 Hello, citizens of Earth. It's me, Jared, coming to you from station 204 for your space news for June 19th, 2019. Let's go ahead and get started by going to the usually sunny Central California coast. Once again, we've only got one departure to talk about this week. Coming from Space Launch Complex for East in beautiful Vanden Fog Air Force Base, it's a SpaceX Falcon 9 lifting three radar satellites for the Canadian Space Agency. Departing on June 12, 2019 at 1417 universal time, about two and a half minutes into launch, separation saw stage one due to the standard turn and burn for a successful return to landing zone four at Vanden Fog, the first daylight West Coast landing. Over an hour into the mission, the three radar-sat constellation spacecraft, each weighing 1400 kilograms, were deployed into polar orbit. The three satellites will cover roughly 90 percent of the Earth's surface daily and be used for maritime surveillance and environmental monitoring. And here's how the week ahead is looking for upcoming departures from Earth. I've always dreamed of going to space, and now NASA has open boarding for premium platinum princess class to the International Space Station. You coming with me? It's now not just private companies that can participate, but if they'd like to send up a private astronaut as well, NASA's finally open to it per a public announcement they made on June 7. Room and board are only $35,000 a day, and you've got to find your own ride up either on a SpaceX Crew Dragon or Boeing Starliner. Bigelow Aerospace, within a few hours of NASA's announcement, revealed that they have already purchased four launches through SpaceX to carry up to four private astronauts for up to two months on station. The cost? $52 million per seat, and with NASA expecting to host up to a dozen private astronauts per year, expect to see a lot more of these kinds of deals to occur. Space Adventures, a company who has flown paying tourists to the International Space Station, has an agreement with Boeing to fly private astronauts on Starliner. But there's no word yet on whether or not anyone has taken up the ticket. But this may be a case of now that the seats are officially official up for grabs, the customers should start rolling in. The proliferation of access to low Earth orbit and destinations to host both people and experiments is something we've dreamed about for quite a while. It's not the moon or Mars, but it's a destination, and one that's a much more important stepping stone than most folks give it credit for being. I know if I go up to the station, I'm going to be sitting in the cupola taking photos all day long. Now let us know in the comments below what you would do if you could hitch a ride to the station. One thing that could ruin your ISS trip would be a really nasty sunburn, and to talk about space weather for this week, here's Dr. Tammeth Escove. Space weather this week is definitely calmed down compared to last week. As we switch to our front side sun, you can see there isn't much going on. We've got a remnant chronohole that's rotating in through the Earth strike zone, but it's probably not even going to send us all that much fast wind, just a little bit of disturbed solar wind over the next day or so before things begin to settle down. But it probably isn't going to give us much of an aurora show, if any at all. We also don't have any bright readings to report, so this means the solar flux has dropped back down into the high 60s, and that means poor radio propagation on Earth's day side. As we switch to the backside sun, well, it's kind of the same picture. This is what solar minimum looks like, folks. There's not a lot going on, but you can see kind of a fringe of light coming around the eastern limb of Stereo's View. These are the old remnants of Region 2740 and 41. They're going to be rotating into Stereo's View here in the next couple days, which means they could rotate into Earth View in about 10 days. It looks like they're surviving their backside passage yet again, and that could mean a boost to the solar flux, but we just have to wait for it. It's been a little over a month since we last checked in at Mars, and dust storm season is well underway. Over this past week, a dust storm in the northern hemisphere occurred over the eastern Arcadia region and spread both southward and eastward towards the plains of Acidalia. The dust haze from this storm has pushed as far south as the flanks of Olympus Mons, and in the southern hemisphere, dust storms were spotted over Serenium, Aeonia, and eastern Nochisterra. Luckily, the skies were storm-free for a robotic Martian colonists Curiosity and Insight. Currently, Insight is reporting partially sunny skies at Elysium Planitia, with a high of minus 23 Celsius and a low of minus 105. The winds are out of the south-southeast at 16 meters per second. But the biggest news this week at Mars is not the weather. It's the discovery of a new impact crater about 15 meters wide that's 50 feet near the equator in Valles Marineris. Here are some before and after pictures taken by the high-rise instrument orbiting at over 250 kilometers above the surface. The meteor that caused this crater is expected to be only about one and a half meters wide, that's about five feet, which would have easily burned up in the Earth's atmosphere before hitting the ground. But at Mars, it has formed one of the most impressive craters seen by the Mars Reconnaissance Observer over its 13-year history of mapping the red planet. For more details on this week's space weather, including amateur and emergency radio propagation conditions, as well as GPS reception, check out my channel or come see me at space weatherwoman.com. You haven't seen Athena in a while because she's been in the outer solar system and she's got a story to tell us from her visit to Saturn. Cassini was my personal favorite mission and I love it even more now. It was designed in the 80s, it died two years ago and yet it still brings us mind-boggling discoveries about Saturn. Now the reason it was my favorite mission is for one, Saturn's my favorite planet. For two, the way the spacecraft looked was really freaking cool. And three, it went through the plumes of Enceladus, possibly looking for space fish. Like it went through water that's shooting out of a moon. And speaking of moons, Cassini now shows us these baby moons, which we lovingly call moonlets, that are starting to form inside the rings of Saturn. Scientists believe that what's happening in Saturn's rings may be similar to what's happening when planets form around newborn stars. Within the rings, there are pieces being gravitationally attracted together to form larger objects. And if we were to fast forward this process, they may eventually form into a moon similar to how ours formed. We're lucky to have a planet in our backyard that has a ring system that's behaving the way that our early solar system did. Analyzing this further can bring us closer to understanding not only how our moon formed, but the planets too, including us. The Saturnian system has gravitational forces that are so strong, they would typically tear apart larger bodies, which is how we think the rings around Saturn were formed. So the researchers have two interesting questions. Are these bigger pieces actually fragments from something that was broken apart? And if so, why are they coming together now? This is why the research must continue. There are still so many mysteries that lie in our very own solar system that have yet to be answered. And of course, we always want to thank our citizens of tomorrow. Without you folks, we would not be able to do the news show, we would not be able to do the live show, we would not be able to do our upcoming Letting Off Steam show as well. So if you would like to help financially contribute to tomorrow, you can head on over to patreon.com slash tmro or subscribestar.com slash tmro. But if you can't do so financially and you'd still like to give something back to the show, you can head on over to community.tmro.tv and start posting there and maybe figure out a way that you can help us on that site. And with that, we'll see you next week and keep exploring.