 This is your tomorrow space news for February 6th 2019. Now there is no space traffic report this week so let's just jump straight into it and we're going to begin with a whole bunch of rocket engine tests. First up we had the second test firing of a P120C solid rocket motor from the Ariane group on January 28th. This new motor is slated for use on the upcoming Ariane 6 and Vegas C first stage. The test lasted 135 seconds and was done in their Karoo French Guiana test site. This is the largest monolithic carbon fiber solid rocket motor in the world and it has over 142 tons of solid propellant. Then a day later on January 29th Firefly Aerospace came out with this awesome video of what appears to be their lightning one engine. Now if you're thinking to yourself hey I thought firefly went bankrupt you'd be basically correct. Firefly Space Systems did indeed close down all work in December of 2016 but was later acquired and turned into Firefly Aerospace. Now this phoenix of a space company is skipping their original smaller alpha one launch vehicle and moving straight into their alpha two. Firefly has recently shown not only these awesome engine tests but also a COPV or carbon overlay pressure vessel burst test and vehicle tankage so they're bending metal and making fire again. Firefly Aerospace also recently won one of the commercial lunar payload services contracts from NASA. It's currently about 140 employees strong and they're hiring. On January 31st Rocket Lab performed a static fire of their nine Rutherford engines. This is in preparation for the R3D2 or radio frequency disc reduction deployment demonstration mission for DARPA. This mission is to test a prototype antenna to test improvements for radio communications on small sats. The antenna can be compacted into a very small space allowing volume limited launches to still provide great radio communications or that's the hope at least. We'll find out more when the Electron Rocket launches R3D2 slated sometime in February. And finally on February 3rd Elon Musk tweeted several videos of SpaceX's new Raptor engine. This was the first test of a full-scale engine and it only lasted a couple of seconds but it was gorgeous. SpaceX posted on Instagram that the engine chamber pressure reached 170 bar that's about 170 times the pressure at sea level. It had 116 metric tons of force and all of that at 60% power. You may have noticed a green tinge at startup which is typical for SpaceX engines but this one's a bit different. Typically that green startup flares from a chemical reaction of something called t-tab or triethyl aluminum triethyl boron and when it comes in contact with oxygen it ignites and it ignites green. However Raptor doesn't use t-tab like the current SpaceX Merlin engines it uses methalox torch igniters so there shouldn't have been a green flare. Elon tweeted that the green tinge was likely a camera saturation issue or copper from the chamber. It was still beautiful nonetheless. Over the past week India reached a milestone in their human spaceflight program. Did you know that India has quietly been developing their own human spaceflight crew capsule and on a shoestring budget? This is for real and they've done lots of studies and tests to see if they can even pull this off and for many years they didn't officially have a spaceflight program. During the time when their program wasn't official they've already launched two test payloads to gain experience with reentry heat shield technology and there was a really big test last year of their launch abort system so that the capsule will be pulled away from a malfunctioning rocket just in case and once that test was successful the government of India officially launched their human spaceflight program with the goal of an operational three person crew capsule flying in space by 2022. The capsule is called Gaganyan and the crew that rides it will be called Vyominats. The milestone that India recently met was opening their human spaceflight center the Indian equivalent of NASA's Johnson spaceflight center. India's human spaceflight center will be responsible for implementing the Gaganyan project which involves end-to-end mission planning, development of engineering systems for crew survival in space, crew selection and training and also pursuing activities for sustained human spaceflight missions. India won't be alone in this effort either. They've already teamed up with the French space agency CNES for their medical expertise and the Russian space agency Roscosmos to have additional training for Vyominats in Russia and to help India select their Vyominats. With these developments India looks to be on track to be the fourth nation in history to send people into space and in just a few years. Now one thing that may hold their launches back and all launches in general is solar weather and tomorrow is proud to introduce you to Dr. Tamisa Scove who's bringing us our weekly space weather report. Space weather this week has definitely quieted down from the large solar storm that brought Aurora to many parts of the world including Germany and down to the United States. If we flip to the front side sun you can see that massive coral hole that rotated through the Earth strike zone sending us some fast solar wind and that solar storm but