Busy times in Space last week. Apart from launches by Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, Astra, ULA & Roscosmos, two missions came back with samples from outer Space. The Chinese Chang'E5 mission brought back some Lunar samples (see below) after almost a month in Space, and the Japanese Hayabusa2 mission delivered grains of the Asteroid Ryugu (see above) after being out there for 6 years! Both missions will provide better insights in how the Solar System was created some 5 billions years ago. Very impressive efforts that were concluded successfully!

SpaceX Starship SN8 launch attempt is imminent. Expected at 22:00 CET on December 9. Check it out via the livefeed!

Two landmark events this week in the Solar System. First of all, an asteroid sample is on its way to planet Earth and it will hit the Earth's astmosphere with an incomprehensible speed of 14 km/s. This sample was snatched off asteroid Ryugu back in 2018. Secondly, the Chinese moonlander Chang'e 5, that will bring back a Lunar sample, is now in orbit around the Moon and landing can be any moment now!

Hayabusa2 is an asteroid sample-return mission operated by the Japanese space agency, JAXA. It follows on from the Hayabusa mission which returned asteroid samples in 2010. Hayabusa2 was launched on 3 December 2014 and rendezvoused with near-Earth asteroid 162173 Ryugu on 27 June 2018. Capsule landing will be on December 5 around 18:45. See timeline below.

The Chang'e 5 spacecraft launched on Nov. 23 intent on becoming the first mission to bring lunar samples to Earth since 1976; the mission reached lunar orbit on Nov. 28. According to China's state-run news agency Xinhua, the mission's orbiter/return vehicle and its lander/ascender vehicle separated in lunar orbit  yesterday (Nov. 29) at 3:40 p.m. EST (2040 GMT; 4:40 a.m. Beijing time on Nov. 30). That move sets the stage for a landing near the peak of Mons Rümker, a mountain in the Oceanus Procellarum ("Ocean of Storms") region of the moon.(space.com). When the landing will occur exactly is unknown yet, but it sure will be somewhere in the coming days.

In a few hours, a Chinese Long March 5 will launch to the Moon. On-board is the Chang'E 5 lander which will scoop up a sample from the Lunar surface and bring it back to Earth. The last time this happened was in 1976 when the Sovjet Union brought back 170 grams of Lunar Soil with the Luna-24 missions.

Below is the live channel that will show the launch at 21:15 CET. If you want to hang-out with Space people during the launch, check-in to the Eye On Orbit chillspace.

Mars rover Curiosity snapped a selfie on the Martian surface. Curiosity, which touched down inside a 160 km wide  Gale Crater in August 2012, snapped a selfie on October 25 at a locale mission team members named "Mary Anning.". The photo is stitched together from 59 images that Curiosity can make with its camera on the robotic arm. 

Look at all the dust! It is a good thing it is nuclear powered as Solar panels would have a hard time. Also dents on the wheels can be identified. The surface is probably a clay deposit from what was once a seabed.

Remember the historic splashdown of the SpaceX Dragon Crew capsule back in August? That was still a test and now it is time for the first operational flight of crew dragon. 4 astronauts will be on their way to the International Space Station (ISS) as they foresee to lift off on Monday November 15 at 1:27 AM.

NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker, and astronaut Soichi Noguchi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will head to the International Space Station for a six-month science mission.

For live coverage, make sure to check out the Live YouTube feed as shown below.

An exciting mission is almost ready for launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The European Sentinel-6, as part of the EU Copernicus Earth Observation programme, is being mated to the launcher and awaiting its launch currently planned for November 21, 2021 from Vandenberg Airforce base in California, US. 

With global mean sea level rising because of climate change, Copernicus Sentinel-6 is the next radar altimetry reference mission to extend the legacy of sea-surface height measurements until at least 2030. From an altitude of 1336 km it will provide global maps of sea level that we have been seeing on the rise by 3.6 mm per year in the last decades. Unprecendented accuracy and precision in measurements are expected due to technology advancements incorporated in its measurement suite of a radar altimeter and a microwave radiometer. More info on the mission can be found on the ESA website for Sentinel-6.

Since the launch of the Sentinel-5P mission in October 2017, that I worked on for over a decade, I have been made part of a family of sp-called Sentinerds: Space groupies that promote the Sentinel missions on all Social media channels. For Sentinel-6, the Zapread platform should certainly not be excluded. Spot me in the picture below at the launch event. Unfortunately, the launch event will be online this time :(

I have been thinking lately about the connection between Space and Blockchain technologies. Of course due to my involvement in the Bitlinq.space project, that is currently running on a Lightning Network Node. I was also triggered by this news: The First Ethereum Network-Blockchain Satellite From Villanova University Set For Orbit

Of course the realm of Space is a very unwelcoming environment. It is hard to get there, but once you are there, the global access and coverage options are phenomenal. Of course under the condition you did your Space Engineering right and your hardware is not being fried instantly, either because of the extreme temperatures and/or the radiation levels. This makes Space a good place for secure storage as stealing or damaging your belongings would be quite an endeavour. And for resiliency, in case of terrestrial outages, Space assets form a robust alternative. But Space also has disadvantages. You could typically only connect to LEO satellites once per day, for a few minutes. If you can't work with that, and need a GEO satellite, you will have a link budget challenge and need quite some powerfull antennas to get your signal all the way there. 

But apart from the obvious 'node in Space', what do you think could be the benefit of using Space assets in blockchain technology or vice versa? 

In about two hours (21/10/2020, 00:15 AM CET), NASA spacecraft OSIRIS-REx will scoop up a sample of Asteroid Bennu. Watch it live on NASA TV.

OSIRIS-REx launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Sept. 8, 2016, and arrived at Bennu in December 2018. Now at a distance from Earth of 330 Million Km, the probe will make a touch and go to the surface of Bennu and collect some surface samples. Plan is to return these samples to Earth in 2023. 

Asteroids are relics of the earliest materials that formed our solar system, and studying such a sample will allow scientists to answer fundamental questions about the origins of the solar system. Furthermore, Bennu is a near-Earth asteroid (NEA) with possible risk of impacting the Earth in the late 2100s, so the mission is also exploring ways in which such a collision might be avoided.

A long worked on update of the Bitlinq message handler is now running on the Eye On Orbit teleport server and now runs 5 interconnected terminals:

1. A full Bitcoin node (btcoind v0.19.1.0)
2. A Lightning Network node (c-lightning v0.9.0-1)
3. Blockstream Satellite 2.0 S/W, connected with the 60 cm dish pointed at the Geostationary Telstar 11N satellite, receiving the latest blocks
4. Blockstream Satellite 2.0 API data reader
5. Bitlinq message handler v1.05 that is connected to the Bitlinq application on The Things Network (TTN). Whenever a registered device, such as my Lacuna Space IOT terminal, transmits a message to the M6P satellite, this message is relayed to the Blockstream Satellite API for global broadcasting

This is now running 365/24/7.

Next steps to undertake are:

• Getting more Lacuna Space IOT devices in the hands of Blockstream Satellite users
• Getting the in-message payment system to work with some of the latest features of Lightning S/W
• Create a protocol to enable users to give the Bitlinq message handler commands such as retrieving certain webpages and broadcasting these through Blockstream Satellite 
• Final goal is still to have this all work on a Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) cubesat and have the first working Lightning Network node in Space!