Hello, readers, and welcome back to This Week in Space. Today, we've got an announcement for a commercial successor to the International Space Station, and happy news for anyone following Euclid—the other new infrared telescope now peering out at the stars. Plus, the last Cygnus RD-181 launch marks the end of an era.
Voyager 2: Healthy, But Possibly Unreachable Until October
Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were sent to inform us how conditions within our own solar system differ from those outside the bubble of our solar wind. Both probes have been in operation for nearly 50 years. Mission techs intend to shepherd the pair as far into interstellar space as they can, in search of every last bit of information the Voyagers can tell us about the heliopause. However, late last week, NASA acknowledged that a programming error had cut off contact with the Voyager 2 space probe, which is currently just shy of 20 billion kilometers away. A series of commands transmitted to the spacecraft resulted in its antenna pointing two degrees away from Earth. Two degrees might not sound like much, but at 20 billion kilometers away the impact of the mistake is substantial.
Luckily, the impact on NASA's ongoing Voyager 2 science mission may be minimal. Tuesday, NASA told reporters that its Deep Space Network antennas had picked up a "heartbeat" from the off-kilter spacecraft, confirming that it's alive and healthy—just misaligned. NASA will attempt to contact the probe to order it to realign itself, but even if that fails, NASA has other options. As my colleague Ryan Whitwam explains, Voyager 2 is set to automatically reset its antenna position every few months. The next reset is scheduled for Oct. 15, and NASA should be able to reacquire the probe's radio signal at that time.
Airbus, Voyager Space Announce Plans for Commercial Successor to the ISS
With the International Space Station facing an increasingly uncertain future later in the 2020s, discussion and planning have already begun for what might follow the venerable ISS. Today, Voyager Space and Airbus announced a joint plan to build a commercial successor to the ISS. The station, dubbed Starlab, will be up and running by 2028 if all goes well. The United States has authorized funding for the ISS through 2030, which leaves some room for all to (inevitably) not go well.
Voyager Space has been working on a space station design for several years now. The company received $160 million in NASA funding back in 2021 to develop its concept and had previously partnered with Lockheed to build a station with a pressurized habitation module. Airbus is taking over Lockheed's role and is proposing a different, more conventional design that uses metal. The station would be eight meters in diameter, which is considerably wider than the ISS, but the new design won't offer nearly as much total volume. Total volume aboard the station would be roughly half that of the International Space Station.
While the station is expected to operate as a commercial enterprise, Voyager Space's CEO, Dylan Taylor, told journalists that "NASA and other space agencies will be the core of our business for the first Starlab." This only makes sense, given how long it could take to build a robust market for commercial ground-to-orbit travel. The joint announcement declared that the collaboration would be US-led, but it's interesting to consider the geopolitical dynamics, particularly in light of how the United States and Russia have all but ceased cooperating on matters related to space. The now-defunct cooperation between Russia, Ukraine, and the US was a model for how closer ties could benefit all players. Voyager Space's decision to work with a European company could encourage future strategic cooperation.
Swan Song: The Last Cygnus RD-181 Marks the End of an Era for US, Russia, and Ukraine
Earlier this week, Northrop Grumman's last 200-series Antares rocket successfully ignited and took flight. The Cygnus capsule it carried is now on its way to the ISS. While there will be other Antares missions, this was the last of the 200-series rockets, which were powered by RD-181 engines originally designed in Russia. The first stage of this iteration of the rocket family used to be assembled in Ukraine, but that was before the Russians started hitting Dnipro with missile salvos on a regular basis.
Northrop Grumman will be fine; the company has already announced that its upcoming 300-series Antares rocket will be powered by an engine built by the American company Firefly Aerospace. As Ars Technica points out, however, the 200-series Antares program was once held out as a vision for what the future of space cooperation between two of the most powerful nations on Earth could look like. Russia and Ukraine had long been rocketry partners. NASA needed cost-effective, reliable rockets to carry resupply missions to the ISS as the Shuttle program wound down. Russia's space programs needed revenue. The Antares program operated long enough to prove that this kind of cooperation could work and work well, but Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine hit the brakes on aerospace cooperation between the West and Russia. The two nations have agreed to continue joint operations on the ISS until that station is decommissioned, but discussions on other topics are frosty at best.
Settled in at L2, Euclid Prepares... for Science!
These days, when you think of an infrared telescope—which is a thing I'm sure you all do often—you probably think of the James Webb Space Telescope. As exciting as the JWST is, however, it's not the only new observatory ready for its moment in the spotlight. The European Space Agency (ESA) launched Euclid about a month ago and has been busy preparing the telescope for observations ever since. Now, with the telescope approaching its L2 deployment point, the ESA has shared some early test images.