it is now beginning to wane and over the next couple days we should only see a roar around high latitudes. Now we also have that bright region on the Earth facing sun on the east limb. Now if we flip to the back side of the sun you can still see that region rotating off to stereo's uh west limb view. That's about all we have that's going on on the back side. After that it's pretty quiet so that means there's probably not going to be a lot of activity over the next week. Switching to our moon this week we are passing through the new moon phase so you dark sky watchers should be happy and even as we reach the ninth the moon will still only be about 15% illuminated but you have to check your local rise and set times. And now for our Leo-Mio-Geo orbit outlook. We just had that solar storm that has definitely enhanced the radiation belts. You can see the outer zone being enhanced just outside of the Mio orbit and that is affecting spacecraft charging especially at Mio and Geo orbits. Taking a closer look at our Geo charging environment you can see we do have a slight risk for surface charging but it's isolated mostly in the post midnight sector but the real issue is internal charging and that's due to the solar storm folks. The solar storm has a tendency to pump up that outer zone and cause some issues and you can see the internal charging risk isn't pretty much all local times and unfortunately it's probably going to get worse before it gets better until that solar storm completely moves out so you Geo satellite operators you may expect a few more anomalies before all this is over. For more space weather details including ground effects like issues with your GPS or when and where you can see Aurora check out my channel or come visit space weatherwoman.com. Earth is protected from space weather by a magnetic field and our atmosphere also protects us from most celestial objects but the moon not so much. Recently two surprises from our closest celestial neighbor have appeared figuring out the rate at which asteroids hit the earth has long been desired so we have a solid understanding of just how important planetary defense is and a team from the University of Toronto has determined this rate and compared it to the rate in the solar systems past and the news is not good impacts occur at a frequency two to three times more than they did 290 million years ago. Radiometric dating of rocks on earth helps but the moon doesn't have active geology nor does it have erosion from wind or water so it's the perfect laboratory to figure this out. NASA's lunar reconnaissance orbiter has an instrument called a radiometer this takes accurate measurements of just how much heat is leaving the moon's surface during the lunar night and rocks they radiate more heat than the fine powdered regolith and this was used to date the ages of craters. You can also look at the number of total craters as well to determine their age. A young crater is devoid of smaller craters inside of it but older craters have more craters inside of them. This is the natural equivalent of yo moon we heard you like craters so we put some craters in your craters. Compared to the known craters on the earth dating back as far as 650 million years ago they found that the rate of impacts increased about 290 million years ago so what caused this well likely several large collisions occurred between objects in the asteroid belt this ended up scattering debris into the inner solar system so get your cosmic hard hats on it's going to be a bit dodgy for the next few hundred million years but that's not the only thing the moon is telling us we may have actually found a little bit of ancient earth on the moon and just so happened to bring it home. Meet Big Bertha this was the largest rock sample brought home by Apollo 14 but Big Bertha almost didn't make it to the earth now Apollo 14 was commanded by the first American in space Alan Shepard and with the crew including fellow moonwalker Edgar Mitchell and Stuart Rusa who would stay on board of the command service module to keep it tidy but it was fraught with problems docking between the command module and the lunar module was problematic and nearly didn't occur then a landing radar glitch with the lunar module during descent to land on the moon's surface almost caused a landing abort to be called but they ended up landing in the frau mora formation this is where Apollo 13 was originally planned to land and Shepard and Mitchell collected about 43 kilograms of lunar rocks in regolith now Big Bertha was one of those samples and recent analyses conducted by an international team at Curtin University in Australia found that it contained granite a highly unusual type of rock to find on the moon now in addition it also contained quartz even more unusual to find on the moon and if that wasn't enough to make this sample bizarre its chemical fingerprints show that its formation was rife with water and oxygen and these are things that the moon lacks so what's the simplest explanation well it's a rock from earth and it got blasted into space by an impact roughly four billion years ago during the period of heavy bombardment and then itself impacted into the moon only for billions of years later to be picked up and brought back home speaking of the moon i heard