TESS to Launch April 16 in Search of New Worlds

The next-gen exoplanet-hunting satellite by NASA, Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), is planned to launch on SpaceX Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral FL Space Launch Complex 40 on April 16 at 18:32. TESS is the first NASA Astrophysics satellite mission to launch with SpaceX. The craft will perform 2 months of maneuvering and at least 5 burns to place it in a lunar flyby orbit to achieve a final highly-elliptical HEO with a period of 13.65 days in 2:1 resonance with the Moon. TESS will monitor 500,000 stars in a 2-year survey of the solar neighborhood, searching for temporary drops in brightness caused by planetary transits. Four wide-field charge couple device cameras each with 7 stacked lenses will help observe thousands of exoplanets and determine the mass, size, density and orbit. The spacecraft will have a launch mass of 350 kg. Its solar arrays will produce 390 watts of electricity, and it will communicate with Earth at 8 ground stations in USA once every 2 weeks at 100 mbps. Likely to run out of fuel within the next few months, the significant Kepler and K2 mission is now in campaign 17 and has discovered more than 2,724 exoplanet candidates and 2,649 confirmed exoplanets. TESS will study stars 30-100 times brighter than those surveyed by Kepler, and is predicted to catalog >1,500 exoplanet candidates, including about 500 Earth-sized and ‘Super Earth’ planets with radii less than twice that of Earth. (Pictured: TESS PI George Ricker; Image Credit: NASA, JPL, Caltech, GSFC, MIT, STSci, CfA, SpaceX, Orbital ATK)

MONDAY

Three Mid-April Launches and Commercial Spaceflight Updates

Rocket Lab is scheduled to launch the third flight of its Electron rocket on April 20 at Launch Complex 1 on Mahia Peninsula, New Zealand. “It’s Business Time” will be its first fully commercial mission and plans to carry two Lemur-2 CubeSats for Spire Global and one CICERO satellite for GeoOptics. Founder and CEO Peter Beck states “It’s Business Time represents the shift to responsive space” by having the capability to finish an Electron vehicle every week with use of 3D printers. Rocket Lab plans to produce 100 Rutherford engines this year; 30 have been completed and are currently being integrated to fill growing demands of commercial launches. The maximum payload is 225 kg on the 2-stage, 17 m tall rocket. In Russia, Roscosmos plans to launch Blagovest No. 12L satellite with Proton rocket and Breeze M upper stage on April 19 in Kazakhstan. China Long March 3B is scheduled to launch the Apstar 6C satellite on April 21. In USA, the 2-stage, LOX/RP-1 LauncherOne continues through final stages of testing before being air launched on Cosmic Girl, a 747-400 carrier aircraft. The carrier will reach over 10 km before LauncherOne is released and fires its single stage engine, followed by a single upper stage engine to boost it into orbit. The cofounder of Vector rocket company, James Cantrell, states his confidence in launching the 2-stage, 3 LP-1 engine Vector-R in 2018 from Kodiak Launch Complex in Alaska carrying 2 PocketQube satellites and an Alba Orbital deployer, after completing three initial test flights. (Image Credit: NASA, Rocket Lab, Roscosmos, CNSA, Vector, Virgin Orbit)

Apr 16 — Canadian Space Agency, Neptec Design Group, Kanata, Ontario, Canada: Karen McCrimmon, Member of Parliament for Kanata–Carleton, on behalf of Honourable Navdeep Bains, to announce new investments in cutting-edge technologies destined for space and Earth.

Apr 16-17— University of Luxembourg, Ministry of the Economy, Luxembourg National Research Fund, Luxembourg Institute for Science and Technology, Europlanet, Luxembourg: Asteroid Science Intersections with In-Space Mine Engineering (ASIME).

Apr 16-19 — Space Foundation, Colorado Springs CO: 34th Space Symposium: 2018 Premier Global Space Conference; space leaders to discuss critical issues affecting all space sectors; at Broadmoor Hotel.

Apr 16 — Apollo Asteroid 2018 FJ29: Near-Earth Flyby (0.078 AU)

Continued from…

Apr 9-20 — United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), Vienna, Austria: 57th Legal Subcommittee Meeting of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPOUS).

Apr 15-16 — Space Generation Advisory Council, Colorado Springs CO: Space Generation Fusion Forum 2018.

TUESDAY

Apr 17-18 — ESA, Noordwijk, The Netherlands: Earth Observation in Space 4.0 Workshop.

Apr 17-19 — United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITR) Operational Satellite Application Programme, Esri, Geneva, Switzerland: GIS for a Sustainable World Conference.