Last week, we celebrated the launch anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope.
And this week, well, we're catching up in the news that NASA has paused telescope science due to a gyro issue.
So the US Space Agency is working to resume science operations on Hubble after it entered safe mode on April 23 due to an ongoing gyroscope issue.
NASA says Hubble's instruments are stable and the telescope is in good health, but it automatically entered safe mode when one of its three gyroscopes gave faulty readings.
It's just a typical Monday in space now, isn't it?
Today is April 29, 2024.
I'm Maria Varmausis and this is T-minus.
SpaceX launches Galileo satellites.
Spire contracted by a financial firm for weather monitoring.
Comstack recommends moving AST out of the FAA.
And our guest today is Dr.
Stefan Frey, CEO and co-founder of German-based space startup Vioma.
And I spoke to Stefan about their approach to space traffic management, so stick around for that chat later in the program.
We start today's briefing with a launch announcement.
I'm not going to surprise many of you to hear that the launch in question was on a SpaceX Falcon 9, but it wasn't the usual Starlink satellites that were being transported to low Earth orbit on Saturday.
Actually it was the latest Galileo satellites.
And the weekend flight marked the first time that the European Commission's Galileo satellites launched onboard an American-made rocket and from US soil.
The Galileo satellite constellation, as you might know, is part of Europe's global navigation satellite system.
And historically, all of the satellites for Galileo have launched on either Russian Soyuz rockets or on the Ariane 5.
But neither are an option right now, as ESA stopped using Soyuz as a launch vehicle following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
And on top of that, the final Ariane 5 rocket, as you might remember, launched in July 2023, hence the use of the Falcon 9s.
The Galileo satellites that launched on Saturday will support the current constellation and offer supplementary services in the event that another satellite stops working as intended.
Another big difference with this weekend's launch was that SpaceX did not recover the first stage.
The first stage booster on this mission, tail number B-1060 on the SpaceX fleet for those keeping track at home, launched for a 20th and final time.
SpaceX did not plan to recover B-1060, quote, "due to the additional performance requirement to deliver the payload to medium Earth orbit."
According to SpaceX's social media, the last time a first stage was expended during a Falcon 9 mission was 146 flights ago in November 2022.
It is quite incredible to think that they've managed to recover boosters for this length of time.
And now we're moving on to a bit of a mystery announcement.
Earth observation, as most of us know, is a pretty big market, and it's used by space companies and increasingly by non-traditional space companies.
It was only last week that we were talking to colleagues about how McDonald's has used Earth observation to monitor their cattle.
So it should come as no surprise that the financial sector also wants in.
Spire Global has announced that they've entered into a multi-million dollar deal with a financial firm to provide its high-resolution weather forecasting model.
The model offers a six-day outlook powered by proprietary data collected from space.
The contract also calls on Spire to develop an AI-powered model for long-range forecasting.
But not a lot of details about the amounts of money involved here or which financial firm is actually contracting Spire.
But certainly it's interesting to hear that they're looking into weather forecasting using space-based tech.
So question for you listeners, who do you think will be dabbling in the space arena next?
Something to think about, huh?
And staying with Earth observation for a moment, GAF AG has been awarded a multi-year framework contract for the automated analysis of satellite data for the monitoring of all agricultural areas in the German federal state of Bavaria.
The contract is part of the European Common Agricultural Policy, or CAP, and runs for four years.
It covers the monitoring of numerous crop types, as well as the evaluation of compliance with agri-environmental and climate protection measures, using optical and radar data from the European Copernicus Sentinel Program.
The Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee, known as ComSTAC, met last week.
Now ComSTAC was established in 1984 to provide information, advice, and recommendations to the FAA administrator on critical matters concerning the U.S.
Commercial Space Transportation Industry.
And the group has proposed that the Commercial Space Transportation Office, also called AST, be moved out of the FAA.
The advisory group says that the move would address the perception that AST currently does not receive the resources it needs to regulate a growing space launch industry in its current form within the FAA.
So we will see how the FAA and industry react to the proposal in the coming months.
Stay tuned for that one.
CERES Robotics has been selected by NASA to develop the company's lunar power grid, named Moon Power.
That kind of makes sense.
The NASA Sibber Phase II contract is for CERES to further the development of key components of the C-Tower.
The contract focuses on a deployable, retractable, truss-mast to commission 50 kilowatt-class solar arrays on the lunar surface.
Moon Power is a lunar power generation and distribution system to support continuous robotic and human operations on the moon.
