Ion thrusters are an amazing spacecraft propulsion technology, providing very high efficiency with relatively little fuel. Yet getting one to produce more thrust than that required to lift a sheet of A4 paper requires a lot of electricity. This is why they have been only used for applications where sustained thrust and extremely low fuel usage are important, such as the attitude management of satellites and other spacecraft. Now researchers in New Zealand have created a prototype magnetoplasmadynamic (MPD) thruster with a superconducting electromagnet that is claimed to reduce the required input power by 99% while generating a three times as strong a magnetic field.
Although MPD thrusters have been researched since the 1970s – much like their electrostatic cousins, Hall-effect thrusters – the power limitations on the average spacecraft have limited mission profiles. Through the use of a high-temperature superconducting electromagnet with an integrated cryocooler, the MPD thruster should be able to generate a very strong field, while only sipping power. Whether this works and is as reliable as hoped will be tested this year when the prototype thruster is installed on the ISS for experiments.
The list of countries to achieve their own successful orbital space launch is a short one, almost as small as the exclusive club of states that possess nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union was first off the rank in 1957, with the United States close behind in 1958, and a gaggle of other aerospace-adept states followed in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Italy, Iran, North Korea and South Korea have all joined the list since the dawn of the new millennium.
Absent from the list stands Australia. The proud island nation has never stood out as a player in the field of space exploration, despite offering ground station assistance to many missions from other nations over the years. However, the country has continued to inch its way to the top of the atmosphere, establishing its own space agency in 2018. Since then, development has continued apace, and the country’s first orbital launch appears to be just around the corner.
When the AMSAT-OSCAR 7 (AO-7) amateur radio satellite was launched in 1974, its expected lifespan was about five years. The plucky little satellite made it to 1981 when a battery failure caused it to be written off as dead. Then, in 2002 it came back to life. The prevailing theory being that one of the cells in the satellites NiCd battery pack, in an extremely rare event, failed open — thus allowing the satellite to run (intermittently) off its solar panels.
In a recent video by [Ben] on the AE4JC Amateur Radio YouTube channel goes over the construction of AO-7, its operation, death and subsequent revival are covered, as well as a recent QSO (direct contact).
The battery is made up of multiple individual cells.
The solar panels covering this satellite provided a grand total of 14 watts at maximum illumination, which later dropped to 10 watts, making for a pretty small power budget. The entire satellite was assembled in a ‘clean room’ consisting of a sectioned off part of a basement, with components produced by enthusiasts associated with AMSAT around the world. Onboard are two radio transponders: Mode A at 2 meters and Mode B at 10 meters, as well as four beacons, three of which are active due to an international treaty affecting the 13 cm beacon.
Positioned in a geocentric LEO (1,447 – 1,465 km) orbit, it’s quite amazing that after 50 years it’s still mostly operational. Most of this is due to how the satellite smartly uses the Earth’s magnetic field for alignment with magnets as well as the impact of photons to maintain its spin. This passive control combined with the relatively high altitude should allow AO-7 to function pretty much indefinitely while the PV panels keep producing enough power. All because a NiCd battery failed in a very unusual way.
In 2015, Tim Ellis and Jordan Noone founded Relativity Space around an ambitious goal: to be the first company to put a 3D printed rocket into orbit. While additive manufacturing was already becoming an increasingly important tool in the aerospace industry, the duo believed it could be pushed further than anyone had yet realized.
Rather than assembling a rocket out of smaller printed parts, they imagined the entire rocket being produced on a huge printer. Once the methodology was perfected, they believed rockets could be printed faster and cheaper than they could be traditionally assembled. What’s more, in the far future, Relativity might even be able to produce rockets off-world in fully automated factories. It was a bold idea, to be sure. But then, landing rockets on a barge in the middle of the ocean once seemed pretty far fetched as well.
An early printed propellant tank.
Of course, printing something the size of an orbital rocket requires an exceptionally large 3D printer, so Relativity Space had to built one. It wasn’t long before the company had gotten to the point where they had successfully tested their printed rocket engine, and were scaling up their processes to print the vehicle’s propellant tanks. In 2018 Bryce Salmi, then an avionics hardware engineer at Relatively Space, gave a talk at Hackaday Supercon detailing the rapid progress the company had made so far.
