 This is your Space News from tomorrow for March 7th, 2019. It was a very exciting week, so let's get straight into it with our Space Traffic Report. Wednesday, February 27th, at 2137 Universal Time, we had a launch out of French Guiana. Had to do a polar orbit, this was a Soyuz ST-B rocket operated by Arianespace. On board were six refrigerator-sized, one-wed communication satellites. Specifically, these are satellites to bring high-speed internet to the entire planet. We happen to do a story on OneWeb in our news for January 30th, 2019, if you want to go check that out. This launch helps OneWeb secure their required KU band of the radio spectrum, as they have a November 29th deadline imposed by the International Telecommunications Union to begin operating on that spectrum in order to keep it. If these satellites work as expected, OneWeb hopes to begin regular launches of Soyuz rockets this year, carrying between 32 and 36 satellites at a time. Hopefully, low-cost, high-speed, global internet is just around the corner. For those who don't know, I work at SpaceX as what I like to call a pixel janitor, which means that I can't talk about SpaceX stories. And there was a big one this week. So I found the biggest SpaceX fan that I could to help us talk about Demonstration Mission 1. Thanks, Ben. Hi, it's me, Tim Dodd, the everyday astronaut. And yeah, I guess you could call me a SpaceX fan. I mean, after all, I did drive all the way from Iowa down to Florida over 24 hours in order to see DM1. Now, this took off from Launch Complex 39A in Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This flight took off perfectly at 2.49 a.m. Eastern time, 7.49 UTC on March 2nd, 2019. And this was the first flight of 1051.1 Falcon 9 booster. So for all of these upcoming missions, NASA and SpaceX will be using brand new Falcon 9 boosters. And that sounds like later on they have the option if they want to try to certify used boosters in the future, that's something that NASA and SpaceX could probably figure out and they might pursue later. But for now, it's going to all be brand new boosters. And this was one of them. This booster was also recovered on, of course, I still love you, the autonomous spaceport drone ship, several hundred miles downrange. And it will always have to be downrange on the drone ship because they will not ever be doing a return to launch site landing when they're launching crew. Although there was no one on board, there was a mannequin named Ripley, which was named after Sigourney Weaver's character in the movie Aliens, which I think is pretty funny. She wasn't alone because they also had this super high tech zero G indicator, which was just this like cheap little plush doll earth thing that I feel like they literally just kind of threw in last minute, which was there as soon as zero G happened, you could see it kind of float around and antics sort of ensued over a day later after this beautiful, beautiful launch and perfect landing of the booster, the Crew Dragon capsule flew up to the International Space Station and docked just over a day later, went off absolutely perfectly. Once it was docked, it looks like the crew just kind of poked their heads in, checked everything out, gave it a, you know, kind of kick the tires a little bit and made sure everything is good because this was kind of, that's one of the biggest milestones. But now, after a couple days on station, we'll spend about five days in space all together. Thursday morning, it's undocking or has undocked, depending on when the show comes out. Friday morning, it will re-enter and splash down in the Atlantic Ocean. Now, this is the first time that SpaceX has ever splashed down in the Atlantic, the original Dragon capsule always splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. So it's splashing down actually relatively close to where, of course, I still love you, that the drone ship was for the booster landing. And of course, the booster is already back in port, so there's, it's not like you're going to have a Crew Dragon capsule parachuting down into the booster. It's already, it's already safe at home. So we're really excited to see this thing come in for re-entry and have a successful splash down. That's the last big milestone. If that works out, this is an absolute textbook flawless mission. And it's a very, very exciting feature because we're going to hopefully be putting humans on this thing later this year. So hopefully everything looks and works out fantastic and I couldn't be more excited. So congrats SpaceX and NASA on so far, an absolutely flawless mission. Now back to you, Ben, some guy that likes to make little videos. Thanks Tim. Now while this week was certainly action packed, next week looks to be just as exciting. We're expecting the departure of Crew Dragon from station in just a couple of days, along with three upcoming launches with the communication satellite going up on the ninth, a military satellite on the 13th, and some astronauts heading to station on the 14th. And now I'll hand it over to Jared to talk about our busy galactic core. The center of the Milky Way is a dynamic place and new research is finding objects that could help us crack some of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics. A potential clue for the origin of mysterious events called fast radio bursts may be uncovered by a magnetar recently discovered to be orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Neutron stars are the leftovers of a giant star's collapsed core, packing two to three times the mass of our own sun into an object on average 20 kilometers across, and then often spinning it several hundred