Lifeboat Foundation

The latest on some space debris…

The Falcon 9 DSCOVR’s booster: 7 Feb. 2022.

The animation above comes from 268, single, 4-second exposures, remotely taken with the “Elena” (PlaneWave 17″+Paramount ME+SBIG STL-6303E) robotic unit available at Virtual Telescope. The telescope tracked the apparent motion of the booster, so it looks like a sharp dot, with surrounding stars moving on the background. East is up, South on the left.

Continue reading “The Falcon 9 DSCOVR’s booster going to hit the Moon: a video — 7 Feb. 2022” »

A Chinese satellite was spotted apparently clearing up space junk. But US officials are concerned the technology could be used against non-junk satellites.

Last month, a private satellite tracking company spotted a Chinese spacecraft apparently grabbing and throwing a dead satellite away into a “graveyard” orbit.

Connecting & enabling a smarter planet — alistair fulton, VP, wireless & sensing products, semtech.

Alistair Fulton (https://www.semtech.com/company/executive-leadership/alistair-fulton) is the Vice President and General Manager of Semtech’s Wireless and Sensing Products Group.

Continue reading “Alistair Fulton — Connecting & Enabling A Smarter Planet — VP, Wireless & Sensing Products, Semtech” »

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have gained insight into a fundamental process found throughout the universe. They discovered that the magnetic fields threading through plasma, the charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei, can affect the coming together and violent snapping apart of the plasma’s magnetic field lines. This insight could help scientists predict the occurrence of coronal mass ejections, enormous burps of plasma from the sun that could threaten satellites and electrical grids on Earth.

The scientists focused on the role of guide fields, magnetic fields threading through plasma blobs, or chunks, known as plasmoids. The guide fields add rigidity to the system and ultimately affect the ratio of large plasmoids to small ones and help determine how much reconnection occurs.

Plasmoid reconnection resembles the parallel computing that occurs in smart phones or in high-powered computers that model the weather. During this computing, many processors are calculating simultaneously and making the overall calculation rate quicker. Similarly, plasmoids speed up the overall rate of reconnection by making it occur in many places at once.

SpaceX has rapidly recovered the first converted Falcon Heavy ‘side core’ after its first Falcon 9 launch and landing, kicking off preparations for its fourth launch less than two days after its third.

After four consecutive days of delays, one of which was caused by an inexplicably wayward cruise ship, former Falcon Heavy side core B1052 finally lifted off on January 31st on its first mission as a Falcon 9 booster. Despite the painful launch campaign, B1052 performed perfectly and helped send the Italian Space Agency’s (ASI) CSG-2 Earth observation satellite to a polar sun-synchronous orbit (SSO) before boosting back to the Florida coast and landing just a few miles south of where it launched.

As a Falcon Heavy side core, B1052 supported both of the only two launches of the Block 5 variant of the rocket – first on April 11th, 2019 and again on June 25th, 2019. Both times, side boosters B1052 and B1053 performed return-to-launch-site (RTLS) maneuvers and landed side by side at SpaceX’s LZ-1 and LZ-2 landing pads. CSG-2 thus marked B1052’s third launch and third RTLS landing.

But Elon Musk’s company touts improved hardware, faster service speeds and priority support for its premium customers.

“Starlink Premium has more than double the antenna capability of Starlink, delivering faster internet speeds and higher throughput for the highest demand users, including businesses,” the SpaceX website said.

According to the Starlink website, the first premium deliveries will begin in the second quarter.

For the first time, SpaceX has converted a flight-proven Falcon Heavy side core into a Falcon 9 booster and successfully launched the reborn rocket, carrying an Italian Earth observation satellite to orbit with one of the most visually spectacular Falcon launches in recent memory.

After a tortured campaign of four scrubbed or aborted launch attempts between January 27th and 30th, Falcon 9 finally lifted off from SpaceX’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS) LC-40 pad at 6:11 pm EST (23:11 UTC) on Monday, January 31st. The converted Falcon Heavy booster performed perfectly on its first solo mission, successfully carrying a Falcon upper stage and Italy’s CSG-2 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) Earth observation satellite to an altitude of 70 km (~45 mi) and a velocity of ~1.7 km/s (Mach 5) – effectively the edge of space.

Thanks to near-perfect weather and the timing of the launch about 15 minutes after sunset, Falcon Heavy side core B1052’s first mission as a Falcon 9 booster wound up producing some of the best views of a SpaceX launch in the company’s history. As the rocket ascended, the sky continued to darken for local ground observers. It wasn’t long before Falcon 9’s shiny, white airframe ascended into direct sunlight, which created some extraordinary contrast against the darkening sky for tracking cameras near the launch site.

Called ‘e. Deorbit’, it could change everything.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. According to the European Space Agency (ESA), there are 128 million objects the size of 1 mm to 1 cm, 900,000 objects the size of 1 cm to 10 cm, and 34,000 objects greater than 10 cm currently whizzing around our planet.

Continue reading “Space Collisions: Can We Avoid A Catastrophe?” »