French military surveillance satellite launched by Soyuz rocket - Spaceflight Now

A Soyuz ST-A rocket fires off its launch pad in French Guiana with the CSO 2 spacecraft. Credit: ESA/CNES/Arianespace – Photo Optique Video du CSG – P. Piron

An optical reconnaissance satellite for the French military took off atop a Soyuz launcher Tuesday, riding the Russian-made rocket from a tropical spaceport in South America into a 300-mile-high polar orbit to begin a 10-year mission surveying the globe.

France’s CSO 2 spy satellite joins CSO 1, an identical craft launched in 2018, to continue replacing the French military’s 1990s- and 2000s-era Helios family of reconnaissance satellites.

The new military spysat lifted off on a Soyuz ST-A rocket at 11:42:07 a.m. EST (1642:07 GMT) from the European-operated Guiana Space Center in South America. Launch occurred at 1:42 p.m. local time at the spaceport in French Guiana.

Running more than eight months late due to delays primarily caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the mission succeeded in delivering the 7,852-pound (3,562-kilogram) CSO 2 spacecraft to an on-target orbit around 300 miles (480 kilometers) above Earth.

The Soyuz launcher’s four kerosene-fueled first stage boosters shut down and dropped away from the rocket around two minutes after liftoff, followed by separation of the Soyuz payload shroud and core stage. A third stage engine fired next, then released a Russian Fregat upper stage for a pair of engine burns to place the CSO 2 spacecraft in the proper orbit for deployment.

Ground teams in French Guiana confirmed separation of the CSO 2 satellite around one hour liftoff, as the spacecraft flew over a European Space Agency ground station in Australia.

“Mission perfectly accomplished,” said Stéphane Israël, CEO of Arianespace, the French company that oversees launch operations in French Guiana.

“It’s a really moving moment, and great news for the French Armed Forces,” said Caroline Laurent, director of orbital systems at CNES, the French space agency, a partner for the French military on the CSO program. “Personally speaking, I think it is the best Earth observation satellite in the world.”

The CSO 2 spacecraft is set to provide the highest-resolution Earth observation images ever produced by a European satellite. The first images from CSO 2 are expected to be downlinked within about two weeks of launch, according to Laurent.

“We launched a magnificent satellite,” said Maj. Gen. Michel Friedling, head of French Space Command. “It will producing images of extraordinary quality. we are very much looking forward to this. Our military operators are behind their desks awaiting these images.”

Credit: ESA/CNES/Arianespace – Photo Optique Video du CSG – P. Piron

CSO 2 is the second satellite to join the French military’s Composante Spatiale Optique, or CSO, series of orbiting reconnaissance platforms.

France’s CSO 1 satellite launched on a Soyuz rocket in December 2018, and the third and final CSO satellite is scheduled to launch on Europe’s new Ariane 6 rocket in 2022.

While CSO 1 launched into an orbit around 500 miles (800 kilometers) in altitude, the CSO 2 spacecraft flies 200 miles (about 300 kilometers) closer to Earth. In that orbit, the satellite will capture sharper images for French military planners and intelligence analysts.

The CSO satellites are replacing France’s Helios family of military surveillance satellites, the last of which launched aboard an Ariane 5 rocket in 2009.

The new CSO satellites boast better global imaging capabilities than their Helios predecessors, and can take more pictures in a single overhead pass than the Helios spysats, according to the French Ministry of the Armed Forces.

The CSO satellites reportedly have a resolution of around 14 inches, or 35 centimeters, from the 500-mile-high orbit. From the lower 300-mile-high perch, CSO 2’s resolution is predicted to be better than 8 inches, or around 20 centimeters. For comparison, the new WorldView Legion commercial Earth-imaging satellites being developed by DigitalGlobe have a resolution of about 11.4 inches, or 29 centimeters.

The imaging capabilities of the U.S. government’s spy satellites are classified.

The French military’s CSO 2 reconnaissance satellite, with a cover over its optical telescope. Credit: Arianespace

Placing the CSO 2 satellite into a lower orbit allows it to “supply imagery at the highest possible level of resolution, quality and analytical precision,” CNES said on its website.

