 Hello and welcome to Station 204. For your space news today on November 27th, 2019, we're gonna be covering China landing on Mars. We're also gonna be talking about JAXA out at Ryugu. But first, let's get started with our space traffic, finding out who's putting what where. We start this week down in Boca Chica, Texas, at SpaceX's Starship Test Facilities. During a Starship Mark I pressure test, near maximum operating pressures an anomaly occurred, sending the forward bulkhead on a rapid unscheduled suborbital flight with a maximum altitude of 100 to 150 meters. No report on his horizontal distance, but still an impressive feat nonetheless for a vehicle that was reportedly not going to fly to any height. Now for an intentional lift off, we're headed to the Xishang spaceport in China for the launch of a Long March 3B. Leaving the pad at 055 universal time, the hypergolic propelled vehicle lofted two Bidu navigation satellites into a medium Earth orbit, continuing to build out China's Bidu navigation constellation. Now parts of this Long March 3 rocket landed on a nearby village, and that's definitely smoke that you don't want to be breathing in, let alone being around. Now this all should be alleviated soon when launches are moved to the Xishang space launch site on Hainan Island. So then China will drop its spent boosters into the ocean. Jumping a little west and a few days ahead, a Soyuz 2-1V launched from site 43 and the Plesiysk Cosmodrome in Northern Russia, doing so at 1752 universal time on November 25th. The Soyuz successfully deployed a payload for the Russian Ministry of Defense, which they said would observe the status of other Russian satellites in orbit. Very similar to the launch of a secretive Russian payload in 2017. On November 26th at 1824 universal time, we got a little rumble in the jungle. An Arion-5 carrying an Egyptian government communications satellite, Tiba-1, and broadband satellite in Marsat GX-5 leapt off at the pad at the Ghana Space Center in Kourou. Carried to a geosynchronous transfer orbit, the two satellites separated from the upper stage at 25 minutes and 34 minutes after launch, respectively. And mission success was declared. This was Arion Space's 250th mission since the first launch of an Arion-1 in 1979. And here are your upcoming departures. Now I've got another space news bonanza happening for us this week. There's so much to talk about on, off, and going away from the Earth. So let's get you up to eight kilometers per second so you're at a speed to see it all. NASA is aggressively moving programs forward to send humans back to the moon to stay. NASA's commercial lunar payload services selected five more companies that can provide the ability to deliver 10 kilograms to the surface of the moon. SpaceX, Blue Origin, Series Robotics, Sierra Nevada Corp, and Tyvek Nano satellite systems joined nine other companies, including the likes of Mastin Space Systems, Astrobotic, and Lockheed Martin. Each company provides its own lander. For instance, Blue Origin is offering its blue moon and SpaceX is offering starship. NASA, as fast as they're moving to return to the moon for good, is still waiting on Congress to approve a budget that includes clips. A hover test of an engineering model of China's own Mars lander was declared a success at the public unveiling of the planned mission. To be launched in the July 2020 window on the powerful Long March 5 launcher, this mission will include an orbiter with science instruments, a lander module, and a rover contained inside, which if they're successful, they'll be the second country to land on the surface of Mars, which historically has a success rate of under 50%. China is also expanding its scientific collaboration with countries in Europe, but the United States has legislation in place that strictly forbids NASA's participation. Boeing's first spaceworthy starliner departed its factory last week and made the several kilometer trip to Pad 41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Once out, Pad 41, crews lifted the capsule onto the Atlas V rocket, it'll ride to orbit and began connection closeouts that'll continue for the next few weeks. Still on track for a December 17th launch, starliner will not carry a crew on board for its first flight, but will have an instrumented dummy named Rosie in honor of the World War II icon, Rosie the Riveter. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is one of those rare experiments that's easier to do in space than on the ground because it's easier to cool. That is, of course, until the cooling system breaks. And now we have to do some really complex spacewalks to fix it. ISS Commander Luca Parmitano and Flight Engineer Drew Morgan stepped outside to remove the cooling pump, which forced them to destroy the cooling lines so that a new cooling system can be installed. And now to talk a little more about this week's space weather, here's Dr. Tamatha Scove. Space weather this week continues to be a bit on the disturbed side. We are coming down from a solar storm fizzle that occurred last week, but it did bring Aurora down to many parts of the world. And as we switch to our front side, son, oh look, there's yet another coronal hole that's gonna be rotating into the Earth Strike Zone here over the next couple of days. And it could keep us at disturbed conditions and continue with this high latitude Aurora over the next couple of days. Plus, if you look, you can see a bright region that's kind of growing in the middle of that coronal hole. This bright region does have solar cycle 25 polarity. So once again, we are seeing consistent signatures of the new cycle. It isn't here yet, but we're getting stronger and stronger indications that it's just around the corner. As we switch to our far side, son, this is the view of the sun from Stereo's view and it's actually looking at the sun from the side. You can see the sun has been pretty much