 Hello everybody and welcome to a very exciting episode of Tomorrow News. A rare failure from SpaceX, a strange failure from Soyuz and an incredible landing for Perseverance are all coming up on February 21st edition of Tomorrow News. Now unless you don't watch launches you probably know what is coming up front in today's SpaceX update and it is a very surprising anomaly. You probably remembered me saying this last week. Another successful landing on Of Course I Still Love you followed the launch setting is another record, the 24th consecutive landing of a Falcon 9, although only one faring half was recovered after being fished out of the ocean, the other one sadly was destroyed. Sadly, that record can no longer be continued as if the launch has started at 19, as on descent from separation the B1059 booster suffered from some engine issues. We can see here after the entry burn cutoff point there was still some burning going around the engines which could possibly be because of some leaking fuel. Cutting straight to the landing or black-off landing as all we saw was a bit of an orange plume which instantly disappeared as soon as the booster hit the ocean. The seagulls didn't see that bothered though so I guess that could be an upside of the failure. Scott Manley has done a very good in-depth video going through a lot of the data and I'll make sure a link is left down in the description because I would highly recommend you watch it after this video of course. Elon has been tweeting about SN10 with him saying that the probability of a landing is now up to around 60%. Now I'm really excited about this because well we might actually see a full-sized starship stick the landing but I don't want to curse anything so let's move on to something even more exciting. The aft section of the first super heavy booster dubbed BN1 was moved over to the high bay as the team down in Boca Chica are getting ready to do some stacking. We've also got our eyes on some new dome sections which is very very cool to see. A lot of work has also been put into SN11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 with SN15 already ready for stacking and remember they haven't even flown SN10 yet. You know I gotta say there is a lot of impressive work happening down at Boca Chica right now but have you considered Mars lately? That sounds confirmed. Perseverance taking the stand of half-life. Getting through the seven minutes of terror perseverance nailed the landing in Jezero crater with confirmation coming at approximately 2056 coordinated universal time on February 18th. Near immediately several thumbnail images were downlinked to Earth. Raw images have finally started coming down the pipe after a bit of a clog. Now Mars is as usual an alien landscape of dry sandy rocky beauty. I know I sure would love to get out there and just kind of zip around in my jeep so long as at the end of the day there's some in and out waiting for me. We'll put a link in the description below so that way you can go and look at the raw images yourself. Sometimes they come down individually sometimes they're just dumped in there but one thing is certain they are all absolutely fantastic to see hot off of the rover. You'll remember I talked about several cameras that will be taking photos at a fast enough frame rate that they'll be able to be stitched together into videos and a single frame was released and this is one hell of a photo we're looking down with a camera from the descent stage towards perseverance which is hanging on the cables of the sky crane and we could see the interaction between dust on the Martian surface with the plumes from the rocket engines on the descent stage. But why show the still frames? I mean they're all going to get stitched together in videos and they were stitched together in videos and NASA put those videos out so why don't we go ahead and roll them and I'm just not going to say anything because these are videos from Mars. The first time we've ever done video from Mars so just watch, watch, I'm not saying anything, watch. Navigation has confirmed that the parachute has deployed and we are seeing significant deceleration in the velocity. Our current velocity is 448 meters per second at an altitude of about 12 kilometers from the surface of Mars. Heat shield set. Perseverance has now slowed to subsonic speeds and the heat shield has been separated. This allows both the radar and the cameras to get their first look at the surface. Current velocity is 145 meters per second at an altitude of about 9.5 kilometers above the surface. Nav filter confirmed. Velocity solution 3.3 meters per second. Altitude 7.4 kilometers. Now has radar lock on the ground. Current velocity is about 100 meters per second. 