The improved imaging quality from CSO 2, flying in its lower orbit, makes the new satellite well-suited for follow-up observations from other satellites in the fleet. CSO 2 could help identify targets and reveal information not visible to satellites in higher orbits, which have a broader field-of-view.

In its low-altitude orbit, CSO 2 could identify the details of a car, according to Nadège Roussel, chief weapons engineer at DGA, the French military’s procurement agency.

“Such level of detail is real operational asset, and its performance makes this a unique system in Europe,” she said.

The three CSO satellites are identical, other than an adjustment in the focusing of the optical instrument on CSO 2 to allow it to take pictures from a lower altitude, according to Pierre-Emmanuel Martinez, CSO 2 satellite manager at CNES.

The new-generation CSO spy satellite fleet is costing the French government more than $1.5 billion, including spacecraft, launch and ground system upgrade expenses, according to French authorities. The program is funded through the DGA, and the French space agency CNES is responsible for in-orbit testing, satellite operations, and the purchasing of the spacecraft and launch services.

Artist’s concept of two CSO satellites in orbit. Credit: DGA

The French government has agreements to share optical imagery from the CSO satellites with the governments of Germany, Sweden, Belgium, and Italy, officials said. In exchange, the French military receives imagery from German and Italian radar observation satellites, which are designed for day-or-night, all-weather surveillance, and access to a ground station in Sweden.

The CSO satellites will also provide intelligence agencies and military officials imagery day-or-night in visible and infrared bands. The infrared imaging capability is an improvement over the Helios fleet, an upgraded enabled by the introduction of cryogenic cooling systems to chill infrared detectors on the CSO satellites.

Each CSO spacecraft features an agile pointing capability, allowing rapid steering from target to target, and enabling views from different look angles for three-dimensional stereo surveillance products.

French officials said reconnaissance imagery from the CSO satellites are useful in obtaining information about inaccessible regions, evaluating the strength of enemy military forces, and identifying civilians in close proximity to the battlefield. The images can help prepare plans for airstrikes, locate coordinates to guide missiles, avoid collateral damage to civilians, and allow commanders to evaluate the effectiveness of strikes by comparing images taken before and after a military operation.

The CSO 2 satellite also features a new autonomous orbit control capability, allowing the spacecraft to maintain its altitude and counteract atmospheric drag using quick burns of on-board thrusters. The satellite can perform the autonomous control maneuvers over the ocean and be ready to resume imaging operations once back over land, according to the French military.

The three CSO satellites were built by Airbus, with optical imaging instruments produced by Thales Alenia Space. CNES controls the satellites from a center in Toulouse, France, and the French military receives images at an airbase in Creil, France.

A French military operator analyzes a satellite image. Credit: Arianespace/DGA

Airbus won the contract to build the CSO satellites in 2010, and the French government approved construction of a third CSO satellite after Germany committed to join the program in 2015.

“Providing the most modern and efficient observation capability for the safety of our citizens, as well as the sovereignty and independence of France and Europe, CSO is a real game changer in terms of resolution, complexity, safety of transmission, reliability and availability: only a couple of nations can claim such a capability,” said Jean-Marc Nasr, head of Airbus Space Systems.

“Today we are celebrating the launch of CSO 2, featuring the most powerful ‘space camera’ ever built in Europe,” said Hervé Derrey, president and CEO of Thales Alenia Space. “We are very proud to have built its telephoto lens and electronics, the brains of the satellite. To develop this instrument, we called on the full sum of our experience in building the optical instruments for the six satellites in the Helios 1, Helios 2 and Pleiades families, allowing us to offer an instrument with unrivaled performance.”

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Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.

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2020-12-29 23:58:02Z
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Coverage of “wooden satellites” misses the point - Ars Technica

Enlarge / An experimental satellite, not made of wood, that was used to test ideas for orbital junk removal.

NASA

We here at Ars were somewhat surprised to stumble across a BBC headline indicating that a university-industry partnership in Japan was working on developing wooden satellites. The plan is less insane than it sounds—wood is a remarkable material that's largely unappreciated because of its ubiquity. But most of the reasons to shift to wood give in the coverage of the plan completely misses the mark.