It is designed to deliver reliable and sustainable power to support lunar habitats, rovers, and construction systems for future robotic and crewed lunar missions.
Evolution Space held a full-scale static fire of their tactical propulsion architecture.
The company says the test was done as a part of an effort to help address the critical gap in solid rocket motor supply that's currently impacting U.S. strategic interests.
The motor, measuring over five feet in length, was sized to mirror one of the tactical motors, facing significant shortages as global conflicts arise.
Over 9,000 pounds of thrust was sustained for approximately one second, exceeding the targeted performance metrics.
Evolution says they will now move from development to qualification of the recently tested motor, as well as to other primary tactical propulsion architectures, with its next flight test scheduled for mid-summer.
The Senegalese Space Study Agency has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Turkish Space Agency.
The MOU focuses on human capacity development and space infrastructure advancement between the two nations.
The agreement between Senegal and Turkey outlines collaborative efforts in research, technology exchange, and joint projects to advance space exploration and the utilization of both nations in space-related endeavors.
China has shared the first images captured by its Einstein probe satellite.
The satellite is equipped with a wide-field X-ray telescope and a follow-up X-ray telescope, and both of which can simultaneously achieve wide-field observation and X-ray-focused imaging.
The 11 released images include observations of objects near the center of the Milky Way, as in the supermassive black hole M87 and supernova remnants, as well as the first captured X-ray transients.
Very cool.
Over to Tiangong Space Station now, and the Shenzhou-17 crew have handed over the keys, metaphorically speaking, to the Chinese spacecraft over to the crew of Shenzhou-18.
The ceremony was held on Sunday to symbolize the handover between crew missions, and the three-man Shenzhou-17 crew are due to return to Earth tomorrow.
And it is launch week in southern Australia.
High impulse and the southern launch range have said that weather conditions have caused a slight delay in plans.
They are targeting no earlier than 7 a.m. local time on Thursday, May 2 to launch the SR-75-1 "Light This Candle" mission from the Kuniba Test Range.
The range is planning on a viewing of the launch from nearby Kuniba Township.
Godspeed and at Astra to all involved.
And that concludes our briefing for today.
As always, you'll find links to further reading on all the stories that we've mentioned in our show notes.
We've also added a piece on SpaceX's progress with Starship, and a Bloomberg article on India's space program and their upcoming election.
Hey T-Minus Crew, every Monday we produce a written intelligence roundup.
It's called Signals and Space, so if you happen to miss any T-Minus episodes, this strategic intelligence product will get you up to speed in the fastest way possible.
It's all signal, no noise.
You can sign up for signals and space in our show notes or at space.ntuk.com.
Our guest today is Dr.
Stefan Frey, CEO and co-founder of German-based base startup Vioma.
I'm Stefan, I'm the CEO of Vioma.
We are in the business of space situational awareness, so we want to make sure that everyone up there flies safely, that their assets are protected both against accidental but also against malicious attacks.
Fantastic, thank you for joining me today, I appreciate it.
So tell me a little bit about Vioma's approach to space traffic management.
Yeah, so what we realize is that there is not enough information up there.
We don't know where are all the objects and we don't know if they changed their course.
We only know maybe a day later, maybe two days later, so we need to act faster than that and that's why we realize we want to generate our own observational data and that is why we're putting our own satellites into space to observe the space environment, building our own space object catalog, but not only of large objects but also small objects down to a couple of centimeters because as you probably know and your listeners as well, they're also a danger for satellites up there.
Absolutely, yeah.
So tell me about the satellites that you're working on.
Yeah, so they are roughly 100 kilograms of micro satellites, more or less your dishwasher size let's say, because we realize that of course to be able to see also the small objects, we need to have a very sensitive sensor and that means for us since we have an optical and that means we need a large aperture.
We need to be able to collect as much light as possible from those objects.
On top of that, we have a very long stray light baffle and that allows us to really see in almost any direction.
So our field of regard, meaning wherever we want to be able to point is more than a hemisphere and that in turn again allows us to be able to observe objects or events of interest within just a couple of minutes because we're space born and that is what we can achieve.
Fantastic, so once you have that data, you're also doing data processing as well, is that right?
Yes, that's correct.
So we already partially do it on board of the satellite itself because we don't want to have to download all the image data because of course they're very large.
So we do already the image processing on board, reducing those images to just a couple of small specs that are of interest to us.
We then process these data, we do tracking data information and we then do the orbit determination so that we can build and maintain our own catalogue of space objects.
Fantastic, so who are your customers?
Who are you looking to work with?