6.6 kilometers above the surface. Perseverance is continuing to descend on the parachute. We're coming up on the initialization of terrain relative navigation and subsequently the priming of the landing engines. Our current velocity is about 90 meters per second at an altitude of 4.2 kilometers. OBS valid. We have confirmation that the land division system has produced a valid solution and part of terrain relative navigation. Priming. PBA is nominal. We have priming of the landing engines. Backshell set. Current velocity is 83 meters per second at about 2.6 kilometers from the surface of Mars. We have confirmation that the backshell has separated. We are currently performing the divert maneuver. Current velocity is about 75 meters per second at an altitude of about a kilometer off the surface of Mars. Here in safety Bravo. We have completed our terrain relative navigation. Current speed is about 30 meters per second at an altitude of about 300 meters off the surface of Mars. We have started our constant velocity accordion which means we are conducting the sky crane. About to conduct the sky crane maneuver. Sky crane maneuver has started about 20 meters off the surface. Tango Delta. Touchdown confirmed. Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars. Ready to begin seeking the sand of past life. Now I don't want to reveal too many details to you because we've got our own tomorrow news special about the difficulty of landing on Mars. I'm going to save the analysis for that so you keep your eyes and ears ready to go for when that drops in the next couple of days. And I know that you're probably thinking well there's a bajillion videos out there to talk about how difficult it is to land on Mars and all of those videos miss a bajillion details. So there's many things that no one has really ever talked about that actually make it very hard to land on Mars. So prepare yourselves. I'm going to make sure that you come away knowing everything that you have to worry about. These missions may be done by robots but ultimately it is a extension of humanity reaching out into the universe to understand it. Yes we may not actually be going there in person yet but you know robots kind of allow us to go there in spirit if you will. Robotic exploration is human exploration. This is Alejandro Miguel San Martín. For NASA's previous rovers he's been the chief engineer for the guidance navigation and control systems and he helped co-invent the sky crane landing system. He acted as an advisor to the Perseverance team for their landing and he was watching his computer code at work. Touchdown. We got touchdown. This is Alan Chen the lead for entry descent and landing on Perseverance. He sent out this tweet showing him and his wife who also works at JPL embracing each other in celebration over the landing. Now if you know anything about the Jet Propulsion Laboratory you know that it is full of a bunch of cheeky engineers. They like to leave little Easter eggs and surprises all over the place for us and Perseverance is no different. The supersonic parachute that Perseverance deployed has a pattern in the fabric. Now this helps primarily for the engineering teams. They can know exactly what part of the parachute is doing what at all times in the imagery received. This will help in further refining the design but that pattern well some very smart folks noticed something about it that lined up to make a code to say something and it does. The interior rings read dare mighty things the unofficial motto of JPL and the outer rings are the latitude and longitude coordinates for JPL on earth. Good call on putting that there just in case there's a need to return it back to earth. In addition there's a nice little piece of artwork on the deck of Perseverance that could be considered a family portrait of all of the rovers that NASA has sent to Mars. 1997 sojourners on the left 2004's Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity right there next to it then 2012's Curiosity and closing it up on the right is Perseverance. Now over the next few weeks the systems on board of the rover and the instruments are going to be fired up tested individually and made sure that everything is working a okay and then the science shall commence in addition to that sometime around mid-april ingenuity the Mars helicopter is going to be deployed and make its first flight. So that's a bit of time out but hey I mean it's going to be a helicopter on Mars. I mean what more do you want cool EDL video now we're going to have a helicopter like JPL's just giving you everything you've ever wanted right now it wasn't just Perseverance right we've got some other friends that are at Mars as well and they were busy this week. Hope the first interplanetary mission from the United Arab Emirates that's going to be studying the weather of Mars as a whole well it took its first images of Mars and it is quite a gorgeous view I'm really looking forward to the consistent full-disk images that will be seen of the planet from it. China's Tianwen-1 is also making itself at home in orbit around Mars performing several maneuvers to change the inclination or angle of its orbit around Mars. When it entered into orbit initially it was doing an equatorial orbit but it has now changed itself up to be in a polar orbit. It's also beginning a series of maneuvers to dip down a little bit closer to its science orbit proper. Now none of this by the way is being confirmed by the China National Space Administration. Yep that's right the operator of the mission ain't telling anybody anything so who is helping us figure this out well amateur radio operators here on earth yes ham radio enthusiasts are picking up those signals coming from Tianwen-1 and figuring out exactly what it's doing now obviously these are not your average ham radio operators these are folks who have access to very large systems and very powerful very sensitive systems and