 Welcome to Station 204, it's space news time for December 11th, 2019, we're going to be talking a little bit about the space launch system doing its very best Starship Mark 1 impression, launches from the past week, the upcoming launch of Starliner, and your weekly space weather update. So let's get this show started with a bang! And that was the intentional destruction of the space launch system's liquid hydrogen tank test article, taken up to 260% of flight pressure and sustained at that pressure for five hours before it zippered itself open. Destructive testing, like what was done here, is accomplished in finding the regime in which materials and systems finally give up the ghost, and that helps aid in better designs in the future. One of the great things about these kinds of tests is that this data is freely shared by NASA, so it won't be just only SLS that benefits from this, in addition the failure of the tank occurred within three percent of the predicted pressure, which will help with refining design models. So congrats NASA and great test, always good to see stuff breaking when you're expecting it to break. Boeing Starliner capsule is now in the final preparations for its upcoming orbital flight test, OFT1. That's not just going to be Starliner that's being put to the test here, we've also got to remember that there's completely new ground support equipment and ground crews that are also going to be run through the gauntlet. A major milestone test was run on December 6th, known as the Integrated Day of Launch Test. Starliner's ride is a United Launch Alliance Atlas V in the N22 configuration, with the N denoting no payload fairing being used as Starliner, it sits at the top of the Atlas V rocket. That first two indicates that two strap-on solid rocket motors are attached to the common core booster that makes up stage one of the Atlas V, and that final two indicating the upper stage has two engines, also known as a dual engine centaur. Now Atlas Vs have flown quite a lot of missions, but never with a crew on board, so there's a need to be beyond good, you have to be perfect. And as you can imagine, having a crew complicates things a bit. A regular Atlas V countdown takes about seven hours from the start of operations to liftoff. Now with meat in the pitcher, that's extended out quite a bit to an 11-hour countdown. Practice makes perfect, especially out on the pad, and two teams from Boeing and United Launch Alliance work together out on pad 41 at the Cape to run through procedures that'll be used for the upcoming OFT-1 mission and subsequent Starliner crewed flights after. Liquid oxygen was loaded into the Atlas V stage, liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen was also loaded into the Centaur upper stage. Both were then set stable and had their cryogenic fluids replenished, and the teams at this point entered into the Starliner white room via the crew access arm to practice loading the astronauts. Now this is different from what SpaceX will do with Crew Dragon, where astronauts will be loaded, and then the Falcon 9 will be fueled up. Ten minutes before the simulated T-Zero of liftoff, the crew access arm was retracted, and as T-Zero was approached, ULA's teams called in abort, and the Atlas V and Starliner were saved. Now even though the test of the ground support equipment and ground teams was successful, there is still a little bit of a delay. Unfortunately, because of SpaceX's CRS-19 having a 24-hour turnaround from its initial launch date, that also pushed Boeing's OFT-1 back a day, which is now presently set for December 20th. And of course, regardless of when OFT-1 launches, make sure to come back as we'll have it all covered for you. And it has been a busy week for leaving Earth and doing things off of it, so let's head right into space traffic. Five, four, three, two, one, zero, ignition, liftoff. We start by piercing a ridiculously clear Florida sky. A SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted a Dragon capsule on the CRS-19 mission, leaving Pad 40 at 1729 universal time on December 5th. At stage separation, Stage 1 did its standard turn and burn, and successfully landed on the drone ship. Of course, I still love you. Eight and a half minutes after a liftoff, Dragon C-106 was deployed into orbit to chase down the International Space Station. The upper stage of this Falcon 9 continued on an extended duration mission, showing off its ability to operate long enough to inject high-value payloads for unspecified customers directly into geosynchronous orbit, burning its Merlin vacuum engine for 20 seconds after coasting for several hours, and then deorbitating itself after five hours. This was the third extended duration mission for a Falcon 9 upper stage. The final launch of Rocket Lab's electron vehicle for 2019 occurred at OA-18 universal time on December 6th, lifting off from launch complex 1 at the Mahia Peninsula on New Zealand's North Island. After a quick hot swap, weeeeee! The Curie kick stage separated from the second stage and continued carrying seven small satellites into orbit. The largest was fielded by Astralive Experiences to test the generation of artificial meteor showers, which, if you're interested in how that'll work, tune in to Tomorrow Space Orbit 11.39 where I interviewed Josh Rodenbaugh from Astralive Experiences. But this tenth launch of electron was something pretty special, as Rocket Lab's recently announced reusable ambitions were finally put to the test for the first time. With a load of instrumentation to record a multitude of data channels, Stage 1 of Electron attempted a guided high-speed entry back into the Earth's atmosphere. With no actual attempt to recover stage when occurring, it was simply a data gathering. Can this be done, exercise? And Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck announced that it had worked with Stage 1 surviving hypersonic reentry and heating. So, congrats to Rocket Lab, one step closer to joining the ranks of reusable orbital class rockets. 