quiet. There's not any coronal holes and not a lot of bright regions, but over the course of the last 24 hours, we see two bright regions that have emerged on the far side sun. And this is good news for amateur radio operators and emergency responders because it helps boost that solar flux and helps radio propagation hopefully get up out of the poor conditions. Did you catch the bull-eyed explosion over Southern Wisconsin on November 22nd? This is the view over Madison, Wisconsin, captured by the University of Wisconsin AOSS rooftop cameras. The origin of this bull-eyed is most likely the Alpha Montserratids meteor shower that briefly turned into an outburst, the intensity of which has not occurred for more than two decades. Now, typically the Alpha Montserratids, also called the Unicorn Meteor Shower, only produces a few meteors each year. However, on this night, conditions were very different. Astronomers Esko Leitinen and Peter Geneskens published a paper recently on the unusual meteor event writing that the conditions are nearly identical to the outburst 24 years ago, which had about 400 meteors an hour. According to Leitinen and Geneskens, the outburst is caused by a dust released by a long period comet, but the comet's identity remains unknown. Now, several eyewitnesses to the Wisconsin bull-eyed said they saw a brief flash in the sky that came out of nowhere and the bull-eyed was so low that they even heard the explosion as it broke up over the water. Too bad the solar storm that was occurring at the same time wasn't strong enough to bring Aurora down to Wisconsin that night, but some people at higher latitudes got lucky. Not only did they manage to catch the Unicorn Meteor Shower, but they caught several of these meteors streaking through Aurora-lit skies. Gorgeous. For more details on this week's space weather, including when and where to see Aurora, how your GPS reception will fare and what's gonna happen for emergency and amateur radio, come check out my channel or see me at spaceweatherwoman.com. Just as SpaceX is revolutionizing how we launch and land rockets with Falcon, JAXA is now ushering in a new dawn of asteroid mining with its own Falcon. Hayabusa 2 follows its infamously problematic predecessor of the same name, which led JAXA's control room on a roller coaster of emotions. The largest solar flare in recorded history damaged its solar cells. That caused a slew of electrical issues. That led to propulsion issues. It had two reaction wheels fail. It had a fuel leak. It had navigation problems. And all of this before yeeting its landing probe into the inky blackness of space. And that's just the appetizer. Now, in stark contrast, Hayabusa 2 has had a nearly flawless mission. After five years and a whole lot of explosions, Hayabusa 2 is officially returning from near-Earth asteroid Ryugu with both surface and subsurface samples in hopefully unprecedented amounts. Not only will there be a huge scientific payoff, but the path to asteroid mining will definitely become more feasible. Unlike previous sample return missions, Hayabusa 2 is the first spacecraft to successfully collect subsurface samples using projectiles ranging from bullet-sized to literal bombs. Future mining crafts could build upon these very innovations to establish a more efficient method of collecting and returning valuable materials. Plus, we'll learn more about the near-Earth asteroids that would be prime candidates for prospecting, with Ryugu itself estimated to contain over $80 billion in metals, water, and ammonia. Now, my favorite part about this charming rubble pile is what's on the inside. This asteroid contains materials left over from the primordial solar system that evolved in such a way that makes asteroids a bit like old home movies. By studying how the materials have evolved and interacted with each other, we can essentially play the tape back as to how terrestrial planets formed. With these samples, scientists are hoping to answer some long-standing questions about Earth, such as, where did all this water come from? And where did all these organic compounds that make this little thing called life possible come from? So how much material are we actually talking about? Well, we won't know until it gets here. But the success of Hayabusa 2 and JAXA's rapid growth signifies a promising future of space exploration. From launching their first satellite in 2005 to pulling off a first-of-its-kind sample return mission not even 15 years later, the prospects for the mining and maybe even human exploration of our solar system have certainly increased. Thanks for watching this week's Space News. Just wanted to let you know that our next live show will be happening on December 14th, right back at our usual time of 1800 universal. Now, we're gonna be talking about everything that happened in 2019 in spaceflight. And take a look at everything that's hopefully gonna happen in 2020. So make sure to join us. We've got a lot of ground to cover. And of course, we wanna give a huge shout out to all of the citizens of tomorrow. Without your help, we wouldn't be able to make any of this possible. No news, no interviews, no letting off steam. 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.tomorrow.tv to find other ways to help. As always, hitting that subscribe and notification button, liking, sharing and getting us in in front of as many of your friends as possible helps us pursue the core of our mission, which is to get everyone excited about space. And that wraps up this week's Space News. Until the next episode, remember, keep exploring. Let's get started with our space traffic finding out who's putting what where. And that's just the appetizer. Is that, I'm drawn blanks here. Is that good? Texas, it's SpaceX's Starship, Starship, Starship. So two has had a nearly flawless mission. Was that too douchey or was that okay? Okay, it was, it felt douchey. Yeah, it's gonna upset some people.