Euclid is designed to observe roughly one-third of the sky over its six-year mission, with a specific focus on areas of the sky facing away from the Milky Way. Where the JWST is designed to zoom way in to observe the most distant and oldest objects humanity has ever imaged, Euclid throws its arms open and measures a much larger swath of the sky. The telescope's primary mission is to gather data on dark energy and dark matter, hopefully shedding more light on the expansion rate of the universe in the process.
"Although these first test images are not yet usable for scientific purposes, I am pleased that the telescope and the two instruments are now working superbly in space,” says Knud Jahnke of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, one of two instrument scientists attached to Euclid's Near Infrared Spectrograph and Photometer. The ESA notes that Euclid fields "the largest imaging plane in the history of science to date," and that it will only take a few days for Euclid to return more data to Earth on its 850 gigabit/day signal than Hubble has returned through its entire operating lifetime to date.
New Asteroid Hunting Algorithm Reveals Space Rock Other Models Missed
Civilization-ending asteroids are practically the poster child for "Low Likelihood / High Impact" phenomenon (pun thoroughly intended), but it doesn't take a planet-killer to deliver unto us a really, really bad time. HelioLinc3D, a new search algorithm designed to hunt for previously unknown asteroids, has already proven its mettle when set to work on data previously gathered by the ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) project. Now, HelioLinc3D has identified a good-sized space rock that ATLAS missed: 2022 SF 289, a rocky body some 600 feet long.
The find is impressive, not least because HelioLinc3D isn't specifically designed or customized for use on ATLAS data sets. (The algorithm was developed for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, currently expected online in 2025.) At 600 feet long, the new asteroid isn't large enough to pose a global threat, but finding it demonstrates that other such rocks may have slipped through current detection grids.
HelioLinc3D combined fragments of data from ATLAS observations, identified a pattern, and pointed the team toward the asteroid that ATLAS had missed. "Any survey will have difficulty discovering objects like 2022 SF289 that are near its sensitivity limit, but HelioLinc3D shows that it is possible to recover these faint objects as long as they are visible over several nights," says ATLAS project leader Larry Denneau. Ryan Whitwam has more.
Asteroid Ryugu Sample Contains Rocks Older Than the Sun
If you had to pick a time when things really got started in our corner of the Milky Way, you could do worse than choosing ~4.6 billion years ago. About that time in history, the giant cloud of matter that would become... well, everything you see around these parts collapsed in on itself, started rotating, and spun itself apart into the Sun and its protoplanetary disc. It's tough to gather concrete evidence on what the local stellar neighborhood looked like before this happened, or what kinds of rock were present at the time, but the scientists studying samples retrieved from asteroid 162173 Ryugu in 2020 have found some tiny, tantalizing clues.
Deep analysis of the sample has revealed rock grains with chemical compositions that differ significantly from any rocks formed by (or even found near) our Sun. The authors write, "The 5 to 10 times higher abundances... in the primitive clasts compared to bulk Ryugu suggest that the clasts formed in a unique part of the protoplanetary disk enriched in presolar materials. These clasts likely represent previously unsampled outer solar system material that accreted onto Ryugu after aqueous alteration ceased, consistent with Ryugu’s rubble pile origin."
According to the researchers, at least some of these rock grains likely came from stars on the Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB), though one grain showed evidence that it might have been created by a supernova. Because many of the grains contain materials that would be destroyed by water, the researchers theorize that they could only have been introduced to the asteroid (or its parent body) after said parent body had lost its water. Currently, Ryugu is thought to have formed in the outer reaches of the solar system before migrating closer to the Sun.
Skywatchers Corner
Speaking of things that periodically swoop in close to the Sun—it's August, so it's finally time for a perennial favorite meteor shower, the Perseids. This shower is top of the line, in both number and brightness of the visible shooting stars it creates. Like Old Faithful, it's reliable enough to share with the kids. The Perseids will peak on August 11 this year, and the days immediately before and after the peak are the best for catching sight of a shooting star.
This year, August also boasts a pair of lunar phenomena that are visible to the unaided eye, no telescope needed. Not only does August have a blue moon, both full moons will be "supermoons," unusually large and bright. The first full moon happened Tuesday of this week, and the second, "blue" moon will reach peak fullness on August 30. As a happy coincidence, this means that the waning moon will offer less and less threat of washing out the crescendo of the Perseids with reflected moonlight, giving us the best chance of catching a meteor as it crosses the sky.
For the best odds of seeing a fireball, roll out a blanket or towel shortly after full dark, and lay flat on your back, looking straight up. This gives your eyes time to adjust. But before you get settled down, turn to the south and see if you can spot the Milky Way, visible as an oblique swathe of soft, diffuse light in the darkened sky. Stay cool, good luck, and we'll see you next Friday—just in time to catch the Perseids at their peak.
