1 of 13 Space News Update — January 21, 2020 — Contents In the News Story 1: SpaceX Aces Final Major Test Before First Crew Mission Story 2: Building Blocks of Life Spotted on Rosetta’s Comet Hint at Composition of Its Birthplace Story 3: A Second Planet May Have been Found Orbiting Proxima Centauri! And it’s a Super Earth. Departments The Night Sky ISS Sighting Opportunities NASA-TV Highlights Space Calendar Food for Thought Space Image of the Week
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Space News Updatespaceodyssey.dmns.org/media/87255/snu_200121.pdf · 2020-01-21 · Rosetta explored Comet 67P for over two years, ending its mission by crash-landing on the comet
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1 of 13
Space News Update — January 21, 2020 —
Contents
In the News
Story 1:
SpaceX Aces Final Major Test Before First Crew Mission
Story 2:
Building Blocks of Life Spotted on Rosetta’s Comet Hint at Composition of Its Birthplace
Story 3:
A Second Planet May Have been Found Orbiting Proxima Centauri! And it’s a Super Earth.
Departments
The Night Sky
ISS Sighting Opportunities
NASA-TV Highlights
Space Calendar
Food for Thought
Space Image of the Week
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1. SpaceX Aces Final Major Test Before First Crew Mission
The Crew Dragon’s abort engines ignite atop the Falcon 9. Credit: SpaceX
SpaceX performed a dramatic high-altitude test flight Sunday of the company’s Crew Dragon capsule over Florida’s
Space Coast, testing the human-rated ship’s ability to escape a rocket failure and save its crew before two NASA
astronauts strap in for a flight to the International Space Station as soon as this spring.
The unusual test flight included an intentional failure of the Crew Dragon’s Falcon 9 rocket about a minute-and-a-
half after liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center. The rocket, with a recycled first stage booster flown three previous
times, disintegrated in a fireball high over the Atlantic Ocean as the crew capsule sped away from the top of the
launcher with a powerful boost from eight SuperDraco engines.
The SuperDraco engines — mounted around the circumference of the gumdrop-shaped crew capsule — fired
around eight seconds to carry the spaceship a safe distance from the Falcon 9 rocket after the booster’s first stage
engines shut down, a standard part of the launch escape sequence.
The Crew Dragon arced on a ballistic trajectory to a top speed of about Mach 2.2 and a peak altitude of about
131,000 feet, according to Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and chief executive. The capsule then deployed four main
parachutes for a splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean roughly 20 miles (32 kilometers) east of the Kennedy Space
Center.
Musk, NASA officials and astronauts were pleased with the performance of the Crew Dragon’s launch escape
system. “I’m super fired up,” Musk said. “This is great … We’re looking forward to the next step.”
NASA has signed agreements with SpaceX valued at more than $3.1 billion since 2011 to fund the design,
development, construction and testing of the Crew Dragon spacecraft.
The next major step for the Crew Dragon program is the capsule’s first trip to space with astronauts. The Crew
Dragon’s in-flight abort test Sunday was the last major flight demonstration of a full-scale Crew Dragon spacecraft
before its first launch with humans on-board.
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Veteran NASA shuttle fliers Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken are training for the mission — designated Demo-2 — to
fly the Crew Dragon to the International Space Station.
Musk said after Sunday’s in-flight abort test that the Demo-2 mission would likely launch in the second quarter of
this year — between the beginning of April and the end of June — although rocket and spacecraft hardware for the
Demo-2 flight could be in place at the Kennedy Space Center by the end of February or early March.
“The hardware necessary for first crewed launch, we believe, will be ready by the end of February,” Musk said.
“However, there’s still a lot of work once the hardware is ready to cross-check everything, triple-check, quadruple-
check, go over everything again so that every stone has been turned over three or four times.
“And there is also the schedule for getting to (the) space station because space station has a lot of things going to
it, so what’s the right timing for this?” Musk said. “The sort of collective wisdom at this point is we’re highly
confident the hardware will be ready in Quarter 1, most likely the end of February, but no later than March, and
that it and it would appear probable that the first crew launch would occur in the 2nd Quarter.”
In the meantime, SpaceX will collect all the data from the Crew Dragon abort test and analyze the results for any
potential problem areas. NASA is also reviewing numerous Crew Dragon data packages provided by SpaceX before
agreeing to fly Hurley and Behnken on SpaceX’s next crew capsule launch.
SpaceX plans at least two more atmospheric drop tests of the Crew Dragon parachute system to gain more
confidence in the capsule’s decelerators, which have been a problem area on the project after chute failures on a
cargo-carrying Dragon spacecraft and in Crew Dragon testing.
Engineers found that NASA was using wrong assumptions in models that predict how much force parachutes
experience on spacecraft returning to Earth. Data from testing showed the parachute risers, or suspension lines,
encountered more significant loads than expected, raising concerns about chutes across the agency’s human
spaceflight programs, including on the Starliner commercial crew capsule being developed by Boeing.
SpaceX and NASA agreed to switch to a new generation of Crew Dragon parachutes dubbed the Mark 3, and testing
of the new Mark 3 chutes — made by a company named Airborne Systems — has proceeded without failure since
late last year.
Sunday’s in-flight abort test provided the parachute engineers with another successful test of the Mark 3 chutes,
adding additional confidence about the system’s reliability.
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine called Sunday’s abort test “another amazing milestone” in the agency’s nearly
decade-long effort to resume crew launches to the space station from U.S. soil.
“Make no mistake, there’s a lot left to do,” Bridenstine said. “We have a number of parachute tests upcoming, and
of course, we’re going to get a lot of data from this particular test. So we’re not quite there yet, but by all accounts,
this was a very successful test.”
After a one-day delay due to rough seas in the splashdown zone — and a two-and-a-half-hour hold Sunday to wait
for improved winds — the Crew Dragon spacecraft lifted off on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 10:30 a.m. EST
(1530 GMT) Sunday from pad 39A at Kennedy, the same launch pad once used by NASA’s Saturn 5 moon rockets
and space shuttles.
The 215-foot-tall (65-meter) rocket flew off the launch pad powered by nine kerosene-fueled Merlin 1D engines and
pitched on an easterly trajectory from the Florida spaceport.
The Falcon 9 surpassed the speed of sound in less than a minute, and the Crew Dragon’s pre-programmed escape
sequence initiated around 84 seconds after liftoff, when the rocket was at an altitude of roughly 62,000 feet (19
kilometers). The abort was triggered soon after the point in the launch sequence where the booster and capsule
experience the most extreme aerodynamic pressures.
NASA's Juno Spacecraft Has a Close Encounter with Jupiter Image Credit: Enhanced image by Gerald Eichstädt and Sean Doran (CC BY-NC-SA) based on
images provided courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS
Explanation: A multitude of swirling clouds in Jupiter's dynamic North Temperate Belt is captured in this image from NASA's Juno spacecraft. Appearing in the scene are several bright-white “pop-up” clouds as well as an anticyclonic storm, known as a white oval. This color-enhanced image was taken at 4:58 p.m. EDT on Oct. 29, 2018, as the spacecraft performed its 16th
close flyby of Jupiter. At the time, Juno was about 4,400 miles from the planet's cloud tops, at a latitude of
approximately 40 degrees north.
Citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran created this image using data from the spacecraft's