 Hello all and welcome to tomorrow news. Now this week we've got Ryan who's going to be covering SpaceX's DM2 mission. I'll be talking about some good and bad things that just happened to Virgin Orbit and we've got Dr. Tamethascove with this week's Space Weather. Now before we get started just want to remind you as always that if you really like what we do here tomorrow don't forget to subscribe to us, hit the notification bell somewhere up there like the video, share the video everywhere that you can. Every little bit of support helps us in getting the news of our universe out to everyone that we can. So why wait any longer because Ryan has got a lot to talk about this week of May 26, 2020. Ryan go ahead and take it away because you've got a lot to cover. It is only one day until DM2 and hoping that the 50% chance of a scrub won't delay our excitement. We are very close to the day where if the launch goes ahead it would be 15 years to the day since Falcon 1's first successful hot fire test. The astronauts who will be riding the Dragon all the way to the International Space Station Bob Benkin and Doug Hurley have completed a full rehearsal of the activities that they will be taking part in on launch day making sure that they and everyone around them is ready for the real thing. Bob Benkin has also said that they do have a name for the Dragon capsule but they will announce it on launch day giving us even more things to be excited about. But the buzz around launch day for DM2 certainly has not affected Starship as the SN4 vehicle has performed yet another static fire as it readies itself for a 150m hop that should be coming very soon and SN6 is being worked on and the nose cones can still be found all around the complex. For a long time SpaceX have become one of or if not the cheapest way to get big satellites into space or a large cluster of them at once however they haven't been so dominant in the small sat market. Of course to begin with SpaceX originally were going to continue with the Falcon 1 program until they decided to focus their efforts on Falcon 9 and its surrounding programs. But in August they announced the small sat ride share program where for the cheap price of $1 million for 200 kilos into low earth orbit you could launch your small sat into space and a new customer has been announced. Planet which is an Earth imaging company with more than 150 satellites already in orbit announced that they will launch 6 of their SkySat satellites on Starlink missions. The fairing of the Falcon 9 is already pretty cramped with all of the Starlink satellites in there but I am sure that they can make some room. You can see the SpaceX ride share program as more of a bus to get into space whereas small sat providers such as RocketLab are more of a taxi to your desired orbit. For the fifth time American astronauts will launch for the first time on an American made launch system following Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and the Space Shuttle. We're really close now and I really am struggling to believe that this is actually going to happen but it is. I'm going to be honest and even though there are astronauts launching on Soyuz to the ISS roughly every six months this just seems so much more cooler to me and it isn't because I am a SpaceX fanboy. Us mere mortals here on Earth will be able to connect to this launch more than any other because Elon and the team at SpaceX have shown us every step of the way from the failures of Falcon 1 to the successes of Falcon 9 and the tests of the Dragon spacecraft. No one else has done this before. No other organization has been this transparent which is why I believe that this new era of spaceflight is truly special. And Ryan is quite right about this being a new era of spaceflight and I can actually think of another company that's been just as transparent as SpaceX has and that is Virgin orbit. They've been showing us the grittiest of details of what it's like to start up an aerospace company since day one and while most of us were at home for the Memorial Day holiday we just had in the United States, Virgin orbit, they were busy off the coast of Southern California. Launcher 1 was prepped and set for its first test flight. Virgin orbit themselves said it was the processes leading up to and including the ignition of Launcher 1's Newton 3 first stage engine that were the main objectives. Anything else after that was gravy. Now you're probably wondering why I called Virgin orbit transparent when they did not live stream this first test flight of Launcher 1. Now last year we actually had Virgin orbit's VP of special projects, William Pomerance on the show and I asked him why that wasn't going to happen. You've heard me evangelize for air launch and how much I love that. It is awesome in so many ways it ain't great for live streaming. No it's not. Because when we dropped the rocket off the aircraft we're a thousand miles away from anything. Yeah and I would imagine you also have to like you know the planes rolling so you've got to get out of the way of the rocket which means you're no longer really on there with a signal on a satellite. So when you drop the