D-Orbit and Astrocast sign new agreement for the launch of ten nanosats

Astrocast and D-Orbit have signed an agreement for the launch and deployment in LEO low inclination orbit of ten Astrocast nanosatellites through D-Orbit 's InOrbit NOW Launch Service. The agreement calls for the Astrocast nanosatellites to be launched onboard an Arianespace Vega or Vega C vehicle from Kourou, French Guyana, in the first quarter of 2022. This batch of nanosatellites will make up the Astrocast IoT Nanonsatellite Network's equatorial plane. The Astrocast constellation will consist of eight orbital planes, each consisting of eight operational and two spare satellites. The complete 80-unit Low Earth Orbit network will provide cost-effective two-way communications for the millions of IoT devices in remote areas of the world. Astrocast's constellation is expected to disrupt numerous enterprises, creating substantial efficiencies and cost advantages within key global sectors including maritime, oil and gas, mining, supply chain and logistics, automotive, utilities, and many others. Following an earlier InOrbit NOW mission planned in 2020 to deploy another batch of ten Astrocast satellites in sun-synchronous orbit, this mission will mark a total of twenty Astrocast satellites to be launched and deployed by D-Orbit. During the planned Astrocast mission, the ten nanosatellites will travel inside the DCube dispensers, designed by D-Orbit to reduce vibration and shock levels during launch.

"Reliable access to space is critical for Astrocast as we move quickly to deploy our constellation. We feel D-Orbit is a critical partner in our efforts and we are very excited to further our commitment to working together," said Kjell Karlsen, CFO, Astrocast.

"We are honored to contribute to the expansion of Astrocast's infrastructure in low inclination orbits" commented Renato Panesi, D-Orbit COO.

"This contract expands previous agreements with Astrocast and strengthens the cooperation between the two companies. We feel honored by Astrocast's renewed trust in our company and it's a privilege for D-Orbit to contribute to such an important mission".

CAPTION Ten Astrocast nanosatellites to be launched in low inclination orbit on Arianespace Vega or Vega C

Secrecy Tightens for X-37B

The recent landing of the latest X-37B robot spaceplane mission has been less visible to outsiders than any previous mission. The US Air Force has released photos of the spacecraft taken soon after its return. They show that the vehicle seems to be in fairly good condition after its longest flight ever, which extended for well over two years. The photos also show that the spacecraft has no visible features that would distinguish it from other spacecraft launched in this program, and in some ways make it hard to know exactly which one of the identical X-37B vehicles was used on this mission. We can probably judge that the mission was successful, but we are still not entirely sure of what the spacecraft was doing in orbit. Analysts have been speculating on the program for years, and have never been successful in penetrating the veil of secrecy surrounding the project. While the project itself is an amazing feat of technology, kudos must be extended to the team behind the scenes, who have managed to keep so much under wraps for so long. The existence of X-37B is no secret, and much has been officially released into the public domain. But there is an ongoing trend of tightening secrecy for the X-37B. In the past, we were given detailed images of the spacecraft being encapsulated in its payload fairing for launch, and then treated to nice video and images of its landing. That changed for recent missions, when pre-launch imagery of the spacecraft was not released. At the time, this analyst speculated that something had changed with the hardware, and this needed to be concealed.

The theory was that some form of instrument or sensor target had been added to the interface between the spacecraft and its launch vehicle, which would be used in some sort of interactions between the X-37B and the final launch stage shortly after launch.

The fact that the US Air Force had no problems with releasing full views of the spaceplane after landing suggested that any sensitive parts were on the rocket and not the X-37B itself.

This time, it's different. Admittedly, we still have photos of the spacecraft after landing, but they are far more restricted than ever before. The US Air Force Web site and an affiliated site contain just two images of the latest landing. No video of the landing has been released, either, which is also a departure from earlier trends.

Curiously, the images do not give any proper views of the rear of the spacecraft. By not showing certain things, the USAF is hinting that something unusual is there.

What could it be? This analyst suggests that some sort of calibration target is pasted to the rear of the X-37B. It was presumably photographed by sensors on the rocket soon after the spaceplane separated from it. This suggests that cameras or other sensors are being tested for close inspections of other satellites. T

hat being said, this analyst does not believe that any X-37B mission has ever made a close inspection of any foreign satellite, despite speculation elsewhere.

