. “It’s taken a lot of modifications on our part to get this hardware ready to go fly.” He added that putting the door in the payload fairing does not affect SpaceX’s ability to recover and reuse it.

“We really appreciate how SpaceX has worked with us to accommodate the flow of cargo and integration, and we’ve been able to reuse a lot of our procedures,” Dhalla said.

Besides the development of the payload fairing door for Cygnus launches, SpaceX has been testing modifications to its transporter erector at Launch Complex 39A, enabling it to load liquid methane and oxygen propellants. That is required for the upcoming launch of the IM-1 lunar lander by Intuitive Machines, which will be fueled on the pad, inside the payload fairing, shortly before launch.

Gerstenmaier said SpaceX was doing testing of that equipment to ensure it is ready for the IM-1 launch, currently projected for mid-February. “That work is pretty much on track,” he said. “It’s a lot of interesting integration but, as you see even with this Northrop Grumman 20 mission, we at SpaceX like to do innovative and creative things.”

NASA pushes ahead with Earth System Observatory despite uncertain budgets

NASA is making progress on a multibillion-dollar series of Earth science missions amid uncertainty about their funding for the next year. In town hall sessions at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in December, NASA officials discussed work on the Earth System Observatory, a series of missions intended to implement the five “designated observables” recommended by the Earth science decadal survey in 2018. Four missions are currently in early phases of development for the Earth System Observatory: the Atmosphere Observing System (AOS)-Storm, AOS-Sky, Surface Biology and Geology, and Mass Change, which NASA recently renamed GRACE-Continuity or GRACE-C to emphasize its links to the GRACE and GRACE-Follow On missions. A fifth mission, Surface Deformation and Change, is an extended study phase so that the agency can incorporate lessons from the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission launching in the spring of 2024. These missions “are intended to answer a wide variety of questions” in Earth science, said Karen St. Germain, director of the Earth science division at NASA Headquarters, in one town hall session, and “to integrate observations, science and applications for societal benefit.” The Earth System Observatory represents the “core missions” of Earth science for NASA in the future, she said, alongside a series of smaller missions. “They exist in a larger ecosystem of competed missions.”

The Atmosphere Observing System (AOS) Sky and Storm missions are part of the Earth System Observatory. Credit: NASA

Those missions, though, will not be cheap. The first four missions have an estimated cost of $3.5 billion, including $1.8 billion to $1.99 billion for AOS-Storm and AOS-Sky. St. Germain, though, noted that several international partners will contribute an additional $1.2 billion in instruments and spacecraft for the effort. “It allows us to do more together than the sum of what we could do individually,” she said. “We’re trying to get the maximum science per U.S. dollar invested.”

Those missions are tentatively scheduled to launch from the late 2020s into the early 2030s. However, she acknowledged that is dependent on budgets. NASA requested $287 million for Earth System Observatory missions for fiscal year 2024, projecting that to grow to more than half a billion dollars a year by 2026 as the missions move into later phases of development.

“We are counting on an increase to cover that development,” she said of the budget for the missions. NASA requested more than $2.47 billion for Earth science in 2024, an increase of nearly $280 million from 2023.

That increase, though, has run into broader budget pressures facing NASA as part of a spending agreement passed in June that caps non-defense discretionary spending, like NASA, at 2023 levels for 2024. A Senate appropriation bill would provide a little less than $2.22 billion for Earth science, while the House bill offers only $2 billion.

The House bill is silent on funding for the Earth System Observatory, but the report accompanying the Senate bill noted that appropriators were “pleased” with the progress NASA was making on the missions. “The Committee expects NASA to continue formulation of the four Earth System Observatory missions,” it stated, “and provides the request level for these four missions.”

St. Germain acknowledged the fiscal uncertainty that the Earth System Observatory and other Earth science programs face, as NASA operates under a continuing resolution holding funding at 2023 levels until Feb. 2. “This is an ongoing conversation,” she said, guided by the direction given by the decadal survey. “We’re moving forward in a budget environment where we will work very hard and do our best to maximize what we can accomplish with the budgets that we end up getting.”

However, at a meeting of a National Academies committee Nov. 29, she said NASA was hitting the limits of the advice the decadal survey provided on dealing with budget challenges, including balancing large directed missions with smaller competed ones. “We find ourselves in a position where we’ve exhausted most of the guidance the decadal gave us,” she said.

“It is going to be a challenging year,” Nicola Fox, NASA associate administrator for science, said of 2024 at an AGU town hall meeting, citing the budget uncertainty. “We look forward with hope to an appropriation that we will immediately be ready to implement.”

She asked scientists at the town hall meeting to work together to advocate for NASA Earth science budgets overall and avoid internecine sniping that pits programs against one another. “The worst thing we can do is not go forward as a community,” she said.