rocket your aircraft has just gotten about 60,000 pounds lighter on that side. So it veers off which is good because we want to get the airplane very, very far away from the rocket as quickly as possible just in case. So it's in a very steep climb and then goes into a very steep bank and gets the heck out of dodge very, very, very quickly. So yeah when you think about radomes and antennas that are on this aircraft they're not pointed in the optimal direction for high definition video streaming. I mean it makes sense to me streams are a bonus. You know no entity is obligated to give us a look into what they're actually doing. But this is a segment that's talking about the test flight of Launcher 1. Not my soapbox so let's get rid of it. All ground systems worked as planned and that's important because Launcher 1 is a first of its kind. Other air launched orbital class rockets like Northrop Grumman's Pegasus are solid fuel. Launcher 1 is liquid fuel, RP1 and liquid oxygen. No one, no one has done an air launched orbital class rocket before that's liquid fuel. Now Virgin Orbit 747 Cosmic Girl took off from Mojave air and spaceport and headed out over the Pacific. Once in the test area Cosmic Girl lined up with its heading, hit its altitude and its angle it wanted to be at, it's just the right speed and then released Launcher 1. Virgin Orbit has said that there was a clean release. Ignition of the Newton 3 engine occurred and the test flight was terminated a few seconds later. Now it's important to remember that this was a test flight and failure of a rocket on its first flight is quite common. And that's all of the information that we have at the moment. So if any more becomes available we'll keep you in the loop. So let's head on over and check out this past week's Earth departures and station arrivals. Beginning in Japan an H2B rocket left the pad at the Tengashima Space Center on May 20th at 1731 Universal Time. On board was H2B Transfer Vehicle 9, also known as Konitori 9, a JAXA uncrewed resupply vehicle for the International Space Station. This was the final flight of an H2B rocket as the H2B vehicle is being retired which I will talk about in just a few segments. Going west to Russia a Soyuz 2-1B rocket lifted off from the Plistix Cosmodrome May 22nd at 0731 Universal. Russia's Ministry of Defense did not provide any information on the payload but based on ground tracks of the rocket and orbital parameters after deployment it's likely the fourth EKS satellite also known as Tundra which is used for missile warning. Now we go up where on May 25th at 1213 Universal Konitori 9 was captured by the International Space Station's Canada Arm 2 carrying 6,000 kilograms of supplies that include the final set of six lithium ion batteries to upgrade the ISS current batteries. Now earlier I mentioned that we saw the final launch of an H2B rocket and that's because this is also the final flight of JAXA's H2B Transfer Vehicle, a new rocket known as H3 is set to perform its test flight later this year and HTV-X will take over as JAXA's new cargo vehicle increasing the payload capability to 7,200 kilograms. And here are your upcoming launches. Scientific instruments are often named after people who made a very big impact in their field. You know Hubble Space Telescope is named after Edwin Hubble the Spitzer Space Telescope is named after Lyman Spitzer and a new space telescope just on the cusp of becoming a reality is finally getting its own name after one of the all-time greats. If you don't know who Nancy Grace Roman is you do now. Her work in astronomy began in the 1940s and she impacted stellar classification, helped lay the foundations for radio astronomy, was the first woman executive at NASA, worked tirelessly to help make the Hubble Space Telescope a reality and was a fierce advocate for women in the sciences. So the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope is getting its new name and that is going to be the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and considering it's a telescope which really does actually have an extremely wide field of view and taking a look at just how wide ranging and impactful Nancy's career was it's an instrument certainly worthy of her name. What I'm really looking forward to with the Roman Space Telescope is just how wide a field of view it's going to enable astronomers to use. That is pretty game-changing I gotta say. In addition it's actually going to be able to directly see exoplanets as small as Jupiter so that's like super exciting and I can't wait for it to launch which is currently scheduled for 2025 and of course we'll see if that schedule holds all depends on budget and other things like that but I mean hey hopefully it won't be James Webb. Anyways moving on let's go ahead and go to Space Weather with her own Dr. Tamethascove. Space Weather this week gives us a lot of eye candy to look at as we switch to our front side sun you can see that bright region there that is a new cycle bright region unfortunately it never became a sun spot however we do have a lot of prominence activity because of that name and including a big filament that looks like it might