Author: Peter Smith

In a bid to expedite its ambitious Artemis moon program, NASA has shortlisted eleven US companies, including the likes of Northrop Grumman and Sierra Nevada, to research, design and develop lunar lander prototypes capable of landing humans on the lunar surface, the agency announced in a May 17 press release.

As part of its Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP), NASA is awarding a combined amount of more than $45 million to these companies.

However, since NextSTEP is a public/private partnership program, the companies will have to shell out twenty percent of the overall project cost from their own coffers, which would not only reduce the taxpayer’s burden but also attract private investment in the potentially lucrative lunar business.

“To accelerate our return to the Moon, we are challenging our traditional ways of doing business,” Marshall Smith, director for human lunar exploration programs at NASA Headquarters, said in the press release.

“We will streamline everything from procurement to partnerships to hardware development and even operations,” he added.

“Our team is excited to get back to the Moon quickly as possible, and our public/private partnerships to study human landing systems are an important step in that process,” he also said.

Since time is of the essence to NASA, it is putting into effect what it calls “undefinitized contract actions,” which essentially means the awardees will be paid in advance to start part of the work even before a final contract is agreed upon and signed.

“We’re taking major steps to begin development as quickly as possible, including invoking a NextSTEP option that allows our partners to begin work while we’re still negotiating,” Greg Chavers – human landing system formulation manager at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama – said in the release.

“We’re keen to collect early industry feedback about our human landing system requirements, and the undefinitized contract action will help us do that,” he added.

While NASA has not provided any design specifications to the awardees, it does plan to issue a “formal solicitation” this summer, laying down its requirements for the lunar lander.

It will then be up to the awardees to “propose innovative concepts, hardware development and integration.”

“This new approach doesn’t prescribe a specific design or number of elements for the human landing system,” Chavers said.

“NASA needs the system to get our astronauts on the surface and return them home safely, and we’re leaving a lot of the specifics to our commercial partners.”

Since the lunar lander will be based on three main elements – transfer, descent and refueling – each partner has been assigned specific areas to work on.

Here’s a list of the eleven awardees and their areas of responsibility

1. Aerojet Rocketdyne – Canoga Park, California: One transfer vehicle study
2. Blue Origin – Kent, Washington: One descent element study, one transfer vehicle study, and one transfer vehicle prototype
3. Boeing – Houston: One descent element study, two descent element prototypes, one transfer vehicle study, one transfer vehicle prototype, one refueling element study, and one refueling element prototype
4. Dynetics – Huntsville, Alabama: One descent element study and five descent element prototypes
5. Lockheed Martin – Littleton, Colorado: One descent element study, four descent element prototypes, one transfer vehicle study, and one refueling element study
6. Masten Space Systems – Mojave, California: One descent element prototype
7. Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems – Dulles, Virginia: One descent element study, four descent element prototypes, one refueling element study, and one refueling element prototype
8. OrbitBeyond – Edison, New Jersey: Two refueling element prototypes
9. Sierra Nevada Corporation, Louisville, Colorado, and Madison, Wisconsin: One descent element study, one descent element prototype, one transfer vehicle study, one transfer vehicle prototype, and one refueling element study
10. SpaceX – Hawthorne, California: One descent element study
11. SSL – Palo Alto, California: One refueling element study and one refueling element prototype

Earlier this week, in a bid to arouse public interest in its ‘Moon2024′ mission, NASA released a video trailer, voiced-over by none other than William Shatner – the man most of us know as Captain Kirk, from Star Trek.

The short clip highlights the agency’s trailblazing Apollo success five decades ago; the challenges faced in cutting through the fictions of science then; and the challenges ahead as it works toward putting humans back on the moon by as early as 2024 – this time, to stay.

“Our charge is to go quickly, and to stay, to press our collective efforts forward with a fervor that will see us return to the moon in a manner that is wholly different than 50 years ago,” Shatner narrates.

“Our greatest adventures remain ahead of us. We are going.”

The video came on the heels of Monday’s christening of the mission, which the agency has decided to name ‘Artemis,’ the Greek mythology goddess of the moon and the twin sister of Apollo, after whom the lunar missions of the sixties and seventies were named.

It was definitely not a random choice, considering the agency’s plan to put the first woman on the lunar surface as part of the Moon2024 mission, or should we say the Artemis mission.

So important is the Moon2024 mission to the Trump administration that it has proposed a revised 2020 budget, seeking a further $1.6 billion to add to NASA’s $21 billion 2020 budget request.

The additional funding would go towards accelerating the program to meet the 2024 deadline for the mission, which was earlier planned for 2028.

Under my Administration, we are restoring @NASA to greatness and we are going back to the Moon, then Mars. I am updating my budget to include an additional $1.6 billion so that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 13, 2019

Launched on August 20, 1977, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft became the second human creation to break through the Sun’s heliopause and enter interstellar space, achieving the feat on Nov 5, 2018 – officially announced by the space agency on Monday (Dec 10).