Cubesat offers template for future astronomy missions

The first NASA-funded small satellite for exoplanet science is continuing to gather data well beyond its expected lifetime. The Colorado Ultraviolet Transit Experiment, known as CUTE, a six-unit cubesat equipped with a telescope to funnel data to a spectrograph, traveled to sun-synchronous low-Earth orbit in September 2021 as a secondary payload on the NASA- U.S. Geological Survey Landsat 9 Earth-observation mission. CUTE was designed to operate in space for at least eight months. Twenty-seven months later, the satellite’s onboard instruments still are observing the dramatic atmospheric loss of “hot jupiters,” gas giants orbiting very close to bright stars. “This atmospheric escape is incredibly fast,” said Kevin France, CUTE principal investigator at the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), which assembled, tested and operates the satellite. “The materials are coming out so fast that they are dragging all the heavy elements out of the atmosphere with them.” Based on CUTE’s success, two additional NASA-funded, LASP-led missions have adopted similar mission and instrument designs. “CUTE’s been a great success, particularly given that we didn’t really know if we could do it for the amount of money that we proposed,” France told SpaceNews at the American Geophysical Union conference here. Lessons learned from CUTE are helping researchers “figure out how to build small spacecraft, how to build small instruments and how to have a student-led team,” France said.

The Colorado Ultraviolet Transit Experiment, known as CUTE, is a cubesat launched in 2021 to characterize the composition and mass-loss rates of exoplanet atmospheres. Credit: University of Colorado Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics

Smallsat Astronomy

The budget for developing, assembling and operating CUTE through the summer of 2024 is about $5.5 million.

“At this cost, we’re still figuring out how to make things work,” France said. “So, working and doing science is batting above your average.”

The missions mimicking CUTE are 12-unit cubesats Sprite and Mantis.

Sprite, which stands for Supernova remnants Proxies for Reionization and Integrated Testbed Experiment, is scheduled for launch in 2024. The $4 million mission will study how gas and dust is processed in galaxies and how energetic ionizing radiation is transported from stars to the intergalactic medium between galaxies.

Mantis, short for Monitoring Activity from Nearby sTars with uv Imaging and Spectroscopy, is an $8.5 million campaign to observe how high-energy radiation from stars influences the habitability of planets.

Ingenuity and Chance

CUTE remains operational more than two years after launch thanks to ingenuity and luck.

The tiny satellite was sent into orbit at a higher altitude than mission planners expected. As a result, CUTE is expected to reenter Earth’s atmosphere in 2027, instead of late this year as originally scheduled.

Additional time in orbit means extra wear and tear on hardware.

“Every time we have a problem, we figure out a new way to operate the spacecraft,” France said.

When the satellite’s primary and backup memory storage cards failed, for example, mission operators learned to communicate directly with CUTE’s scientific payload.

“We send the data down directly from the science payload to the ground and we bypass the spacecraft altogether,” France said.

Distant Galaxies

Cubesats have been widely adopted for civil and commercial space missions since LASP researchers proposed CUTE in 2016.

At the time, “we were beginning to believe we could study the sun and Earth’s upper atmosphere with cubesats,” France said. “But the idea that we could be pointed at targets that are 300, 400 light years away and do high-precision astronomical measurements from the cubesat was ambitious.”

Now that CUTE has shown the potential, small satellites could play key roles in observing distant galaxies, black holes “and all the other things that we’re interested in studying,” France said.

NASA launches Psyche mission to metal world

A NASA spacecraft is finally on its way to a metallic main belt asteroid after a successful Falcon Heavy launch Oct. 13. The SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 10:19 a.m. Eastern. Its payload, NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, separated from the upper stage 62 minutes after liftoff. The launch was the eighth for the Falcon Heavy but the first by that rocket for NASA. In a statement, NASA said controllers established two-way communications with the spacecraft at 11:50 a.m. Eastern, confirming the spacecraft was in good condition as it goes through initial post-launch commissioning. Psyche is a Discovery-class planetary science mission whose destination is an object in the main asteroid belt also called Psyche. That asteroid is made primarily of metal and could be the core of a larger object whose outer layers were stripped away. On its way to the asteroid, the Psyche spacecraft will conduct a technology demonstration. The Deep Space Optical Communications payload on the spacecraft will test the ability of lasers to provide high-bandwidth communications at interplanetary distances. The launch took place more than a week into a three-week launch period. In late September NASA delayed the launch, once scheduled for Oct. 5, by a week after a review found concerns with the operating temperature of cold-gas thrusters used to maneuver the spacecraft. Engineers had to revise the operating parameters of the thrusters to avoid overheating.

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy lifts off Oct. 13 carrying NASA's Psyche spacecraft. Credit: Jordan Sirokie

“There would have been a potential risk of overheating the thrusters and damaging them” if the parameters were not changed, Henry Stone, Psyche project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said at an Oct. 11 briefing. “It was a serious issue that we had to deal with.”

