 Hello citizens of Earth, come on board station 204 because we're gonna be talking about buying some Soyuz seats, troubleshooting a drill on Mars and using a little X-ray vision to see deep into Halloween, October 31st, 2019. Now let's go ahead and start off our news by heading down to the Cape where we've got a spooky secret coming back as it goes boom, boom in the night. Returning from orbit at the shuttle landing facility at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a United States Air Force X-37B landed at 0751 Universal Time on October 27th. The complete payload manifest for OTV-5 is keep it on the down low. Hush now, if I told you I'd have to kill you, Coca-Cola formula levels of secret, but the Air Force announced that one experiment flying is the advanced structurally embedded thermal spreader two, assets two, which measures the performance of an oscillating heat pipe. Now OTV-5 did set a new record for time on orbit, 780 days. And here are your upcoming departures. I love traveling and a big part of that for me is how I make the journey to the destination. And for NASA right now, that is seats on a Soyuz. But with commercial crew schedules seemingly slipping more than a deer on ice, NASA has had to make a really tough call. $80 million a pop is what a Soyuz seat cost last time NASA purchased a few. I'm sure if a discount is applied, if you buy a dozen, the slip of schedule to the right of both SpaceX's Crew Dragon and Boeing Starliner vehicles means that there's a real possibility that an American astronaut could miss out on going to the International Space Station. So NASA has taken a few steps to prevent this. NASA's final purchased Soyuz seat presently is on MS-16, set to launch in April of 2020. Akihiko Hoshide, a Japanese astronaut who was to launch on MS-16, has now been bumped in favor of a NASA astronaut. You see, NASA manages crew transport for the European Space Agency, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency and the Canadian Space Agency for astronauts to the International Space Station. But as you can imagine, that's probably not making folks particularly happy with the bump that occurred. Now, additional pressure is coming from Roscosmos intentions to drop the number of Soyuz flights from four per year to two with U.S. commercial crew vehicles making up the difference. An additional complication is political. The United States own Iran, North Korea, Syria Non-Proliferation Act. Under this, no U.S. company is allowed to purchase high-tech goods and services from Russia. But NASA has been allowed a waiver since the Congressional Passing of the Act in 2000. That waiver ends in 2020 and there's at present been not any talk as to whether an extension will occur or not. And a slew of tests lay ahead for the two commercial crew vehicles. Timelines from both SpaceX and Boeing are aggressive requiring nothing short of perfection in very complicated mission profiles that'll be analyzed with a fine to come. Oh, what a tangled web we weave. Boy, engineering problems are pretty tough but political ones as well, especially depending upon the decisions you make and crew and other things like that, well, those are things that people will tend to often overlook. But to talk a little bit about an engineering problem that's currently occurring on Mars, let's head on over to our very own Lisa Stojanovski. Last time I updated you on the probe hammering away at Mars, it was stuck. But like I said, never doubt JPL or the German Space Agency DLR because they managed to get it working again until this happened. Oh! Now to understand how this all happened, we have to pick up from where I left off from Space News two weeks ago, which you can check out up here. In August, the team tried to use the robotic arm to collapse the cabin that was caused by the hammering probe. In September, we all had to sit around and wait for Mars to emerge from behind the sun so we could talk to inside again. With the extra time the team had, they decided to go and try and pin the probe, also known as the mole, against the wall using the robotic arm. This technique was pretty risky though. The team had to precisely move the arm to apply enough sideways force to the mole without accidentally hitting or damaging the delicate ribbon cable connected to it. And if they damaged the cable, it would be game over. No more power, no more data coming back from the mole. So here's the result. They continued to hammer down about five centimeters and then moved the scoop away. The mole had nearly sunk all the way into the ground. So the team wanted to make sure the scoop didn't accidentally swing over and hit the cable once the mole was fully submerged. The scoop then pushed on the ground to help apply force to the mole and at some point disaster struck. The team had seen this behavior under only one condition during testing. When the mole was tested at very low atmospheric pressure like that on Mars. I can't believe it, we were doing so well, they had found a solution