 Welcome to your Space News for the week of January 12th, 2020. My name is Jamie Higginbotham, and I'll be your host for this episode. Now, last week I was going to give you an update as to why I thought this next decade was going to be amazing in space, and I didn't quite have time for that. But somehow I had time for a three and a half hour AMA. So if you're interested in that and a whole bunch more about me, life, aerospace, and everything, head on over to youtube.com slash TMRO and look for the Jamie Higginbotham AMA. But on this particular Space News episode, I've got Jared Head that does a Space Launch System rollout update as well as launches followed by Dr. Tamethasco, who gives us an update on the solar weather. And this week we had a pretty active sun, so she brings back the Leo Leo Geo report. All right, let's go ahead and get started. I'll hand it over to Jared. It's been the Albatross around the neck of NASA for the better part of the last decade, but finally a major milestone for the Space Launch System has crossed the line. And that is the completion of the first core stage for the Artemis-1 mission. Too many years behind schedule and too many billions over budget to count. It's about time that a tangible piece of the rocket NASA will use to send their own astronauts back to the moon becomes a reality. At NASA's Meshua assembly facility on January 8th, the core of the first Space Launch System rocket to fly was rolled out. Now, it's about 64 meters long and eight meters in diameter. So it's a chunk of a rocket. SLS team members followed their work out, including a New Orleans second line band. Quite like the music. The core stage is built by Boeing and uses the same facility and a similar insulation foam, the shuttle's external tanks were covered in. That'll help in keeping its two propellants, liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen stay at the cryogenic temperatures they require. At the business end are four aerojet rocket dying RS-25 engines, which you know better is the Space Shuttle main engine, one of my favorite rocket engines ever made. And at full throttle, they'll make a combined two million pounds of thrust. But the first stage of SLS is expendable. So these incredible engines, which flew multiple shuttle missions will end their days in the ocean. And that to me is unbecoming of the technological marvel that those RS-25s are. I mean, that was the United States's first major engine that used staged combustion and the Ferrari of engines. I mean, it's one of the most efficient liquid propellant engines ever made. The core was loaded onto NASA's Pegasus barge. It's being moved to Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, where a series of tests known as the green run will put the core through its paces. And if you'd like to know more about what exactly this green run test is, Jamie covered that on July 31st, 2019, Space News. Once we get a detailed testing schedule, I'm sure that we'll cover it again. Now, the space launch system has really been accelerating its progress over the past two years, especially since last year when it was announced that NASA is going to be attempting to return astronauts to the moon by 2024. And in order to make that target date, let me tell you, it's going to have to go perfectly from here on out. Because if it doesn't, you're probably going to miss 2024 and considering the SpaceX's progress on Starship and Blue Origin's push for Blue Moon, the space launch system is probably obsolete before it even flies. All of our launches and arrivals happened on the same day since our last show. So let's go ahead and get ready to hop around the planet. Beginning at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, a SpaceX Falcon 9 left Pad 40 at 02.19 Universal Time on January 7th, carrying 60 Starlink satellites on the third mission to build out the Starlink constellation. Two and a half minutes after liftoff, stage separation occurred with stage one performing its standard turn and burn, propelling itself to a successful landing on the drone ship. Of course, I still love you. While an attempt to recover the payload fairings was unsuccessful. At 03.20 Universal Time, the Starlink satellites were deployed. One satellite has a special coating to reflect last light. So we'll see if this satiates the desire of us astronomers for Starlink satellites not ruining our data. After a successful cargo run, Dragon C 106 was unbirthed from the International Space Station at 08.41 Universal Time on January 7th, where it was then released by Canon Arm 2 at 10.05. Backing away from the International Space Station, it fired its Draco engines, slowing enough to re-enter the atmosphere and successfully splash down in the Pacific Ocean at 15.42 Universal Time with 1,600 kilograms of research and equipment on board. We wrap up at the Zhixiang Space Center, where a Long March 3B tossed what is speculated to be a Chinese military satellite called TJS-5 into geosynchronous orbit. Liftoff occurred at 15.20 Universal Time on January 7th, and the launch was declared a success. And here are your upcoming departures. Thanks, Jared. Hopefully this next week we'll have a lot more really epic launches for you to be able to report on. All right, now it's time for me to hand this over to Dr. Tambeth Escove, who's not only going to bring us a report on our local star, but also our Leo Mio Geo update. Our sun continues to show signs of life this week. As we switch to our front side sun, you can see multiple bright regions. Now, one of these is actually a sunspot from the new solar cycle. This was region 2755 and no sooner than we got this sunspot than yet another emerged on the Earth facing disk on January 8th. This is region 2756 and it's a new cycle sunspot. And it began to make us think, well, maybe these new cycle sunspots are the norm. Now, since then, that region has rotated to the sun's backside and solar flux is beginning to drop a little bit, but we're still well into the marginal range for radio propagation on top of that. We also have a small chrono hole that's going to be rotating into the Earth strike zone here over the next couple of days. And it could give us some aurora down to about high latitudes. Remember, these storms are pretty weak right now because we're still pretty much in solar minimum as we switch to our far side sun. You can see that equatorial bright region. That's an old cycle bright regions, not even a sunspot. And that has already rotated into Earth view. But beyond that, you really don't see all that much going on in stereo's view because the sun stereo is looking at the sun from the side. So it looks like after this fast wind hits us and we have this small solar storm, we're going to get a reprieve easily over the next week. And now for your Leo, Mio, Geo orbit outlook. Switching 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 cause discharges in electrical short circuits. You can see we were in pretty good shape until about the ninth when that weak solar storm hit us. And then we started seeing particle injections right around on the dawn side and they started to kind of circulate in and around the geo orbits. Now, these particle injections keep occurring and they're continuing to build up. We did have a flushing of these of these particles right around the 10th. But as you can see, they're continuing to build up again. So you satellite operators in and around geo and any space traffic in and around the geo orbits, you are going to be worrying about satellite surface charging here over the next couple of days. And when that fast solar wind hits, that will give us yet more injection of these low energy particles, so surface charging is going to continue to be an issue. For more details on this week's space weather, including when and where you can see Aurora, how your GPS reception and radio communications going to fare. Come check out my channel or see me at space weather woman dot com. Thanks, Dr. Scove. Now, that's our show this week. I realize it was a little bit shorter than normal, but that's because I didn't do my homework. Instead, I did that three and a half hour AMA, so I don't have a space news story myself. But if you would like to get additional space news, make sure to like and subscribe on our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash T M R O and hit that notification bell as well. Then you get updates whenever we're live, which happens all the time now, as well as whenever we upload new content. And a huge thank you to all of the members of tomorrow who help to make these episodes happen. These are the people who contribute week after week, month after month to every single episode as I covered in the AMA tomorrow shows are a little bit upside down right now. But if we just had 10% of our current subscribers give $1 per month, that would make these shows profitable and way easier for us to produce to help find out how you can help us produce the shows tomorrow. Head on over to youtube.com slash T M R O slash join. All right, that's our space news for the week of January 12th, 2020. Thank you so much for watching. We'll see you next week.