times per second due to the conservation of angular momentum from their formation. A magnetar is a neutron star with a viciously potent magnetic field, on the order of quadrillions of times that of the Earth's. Powerful enough that if you were to stray too close to it, your squishy body would be ripped to shreds. Neutron stars and magnetars with regular radio pulses that we can detect are known as pulsars, and a magnetar doing this at the center of our galaxy was observed by Caltech to be doing something quite bizarre. The pulses of radio waves were often changing, broadening, and doing so from pulse to pulse. Explaining that variability in the radio signals could be energetic gas moving at high speeds near the magnetar, not out of the question of an area around a supermassive black hole. The energetic gas could both inhibit or enhance the radio signals. Another explanation could be variability in the magnetar itself. Those radio signals line up well with what we see from fast radio bursts, so this may be a hint that they could be caused by magnetars near supermassive black holes. But the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, with a mass roughly four million times that of our own sun, is not alone. There's an intermediate mass black hole there as well. Using data from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array Radio Telescope Interferometer, a team from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan observed a cloud of gas and were able to detect its movement with high precision and accuracy, which gave evidence of an object with 30,000 times the mass of our sun being present. With no observed object in that location, it's likely a black hole that's currently dormant without material falling into it. This intermediate-sized black hole is in an orbit a mere 20 light years away from the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, and sometime in the very distant future it will merge with it. This ends up being supporting evidence for a hypothesis that black hole growth can be driven by mergers with other black holes. And now to talk about something else from high-energy physics in space that can kill you, here's Sarah. On tomorrow, we talk a lot about the requirements of getting humans to other worlds and some of the hurdles in our way. One of the biggest obstacles is radiation, and as our own Dr. Tam with the scope reminds us weekly with her space weather report, the sun is constantly emitting radiation. So much so that all of the planets in our system are engulfed all of the time. Thankfully, Earth has a global defense mechanism called the magnetosphere, and it's produced by the dynamo that is our core. But the moon has no such protective field, so its surface is constantly being bombarded. But not evenly. Astronomers have long been fascinated by intricate patches of light and dark on the surface of the moon, many of which are big enough to be seen from Earth. They dubbed the patches lunar swirls. It was known that the swirls coincided with magnetic anomalies in the crust, and back in July of 2018, a team from Rutgers University in UC Berkeley put forward an explanation for both the subsurface magnetism and the swirly nature of the patches. Their research suggested that lunar magma cooling in tubes just a few meters down could become magnetized. Then those localized fields could deflect the solar wind. And this week, NASA's Artemis mission, or acceleration, reconnection, turbulence, and electrodynamics of the moon's interaction with the sun, which is an extension and submission of the original Themis mission, or time, history of events, and macro-scale interactions during substorms. I just have to pause here to state my appreciation for the epic Bacronym journey of those two names. The Artemis mission has mapped the interactions between the solar wind and the localized magnetic fields in the swirly regions of the moon, and hypothesis confirmed. The magnetic fields do appear to be shielding the lighter areas, thereby protecting those small patches of the lunar surface from the harsh radiation that has discolored the surrounding regolith. In the NASA press release for these findings, they describe these local fields as acting sort of like a magnetic sunscreen. So does that mean we can go to the moon and set up a colony in the shelter of one of these lava tubes? Unfortunately, not. NASA was quick to point out that these local fields, these sunscreens, if you will, are not strong enough to protect humans from the damaging effects of solar wind. So when we go back to the moon, we're going to have to bring our own SPF 20 bajillion. Technical term. Now I get the honor of welcoming Jade Kim to her first appearance on The Space News Show to talk about Earth's atmosphere. I know, I know, we'll get her a better mic. The Earth's atmosphere, a cozy layer of gases enveloping the planet like a nice snug sweater. It does everything from enable us to do that awesome thing called breathing, to protecting us from the terrifying radiation of the sun, and basically allows us to generally exist. We've been studying the atmosphere extensively for years and years and years, but as it turns out, there is still much more than meets the eye. Much more. Recent findings published in the Journal of Geophysical Research Space Physics put a new spin on some old data from ESA and NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, also known as SOHO. And while the data may be retro, its most recent interpretations are most certainly not. It turns out the Earth's outer atmosphere extends much further than previously thought, about 630,000 kilometers away. That's 50 times the diameter