 Hello citizens of Earth and welcome to Tomorrow News. This week we are going to be going into our deep dive for all of the missions that are heading to Mars in this 2020 window that we are going through right now. Ryan is going to be talking about SpaceX getting a little wet and of course we have our space weather with Dr. Tamethasco who's also going to go into the weather on Mars itself and why that's so important for the spacecraft that are on their way. Now if you like what we do here tomorrow don't forget to subscribe to us, hit the notifications like our videos and share them everywhere that you can, every little bit helps us out. So let's stop messing around, let's jump right into it. This is your Tomorrow News for the week of July 29th, 2020 and Ryan, tell us what is up with X? The official Crew 1 poster has been announced by NASA and in my opinion it looks awesome. It's got the patch which is nearly shaped like a dragon's head, you've got the Crew Dragon spacecraft, you've got the ISS and you've got the astronauts. What more could you want? Speaking of astronauts, if you didn't notice, the crew was actually expanded in March to a total of four people, being the original two of Michael Hopkins and Victor Glover, but including the first women to fly on Dragon, Shannon Walker and the first person from Jaxa to fly on Dragon being Soichi Noguchi. And it isn't just Crew 1 in the news as Crew 2's crew, Crew 2's crew has just been announced. From left to right, Crew 2 will fly Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbera from NASA, Akihiko Hoshide from Jaxa and Thomas Peske from the European Space Agency. But of course these missions cannot launch on schedule if the certification of Crew Dragon is not complete, which is looking on track to do as Endeavour is currently planned to land with Bob and Doug inside on August 2nd around 1835 Coordinated Universal Time, which is only five days away. The fairings used on the Enesis 2 mission have both been caught by the recovery vessels which, if my factor correct, makes it the first ever successful double catch in history, I think. Not much has happened in Boca Chica in this past week yet because as I am recording this SN5 is out on the test stand getting ready for its static fire. The complex itself survived a small sprinkling of Hurricane Hannah which means it should be ready to support Starship SN5 on the lead up to its 150m hop. The launch we have waited so long for, Starlink 9 will hopefully and finally launch on the 1st of August at around 0721 UTC. And with the tank of SpaceX gossip emptied for this week, Jared, have you got any more RP1? We've got plenty of propellant here, Ryan, and that's because Mars is in our sights. We've already got two missions on their way and we've got one that's going to be launching in a matter of hours. So let's go ahead and talk about all three. The first of the trio was the Emirates Mars mission, also known as Al-Ama, Arabic for Hope. Originally announced in July 2014, Hope is a project aimed at expanding the skill set at the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center in Dubai, learning to do things such as designing, manufacturing and integrating large satellites. There was also a desire to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the United Arab Emirates in 2021 and the 2020 launch window to Mars lined up perfectly to allow a mission to arrive there just in time. In deciding what Hope should study, the mission team at the United Arab Emirates put out a global call to scientists asking what is something that's not really well studied at Mars and universally they heard back, Mars's atmosphere. There are presently three spacecraft at Mars, specifically dedicated to studying its atmosphere. The European Space Agency's Mars Express, which has been studying in orbit since 2003, NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Orbiter, also known as MAVEN, which has been in orbit since 2013, and ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, which has been in orbit since 2016. And although Hope is studying the atmosphere much like these other missions, there's a primary difference between them. Mars Express, MAVEN and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter study specific areas and processes in the atmosphere of Mars. Hope will be documenting and studying the entirety of Mars' atmosphere all at once. It will be using a multi-band high resolution camera called the Emirates Exploration Imager that can measure the amount and types of water, ice, dust and gases in the atmosphere of Mars. In addition, the Emirates Infrared Spectrometer will look at the lower and middle atmosphere of Mars, and the other instrument, the Emirates Mars Ultraviolet Spectrometer, will examine the upper atmosphere. The instruments are a collaborative effort between the Muhammad bin Rashid Space Center, Arizona State University, the University of California Berkeley, with major assistance from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder and NASA's Deep Space Network. The Hope mission team has noted that they are studying the entirety of Mars' atmosphere. So in a way, they are actually the first weather satellite that is