and then this setback happens. But that just means it's time for all of us to put on our armchair engineering hats and think of a solution. So comment below if you think you've got an idea of how we could save the mole. Personally, I think we should just let it keep digging at an angle so that the weight of the regolith above it actually pushes down on the sides of the mole and gives it more friction to keep digging. But what do I know? I'm not an actual engineer. The real engineers at JPL and DLR are not giving up. First they're going to move the scoop out of the way so they can get a clear camera view of what's going on and whatever they do, they're gonna make sure that they don't accidentally let the mole tip over out of the hole because then it really would be game over. We're a pretty unique space news program in that we've actually got a real space weather report and I don't really know anybody outside of Dr. Scov's own channel that actually does a space weather report. And it affects our everyday lives whether you're aware of it or not. But our fleet of spacecraft that monitor the sun are starting to age and they're really actually starting to show how quite old they are. But luckily a collaborative effort is looking to refresh and replenish our ability to understand the sun. Solar Orbiter is a mission of the European Space Agency with major collaboration from NASA and other European member states. It's planned for launch at 04.27 on February 6th, 2020. And yes, I too find a solar mission being launched at night to be hilarious. The processing of Solar Orbiter accelerated recently and it wasn't because it's behind schedule or it's having budget issues or there's a problem with an instrument on board. It's because of, and I'm not kidding about this, potential customs issues. Do you have anything to declare? Yeah, just this $1.4 billion highly specialized chunk of exotic metals that'll sample an incredibly harsh place. Although as of today, October 31st, 2019, we know that Brexit has been delayed. Solar Orbiter shipping to the Kennedy Space Center was expedited just in case Brexit went through and customs problems were going to occur. Solar Orbiter will be unique compared to other solar observation spacecraft of its kind. It's orbit's perihelion, the closest point to the sun will be inside of Mercury's orbit using several gravitational assist to do this. It'll also have a rather inclined or tilted orbit. This allows it to view the sun's poles, which is something we haven't done since the European Space Agency's Ulysses mission observed those areas in 2008. It'll carry a suite of instruments to study the solar wind, the sun's magnetic field, the solar atmosphere and coronal mass ejections. Now to tell us a little bit more about this, here is this week's space weather from our very own Dr. Tamethasco. We're coming down from a big solar storm that bumped us up to G2 storm levels and brought aurora clear down to mid-latitudes and the space weather continues to remain active. As we switch to our front side sun, you can see that coronal hole rotating off of the sun's west limb. That's the coronal hole that brought us the fast solar wind and gave us that decent solar storm. And although you can't see it, we had a stealthy solar storm launch on the 25th. I'll show the images in the stereo far side view. It's hard to see it on the disc view. So we have another solar storm that's on its way to Earth now and that could bump us back up to active conditions. And then on top of that, we have another coronal hole that could bring us some more fast wind and a few bright regions. As we switch to our far side sun, you can see this is from stereo's view. It's looking at the sun kind of from the side. You can see those bright regions of merging in stereo's view. Now they're not gonna be enough to be considered sunspots. I mean, we are still in solar minimum after all but they may be able to bump the solar flux up just a little bit for amateur radio operators and emergency responders. On top of that, I'm showing the coronagraph view of that stealthy solar storm that was launched. You can see it go out like that. That solar storm, although we couldn't see it launch from the front side, it's definitely there and it's beginning to hit Earth now. And we should see these maybe bumping back up to active conditions easily over the next day or two. And now for your Leo, Mogeo orbit outlook. As we switch to our low energy particle environment, these are the particles that cause surface charging on the outside of spacecraft, including charging up the solar arrays that then can give discharges and electrical short circuits. You can see those fluxes building up in around the geo orbit and even down into the meo orbit. So this is a lot of surface charging folks. This is all due to that big solar storm that hit. And you can see those fluxes have actually got flushed right around the 28th but then they began to build up again. So satellite operators in geo and also clear down to meo orbits