An alternative theory could be that there is a mounting bracket for a sub-satellite that was deployed from X-37B at some point in its mission. Such a satellite would be very small, and would presumably be in close proximity to the spaceplane. Thus, it could be hard to track or detect it.

What really lies at the rear of the spacecraft? We may never know until this program is declassified, and we could be waiting a long time for that.

NASA attaches first of 4 RS-25 engines to Artemis I rocket stage

Engineers and technicians at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans have structurally mated the first of four RS-25 engines to the core stage for NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket that will help power the first Artemis mission to the Moon. Integration of the RS-25 engines to the recently completed core stage structure is a collaborative, multistep process for NASA and its partners Boeing, the core stage lead contractor, and Aerojet Rocketdyne, the RS-25 engines lead contractor. To complete the installation, the technicians will now integrate the propulsion and electrical systems. The installation process will be repeated for each of the four RS-25 engines. The four RS-25 engines used for Artemis I were delivered to Michoud from Aerojet Rocketdyne's facility at NASA's Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, in June. The engines, located at the bottom of the core stage in a square pattern, are fueled by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. During launch and flight, the four engines will fire nonstop for 8.5 minutes, emitting hot gases from each nozzle 13 times faster than the speed of sound. The completed core stage with all four engines attached will be the largest rocket stage NASA has built since the Saturn V stages for the Apollo Program.

NASA is working to land the first woman and next man on the Moon by 2024. SLS is part of NASA's backbone for deep space exploration, along with Orion and the Gateway in orbit around the Moon. SLS is the only rocket that can send Orion, astronauts and supplies to the Moon on a single mission.

Breakthrough Listen to collaborate with scientists from NASA's TESS Team

Breakthrough Listen announced this week at the International Astronautical Congress in Washington, DC, a new collaboration with scientists working on NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. The new collaboration will be led by TESS Deputy Science Director, MIT Professor Sara Seager; S. Pete Worden, Executive Director of the Breakthrough Initiatives; Dr. Andrew Siemion, leader of the Breakthrough Listen science team at the University of California, Berkeley's SETI Research Center; and will engage Listen partners and collaborators worldwide. The TESS and Listen collaboration will expand Breakthrough Listen's target list (adding over 1,000 "objects of interest" identified by TESS); refine Listen's analysis strategy (for example, utilizing new knowledge about planetary alignments to predict when transmissions might be more likely to occur); and provide more meaningful statistics in the event of non-detections. Observations will take place using Listen's primary facilities (the Green Bank and Parkes Telescopes, MeerKAT, and the Automated Planet Finder), as well as partner facilities including VERITAS, NenuFAR, FAST, the Murchison Widefield Array, LOFAR stations in Ireland and Sweden, Jodrell Bank Observatory and e-MERLIN, Keck Observatory, and the Sardinia Radio Telescope, along with the SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array. "It's exciting that the world's most powerful SETI search, with our partner facilities across the globe, will be collaborating with the TESS team and our most capable planet-hunting machine," remarked Dr. Worden. "We're looking forward to working together as we try to answer one of the most profound questions about our place in the universe: Are we alone?"

The TESS mission measures "light curves" (how the brightness of stars changes over time) to look for telltale dips caused by "transits" - where a planet passes in front of the star as viewed from Earth. The cutting-edge instruments on TESS are sensitive enough to detect small, rocky planets similar to Earth. Such planets are prime targets for follow-up by NASA programs, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, that seek to measure planetary atmospheres. Careful measurements of atmospheric composition could result in the detection of "biosignatures" - indicators that biological processes may be taking place on worlds other than Earth.

As well as looking for biosignatures, astrobiologists search for "technosignatures" - indicators of technology that may have been developed by advanced civilizations. Also known as SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence), technosignature searches use powerful telescopes to look for signals coming from space that appear to have arisen from transmitters, propulsion devices, or other engineering.

No unambiguous technosignatures have been seen to date, but the chances of detection are higher than they have ever been, in large part due to Breakthrough Listen - the most sensitive, comprehensive, and intensive search for advanced life on other worlds ever performed. Listen is using facilities across the globe, including cutting-edge optical telescopes, to search for powerful lasers, and the world's most capable radio telescopes to search for signals over a wide range of the radio spectrum.

