 Hello fellow citizens of Earth, this is your Space News for April 17th, 2019. Let's start this program off with the latest Space Traffic. This week's Space Traffic Report starts out in lunar orbit with Space IL's Bear Sheet Lander, the first private attempt to land on the Moon. After becoming the seventh country to orbit the Moon, the Israeli-built privately funded Bear Sheet Lander attempted to make Israel the fourth country to land successfully on the Moon on April 11th. Starting its landing burn at 1912 universal time, telemetry indicated a problem with an inertial measurement unit occurring at 1919 universal time that caused a loss of main engine control. Bear Sheet then impacted the lunar surface in Marais Serenitatis at 1923 universal time at over 100 meters per second. That's enough to most certainly destroy it via hyper-anergetic litho braking or possibly rapid unintended kinetic disassembly, whichever you prefer. Although unsuccessful, a hearty congratulations is still in order for the team at Space IL for doing such an incredible job with the Bear Sheet Lander. Also on April 11th at 2235 universal time, the first operational flight of Falcon Heavy lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, developing 5.1 million pounds of thrust from its 27 Merlin 1D engines. This was also the first flight of an all-block 5 Falcon Heavy. On the way to orbit, both side boosters successfully separated, turned and burned, and simultaneously landed back at landing zone 1 and landing zone 2, roughly 8 minutes after liftoff. The core stage also separated, turned and burned, and landed on drone ship, of course I still love you, roughly 10 minutes after liftoff, 990 kilometers east of Kennedy Space Center. This is the first time all three first stages of a Falcon Heavy were recovered. The payload fairings were also successfully recovered, meaning that the only part of Falcon Heavy that was not recovered is the second stage. The second stage continued into a parking orbit, then relit its single Merlin vacuum engine for 90 seconds to propel its 6.4 ton ArabSat 6A payload into a 321 by 89,808 kilometer super synchronous orbit inclined at 23 degrees. ArabSat 6A is owned by the 21 Nation Consortium ArabSat, and will provide television, internet, telephone, and secure communications to customers in the Middle East, Africa and Europe. This was the first Lockheed Martin A2100 satellite bus to fly since upgrades of the bus began in 2012. Jared, you're not quite right. Unfortunately, yes SpaceX successfully landed the center core or the Falcon Heavy for the first time, but now they're on a bad luck streak with Falcon Heavy center cores because this is two for two that have actually been unsuccessful in recovery, and that's because on the way home on the 1000 kilometer journey from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean back to Port Canaveral, the center core of the Falcon Heavy tipped over. And this is due to really rough seas, big swells that prevented the crew from going and securing the core to the deck. And they also have a robot named Octagrabber that goes out and grabs onto the OctaWeb of the core of the vehicle to hold it down onto the deck. Unfortunately, the Octagrabber currently is not compatible with the Falcon Heavy's OctaWeb. It's looking like they're going to hopefully be able to reuse the engines and a few other things based on after some inspections, but this will have no effect on the next Falcon Heavy mission, STP-2, which is currently scheduled for June, which will use a brand new Falcon Heavy center core, which is already on its way to the Cape. So bad luck, but hopefully, I mean, they got it nailed down. They know how to recover a boost so they can land the center core. I guarantee third time will be a charm. But looking forward to next week, there is only a single launch and that's of an Antares rocket. It looks like we may be able to add StratoLaunch to the list of launch service providers in just a few years. A little while back, we did a story on the rocket that StratoLaunch is working on to add to their carrier aircraft. It was pretty comprehensive and I do suggest checking that out. But this week, they made news with the carrier aircraft itself. On Saturday morning, just after sunrise in the Mojave Desert, the StratoLaunch carrier airplane took to the skies for the very first time. This is the vehicle that will carry the accompanying rocket up to 10,000 meters, release it for its flight to space, then return back to Earth and rinse and repeat. Think of the StratoLaunch carrier aircraft as a reusable first stage. This is the largest aircraft in the world by wingspan at over 117 meters from tip to tip and has six engines and is basically three Boeing 747s that have been fused together and embezzled. The test brought the craft to over 300 kilometers per hour in velocity at an altitude of over 5,000 meters. As more and more commercial providers spin up, StratoLaunch has the unique advantage of not needing to wait for range assets or pads to become available for flight. Ignoring paperwork issues, they can fly their carrier aircraft where they need it and just launch from there. No need to build new launch sites for different types of orbits, just move that airplane to where you need it. StratoLaunch hopes to be able to bring the carrier aircraft and accompanying rocket into commercial service sometime around the year 2020. There was an epic story this last week that was massive. Pun intended. For this story, I'll hand it back over to Jared. There are very few moments in the history of science that leave an entire field in awe at the effort, work and result that has been yielded from a single experiment. But the release of the first image of a black hole from the event horizon telescope, it's one of those once in a lifetime events. The goal directly image a black hole for the first time. But how do you image something that doesn't generate its own light? Well, you don't look for the black hole, you look for what's around it. Material falling into the black hole in an area known as the accretion disk heats up as it collides with other material to temperatures hot enough to emit x-rays before it slips past the event horizon, the cosmic point of no return. But a single telescope looking in the wavelengths necessary, microwave and radio, is not able to do the job, nor is an array of telescopes over a large distance able to do so. You're going to need a telescope the size of Earth itself to pull this off. Impossible, improbable, unlikely you say. But that's where the potency of a technique known as interferometry comes into play. Interferometry is easy in principle. Gather