The changes involve a “select subset of parameters” to the thrusters, he said, but did not elaborate on the changes. Those changes, he said, will not affect Psyche’s operations once at the asteroid. “The changes affected some of the timeline margins that we already had, but we’ll conduct the same operations when we get to the body.”

NASA rescheduled the launch for Oct. 12, but postponed it another day because of poor weather. The launch period ran through Oct. 25, with instantaneous launch windows each day.
Earlier problems

Psyche was originally scheduled to launch in August 2022. Delays in testing the flight software, though, forced NASA to skip launch opportunities in August and October 2022. An independent review found that those testing delays were symptoms of broader institutional issues at JPL.

While the problems with both Psyche and JPL have been corrected, they affected several NASA science missions. The 14-month launch delay pushed back the spacecraft’s arrival at the asteroid from 2026 to August 2029. The mission’s cost also increased 20% from $1 billion to $1.2 billion.

Psyche’s delay also affected Janus, an asteroid smallsat mission that was to fly as a secondary payload on the launch. The delay meant that Janus could not fly its original mission to go by two pairs of binary asteroids, and the mission could not find suitable alternative targets with its revised trajectory. NASA announced in July it was canceling Janus and putting the completed spacecraft in storage.

The institutional issues at JPL uncovered in the independent review of Psyche’s delays led NASA to delay the next Discovery-class mission under development at JPL, the Venus Emissivity, Radio science, InSAR, Topography, And Spectroscopy, or VERITAS. That mission, selected in 2021 for launch in 2028, is now scheduled for launch no earlier than 2031.

The Psyche delay and budget increase added stress to the overall NASA planetary science program already dealing with challenges like Mars Sample Return. In the agency’s fiscal year 2024 budget request, NASA said it was postponing a heliophysics mission, the Geospace Dynamics Constellation, citing “high budgetary requirements” from other programs.

The Psyche spacecraft will arrive at the asteroid of the same name in 2029. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

“A new kind of world”

NASA, and scientists involved with Psyche, said the mission is worth the wait and the additional cost. The spacecraft will spend 26 months orbiting at Psyche in four different orbits, studying the largest solar system body made primarily of metal.

“This will be our first time visiting a world that has a metal surface,” said Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Psyche principal investigator at Arizona State University, at a pre-launch briefing.

A key goal of the mission is to determine Psyche’s origins, said Ben Weiss, Psyche deputy principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We have two leading ideas about how Psyche formed,” he said, either as the core of a planetesimal that failed to become a planet, or as a primordial body enriched in metal for some reason.

“We are going to go into orbit around Psyche and measure its various properties at lower and lower altitudes,” he said. The spacecraft is equipped with a camera, gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer and magnetometer.

“It’s primary exploration of a new kind of world,” said Elkins-Tanton. “There aren’t that many completely unexplored types of worlds in our solar system to go see, so that is what is so exciting about this.”

Ispace revises design of lunar lander for NASA CLPS mission

The American subsidiary of Japanese company Ispace has revised the design of a lunar lander it is providing for a NASA mission, pushing back the launch of that mission by a year. The company, ispace technologies U.S., unveiled the new lander design, called APEX 1.0, at a Sept. 28 event at its new headquarters in the Denver suburb of Centennial, Colorado. The lander will be used on a NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) mission awarded to Draper in July 2022 that, at the time, planned to use a lander called Series-2. The lander redesign was driven by the needs of the NASA payloads. “The environmentals didn’t close on the Series-2 design, particularly in the area of vibration,” said Ron Garan, chief executive of ispace U.S., in an interview. “We needed to do a complete redesign of the vehicle in order to accommodate that.” The redesign, he said, ensures that the lander can accommodate the widest possible range of payloads. APEX 1.0 will be able to host up to 300 kilograms of payloads, with the ability to expand to 500 kilograms. The lander also supports the ability to release satellites in lunar orbit, which will be used for the CLPS mission to relay communications from its landing site on the lunar farside. Garan said there is strong interest from other customers in flying payloads both on the CLPS mission, called Mission 3 by ispace and CP-12 by NASA, and subsequent ones. That includes rovers as well as experiments in in situ resource utilization (ISRU). “We’re going after both commercial and government contracts to supplement CP-12. We have payload capacity right now,” he said.

The APEX 1.0 lander from ispace U.S. was designed to better accommodate payloads such as those flying on a NASA CLPS mission in 2026. Credit: ispace U.S.

The APEX 1.0 design has completed preliminary design reviews, with ispace projecting it will pass its critical design review (CDR) by March 2024. Garan said CDR is currently scheduled for December.

The revised lander, though, will delay the mission. When NASA selected the Draper-led team for the mission last year, it projected launch in 2025. That launch has now slipped to 2026, ispace said, because of the lander design.

