The February 21 launch of a Falcon 9 carried a primary payload of an Indonesian communications satellite and a small military satellite, but the far more interesting payload was the Beresheet Lander from Israeli non-profit SpaceIL. Should Beresheet succeed in its landing on the Moon—which won’t happen until April—it would be the first Israeli landing on the Moon, the first non-governmental landing on the Moon, and the smallest lander ever to successfully reach the surface.
SpaceIL originally began construction on Beresheet with its eyes on Google Lunar X Prize, which would have paid out up to $20 million. The time allowed to receive that award expired, but SpaceIL kept raising funds and making progress—and now its lander is on its way to the Moon. If it makes a landing, it will collect photos and video. It will also make a “hop” across the lunar surface, moving from one landing spot to another about 500 meters away. The requirement of moving across the surface was something that was also part of the original Lunar X-prize challenge. Google clearly expected it to require landing some form of rover, but SpaceIL was just one of several teams that decided to meet that challenge by staging a mini-flight of their entire craft.
While it may have taken Apollo astronauts just days to get to the Moon, Beresheet is taking a slower passage. The Indonesian satellite that paid for the bulk of the Falcon 9 flight was headed for geosynchronous orbit, so that’s where the little lander is getting off. Through a series of maneuvers over the next few weeks, it will move from a highly elliptical Earth-orbit, to a highly-elliptical Lunar orbit, then gradually make its orbit smaller and more circular as it prepares for a landing attempt that should happen around April 11. It’s not fast, but it does save a lot of fuel over the approach of barreling straight at the Moon.
Beresheet could make Israel just the fourth country to land a vehicle on the moon, following the US, Russia and China.
NASA
Nasa.gov is now hosting the best image of Ultima Thule
The first images back from the long-traveling New Horizons probe as it passed Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, also known as Ultima Thule, may have seemed a bit disappointing, but as more data is processed, the details of that distant object become more clear. What first seemed like a “snow man” then a “walnut attached to a pancake” is being displayed in ever greater detail.
These new images of Ultima Thule – obtained by the telephoto Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) just six-and-a-half minutes before New Horizons’ closest approach to the object (officially named 2014 MU69) at 12:33 a.m. EST on Jan. 1, 2019 – offer a resolution of about 110 feet (33 meters) per pixel. Their combination of high spatial resolution and a favorable viewing angle gives the team an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the surface, as well as the origin and evolution, of Ultima Thule, which is thought to be the most primitive object ever encountered by a spacecraft.
A leftover bit from the Solar System before it really was a system with something that would be recognized as planets.
Virgin Galactic
SpaceNews covers a new flight of SpaceShip Two as VG carries its first passenger.
Jeff Foust
SpaceShipTwo successfully flew to the edge of space for the second time Feb. 22, carrying three people for the first time as the company moved closer to beginning commercial operations of the suborbital spaceplane.
VSS Unity, as the second SpaceShipTwo vehicle is named, was released from its WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft at 11:53 a.m. Eastern, about 45 minutes after taking off from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. It fired its hybrid rocket engine for roughly one minute, flying to an altitude of 89.9 kilometers and top speed of Mach 3 before gliding back to a runway landing in Mojave at 12:08 p.m. Eastern.
One big landmark — in addition to the two pilots, this flight carried a passenger, Beth Moses, who is the Chief Astronaut Instructor for Virgin Galactic. Moses is also the first female passenger or pilot on a Virgin Galactic flight.
Moses’ flight comes as Virgin Galactic’s founder Richard Branson has indicated he intends to take a flight on Unity some time in the next few months, saying that he expects to be “in space” in time for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing in July. VSS Unity is designed to take to take as many as six passengers along in addition to the two pilots on any flight. In the last six months, the frequency and altitude of flights has increased as Virgin Galactic prepares to move into commercial service.
The pilots on the last Virgin Galactic flight received astronauts wings from the FAA. The pilots, and Moses, should receive the same after this flight.
SpaceX
The launch of the Nasantara Satu comm satellite and the Beresheet Lander.
NASA has also cleared SpaceX for the test flight of Crew Dragon on March 2.
Following a full day of briefings and discussion, NASA and SpaceX are proceeding with plans to conduct the first uncrewed test flight of the Crew Dragon on a mission to the International Space Station. Launch is scheduled for 2:48 a.m. EST Saturday, March 2 from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It will be the first time a commercially built and operated American rocket and spacecraft designed for humans will launch to the space station.
This time, after a lot of delays, it may just happen.
JAXA
Ars Technica reports on Hayabusa2’s successful touchdown on asteroid Ryugu
Today, in an extended Twitter thread and ensuing press conference, JAXA's Hayabusa2 team announced that everything had gone well in gathering an asteroid sample for eventual return to Earth. While we don't yet know about the material it obtained, the Japanese spacecraft has successfully executed all the commands associated with the sample recovery.
Hayabusa2 has been in space since 2014, and it slowly made its way to an orbit 20km above the surface of the asteroid Ryugu. In late 2018, the spacecraft made a close approach to the asteroid and released two small, solar-powered robots that have been hopping on the surface since. This week has seen the first of what are intended to be several sample-gathering attempts.
Kosmos 1
If you’re waiting for news on the flight of Kosmos 1, know that the ‘capsule’ and contents have been ready for some time now. Ready for so long that my itchy soldering finger has led me to build flight computer version 2, and 3, and 4. The current version, building using an Adafruit Feather board and a GPS featherwing is nice and small. Small enough that I may fly it side by side with a Ardiuno nano-based board so that both can get a test when it comes to how they work at altitude.
What’s not been ready is the weather. The St. Louis area has had snow, ice, rain, rainy snow, icy rain, or snowy rain ice for what seems like weeks. Today it’s fog and thunderstorms over the melting slush from the sleet storm that hit a couple of days ago. And if conditions on the ground have been bad, they’ve also been accompanied by freakishly fast winds at altitude, enough so that a two hour balloon flight might have had me looking for a touchdown near either Louisville or Indianapolis.
So for the meantime, I’m just iterating on everything, trying to create a system with the best possibility for success, and waiting for better weather. And it’s unlikely to be next week, because I’m hoping to head for Florida on Thursday to catch the Demo-1 flight of the Dragon 1 capsule on its way to the ISS. So, at the moment, it’s looking like either March 16 or 23, which puts the flight about two months behind what I had originally hoped.
Dang space flights. Always getting delayed. Even when the capsule is a Styrofoam minnow bucket.