they've been taking a look they've been seeing the signal they've been looking at things like Doppler shifts switches in frequency from the high gain antenna back to the low gain antenna and from low gain back to high gain and they've been able to figure out all of these things that Tianwen-1 is doing currently so that's pretty wild to think about amateur radio operators doing that here on earth so now i'm going to go ahead and toss it right back to you Ryan. March 25th was originally going to play host of the second test of Boeing's CST-100 Starliner to try and rectify the very big timings issue which caused the first test vehicle to fail its primary goal of docking with the International Space Station well sadly some hardware has been damaged during the processing of the spacecraft and April 2nd will now play host to the test avionics units on the vehicle had to be replaced by Boeing as they had been damaged by a power surge that was caused by a ground support equipment configuration issue during final checkouts NASA have said that 95% of the recommended changes Boeing received in the independent review following the first test of Starliner have been applied so hopefully the short delay won't be the start of any more to come let's get into this week's space traffic then starting with an earth departure and an ISS arrival the 77th progress mission lifted off out of launch complex 31-6 at the biker nor cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 04-45 coordinated universal time on February the 15th a corridor of cross and a couple days later the Soyuz vehicle started its approach to the pier's module where this interesting picture was taken. Sergei Rizikov the current station commander then remotely took control of the vehicle and manually docked it to the station using the Toru system the docking then officially occurred at 06-26 UTC on the 17th of February the day following the launch of progress saw the launch of 60 styling satellites to low earth orbit at 03-59 UTC B-1059 did a fine job at lifting the second stage in the payload but we saw earlier what happened afterwards 17-30 UTC on February the 20th saw yet another launch to the International Space Station and Northrop Grumman's first of the year it is of course the launch of Cygnus atop this Antares 230 plus. Taking off out of launch pad 0A on Wallops Island this vehicle was also named after Katherine Johnson who calculated orbital mechanics and trajectories for some of NASA's most famous missions to space such as Alan Shepard's first flight to space and John Glenn's first flight to earth orbit. Let's have a look at the launches coming up next week and here is your space weather with Dr. Tamatha Scove. Space weather has been a bit active over the past couple days and it looks like the sun is upping the ante as we take a look at our front side sun you can see the culprit right here this is a big coronal hole this thing has been rotating into the earth strike zone and it's been sending us some fast solar wind over the past 24 to 48 hours it's bumped us up to active conditions and brought aurora down not just to high latitudes but to mid latitudes as well and it looks like over the next day or so it's going to continue to bring more fast solar wind so we're going to continue to get a bit more aurora views before things settle down but believe it or not that's not the only story if you look just to the east of it you can see that big long filament you're not seeing double this is a different filament than the one we saw last week but it looks very similar however there's one big difference if you take a look at it on the 20th watch it begin to slowly lift off and then whoosh that thing gets slingshotted off of the sun it looks like it's earth directed but when it's slingshotted like that it's kind of hard to tell so we're waiting for coronagraph images right now to be uh confirmed that we'd actually have something like a halo eruption which means it will be earth directed and it will bring us a solar storm so we have more chances for aurora now as we switch to our far-sighted sun this is stereo a and it's looking at the sun pretty much from the side you can see between those two coronal holes you can see that big long filament that's the one that actually is now going earth directed or at least we believe it to be earth directed but also take a look in the north that is region 2803 and this is the reason why solar flux has bumped up to the mid 70s we're getting some decent radio propagation on earth's day side and it's going to keep us well into the marginal range and we're going to keep watching this region to see if it becomes flare active for more details on this week space weather including if that solar storm launch is going to be earth directed and how it might affect you come check out my channel or see me at space weatherwoman.com in the last few seconds of the episode i want to make sure that all the citizens of tomorrow are thanked for their incredible support of the show without their support this simply wouldn't be possible and if you'd like to help the show head over to youtube.com forward slash tmro forward slash join that's it for today jarrod is back in a couple days with a special talking about the landing of perseverance and i'll be back next week so for the time being stay safe and goodbye