Lifeboat Foundation

The South African satellite, SumbandilaSat (Pathfinder in Venda) is reaching the end of its life and will deorbit on Friday 10 December 2021.

The satellite was launched in 2009 and took a total of 1,128 high-resolution, usable images. In addition, these imageries were applied in local research and on the Copernicus (previously GMES: Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) programme. The data also contributed towards disaster management such as flood monitoring in Namibia and fire campaigns in the Kruger National Park in South Africa. Furthermore, it also recorded timely images of the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the Tuscaloosa tornado in the USA.

In May 2005, the then DST (Department of Science and Technology) of the South African Government commissioned Stellenbosch University and SunSpace to develop the ZASat pathfinder satellite program (later renamed SumbandilaSat), a technology demonstrator in conjunction with the South African industry. Consequently, SumbandilaSat was delivered 15 months later and launched from Baikonur, Kazakhstan on September 17 2009 with monitoring and satellite support from the SANSA Space Operations facility in Hartebeesthoek.

More than two years after the rocket’s last launch, SpaceX appears to have finally decided to give at least one of two surviving Falcon Heavy Block 5 cores a new lease on life as a Falcon 9 booster.

Known as B1052, the Falcon Heavy side core or booster debuted in April 2019 as part of the first flight of the rocket’s Block 5 variant, successfully launching Saudi Arabia’s large Arabsat 6A communications satellite to an almost 90,000 km (56,000 mi) transfer orbit. Following in the footsteps of the first Falcon Heavy, the first Block 5 vehicle repeated its predecessor’s iconic double-landing back at Cape Canaveral. Just 74 days later, both Falcon Heavy Block 5 side boosters B1052 and B1053 launched again, this time supporting the US military’s long-delayed STP-2 rideshare and qualification mission.

The Chinese private spaceflight company Galactic Energy has made the second flight of its Ceres-1 rocket, carrying five satellites into orbit, including a satellite known as Golden Bauhinia-1–03. The launch took place at 04:12 UTC on Tuesday, December 7th (12:12 Beijing time) from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center.

The Ceres-1 is a four-stage rocket, using three solid-fueled stages with a hydrazine-fueled fourth stage to complete orbital insertion and refinement. Ceres-1 is capable of launching a payload of up 400 kilograms to low Earth orbit, or up to 230 kilograms into a sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 700 kilometers.

Also known as Gushenxing-1, Ceres-1 was developed by Galactic Energy, one of several Chinese companies currently fielding or testing small solid-fueled satellite launchers. The first Ceres-1 launch was conducted successfully on November 7, 2020, making Galactic Energy the second private Chinese company to launch a satellite into low Earth orbit.

Uganda is preparing to launch its first satellite by August 2022. The satellite, PearlAfricaSat-1, is the latest mission from the Joint Global Multi-Nation Birds Satellite project. The initiative began in October 2019 as part of a directive by Uganda’s President to develop a National Space Agency and Institute.

Uganda signed the collaborative research agreement with the Kyushu Institute of Technology (Kyutech), Japan. The agreement involved enrolling and upskilling three graduate engineers to design, build, test, and launch the first satellite for Uganda. Consequently, Japan registered three Ugandan graduate engineers, including; Bonny Omara, Edgar Mujunu, and Derrick Tebuseke.

The core missions for PearlAfricaSat-1 are a multispectral camera payload. The Multispectral Camera mission will provide about 20-metre resolution images for Uganda to facilitate water quality, soil fertility, and land use and cover analysis. The satellite will play a vital role in the oil and gas operation by monitoring the East African crude oil pipeline. This will enable accurate weather forecasts by gathering remote sensor data for predicting landslides and drought. Once the satellite reaches orbit, an Uganda ground station will monitor its health status for a few days before it starts executing its mission.

The James Webb Space Telescope was fuelled inside the payload preparation facility at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana ahead of its launch on Ariane 5.

Webb’s thrusters will use this propellant to make critical course-corrections after separation from Ariane 5, to maintain its prescribed orbit about one and a half million kilometers from Earth, and to repoint the observatory and manage its momentum during operations.

Fuelling any satellite is a particularly delicate operation requiring setup of the equipment and connections, fuelling, and then pressurization.

If someone told you that the world’s biggest laser was in California that has something to do with space and national defence, you might imagine it was a super-weapon designed to blast enemy satellites out of the sky. But the reality is quite different. The new laser is a unique research tool for scientists, capable of creating the extreme conditions that exist inside stars and nuclear explosions.

The giant laser is located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, California, and it goes by the rather cryptic name of the National Ignition Facility (NIF). That’s because, in the context of nuclear science, “ignition” has a very specific meaning according to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It refers to the point at which a fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining – a condition that is found inside the sun and other stars, but is extremely difficult to achieve in an earthbound laboratory. Triggering nuclear fusion requires enormously high temperatures and pressures, and that’s where NIF’s giant laser comes in.

To handle this, people have trained neural networks on regions where we have more complete weather data. Once trained, the system could be fed partial data and infer what the rest was likely to be. For example, the trained system can create a likely weather radar map using things like satellite cloud images and data on lightning strikes.

This is exactly the sort of thing that neural networks do well with: recognizing patterns and inferring correlations.

What drew the Rigetti team’s attention is the fact that neural networks also map well onto quantum processors. In a typical neural network, a layer of “neurons” performs operations before forwarding its results to the next layer. The network “learns” by altering the strength of the connections among units in different layers. On a quantum processor, each qubit can perform the equivalent of an operation. The qubits also share connections among themselves, and the strength of the connection can be adjusted. So, it’s possible to implement and train a neural network on a quantum processor.

Abstract: Here we show that precise Gaia EDR3 proper motions have provided robust estimates of 3D velocities, angular momentum and total energy for 40 Milky Way dwarfs. The results are statistically robust and are independent of the Milky Way mass profile. Dwarfs do not behave like long-lived satellites of the Milky Way because of their excessively large velocities, angular momenta, and total energies. Comparing them to other MW halo population, we find that many are at first passage, $\le$2 Gyr ago, i.e., more recently than the passage of Sagittarius, $\sim$4–5 Gyr ago. We suggest that this is in agreement with the stellar populations of all dwarfs, for which we find that a small fraction of young stars cannot be excluded. We also find that dwarf radial velocities contribute too little to their kinetic energy when compared to satellite systems with motions only regulated by gravity, and some other mechanism must be at work such as ram pressure. The latter may have preferentially reduced radial velocities when dwarf progenitors entered the halo until they lost their gas. It could also explain why most dwarfs lie near their pericenter. We also discover a novel large scale structure perpendicular to the Milky Way disk, which is made by 20% of dwarfs orbiting or counter orbiting with the Sagittarius dwarf.

From: Francois Hammer [view email].

An international team of astronomers using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has detected a rocky planet, about half the mass of Earth, in an extraordinarily short 7.7-hour orbit around its parent star.

It’s a reminder that the science of extrasolar planet hunting seems to enter bizarro land with each new discovery. Planetary scientists still haven’t figured out how our own tiny Mercury — which orbits our Sun once every 88 days — actually formed and evolved. So, this iron-rich ultrashort-period (USP) planet, dubbed GJ 367b should really boggle their minds.

It’s completely rocky, unlike most previously detected gaseous hot Jupiters on extremely short stellar orbits. As a result, the tiny planet is estimated to have a surface with temperatures of 1,500 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt iron; hardly an Earth 2.0.