To the degree that there is a plan, at least. According to the BBC and other coverage, the partnership is between Kyoto University and a company called Sumitomo Forestry. But neither the university nor the company has any information on the project available on the English-language versions of their websites. The BBC article gets all its quotes from Takao Doi, who's currently faculty at Kyoto University. According to Doi, the collaboration is on track to be manufacturing flight models of wooden satellites by 2023.

While wood may seem like a horrific fit for the harsh environment of space, the idea may seem less insane if you think of wood in terms of its structural composition: a mix of two robust polymers, cellulose and lignin. The strength and durability of wood depends heavily on the ratio of these polymers and what's also present in the mix with them. But it's also possible to physically and chemically treat wood to alter its properties further. One version of wood was as strong as aluminum by some measures, and had some interesting additional properties. And a forestry company can be expected to have extensive knowledge of how to process wood.

The question is whether wood has any material properties that make it a better fit for satellites than any alternative material. Nikkei Asia indicates that one potential advantage is that wood is transparent to many wavelengths that satellites use to communicate, potentially eliminating the need for external antennae. If said antennae would otherwise need to unfurl after a satellite reaches orbit, this could eliminate one potential source of hardware failure.

But the coverage by the BBC and others focuses on space junk. This is a real problem, as the amount of defunct satellites and random debris in low Earth orbit has created hazards for the functional stuff we'd like to keep there. Everything from scientific observatories to the International Space Station have had to be maneuvered around passing bits of junk.

Unfortunately, making satellite housings out of wood won't help with this, for many, many reasons. To start with, a lot of the junk isn't ex-satellites; it's often the boosters and other hardware that got them to orbit in the first place. Housings are also only a fraction of the material in a satellite, leaving lots of additional junk untouched by the change, and any wood that's robust enough to function as an effective satellite housing will be extremely dangerous if it impacts anything at orbital speeds.

Most of the coverage seems to present wooden satellites as helping with the space junk problem because of the fact that wood would burn up when it de-orbits. But this stuff is space junk precisely because it doesn't de-orbit. All of our plans for handling the existing abundance of space junk involve finding a way to induce it to leave orbit. Wood won't make any difference here.

The one point that wood might have in its favor, noted in some of the coverage and by Doi himself, is that it won't leave much in the atmosphere if it does de-orbit and burn up. Most other hardware will vaporize into a gas of aluminum and various other metals, perhaps oxidized. Again, having a wood housing won't eliminate these metals, given that many of them come from the satellites components and the rocket that put them in place. And, at least for the foreseeable future, this material won't be present in the atmosphere at high enough levels to be meaningful.

Given all this, it's completely unclear what problem wooden satellites are meant to solve. Still, the idea of figuring out how to process wood so that it would function in this context is an intriguing materials science problem, and might have some very down-to-earth applications. So, here's to hoping that the project goes ahead regardless.

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2020-12-29 19:34:00Z
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Final full moon of 2020: The 'Cold Moon' peaks TONIGHT across the world - Daily Mail

Final full moon of 2020: The 'Cold Moon' peaks TONIGHT across the world and appears in the sky for more than 15 hours

• The final full moon of 2020 will peak Tuesday evening across the world
• It is called the 'Cold Moon' because it appears when winter starts to set in
• The full moon will rise at 4:19pm ET and peak with illumination at  10:30pm ET
• This full moon is also called the 'Long Night Moon' or the 'Moon Before Yule'

By Stacy Liberatore For Dailymail.com

Published: 17:00 GMT, 29 December 2020 | Updated: 17:25 GMT, 29 December 2020

Space is gifting the Earth with one last present this year – the final full moon of 2020.

The ‘Cold Moon' will rise out of the northeastern sky at 4:19pm ET (9:19pm GMT), with peak illumination at 10:30pm ET (3:30am GMT) Tuesday evening.

The nickname comes from the Native American tribe the Mohwaks and refers to the dropping temperatures in December that means winter has arrived.