let go if it happens to launch it'll be a nice solar storm that could even be earth directed so we're paying very close attention to it. On top of that we also have a mini little bright region in the south and it's been firing off a couple little tiny flares not enough to give us a big solar storm or anything like that but it also is another fun thing to watch and brings us some much needed activity we haven't seen in quite some time. We also have a small chrono hole that's rotating into the earth strike zone which could bump us up to unsettled conditions which we've kind of been sitting at anyway but don't expect a lot from it and then after about a week we have yet another finger-like chrono hole and that could give us a slightly larger burst of fast wind in about a week. Now as we switch to our far side sun this is stereo A and it's looking at the sun pretty much from the side you can see that bright region in the northern hemisphere that's leaving the west limb in stereo's view but now look at this on the east limb of stereo's view in the south look at this bright region and as it begins to rotate into view wait for it wait for it bam did you see that that is a solar storm lodge that's a gorgeous thing to see and on top of that we also have just following it in the northern hemisphere yet another new cycle bright region so it looks like this new solar cycle is finally beginning to take hold don't know when we're going to be calling it the official start of the new cycle but man this activity is making it feel like it's our old time sun again. Last month Comet Atlas dashed our hopes of a brilliant display when it began to disintegrate right before our eyes but by chance scientists now have an opportunity to study its disintegration in progress. Believe it or not the trajectory of the solar orbiter the second mission launched over the past 18 months to study the sun is about to pass right through the dust and plasma tails of the comet. Back at the end of April Comet Atlas had already fractured into more than half a dozen pieces as shown in amazing photos by the Hubble Space Telescope so when scientists compared the trajectories of solar orbiter and the comet they found an unexpected coincidence. Solar orbiter might pass through the tail of Comet Atlas here over the next two weeks starting on May 31st or June 1st solar orbiter could cross the outer ion tail of Comet Atlas and sample the cometary gas getting ionized by the sun's radiation and blown in the solar wind. If the comet is losing enough material at that time that solar orbiter makes its crossing both the magnetometer and particle instrument could detect the ion tail directly and then later on June 6th solar orbiter should then pass through the neutral dust field left by the disintegration of Atlas. Depending upon how much dust the comet has lost the orbiter may be able to observe the dust slamming into the spacecraft directly or identify its presence through interplanetary field enhancements. In a new article published in the journal of research notes of the AAS authors Jones, Afghan and Price said if quote the solar orbiter instruments detect material from comet Atlas it will be the first predicted serendipitous comet tail crossing by an active spacecraft carrying appropriate instrumentation for the detection of cometary material. Hey perhaps the disintegration of Atlas won't be such a letdown after all. For more details on this week's Space Weather including more info about Comets Atlas and Swan come check out my channel or see me at spaceweatherwoman.com. And to wrap up this week's tomorrow news I just want to thank all of you who helped contribute to the shows here at tomorrow. We really can't do this without you and each and every one of you who does so y'all are like the best people ever and I just want to say if you would like to help contribute to the shows of tomorrow you can head on over to youtube.com slash tmro slash join to do so and check out all the great rewards that we have available to you at the different levels of support and of course watching our shows liking our videos subscribing to tomorrow setting up notifications either for some of our videos or all of them and sharing our videos everywhere you can is also an incredible help as well and that's Miko for this edition of tomorrow news. We do want to let you know that we are planning to have a special edition of news to cover SpaceX's DM2 mission but we're going to have that come out once it actually docks with the International Space Station. So thanks for joining us this week and until the next one stay safe stay healthy and keep exploring hello all and welcome to to go share this video hit the notification bell I think it's over there did I get it right well you'll let me know and don't forget to hit subscribe and like wow off to a brilliant start things that happen at virgin orbit and we've got dr tamethoscope discovered and y'all wanted bloopers y'all are getting some bloopers this week let me tell you this is the most takes I've had to do for a start in a while holy moly please six plus please please sticks please sticks please sticks pll wow one letter two letters