space isle is about to send a lander there yeah absolutely and it's going to take about two and a half months after launch for that lander to reach luna and to start that journey it's going to be riding along as a secondary payload on the next spacex falcon nine flight out of Cape Canaveral and the really cool thing is space isle will then be the first non-government entity to land something on the moon originally a google lunar x prize competitor the lander has been in development since 2011 it was previously known as sparrow but is now called bearish heat which is Hebrew for genesis it was recently announced that the final part of the lander has been installed and will soon be ready for flight now that last piece to get installed a data-based time capsule on this time capsule is a series of digital files containing details about the spacecraft and the engineers who built it national symbols cultural objects dictionaries and 27 different languages and encyclopedias israeli songs landscaping leading figure photos and a children's book inspired by the space isle mission itself in addition to the time capsule the mission also includes a scientific mission it'll have a lunar magnometer or lmag this instrument will measure the moon's magnetic field during orbit descent landing and during the entire mission on the surface there's also planned 500 meter hop in which the instrumentation will remain active taking measurements all of these different steps will give scientists magnetic data from the moon at different locations and times to help better understand the electrical property of luna's interior remember unlike the earth our moon has no spinning core to create a magnetic field so where did these fields come from did it once have a spinning core or did these fields come from impact events like what jared was talking about hopefully this lander will help us find out and as always researching this story i got to thinking that digital time capsule how are they doing that what are they storing that on and how are they going to prevent cosmic radiation from just destroying it after a few years turns out that space isle will be flying an arc unit from the arc mission foundation that's arch but pronounced arc if that sounds vaguely familiar it's because they launched the first of their solar library on the falcon heavy demonstration mission using this same technology the arc disks are projected to last five billion years on the lunar surface and are said to be the longest lasting storage devices ever created by humans the first space base arc is now in its uh roadster mars orbit maybe that's known as a tesla orbit now i'm not i'm not sure but it's sitting next to star man this is the next arc which is then going to be placed of course on the moon the eventual goal is to create an encyclopedia galactica so to speak that contains all of the knowledge gathered by humanity they'll then spread these disks among our solar system to build the largest most resilient and most complete offsite backup of human knowledge ever created and you can look forward to all of that launching the middle of this month that's our news this week and we look forward to continuing the conversation with you this weekend during our live show unfortunately due to scheduling conflicts we needed to move our interview with lana de win the deputy head administrator for asgardia to this coming saturday february 9th at 1800 universal time if you didn't know asgardia is the first space base nation and they even have a flying satellite if you have questions make sure to leave them here in the comments below and we'll pull those forward to our upcoming show and if you like these shows like this one or our live shows or sign shows please consider contributing to our patreon campaign head over to patreon.com slash tmro to see rewards goals we got a lot of great stuff coming out in 2019 and your support helps us make all this happen thank you to everyone for helping make space news a thing uh and one last note before we go uh a quick vote actually i want to know what you thought of the graphic elements that we brought into this particular show specifically the space weather graphic element we've also got one that looks like this which is for space traffic when we actually have launches or departing spacecraft from the space station or maybe a sample return mission do we like these or do we think they're a little too cheesy and over the top uh what do you which do you prefer should we get rid of them and just go back to straight cuts or should we leave the effects in their vote right up over here let me know what you think love them or hate them also if you're an after effects designer and wouldn't mind helping us out with those a little bit we actually want to get rid of the circle around our logo these were just kind of pre-made effects that were on a marketplace but when i get rid of the circle the transition doesn't work quite right we need to build a different map for that so if you're an after effects designer and wouldn't mind helping us out shoot me an email benjamin at tmro.tv hopefully it's not too hard uh but it is uh a little bit above my skill level inside of after effects uh anyhow thank you guys all so much for watching and we look forward to talking to you tomorrow