The moon will be in the sky for more than 15 hours from Tuesday evening into Wednesday morning, making it the longest full moon of the year. 

Scroll down for video 

The ‘Cold Moon' will rise out of the northeastern sky at 4:19pm ET (9:19pm GMT), with peak illumination at 10:30pm ET (3:30am GMT) Tuesday evening. Pictured is the full moon in St. Petersburg, Russia 

NASA’s Gordon Johnston wrote in a recent blog post: ‘This year moonlight will interfere with viewing the annual Quadrantid meteor shower, expected to be active from 28 December, 2020, through 12 January 2021, peaking on the morning of 3 January 2021.’

The last full moon of the year has a variety of names, depending on your location.

It is sometimes referred to as the Full Long Night’s Moon, which refers to ‘the midwinter night is indeed long, and because the moon is above the horizon for a long time,’ according to the Farmer’s Almanac.

‘The midwinter full moon has a high trajectory across the sky because it is opposite a low sun.’

The nickname comes from the Native American tribe the Mohwaks and refers to the dropping temperatures in December that means winter has arrived. Pictured is the full moon hanging over Maryland

Another nickname comes for European pagans who called it the Moon before Yule.

This full moon was a celebration of winter solstice that marks the start of winter.

In the southern hemisphere, where the seasons are flipped, the full December moon is often called the Strawberry Moon, Honey Moon or Rose Moon.

Johnston notes that it could also be called the Chang'e Moon, following China's three successful lunar landers that launched around this time of year.  

‘These missions get their name from the Chinese goddess of the Moon, Chang'e, who lived on the Moon with her pet rabbit, Yutu,' Johnston writes.

‘The Chang'e 3 lander and its companion Yutu rover launched on December 1 and landed on the Moon on December 14 2013.’

The moon will be in the sky for more than 15 hours from Tuesday evening into Wednesday morning, making it the longest full moon of the year. The moon setting behind a hill on the morning of December 29 in Chile

‘The Chang'e 4 lander and its companion Yutu-2 rover launched December 7, 2018 and landed January 3, 2019.’

‘The Chang'e 5 lunar sample return mission launched on November 23 (in UTC, November 24 in China's time zone) and returned its samples to the Earth on December 16, 2020, humanity's first lunar sample return since 1976.’ 

The moon will appear full until Thursday morning and the next time a full moon appears January 28, which is called the 'Full Wolf Moon.'

SCIENTISTS DON'T AGREE ON HOW THE MOON FORMED BUT MANY BELIEVE IT WAS THE RESULT OF AN IMPACT BETWEEN EARTH AND ANOTHER PLANET

Many researchers believe the moon formed after Earth was hit by a planet the size of Mars billions of years ago.

This is called the giant impact hypothesis.

The theory suggests the moon is made up of debris left over following a collision between our planet and a body around 4.5 billion years ago.

The colliding body is sometimes called Theia, after the mythical Greek Titan who was the mother of Selene, the goddess of the moon.

Many researchers believe the moon formed after Earth was hit by a planet the size of Mars billions of years ago. This is called the giant impact hypothesis

But one mystery has persisted, revealed by rocks the Apollo astronauts brought back from the moon: Why are the moon and Earth so similar in their composition?

Several different theories have emerged over the years to explain the similar fingerprints of Earth and the moon.

Perhaps the impact created a huge cloud of debris that mixed thoroughly with the Earth and then later condensed to form the moon.

Or Theia could have, coincidentally, been chemically similar to young Earth.

A third possibility is that the moon formed from Earthen materials, rather than from Theia, although this would have been a very unusual type of impact.

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2020-12-29 17:00:00Z
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Cold Moon 2020: Thirteenth and final Full Moon of the year to rise tonight - Daily Express

The Cold Moon will dazzle the skies tonight, with the Full Moon rising in the early hours of December 30. Stargazers can expect to see the Moon in all its glory come 3.38am on December 30.

This time around, the Moon is dubbed the Cold Moon, called as such due to it rising in the winter month of December.

The Royal Greenwich Observatory said: "The coming of winter earned December's full moon the name cold moon.

