Earth strikes back (9/27/22)

Good morning. What a time to be alive!

In today's newsletter:💥 DART postmortem🎙️ Pathfinder #0018🔁 On the move

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Team Earth Strikes Back

At last, justice for the dinosaurs.

Last night, NASA’s first planetary defense mission ended with a bang. Years in the making, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission smashed into the asteroid Dimorphos.

With DART, NASA hopes to test whether it would be possible to protect our pale blue dot from potential oncoming planet-killing asteroids down the road.

Rewind the tapes: NASA launched the four-foot-wide spacecraft back in November with ambitions to knock an unsuspecting asteroid just slightly off its orbital path. To reach its target, the little DART that could traveled 6.8 million miles over 10 months.

It wasn’t easy to predict how Dimorphos’s trajectory would change upon impact. We didn’t really know the structure of the asteroid.

• If it was solid, dense, and smooth—like a billiard ball—it’d be easier to predict and likely slow more in its orbit.

• If it’s a loosely constructed pile of rubble—the more likely scenario—then Dimorphos would absorb more of the impact in a less predictable way.

The best guess was that the kinetic impact would shorten Dimorphos’ orbit by about ten minutes, but there was no way to know for sure without crashing DART into it and watching what happened.

What we know: Dimorphos is an asteroid roughly the width of a football field in orbit around a larger asteroid, Didymos. Until last night, Dimorphos completed an orbit around Didymos every 11 hours and 55 minutes. That may have changed now.

DART crashed into the asteroid almost perfectly head-on with respect to the asteroid’s orbital velocity at a speed of 14,000 miles per hour. It hit the asteroid about 17 meters away from the impact point picked out by the research team—a bullseye, by NASA standards.

The DART craft itself is no more. It was blown to smithereens upon impact, bravely sacrificing itself for Earth’s sake. Now, researchers are relying on observations from ground telescopes and LICIACube. The free-flying cubesat contains an auxiliary camera. It’s hovering about 55 km away from the asteroid, helping to shape our understanding of what exactly happened right of kaboom.

What we don’t know: It’s only been ~14 hours since the impact, which means that so far, Dimorphos has only completed one additional rotation around Didymos. The DART team back at NASA will continue to monitor the asteroid’s adjusted orbit for at least the next two months and draw conclusions about the efficacy of the spacecraft smash method of planetary defense.

In the coming days and weeks, NASA researchers will observe the binary asteroid system with ground telescopes and slowly receive image transmissions from LICIACube. The team will have more information about the ejecta from the crash, the structure of the asteroid, and the potential changes in Dimorphos’ orbit in the days and weeks to come.

Share this story with a doomsday prepper:

Pathfinder #0018, with Brian Barritt

We’re back for Round 3 of the Pathfinder from Paris experience. Just days after Aalyria Technologies emerged from stealth mode, Ryan sat down with Brian Barritt, the startup’s CTO.

Aalyria leverages technology from various Google advanced development programs and aims to build speedy, secure networks spanning land, sea, air, LEO, and deep space.

How do you pronounce it? Ah-leer-e-ah.

What are its origins? Aalyria was widely reported to have spun out of Alphabet, but Brian tells us that’s not exactly right. “I think the right way to describe it is Aalyria, the entity, acquired this technology from Alphabet, [but] this is not an Alphabet company,” Brian said.

The startup heavily embraces technology that was developed but never commercialized at Google’s parent company. And many of its ~30 full-time employees and founding team previously worked at Google or one of its affiliated deeptech endeavors.

Who’s backing it? Alphabet is a minority owner, Brian said, but the startup also has an $8M Defense Innovation Unit contract to its name and backing from the founders of Accel, J2 Ventures, and Housatonic.

What’s Aalyria building?

1. Spacetime, a smart software system for orchestrating networks of ground stations, aircraft, satellites, vessels, and urban meshes.

2. Tightbeam, an advanced laser communication terminal for ground-to-space, terrestrial, and airborne applications. Aalyria has made some bold claims about Tightbeam’s performance, and–if they hold up—the system could revolutionize data transmission around Earth and between Earth, space, and even deep space, Brian said.

There are a lot of boundary-pushing ideas in this conversation, so we don’t recommend listening to it at a speed faster than 1x. You’re guaranteed to learn something new about laser communications, software disrupting communications networks, and how these technologies could be put to work in space.

Listen now

Our podcast distribution tool is on the fritz this morning, so for the time being, we only have a YouTube link to offer you. If you'd prefer to listen on Spotify or Apple, hang tight—the wait will be worth it.

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In Other News

• NASA rolled SLS back, hoping to minimize any damage from Hurricane Ian.

• Consequently, Artemis I’s next earliest launch date is likely Nov. 12.

• Tehran blocked Starlink’s website, shortly after SpaceX activated Starlink in Iran.

• Colorado’s senators called on Air Force secretary Frank Kendall to keep the US Space Command office in Colorado Springs rather than move it to Alabama as planned.

• Dmitry Rogozin, former Roscosmos chief, will reportedly lead a new "Crimean Federal District" that would stretch across Russia-occupied Ukrainian territory.

The View from Space