at Mars. And that's going to be very, very helpful in figuring out daily weather patterns on Mars, which will also be very, very helpful in figuring out what are we going to do when we send a crewed mission to Mars. The team has also said all data gathered by Hope will be made publicly available. Amran Sharaf is the project manager who has worked on previous satellites Dubai has put into orbit around the Earth, and Sara Amiri is the lead science investigator and has worked on previous Earth orbiting satellites flown by Dubai and is a current cabinet member of the United Arab Emirates in the position of Minister of State for Advanced Sciences. The team consists of 150 Emirati engineers and 200 engineers and scientists from the United Arab Emirates and partner organizations. Hope was launched on July 19, 2020 at 2158 Universal Time by a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H2A from the Tangashima Space Center and will arrive sometime in February 2021 and has a planned mission duration of two years. The second mission that's currently in route to Mars is a little difficult to get information about because the China National Space Administration not exactly known for being very open about what they're actually working on half at the time, but it's really hard to hide something when you're sending it to Mars. So let's go ahead and talk about what we know about their mission Tianwen-1. Tianwen means heavenly questions and the mission Tianwen-1 is certainly lined up to answer some of them. Originally expecting to explore Mars with Russia, the failure of Roscosmos Phobos Grunt mission, which was carrying a Mars orbiter for China called Yungo-1, most certainly didn't dampen their spirits. Taking the route of doing a homegrown mission, the China Aerospace and Technology Corporation along with the National Space Science Center in Beijing have developed an incredibly complex mission involving an orbiter, lander and rover. Now it's certainly one of the most technologically advanced first tries in the history of Mars exploration and it's all made from scratch. Tianwen-1 was successfully launched the top China's most potent vehicle, the Long March Five on July 23rd, 2020 at 04.41 universal time from the Wencheng spacecraft launch site. Expected to arrive sometime between February 11th and February 24th, 2021, it will then survey Mars from orbit for at least two months looking for a landing site before deploying its lander and a rover for atmospheric entry as early as late April. Then the orbiter is a medium resolution camera that can take images with objects 100 meters in size visible and another high resolution camera which can provide images with objects 2 meters in size visible, very similar to the high-rise camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. In addition there's a magnetometer to measure Mars' tenuous magnetic field, a mineralogy spectrometer to determine the makeup of Mars surface, a subsurface radar and instruments to perform particle analysis. The solar powered rover contains a ground penetrating radar, a magnetometer for surface use, a weather station, cameras and a spectrometer to measure composition of the surface directly, potentially hunting for biosignatures. Tianwen-1's overall goal is to map Mars, find evidence for potential past life and test technology that would be used in a future sample return mission. Mission managers within CNSA have said that the data gathered by Tianwen-1's orbiter and rover will be made publicly available and that orbiter has a planned mission duration of two years and the rover is expected to last 90 Martian Soles. So those are the two missions that are currently on their way to Mars and as of the making of this Tomorrow News episode, NASA's Perseverance rover is still on track to launch tomorrow, July 30th, 2020 at 11.50 universal time. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has certainly made the most advanced mission being launched in this window. Perseverance looks a lot like Curiosity, its cousin which landed and has been operating on Mars since 2012, but the looks are where the similarities end. Mars has properly wrecked Curiosity's wheels, so Perseverance's wheels have been made larger in diameter by two and a half centimeters. They are thicker, made of aluminum that's more durable and have a different traction pattern to generate more grip. This is going to be extremely important as Curiosity weighs 899 kilograms, but Perseverance tips the scales at a whopping 1050 kilograms owing to its expanded science payload. And when you take a look at that science payload, it is a potent force looking for a life off of Earth and the potential of pristine samples of Mars eventually returning to us. Inside Perseverance is an isolated system to cache Mars surface material. There's 43 containers that samples can be placed into, but several will be kept unused as control containers. Just in case outgassing or some other contamination process occurs. That will allow the contamination to be identified and removed when looking over the actual samples when they're returned to Earth. At some point when 20 or more samples are in the container, the cache will be placed onto the surface