"Other names include the long night moon and the oak moon."

The Moon takes 29.5 days to complete a cycle and reappear in the skies as a Full Moon.

As such, on occasion a calendar month can experience two Full Moons.

The second Full Moon in a month is called a Blue Moon, with the Blue Moon of 2020 coming on October 31.

This means some years, a Full Moon can illuminate the skies on 13 separate occasions.

Tonight sees the 13th and final Full Moon of the year.

READ MORE: Full Moon: Is it a Full Moon tonight? Why is the Moon so bright? 

"When the path of the Sun appears lowest in the sky for the year, the path of the full Moon opposite the Sun appears highest in the sky."

According to the Met Office, clouds could disappear overnight, allowing much of Britain to see the Full Moon in all its glory.

The meteorological service said: "Wintry showers affecting in north and west with further snow in far north.

"Most inland areas dry with clear spells and a widespread frost. Ice and freezing fog patches likely."

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2020-12-29 14:17:00Z
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Japanese pairing looking into using wood to build satellites - Tech Xplore

Japanese company Sumitomo Forestry has announced a joint development project with Kyoto University to test the idea of using wood as a component in satellite construction. As part of the announcement, officials with Sumitomo Forestry told reporters that work on the project will begin with experiments designed to test different types of wood in extreme environments.

Some of the major components in most satellites include aluminum, Kevlar and aluminum alloys, which are able to withstand both temperature extremes and constant bombardment by radiation—all in a vacuum. Unfortunately, these characteristics also allow satellites to remain in orbit long after their usefulness has ended, resulting in constant additions to the space junk orbiting the planet. According to the World Economic Forum, there are currently approximately 6,000 satellites circling the Earth but only 60% of them are still in use. Some in the field have predicted that nearly 1,000 satellites will be launched into space each year over the coming decade. Considering their lifespan, this suggests there could be thousands more dead satellites orbiting the planet in the coming years. This space debris poses a significant threat to other satellites (they all travel thousands of miles per hour) and also to manned space missions. Most in the space community agree that space junk is becoming a serious problem. And there is more bad news—the aluminum used in satellites has been found to break apart when a satellite returns to Earth, creating hundreds or thousands of tiny alumina particles that wind up floating in the upper atmosphere for many years, possibly posing an environmental problem. For all these reasons, the researchers with this new project are looking to replace these materials with wood.

The major benefit of wood-based satellites is they would burn up completely when returning to Earth. But another major bonus of using wood to create the outer shell of a satellite is that electromagnetic waves would pass right through it, which means antennas could be placed inside of satellite structures, making them simpler to design and deploy. The researchers plan to look for appropriate wood candidates and then to conduct experiments to see it they could be treated to stand up to space conditions. They predict they will have a product ready for testing by 2023.

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2020-12-29 12:00:03Z
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Toronto Public Health records 2,226 new COVID-19 cases over four days - Newstalk 1010 (iHeartRadio)

Although the province will not release its new COVID-19 numbers until Tuesday, Toronto Public Health is releasing new information collected over the past four days.

According to TPH, between Dec. 24 and 27, there were 2,226 new cases of COVID-19 recorded in the city.

There are 306 in hospital, which is an increase of 100 over the four-day-stretch.

Over that time period, there were 64 more lives lost to the virus.

The positive aspect is that 2,531 more people have recovered from the virus.

Breaking the numbers down by day, there would have been an average of 556.5 new cases per day, 25 new hospitalizations per day, 16 new deaths per day, and 633 new recoveries per day.

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2020-12-29 09:59:30Z
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All Dark Matter in the Universe Could Be Primordial Black Holes – Formed From the Collapse of Baby Universes Soon After the Big Bang - SciTechDaily

Baby universes branching off of our universe shortly after the Big Bang appear to us as black holes. Credit: Kavli IPMU

The Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) is home to many interdisciplinary projects which benefit from the synergy of a wide range of expertise available at the institute. One such project is the study of black holes that could have formed in the early universe, before stars and galaxies were born.  