While the heliopause is the boundary separating the Sun’s heliosphere from interstellar space, the heliosphere itself is a vast region surrounding the Sun that is dominated by its continuously expanding plasma known as the solar wind.

It is because of this solar wind that objects within this vast bubble of heliosphere, including Earth, are relatively better protected from the impact of galactic cosmic rays that are far more dominant beyond the heliopause – in interstellar space.

While most of the material inside the heliosphere originates from the Sun, a majority of those found outside the heliopause come from stars that exploded billions of years ago.

The sudden drop in Voyager 2’s plasma readings of the solar wind and the corresponding increase in hits from galactic cosmic ray particles were strong indicators of the Nov 5 crossover.

Voyager 1 experienced this transition on August 25, 2012, more than six years before Voyager 2, making it the first spacecraft to achieve the feat even though it was launched 16 days after (Sep 5, 1977) its twin – thanks to its superior speed.

Explaining the difference between the two heliopause crossings at a press conference, Voyager project scientist at Caltech and former JPL director, Ed Stone, said that the team would have been “ amazed” had both the crossings appeared the same.

“We’re in a different place — one is in the northern hemisphere and the other is in the southern hemisphere — and it’s a different time in the solar cycle,” he said.

“Comparing data from different instruments aboard the trailblazing spacecraft, mission scientists determined the probe crossed the outer edge of the heliosphere on Nov. 5,” said a NASA press release.

“This boundary, called the heliopause, is where the tenuous, hot solar wind meets the cold, dense interstellar medium,” said the release.

“Its twin, Voyager 1, crossed this boundary in 2012, but Voyager 2 carries a working instrument that will provide first-of-its-kind observations of the nature of this gateway into interstellar space,” it added.

Voyager 2 is now more than 11 billion miles from earth, getting farther and farther away as it hurtles through the interstellar void at 34,191 miles per hour (55,025 kph).

However, it is still 300 years short of entering the disc-shaped inner Oort cloud and another 30,000 years away from exiting the spherical outer Oort cloud, completely beyond the influence of the solar system.

“The boundary of the Solar System is considered to be beyond the outer edge of the Oort Cloud, a collection of small objects that are still under the influence of the Sun’s gravity,” NASA said.

“I think we’re all happy and relieved that the Voyager probes have both operated long enough to make it past this milestone,” Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), was quoted as saying in the Dec 10 release.

“This is what we’ve all been waiting for,” she said, adding that the team was “now looking forward to what we’ll be able to learn from having both probes outside the heliopause.”

Also, now that both the Voyagers are in interstellar space – beyond the range of the protective forces of the heliosphere – scientists are looking forward to doing a comparative analysis between readings from their onboard instruments and those from spacecraft and instruments that are currently within the heliosphere.

“I’ve been studying galactic cosmic rays for many years from within our heliosphere,” said Georgia Denolfo, a NASA space scientist at the Goddard Space Flight Center.

“So it’s especially exciting to be able to think that we will be having a mission in the very same space that I have been studying, and many others, from afar,” she said.

Both the Voyagers have been operational for more than 41 years now, with Voyager 1 successfully achieving its primary objective of flybys of Jupiter and Saturn and the latter’s largest moon Titan, studying the planets’ weather, magnetic fields, and rings.

In fact, Voyager 1 was the first spacecraft to capture detailed images of the planets’ natural satellites.

Having completed its mission in November 1980, Voyager 1 made the historic heliopause crossing in 2012, as mentioned earlier.

It will continue traveling through the vastness of interstellar space until its radioisotope thermoelectric generators are no longer capable of keeping the onboard instruments operational, which is expected to happen sometime in 2025.

Traveling 4,000 miles per hour slower than its twin, Voyager 2 did take longer to reach Jupiter and Saturn but it achieved what no other spacecraft had done before; that is, explore the Uranus and Neptune systems, achieving the historic feat in 1986 and 1989, respectively.

And now, as we know, it has successfully made the second heliopause crossing in history and, like its twin, is flying through the galactic cosmic ray particles of interstellar space.

It continues to maintain contact through the NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) and has already started beaming data on interstellar plasma temperature and density.

“Both spacecraft are very healthy, if you consider them senior citizens,” said Dodd, adding that “they are operating just fine.”

As the power-generating capabilities of the two spacecraft continue to decline, mission officials may have to sacrifice some of the relatively less important instruments on them.

“The difficult decisions are going to be made by Dr. Stone and the science team on which instruments to turn off first,” she said, adding that “those decisions will be made with getting the most science value back.”

Dodd is looking forward to squeezing out, at least, ten more years from the two probes.

“My own personal goal would be to get these spacecraft to last 50 years,” she said, adding: “If we get out to 2027, that will be a 50-year mission. I think that would be fantastic.”

“I often get asked, ‘Is this it for Voyager?’” said Nicky Fox, director at NASA’s heliophysics division.

“Absolutely not. This is really for me the beginning of a new era of heliophysics science,” he said.