That has financial implications for the company. In a Sept. 28 statement, ispace, traded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, said it was lowering its sales forecast for the current fiscal year, which runs through March 2024, by more than 50% to 3.05 billion yen ($20.4 million) because the delays in Mission 3 mean payload sales will be recognized in later years.

Separately, ispace said it was lowering its projected net loss for the year by 3.385 billion yen to 4.5 billion yen, citing the payout from an insurance policy on its HAKUTO-R M1 lander that crashed attempting to land on the moon in April.

The company anticipates growing demand for lunar landers, which motivated the decision to move into a new 4,600-square-meter U.S. headquarters. “If we win some more contracts, we’re going to take off on a steeper exponential curve of growth, and so we need a facility that will enable that,” Garan said.

The facility will be able to support production of future landers, although other partners will handle the assembly, integration and testing of the Mission 3 lander. It will also host a growing engineering workforce. Garan said that ispace U.S. had about 50 employees when he joined three and a half months ago, and has now grown to 85. He projected the company will have more than 100 employees by the end of the year.

“It took ispace U.S. a little bit of time to get off the ground, to get going. We are firing on all cylinders now,” he said. “Out goal is to be a significant player, to make a significant contribution to the establishment of lunar infrastructure.”

Crew-7 launches to the space station

A Falcon 9 launched a multinational crew to the International Space Station Aug. 26 after a one-day delay to check the spacecraft’s life support system. The SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center at 3:27 a.m. Eastern on the Crew-7 mission for NASA. The Crew Dragon spacecraft Endurance separated from the Falcon 9’s upper stage a little more than 12 minutes later. Endurance, with its crew of four, is scheduled to dock with the zenith port on the Harmony module of the ISS at 8:39 a.m. Eastern Aug. 27. That will kick off a roughly six-month stay on the station. The launch was scheduled for Aug. 25 but postponed several hours before the scheduled liftoff. NASA said that engineers needed more time to review a component of the Crew Dragon’s life support system, known as ECLSS. NASA did not initially state what that component was but later said it was valves in an air supply system. Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said at the post-launch briefing that after discovering corroded valves in the propulsion system of a cargo Dragon in June, SpaceX “out of an abundance of caution” decided to review all valves on the spacecraft, including for life support and propulsion. The review was designed to check the “force margin,” or the ability of the valve to open and close. “It took a little bit more time to get through the ECLSS valves,” he said, which led to the one-day slip. “We said, let’s stand down for 24 hours and make sure we understand it before we go fly.” That review confirmed that the valves were working properly and required no changes.

A Falcon 9 lifts off from the Kennedy Space Center Aug. 26 on the Crew-7 mission to the ISS. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

During the launch countdown, controllers reported a sensor issue that was cleared shortly before liftoff. At the post-launch briefing, officials said that sensors had detected trace amounts of nitrogen tetroxide, or NTO, from the Crew Dragon spacecraft that indicated a possible propellant leak. NTO is one of the two hypergolic propellants used by the spacecraft’s thrusters.

Benji Reed, senior director of the human spaceflight program at SpaceX, said at the post-launch briefing that the levels of NTO detected were about 0.25 parts per million. Three engineers independently calculated what level of leak could cause that reading and all three came to the same conclusion. “The good news was that the number that we came up with was well within the range of what you might normally see.”

That assessment, though, came down to the wire. “We were working the problem and we cleared it within the last two minutes of the count,” he said.

Crew-7 is the first commercial crew flight to carry people from four different agencies. The mission is commanded by NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli on her first flight to space. European Space Agency astronaut Andreas Mogensen is the pilot; he made a 10-day trip to the station on a Soyuz spacecraft in 2015. Satoshi Furukawa of the Japanese space agency JAXA and Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov are mission specialists. Furukawa flew a long-duration mission to the ISS in 2011 while Borisov is on his first trip to space.

That multinational lineup was simply how the crew assignments worked out, said Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager, at a preflight briefing Aug. 21. “The way the timing worked out for this one with our integrated crew agreement that we have with Roscosmos, it was time for these other folks to fly,” he said.

Stich said at that briefing that another milestone for Crew-7 is having a non-NASA astronaut, Mogensen, be a Crew Dragon pilot for the first time. “It’s a very big deal for us,” he said then.

Such multinational crews will not always be the case. The next Crew Dragon mission to the ISS, Crew-8 launching in early 2024, will have three NASA astronauts and one Roscosmos cosmonaut.

The arrival of Crew-7 will allow NASA to begin preparations for the return of the Crew-6 mission, which has been on the station for nearly six months. Montalbano said at the post-launch briefing that the agency was planning a five-day handover between Crew-6 and Crew-7 before Crew-6 departs on the Crew Dragon spacecraft Endeavour. That timing, though, will depend on weather at splashdown locations off the Florida coast, which could be affected by the expected formation of a tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico in the next several days.