16 hours after the launch of SpaceX's CRS-19 mission, a Soyuz 21A booster lifted off from pad 31 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome carrying Roscosmos Progress MS-13 cargo resupply craft to the International Space Station. It occurred at 09.34, universal time on December 6th. Once successfully in orbit, Progress MS-13 deployed solar arrays and navigation antennae and began its three-day trek to the International Space Station. Thought China was done for the year? Nope. Launched for the first time from the TUan Space Center, a Kaidou-1A Chuck G-Lin Galfin O2B at O255 universal time on December 7th, successfully placing it into orbit. G-Lin Galfin O2B joins multiple G-Lin-1 spacecraft that make up a large Earth observation fleet. Wait, is that the exact same rocket from the exact same mobile launch pad chucking the exact same payload? No, no and no. But your eyes are not deceiving you. That's another Kaidou-1A being launched less than six hours after the first one from the same launch site at the Taiwan Space Center carrying an entirely different payload, leaving Earth at 08.52 universal time on December 7th. Successfully placed into orbit were two privately owned Chinese satellites for environmental monitoring and emergency comms and tracking services. Two more were medium resolution capable remote sensing satellites and then two experimental data relay nanosatellites. For those interested, Kaidou is Chinese for Speedy Vessel, appropriately named. Knock, knock, knockin' on the International Space Station's door was SpaceX's CRS-19 Dragon C-106, making its second return to the International Space Station, having flown the CRS-4 and CRS-11 missions in 2014 and 2017 respectively. Captured by Canadarm 2 occurred at 10.05 universal time on December 8th, thanks to the handy work of Commander Luca Parmitano, and it was promptly berthed to station. 2600 kilograms of supplies and science will be unpacked over the coming weeks. Now some of that science on board, it's going to use 40 mice's, mises, mouse's mice to study bone and muscle density issues, also to test a few new observation systems and an experiment to see how a molting of barley occurs in microgravity. Cheers to that one! In docking at 10.38 universal time on December 9th, Progress MS-13 arrived at the International Space Station with 2500 kilograms of supplies ranging from propellant, water, oxygen and crew resources. There's now five spacecraft docked to the ISS, Progress MS-13, Dragon CRS-19, Cygnus NG-12 and Soyuz MS-13 and MS-15. And here are your upcoming departures. And now to talk about this week's space weather, here's Dr. Tamatha Scove. Space weather this week remains on the quiet side. As we switch to our front side sun, you can see a couple bright regions even at high latitudes in the northern hemisphere. These are more indicators that Solar Cycle 25 is right around the corner, but don't expect any flares or anything from these types of regions yet, because we're still in the deep minimum. Meanwhile, we do have a coronal hole that's going to be rotating into the Earth's strike zone here in the next couple days, and it could bring a little bit of aurora to high latitudes. But once again, because we are in the deep solar minimum, these solar storms that these coronal holes bring with the fast solar wind is just not all that much to bring any aurora down to mid-latitudes. As we switch to our far side sun, this is Stereo's view looking at the sun from the side. You can see a couple of those bright regions as they rotate into Earth's view on the Stereo's West Limb. You could also see a coronal hole that's going to be rotating into the Earth's strike zone here in probably about another 10 days or so, which could bring us yet another storm. But once again, aurora will be limited to high latitudes. We are deep into the dust storm season on Mars, but this year, thankfully, it has been pretty mild. Back in 2018, a massive global and long-lasting dust storm ended the Opportunity Rovers mission. You can see here the views of Mars before and during this global dust storm, which lasted several months and suffocated the battery life from opi. If it weren't for the highest mountain peaks breaking through the dust layer, you wouldn't even be able to tell these images are from the same planet. Now, new light is being shed on the huge rising pillars of dust called dust towers that commonly occur during these storms. These concentrated clouds of dust are found to warm in sunlight, which heats the surrounding atmosphere and allows the dust to ride the resulting thermals up to high altitudes. This image, taken by the Marci instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, shows such a dust tower as a yellow white cloud located just south of Olympus Mons and just west of Valles Marineris. This tower is being lofted many kilometers above the surface, while the blue white plumes next to it are water vapor clouds. Scientists believe the water vapor trapped in these dust towers might also be riding them like an elevator to space, where solar radiation then breaks apart the water molecules. This might help explain how Mars water has disappeared over billions of years. When a tower starts at the planet's surface, it's an area about as wide as a state of Rhode Island. But by the time the tower decays, it can form a layer of dust more than 50 kilometers above the Martian surface and be wider than the entire continental United States. Luckily though, this dust tower near the Valley of Marineris came nowhere near the locations of Curiosity Rover and Gale Crater or Mars Insight in Alishan, Polynesia. In fact, currently the Insight Lander reports clear and sunny skies with a high temperature of minus 21 degrees Celsius and winds out of the south-south east at 22 meters per second. For more details on this week's space weather, including when and where to see aurora and whether or not your GPS and emergency communications are going to fair okay, come check out my channel or see me at spacewithourwoman.com. And of course, we wouldn't be able to do the shows of tomorrow without you, our citizens. Your help makes every single aspect of this possible. It always blows my mind that we're able to deliver what we can simply because you feel we're worthy of being given something from you. So if you got something out of this and you would like to give something back to help us out, you can head on over to youtube.com slash tmro slash join. As always, if you can't contribute via tmro slash join, that's perfectly a okay. Subscribing to us, hitting that notification bell, watching and liking our videos and sharing our work supports us as well. By doing that, you're our mission specialists, making our objective possible, getting every person everywhere excited about space. And make sure to set your clocks, alarms, sundials and time indication stones for this Saturday, December 14th, 1800 universal time, because we'll be having our last tomorrow space show of 2019 wrapping up the year with a round table review of some of our favorite things that happened during 2019 and what we're looking forward to in 2020. And that's it for this week's space news. Until the next one, remember, keep exploring. So congrats and great test, Nasa. Watch it too much trailer park boys.