allowing it to be available for pickup for a future Mars sample return mission that's currently in the planning stages right now. This is incredibly important as timelines of crewed missions to Mars are fluid thanks to budgets and the laws of nature. And it's widely accepted in the planetary geology and astrobiological communities that the instant a crewed spacecraft opens its airlock on Mars, that's it. The planet is considered contaminated. Speaking of life getting to Mars, one of the biggest science objectives of Perseverance's mission is to potentially find the signatures of past life on Mars. The planetary instrument for X-ray lithochemistry known as pixel and the very long and most certainly back-renamed scanning habitable environments with ramen and luminescence for organics and chemicals known as Sherlock lead the charge in hunting for life. Pixel will use X-ray light to look at Mars rocks and determine their composition at extremely tiny scales, while Sherlock will do the same with ultraviolet light which will allow it to detect organic compounds and potentially the remnants of biosignatures. Perseverance also carries a ground penetrating radar specifically tuned for finding water ices and brines and supercam which will allow distant rocks to be shot with a powerful laser and the vaporized gas is coming off to be analyzed from a distance. Masscam Z will allow the primary imaging system to zoom in, meaning a massive amount of context will now be possible to be generated wherever Perseverance is and a souped up version of the meteorological station on Curiosity called the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer will monitor weather conditions at the surface. There's also 23 cameras including some that will run during the entry descent landing portion of the mission and not just looking down like the Mars descent imager did for Curiosity but also looking upwards to view parachute deployment and another looking upwards to view the lowering of Perseverance from the sky crane landing system. In addition, the long awaited use of a microphone on Mars is finally happening with two on board which should record the sounds of wind, Perseverance driving and its robotic arm and instruments at work. Maybe there's some sweet music being played on Mars too, Bowie, Holst and Tomita anyone? There's also three other experiments that are very exciting and you future Martians are going to want to listen to what they're all about. The Sherlock Instruments calibration target includes a Mars meteorite that was found on Earth being returned to Mars, how neat is that? But also it includes five materials that are being considered for spacesuits on Mars, polycarbonate for visors along with Vectran, orthophabric, Teflon and coated Teflon for suit materials. They'll be evaluated as the mission continues and be extremely helpful in figuring out what materials are ideal for the outer layers of a Mars space suit and at what rate the environment of Mars wears them down as well. Then there's the Mars Oxygen Institute Resource Utilization experiment known as MOXI which will pull in the Martian atmosphere and use the carbon dioxide present to generate pure oxygen through a process called solid oxide electrolysis. This is an important experiment as you're going to need to find and create your own resources like oxygen during a crewed mission to Mars and this will be the first on Mars test of any system that could potentially do that. And there's one final one that I'll most certainly want you having to take flight and that's the Mars Helicopter Ingenuity. This will be the first attempt at atmospheric flight on another planet. Ingenuity is more a technology demonstrator than an actual key portion of the planned mission for Perseverance. But oh my gosh is it so heckin' cool that they've tested it in the vacuum chamber at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and it works. It actually really works. A small suite of cameras, sensors, a laser altimeter and radios to communicate with Perseverance will tell Ingenuity how it's flying and where it's going. And it has an expected maximum altitude of 5 meters, a maximum speed of 30 kilometers an hour, a maximum range of 300 meters and a maximum flight time of 90 seconds. Ingenuity is designed to try to at least get one flight in within 30 days of landing and if all goes well JPL may expand Ingenuity's use to act as a scout for where Perseverance should drive and could potentially have it flying once per day. Much to my surprise this actually was not the first vehicle built for atmospheric flight in Mars. In the mid-1970's NASA tested a series of uncrewed aerial vehicles called Mini Sniffers at NASA's Armstrong Facility in California and it was seriously considered for a mission to sample the atmosphere of Mars and other planets as well. And for power Perseverance is going a little nuclear. It uses a multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator using 5 kg of plutonium-238 to generate 110 watts of power, which will fade in output over the lifetime of the mission, planned for two years. But we're eight years later and curiosity is still kicking. As of the filming of this episode of Tomorrow