So we have two segments, let's say one of them is the defense sector because of course they need to know whenever there is someone attacking their assets up in space as well.
As you know, very well aware, space has become a military operational domain as well and that's why we need to protect those assets.
But on the other hand, we also have commercial customers because we want to make sure that whenever there is a collision risk, we can tell them and we can tell them with the very accurate data, right?
So in most cases, they don't need to do a maneuver and that's why with better data, we can really make their operations more efficient.
So I should maybe get into a little bit of the history of your company, like why you founded it, was there a specific mission or I mean you mentioned it a little bit but just a little bit about the genesis of YOMO would be great.
So me and my co-founders, we come out of the European Space Agency, let's say environment.
I myself personally have been working for the Space Debris Office for a couple of years and of course there I learned everything about the problem itself that is being posed to satellite operators when it comes to the risk of losing their assets because of collisions.
And we realized there and then that there is not enough data and we today, satellite operators have to take decisions based on very little information.
They're basically flying blind and this is what we want to change.
Yeah, so what's very interesting to me about many different organizations trying to take on this challenge is there are different approaches.
I'm curious if your differentiator, I guess is the question here, what you do differently.
Yeah, no, that's a good question.
I think we're still at the level where any kind of information is helpful, right?
So we need to all work on all fronts to be able to generate as much data as possible.
What we really want to push down is the kind of latency that you require.
So we want to be able to, someone is asking us, okay, there is an object that made a maneuver, we need to know where it's going and we can tell everything in just a couple of minutes and this is where we want to go.
I want to make sure I hear a little bit about long-term vision, long-term plans.
I'd love to hear a bit about that.
Yeah.
So we are not only providing services to satellite operators, we are a satellite operator ourselves, right?
We put satellites into space, so we are developing all these kind of flight dynamics, mission planning tools that you require to operate your satellite and we want to make this available also to our customers.
So we're really going to provide an entire suit when it comes to safety but operations of satellites and where we want to go long-term, of course, is the automation of those satellites because reliability and resilience is very important.
We want to make sure that your satellite continues flying safely even if you lose connection for maybe three days so the satellite can take their own decisions moving out of the way of the interest situation.
That's fascinating.
Can you talk about how that would happen?
That's very fascinating to me.
Yeah.
Of course, you can always have, you know, upload as much data as possible to the satellite and then once it doesn't get any information anymore because you have a power outage or whatever, a communication outage, it can then still estimate where are all the objects and making sure that it takes its own decisions ultimately without supervision.
It truly autonomously on it.
Correct.
That's the idea.
I love that.
I just, sorry.
I geeked out a little bit.
I just think that's so neat.
That's so cool.
Well, thank you so much.
It's been a pleasure speaking with you.
My pleasure, ma'am.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
We'll be right back.
Welcome back.
And we're talking maps now.
If you have a certain age like me, then those used to mean actual paper maps that were always a pain to refold.
Thank goodness for satellite navigation systems, huh?
But innovation isn't about to stop there with sat nav.
A new project sponsored by the International Space Station National Laboratory called the Multi-Resolution Scanner, or MRS, is testing a novel 3D mapping technology.
MRS is designed to rapidly create 3D maps of various environments in unprecedented detail, like the space station or even a lava tube on the moon or Mars.
The famous little robotic Astro-B's aboard the ISS will use onboard sensors and perception algorithms to simultaneously build detailed maps of the environment while localizing themselves within it.
This capability is called simultaneous localization and mapping, or SLAM.
MRS relies on cutting-edge photogrammetry software called Stereo-Depth Fusion and 3D SLAM technology called Wildcat.
Catch all that?
The software enables MRS to map, analyze, and navigate its surrounding environment autonomously.
And this project is a collaboration between Boeing and CYRO, the Australian government agency responsible for scientific research.
The Lunar Gateway and even other outposts in space could be predominantly crewed by robots and it's hoped that this 3D mapping technology would enable robotic helpers to keep systems going autonomously when humans aren't present.
This is pretty neat stuff.
I wonder how long until we're all navigating using 3D maps in our vehicles on Earth.
I'm not sure if I'm ready for that, but that still will be pretty cool.
That's it for T-Minus for April 29, 2024.
For additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes at space.ntuk.com.
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This episode was produced by Alice Karuth, mixing by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester, with original music and sound design by Elliot Peltzman.
Our associate producer is Liz Stokes.
Our executive producer is Jen Iben.
Our VP is Brandon Karpf.
And I'm Maria Varmausis.
Thanks for listening.
We'll see you tomorrow.
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