expect that you're gonna be dealing with some surface charging issues easily over the next couple of days. Now as we switch to our higher energy particle environment, these are the particles I can penetrate further into the spacecraft electronics and actually cause upsets with performance. You can actually see inside of geo again, we are having some issues with the internal charging fluxes. Now they do get flushed on the 28th just like the lower energy particle stuff does but we are seeing injections once again. So the internal charging capacity is beginning to build up again around the geo and down even into the meo orbits. So you satellite operators at geo and meo, you're gonna be dealing with both surface charging and internal charging. And then of course down at leo, well because of that solar storm, you're gonna be dealing with drag issues. So that means your satellites are gonna be slowing down and changing orbits. For more details on this week's space weather, including when and where to see Aurora, what's going on with that new solar storm and how your amateur radio and GPS is gonna fare. Come check out my channel or see me at spacewetherwoman.com. Even though I started off here as the astronomer of tomorrow, I very rarely get to talk astronomy stories these days. So I'm just gonna slip a little one in here and make sure not to tell Jamie, please. Earlier this year, we covered the launch of Spectre RG, a new X-ray space telescope. It's a collaboration between Russia and Germany. The primary instrument onboard is called Irozita, a highly specialized X-ray detector with the plan to map the entire sky in X-rays over the next seven years. This should provide us a comprehensive map of the universe, which will help us model dark energy and dark matter much, much better. And I mean, you know, that's good because it's only the stuff that makes up 95% of the universe. And when you look at the Irozita instrument, it appears to be something that I'd expect to find a James Bond villain using. Yes, Mr. Bond, I do believe I will collect all these higher energy photons. During the commissioning phase, there were problems found with the electronic controls of the camera, but that's why you have those times built in so that way you can troubleshoot problems. End with that troubleshooting over. The first light image is of the large Magellanic cloud and it is stunning. Now, although this may not look sharp for what we're used to seeing with something like, say, Hubble, for X-ray light, this is laser focus. We're seeing a lot of supernovae remnants, which are the cosmic cookers for the elements that were made out of. These wavelengths of light aren't visible to our eyes and that's a real advantage of telescopes like this. We can cut through things like clouds of gas and dust and see things that otherwise would be completely missed and we learn more from what's invisible to us. And of course, don't forget that we've got our live shows every Saturday at 1800 UTC and this upcoming Saturday, November 2nd, we've got a pretty interesting guest. Dr. Matt Richardson of the University of Tokyo and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency is gonna come on and talk reusable rocket engines. Now, Matt recently graduated with a PhD in Aerospace Engineering where he tested ways to extend the lifetime and reduce refurbishment costs of liquid-fueled rocket engines. So if you're a big fan of reusability, you are definitely going to wanna tune into this one and maybe tune into it multiple times. And of course, we want to give a huge shout out to all of our citizens of tomorrow. Without your help, we wouldn't be able to make any of this possible. No news, no interview, no letting off steam shows. So if you got something from us and would like to give something back, you can head on over to youtube.com slash tmro slash join and you can also head over to community.tmro.tv to find other ways to help as well. As always, hitting that subscribe and notification button, liking, sharing and getting us in front of as many of your friends as possible helps us pursue the core of our mission to get everyone excited about space. So from this big fruit, thank you so much for watching Space News. Until the next one, keep exploring. Shh. Hello citizens. Hello. Hello citizens of Earth. God, it's burning up in this. Last time I updated you on the probe hammering. Blah, blah, blah. Do you find me appealing? When it comes to bananas and puns, I have a bunch. If you don't like my banana puns, you can always split. You know why I have to wear sunscreen? Because I peel. Do you know what I say when I answer the phone? Yellow, do you know where I'm going to get my education? At Sunday school. I'm feeling a little sick. I think I've got yellow fever. Monkeys like me because I've got a peel. You know what kind of key opens the banana? A monkey. Do you know why I went out with the prune? Because I couldn't find a date. I failed my first driving test because I peeled out. OK, that's enough of that.