Such primordial black holes (PBHs) could account for all or part of dark matter, be responsible for some of the observed gravitational waves signals, and seed supermassive black holes found in the center of our Galaxy and other galaxies. They could also play a role in the synthesis of heavy elements when they collide with neutron stars and destroy them, releasing neutron-rich material.

In particular, there is an exciting possibility that the mysterious dark matter, which accounts for most of the matter in the universe, is composed of primordial black holes. The 2020 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to a theorist, Roger Penrose, and two astronomers, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez, for their discoveries that confirmed the existence of black holes. Since black holes are known to exist in nature, they make a very appealing candidate for dark matter. 

The recent progress in fundamental theory, astrophysics, and astronomical observations in search of PBHs has been made by an international team of particle physicists, cosmologists and astronomers, including Kavli IPMU members Alexander Kusenko, Misao Sasaki, Sunao Sugiyama, Masahiro Takada and Volodymyr Takhistov.

To learn more about primordial black holes, the research team looked at the early universe for clues. The early universe was so dense that any positive density fluctuation of more than 50 percent would create a black hole. However, cosmological perturbations that seeded galaxies are known to be much smaller. Nevertheless, a number of processes in the early universe could have created the right conditions for the black holes to form.

Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) is a gigantic digital camera on the Subaru Telescope. Credit: HSC project / NAOJ

One exciting possibility is that primordial black holes could form from the “baby universes” created during inflation, a period of rapid expansion that is believed to be responsible for seeding the structures we observe today, such as galaxies and clusters of galaxies. During inflation, baby universes can branch off of our universe. A small baby (or “daughter”) universe would eventually collapse, but the large amount of energy released in the small volume causes a black hole to form.  

An even more peculiar fate awaits a bigger baby universe. If it is bigger than some critical size, Einstein’s theory of gravity allows the baby universe to exist in a state that appears different to an observer on the inside and the outside. An internal observer sees it as an expanding universe, while an outside observer (such as us) sees it as a black hole. In either case, the big and the small baby universes are seen by us as primordial black holes, which conceal the underlying structure of multiple universes behind their “event horizons.” The event horizon is a boundary below which everything, even light, is trapped and cannot escape the black hole.

A star in the Andromeda galaxy temporarily becomes brighter if a primordial black hole passes in front of the star, focusing its light in accordance with the theory of gravity. Credit: Kavli IPMU/HSC Collaboration

In their paper, the team described a novel scenario for PBH formation and showed that the black holes from the “multiverse” scenario can be found using the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) of the 8.2m Subaru Telescope, a gigantic digital camera — the management of which Kavli IPMU has played a crucial role — near the 4,200 meter summit of Mt. Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Their work is an exciting extension of the HSC search of PBH that Masahiro Takada, a Principal Investigator at the Kavli IPMU, and his team are pursuing. The HSC team has recently reported leading constraints on the existence of PBHs in Niikura, Takada et. al. Nature Astronomy 3, 524–534 (2019)

Why was the HSC indispensable in this research? The HSC has a unique capability to image the entire Andromeda galaxy every few minutes. If a black hole passes through the line of sight to one of the stars, the black hole’s gravity bends the light rays and makes the star appear brighter than before for a short period of time. The duration of the star’s brightening tells the astronomers the mass of the black hole. With HSC observations, one can simultaneously observe one hundred million stars, casting a wide net for primordial black holes that may be crossing one of the lines of sight.  

The first HSC observations have already reported a very intriguing candidate event consistent with a PBH from the “multiverse,” with a black hole mass comparable to the mass of the Moon. Encouraged by this first sign, and guided by the new theoretical understanding, the team is conducting a new round of observations to extend the search and to provide a definitive test of whether PBHs from the multiverse scenario can account for all dark matter.  

Reference: “Exploring Primordial Black Holes from the Multiverse with Optical Telescopes” by Alexander Kusenko, Misao Sasaki, Sunao Sugiyama, Masahiro Takada, Volodymyr Takhistov and Edoardo Vitagliano, 30 October 2020, Physical Review Letters.
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.181304

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2020-12-29 03:05:47Z
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