News, launch is still set for July 30, 2020 at 11.50 universal time. Even though it's happening early in the morning for us here on the West Coast, I will absolutely be up and awake groggily watching the launch of Perseverance. Now there was actually one launch this week from China, so let's talk about it in our space traffic. Lifting off on July 25 at 03.13 universal time, a Long March 4B lofted a new Zhiyan-3 mapping satellite for China, successfully placing it into orbit. This spacecraft known as Zhiyan-303 is the third in the Zhiyan-3 satellite series, covering all the threes you can three of. Lifting imagery for land and environmental surveys, disaster prevention, and urban planning. In addition, two small satellites rode as secondary payloads, Tianqiu-10, which will be used to test space-based data relay systems, and a very interestingly named Lobster I-1, which will perform scientific observations using a wide-field X-ray astronomy imager. And here are your upcoming launches. And for this week's Space Weather and how it's affecting upcoming Mars missions, here's Dr. Tamatha Scoff. We are finally calming down from a couple solar storms we've been having over the past couple weeks, but the sun is not done. As we switch to our front-side sun, we actually have two new bright regions. These are solar cycle 25 sunspots, and as a matter of fact, they're the largest sunspots we've seen yet of this new solar cycle, and luckily they are managing the boost the solar flux for emergency radio operators, but they are not flare active, so we're not having any impacts to radio coms for these Mars launches. And now for your Martian Minute. Excitement builds as we prepare for the Perseverance rover along with its helicopter drone ingenuity to rocket its way to the Red Planet on board the Mars 2020 mission. But before it begins its final descent for a landing at Jezero Crater in search of life, we must always be reminded to check the weather. The loss of opportunity rover during the massive dust storms in the summer of 2018 still stings, and we sure don't want to repeat such a tragedy. During that time, Opportunity, which was in the Meridiani Plainum, had to endure the most intense dust storms ever observed on Mars. These dust storms were seen by multiple instruments, like the Thermal Emission Imaging System also known as Stemus on Mars Odyssey. In the red extensive region shown in the Thymus imagery, you can see the dust storms back in 2018 were massive and they lasted for many months, and sadly, Opportunity rover didn't make it. Since then, things have calmed down quite a bit, but we stay ever vigilant, especially since this new rover we're sending has the best chance yet of finding evidence of life on Mars. Landing in a crater that was once a massive water-filled lake complete with an eastern river delta that spills right into the region, this area is rife for life. But located on the edge of Siritus Major, it's also rife with the potential for dust storms. Guaranteed we'll be keeping a close eye on that weather in that region from now on. In fact, taking a look at the current weather on Mars, we've been seeing a bit of sustained activity just south of Arabia and east of the Meridiani Plainum, which has settled down over the past week, luckily, but if we switch to more sensitive measurements made from thymus, we can see there has been a bit of dust in Siritus Major near Jezero crater. Luckily though, as we continue into the fall season, things are slowly beginning to calm down. Meanwhile, in the tropics near Curiosity at the equator, it's enjoying a partially sunny day with a high temperature of zero Celsius, but at the higher latitudes of Elysium Planitia, in sight shows it's clear and sunny with a high of minus 16, a low of minus 92, and the winds are out of the north-northwest at seven meters a second. For more details on this week's space weather, including what the space traffic's going to look like for those launches tomorrow and what the weather's going to be like when they get there, come check out my channel or see me at spacewetherwoman.com. Nicely done citizens, and I do think that that deserves a very big thank you from all of us here tomorrow. We really can't do this show without you. It does take a large amount of resources to produce something like Tomorrow News or our live shows. So every little bit helps us out, and we are forever thankful for you contributing to the shows here tomorrow. And if you would like to join in and become a citizen of the shows of tomorrow, head on over to youtube.com slash tmro slash join and check out the levels and rewards that you get, such as escape velocity, where you get your own channel in our Discord server, and we've been sort of slinging jokes and talking and having a good time in there with all of you who help support us at that level. So check it out and thank you for your support. And that's Seco 7 for us here at Tomorrow News. Thank you so much for joining us, and until the next one, remember, stay safe, stay healthy, and keep exploring. Rocks and determine their composition at extremely fine scales. Cool. Look at that. Died on me right in the middle of talking. Nice. I feel like Nixon had a debate.