Just a few years later, in March of 2023, the Relativity’s first completed rocket sat fueled and ready to fly on the launch pad. The Terran 1 rocket wasn’t the entirely printed vehicle that Ellis and Noone had imagined, but with approximately 85% of the booster’s mass being made up of printed parts, it was as close as anyone had ever gotten before.
The launch of Terran 1 was a huge milestone for the company, and even though a problem in the second stage engine prevented the rocket from reaching orbit, the flight proved to critics that a 3D printed rocket could fly and that their manufacturing techniques were sound. Almost immediately, Relativity Space announced they would begin work on a larger and more powerful successor to the Terran 1 which would be more competitive to SpaceX’s Falcon 9.
Now, after an administrative shakeup that saw Tim Ellis replaced as CEO, the company has released a nearly 45 minute long video detailing their plans for the next Terran rocket — and explaining why they won’t be 3D printing it.
Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander’s first look at the solar eclipse as it began to emerge from its Mare Crisium landing site on March 14 at 5:30 AM UTC. (Credit: Firefly Aerospace)
After recently landing at the Moon’s Mare Crisium, Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander craft was treated to a spectacle that’s rarely observed: a total solar eclipse as seen from the surface of the Moon. This entire experience was detailed on the Blue Ghost Mission 1 live blog. As the company notes, this is the first time that a commercial entity has been able to observe this phenomenon.
During this event, the Earth gradually moved in front of the Sun, as observed from the lunar surface. During this time, the Blue Ghost lander had to rely on its batteries as it was capturing the solar eclipse with a wide-angle camera on its top deck.
Unlike the Blood Moon seen from the Earth, there was no such cool effect observed from the Lunar surface. The Sun simply vanished, leaving a narrow ring of light around the Earth. The reason for the Blood Moon becomes obvious, however, as the refracting of the sunlight through Earth’s atmosphere changes the normal white-ish light to shift to an ominous red.
The entire sequence of images captured can be observed in the video embedded on the live blog and below, giving a truly unique view of something that few humans (and robots) have so far been able to observe.
As part of the payloads on the Firefly Blue Ghost Mission 1 (BGM1) that recently touched down on the Moon, the Lunar GNNS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) has become the first practical demonstration of acquiring and tracking Earth orbital GNSS satellites. LuGRE consists of a weak-signal GNSS receiver, a high-gain L-band patch antenna the requisite amplification and filter circuits, designed to track a number of GPS and Galileo signals.
Designed by NASA and the Italian Space Agency (ISA), the LuGRE payload’s goal was to demonstrate GNSS-based positioning, navigation and timing at the Moon. This successful demonstration makes it plausible that future lunar missions, whether in orbit or on the surface, could use Earth’s GNSS satellites to navigate and position themselves with. On the way to the lunar surface, LuGRE confirmed being able to track GNSS at various distances from the Earth.
Both LuGRE and BGM1 are part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, with BGM1 delivering a total of ten payloads to the Moon, each designed to study a different aspect of the lunar environment, as well as hardware and technologies relevant to future missions.
Saying farewell is hard, and in the case of the Voyager 1 & 2 spacecraft doubly so, seeing as how they have been with us for more than 47 years. From the highs of the 1970s and 1980s during their primary mission in our Solar System, to their journey into the unknown of Deep Space, every bit of information which their instruments record and send back is something unique that we could not obtain any other way. Yet with the shutting down of two more instruments, both spacecraft are now getting awfully close to the end of their extended missions.
Last February 25 the cosmic ray system (CRS) on Voyager 1 was disabled, with the Low Energy Charged Particle Instrument (LECP) on Voyager 2 to follow on March 24. With each spacecraft losing about 4 watts of available power per year from their RTGs, the next few instruments to be turned off are already known. Voyager 1’s LECP will be turned off next year, with that same year Voyager 2’s CRS also getting disabled.
This would leave both spacecraft with only their magnetometer (MAG) and plasma wave subsystem (PWS). These provide data on the local magnetic field and electron density, respectively, with at least one of these instruments on each spacecraft likely to remain active until the end of this decade, possibly into the next. With some luck both spacecraft will see their 50th birthday before humanity’s only presence in Deep Space falls silent.