of this planet, and yes, this means that the moon technically orbits within the boundaries of our atmosphere. In fact, when the Apollo 16 astronauts took this photo of the glowing feature back in 1972, little did they know they were actually standing in its outskirts. Yes, that's right, both the Earth and the Moon are cuddling under the same gassy blanket. This outermost region is an extremely thin envelope of hydrogen molecules and is referred to as the geocorona, which might sound familiar if you're acquainted with the sun's atmosphere. The solar corona, comprised of extremely tenuous plasma, extends thousands of miles from the solar surface and reaches temperatures of up to 10 million degrees Celsius, a little more extreme than our humble geocorona, but the ideas are similar nonetheless. The discovery was made from data that was collected by the SWAN instrument aboard SOHO, which was able to detect a very particular type of UV radiation called Limon Alpha. That results from the sun's interaction with hydrogen. Earth's atmosphere normally blocks out this radiation, so any observations would have needed to be done in space. SWAN did exactly that and was able to separate the Limon Alpha light coming from the geocorona from other interplanetary hydrogen. Researchers found that the geocorona is actually asymmetrical, denser on the day side and somewhat elongated into a tail on the opposite side due to compression from the solar wind. The amount of hydrogen comprising this region is really sparse, however, and it's still technically a vacuum, which means it won't have any real effect on lunar missions, fortunately. However, astronomers may be the ones to suffer, sorry Jared, as any observations taken in UV wavelengths on or near the moon could be messed with. It also has implications for studying water beyond our solar system in the atmospheres of exoplanets as well. As hydrogen detected in the exospheres of our own Mars, Venus, and Earth have all indicated water vapor near their surfaces. Just to say that when it comes to our beloved planetary sweater, there is still so much to be learned. And even with decades old data from an instrument meant to study the sun, there are still many discoveries that are being made. And finally, let's close out this week with our Space Weather Report from Dr. Tamatha Scove. We are calming down from the biggest solar storm we've had in months and considering its near solar minimum, that's saying quite a bit. We had some gorgeous aurora over many parts of the world and it even made it down into the United States. As we switch to our front side sun, you can see that coronal hole that rotated through the Earth's strike zone, and along with a solar storm, it kind of intensified the effects. So we've actually had some decent storming over the past few days. Now as things begin to calm down, we do still have a single bright region on the Earth-facing disk, but we do have also a couple hot spots that have been developing over the last couple days. Now they're not flare producing, but we are watching them closely. As we switch to our back side sun, you can see that big bright region that's rotating through Stereo's view right now, but it doesn't look like there's a lot behind it. So if things continue as they are, it does look like Space Weather is going to begin to quiet down. Switching to our moon, this week we are passing through the new moon phase, with the new moon being on the 6th, and even by the 9th, the moon will still only be about 5% illuminated. So you night sky watchers, now is a good time to catch those dim objects in the sky. And now for your Leo-Mio-Geo orbit outlook. As we switch to our low energy particles, these are the ones that cause surface charging on the outside of spacecraft. They can even cause charging on the solar arrays. You can actually see the red blobs being injected in and around the Geo orbit. It's actually worse on the dawn side, which is the bottom of this figure. And you can see that big red ring building. Those are the fluxes kind of increasing over the last couple days. They will continue to increase easily over the next few days, possibly even the next week, as the solar storm continues to wane. So satellites like Direct TV and any Geosynchronous satellites, you operators need to be aware you could have some surface charging issues over the next few days. For more details on this week's forecast, including GPS reception, amateur radio issues, and what kind of aurora field reporting we saw during the solar storm, check out my channel or visit me at spaceweatherwoman.com. Now that brings us close to our weekly space news, but the conversation continues this weekend on our live show. This week we welcome Tanya Harrison, Director of Research for New Space Initiative at Arizona State University. We'll be talking about her experience working on the science teams for programs such as the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Opportunity, Curiosity, Mars 2020, and much more. If you're a Mars geek, this will be the show for you. And don't forget to show up live. And the easiest way to remember is to hit that subscribe button and the bell icon so you get a notice the moment we have new content. And a special thank you to all of the citizens of tomorrow who helped to make this show happen. Without you, we wouldn't be able to do what we do. If you've got some value out of this show, consider putting some back in. Head on over to patreon.com slash tmro and contribute whatever you think these episodes are worth to you. That's our show this week. We had a lot of fun. I hope you did too. And we look forward to talking to you tomorrow.