In the past three decades over 4,000 exoplanets have been discovered - many by TESS's predecessor, the Kepler spacecraft. According to recent estimates, the average number of planets per star is greater than one. As a result, technosignature searches operate in a "target-rich" environment, observing stars whether or not confirmed planets are known to exist around them. Nevertheless, as the haul of confirmed exoplanets continues to grow, the additional information about these systems is very useful for optimizing SETI strategies.

Launched in April 2018, TESS has four wide-field cameras, each monitoring a region of sky 24 degrees across (about the width of the span of your hand when held at arm's length). Light curves for 20,000 stars are measured every 2 minutes, and in addition, the brightness of every pixel in the cameras is recorded every 30 minutes.

TESS will observe over 85% of the sky - around 400 times more than Kepler - and is predicted to find as many as 10,000 new planets. Most of the TESS targets are considerably closer to Earth than those viewed by Kepler, enabling technosignature searches to probe for fainter transmitters.

And because TESS only sees planets that pass in front of their host star as viewed from Earth, all the planetary systems it detects will be edge-on. A large fraction (roughly 70%) of radio leakage from Earth-based transmitters is emitted in the plane of Earth's orbit; if the same is true for any transmitters developed by extraterrestrial intelligence, observing the systems edge-on will offer the best chance of detection.

In addition to targeting of TESS planets with Listen facilities, the TESS light curves themselves will be searched for anomalies. A planet transit produces a well-understood variation in detected light from the star, but large-scale engineering projects (for example, "megastructures" constructed in orbit) could block the stellar light in more complex ways. The TESS analysis pipeline is in essence a wide-field anomaly detector, and stars that behave strangely are interesting not just as technosignature candidates, but as potential laboratories for studying interesting astrophysics.

"The discovery by the Kepler spacecraft of Boyajian's star, an object with wild, and apparently random, variations in its light curve, sparked great excitement and a range of possible explanations, of which megastructures were just one," said Dr. Siemion. "Follow-up observations have suggested that dust particles in orbit around the star are responsible for the dimming, but studies of anomalies like this are expanding our knowledge of astrophysics, as well as casting a wider net in the search for technosignatures."

"We are very enthusiastic about joining the Breakthrough Listen SETI search," said Prof. Sara Seager. "Out of all the exoplanet endeavors only SETI holds the promise for identifying signs of intelligent life."

Breakthrough Listen is a scientific program in search for evidence of technological life in the universe. It aims to survey one million nearby stars, the entire galactic plane and 100 nearby galaxies at a wide range of radio and optical bands.

https://tess.mit.edu TESS

http://seti.berkeley.edu BSRC

NASA wants international partners to go to Moon too

As it looks to return to the Moon, NASA is open to the idea of international participation, which could mean a non-American setting foot on Earth's natural satellite for the first time in history, global space chiefs said Monday. "I think there's lots of room on the Moon, and we need all our international partners to go with us to the Moon," NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told reporters at the 70th International Astronautical Congress held in Washington. "If we can come to agreements on the contributions of all the nations and how they're going to be a part of the architecture, then certainly I would, I would see that there'd be no reason we can't have all of our international partners with us on the Moon," he added. The Americans are developing a spacecraft (Orion) and a mini space station (Gateway) that will remain in lunar orbit, which will in theory be used for a first crewed mission in 2024, Artemis 3. Only one element of the mission will be produced outside the US: the Orion service module that will supply it with electricity, propulsion, thermal control, air and water in space and is being delivered by the European Space Agency (ESA). Only once the Gateway is expanded will non-Americans be able to make the journey too. "We are in discussion also with NASA, so that we have European astronauts on the surface of the Moon -- this is of course the European intention," said Jan Worner, head of the ESA, at the same press conference. "2024 is for sure something which is purely American," he later told AFP. For Europeans, it could be "2027, 2028, something like that."

For its part, Japan also wants to take advantage of the new US program to write a new chapter in its own history.

"It's a very simple question to me because JAXA would like to send Japanese astronauts to the surface of the Moon," said Hiroshi Yamakawa, president of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

The building of the ISS in the late 1990s and 2000s appeared to usher in a new era of space cooperation between the US and Russia following the Cold War, but this time around, Washington is in no mood to work with geopolitical rivals.

Specifically, the US Congress has explicitly prohibited any cooperation with China, the world's biggest economy and an emerging space power.

During his speech inaugurating the weeklong conference, Vice President Mike Pence repeated seven times that the US wanted to work with "freedom-loving nations."