data simultaneously from multiple telescopes and combine that data so that the resolution is equivalent to a telescope the size of the two telescopes the furthest away from each other. But as you can imagine, the computing power to both process and combine this data is immense. Telescopes across North America, South America, Europe and Antarctica observed two targets, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way and the supermassive black hole at the center of Galaxy M87 at the same time and they gathered a grand total of five petabytes of data. Yeah, that's quite a lot of data, 5,242,880 gigabytes of data to be exact. Now crunching that data at 800 CPUs running as fast as they could since December 2017 and some wrenching via algorithms never before attempted and this is what we got. Gorgeous, stunning, awe-inspiring, beautiful in its frightening discussion of material and deep within it physics itself. So what are we seeing here in this image? What can we learn from this? Well, quite a bit as astronomy is well known for its ability to take a pixel and squeeze solutions of mysteries out of them. The bright ring is a disc of material a third of a light year across rotating at roughly 1,000 kilometers per second as it slowly spirals in towards the event horizon. 90 Earth masses of material fall in every day. That's an earth mass every 16 minutes. The event horizon, what scientists would call the Schwarzschild radius, is 120 astronomical units across which a reminder the distance between the earth and the sun is one astronomical unit and Pluto is on average 39 astronomical units away from the sun. That darkness in the center is actually larger than the event horizon itself. That's because of the intensity of the gravity and the inability of light to escape it. So we're seeing a silhouette of the event horizon which appears larger than it actually is. Seeing the supermassive black hole at the center of M87 called M87 star was the same thing as aiming a telescope in Los Angeles and seeing a human hair in New York City 3,950 kilometers away with a resolution able to discern the individual scales of keratin on the single hair. Here we see three images. On the left is the actual data of M87 star. The center is a computer model and the one on the right is the computer model blurred to the expected resolution of the real image. They're near identical, eerily so. This amazing result tells us that Einstein's work in the theory of general relativity and all of those who have worked on the physics since are once again correct. And the event horizon telescope network didn't just look for a single session, they looked over multiple days which is an incredible feat of collaboration to have multiple telescopes observing the same targets at multiple times. This means that the data can be crunched for individual observation sessions and the dynamics of that disk of material can be determined, which will help us understand black holes even better. A preliminary name for the black hole has been proposed by astronomers, Povehi, Hawaiian for dark, which comes from the Kumolipo, a chant about the origins of the world from a Hawaiian perspective, a creation story that begins in the dark. This truly is a fantastic result, one for the ages, and the event horizon telescope is now crunching the data on observations made on the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way called Sagittarius A star. We'll most certainly be covering that once that data is released, as we'll be able to compare and contrast to M87 star. And maybe we'll finally be able to answer the question that's bothering me the most. Who made the better song about black holes, Muse or Soundgarden? And feel free to chime in in the comments below. And finally this week, a look at our local star. Dr. Tama Thescov brings us this week's Space Weather. Space weather this week settles down just a bit, even as region 2738 continues to impress us. As we flip to our front side sun, you can see that massive region there. It's continuing to fire off small solar flares, but it's not a risk for major radio blackouts right now. However, it is boosting the solar flux up well into the marginal range for amateur radio and shortwave radio and emergency responders. So enjoy some decent radio propagation on Earth's day side. After that, we're not seeing very much in terms of solar storm prospects. In fact, if we flip to our backside sun, we do see a couple small coronal holes that will be rotating into Earthview here in the next few days. And it might bring us a little bit of fast solar wind and possibly a little bit of aurora in about two weeks. Switching to our moon, we are now passing through the full moon phase with a full moon being on the 20th. So you night sky watchers, if you want to watch dim objects in the sky, you're going to need to check your local rise and set times. Now you night sky watchers get ready because we're about to get hit with the Lyrid meteor shower. And this happens as Earth moves through the cometary debris field. Now the meteor shower will happen between the 19th and about the 25th with the peak being on the 23rd. We could see meteor rate visibilities as high as 4 an hour in the northern hemisphere and even higher in the southern hemisphere, but you're going to have to watch that full moon that happens on the 20th because that could severely reduce your visibility. So make sure you look for dark skies and you get out of the bright lights of the city if you expect to catch it. For more details on this week's space weather, including amateur radio propagation, GPS conditions, and when and where you can see aurora, come check out my channel or visit me at spaceweatherwoman.com. While this does bring an end to the space news for this week, for the epic space nerds out there, the awesomeness continues this weekend. This Saturday at 1800 universal time, we'll be joined by Zhai Li Zhang to talk about the Dragonfigh telephoto array, its unique capabilities, why it is needed, and what we found so far. The easiest way to remember our live shows is to subscribe to our YouTube channel, then hit that bell so you get notifications anytime we have a new news or live show. And a special thank you to all of the citizens of tomorrow who helped make this space news episode happen. These series of names are the people who contribute week after week, helping to bring you new and great content. We are almost completely crowdfunded, so thank you to everyone here for helping to make this all happen. That's our new show this week. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you tomorrow. Keep finding new things, new ways to prove it.