Need a charge? (6/17/22)

Happy Friday. Welcome to the 188 new readers who joined us this week. A reminder we're off Monday. We'll be back Tuesday with a full newsletter and new podcast episode. 

In today's newsletter:🚗 Astrobotic's rover 🎶 Space jams playlist📚 Weekend recs🌋 Geek Out

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Bringing Wireless Charging to the Moon

If your phone dies on the Moon, Astrobotic has you covered. 

Yesterday, the Pittsburgh-based company announced it has completed testing on a wireless charging system that can prep a variety of lunar surface infrastructure for the two-week lunar night.

The lunar colony: Big plans are in the works for a lunar and cislunar economy in the coming decades. Cislunar = the space between the Earth and Moon.

NASA’s Artemis program is set to return humans to the Moon’s surface in the next few years—potentially by 2025—and plenty of companies are envisioning a bustling economy of humans and robots living and working on the lunar surface.

In April, Astrobotic unveiled its Peregrine lunar lander, which is capable of delivering 500kg of payload to the surface. The lander’s first flight is scheduled for late this year as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

Wireless charging: The Moon doesn’t provide the easiest living environment to humans—or to robots. One of the biggest challenges is the 14-day long lunar night, which would keep lunar infrastructure from using solar power, the current space-based power source of choice.

The wireless charging system converts power from a lunar lander or vertical solar array into wireless power, which is then transmitted to an outside device (for example, a rover or lunar habitat) through a transmitter antenna coil. That coil has to be outside the power source, meaning it is exposed to extreme hot and cold temperatures.

• Astrobotic tested the system at its HQ in extreme temperatures and in regolith, similar to the loose, dusty material coating the surface of the Moon.

• In these situations, NASA Glenn Research Center found that the charging system surpassed its performance goals.

“By enabling night survival, we’re opening…the Moon to more science activity, for much longer than ever before,” Jay Eckard, Senior Project Manager for Lunar Surface Systems at Astrobotic, said in a press release.

Zoom out: NASA is currently working with nine CLPS providers. “The whole group of CLPS landers excites me, because…we're going to have multiple landings on the Moon from these private companies that have been enabled by NASA,” Rob Meyerson, former president of Blue Origin and CEO of Delalune Space, told us last week on the Pathfinder podcast.

“When we get there, no matter what business it is that you're going to build, you're going to need mobility. You're going to need to land. You're going to need a cargo capability to service, either bring more robots or bring supplies, for the humans that are there.” 

Share this story with someone who's hoping their next gig will be on the Moon.

In need of some tunes this summer? We’ve got you covered.

Payload is pleased to present “Space Jams”, the only space-themed playlist you'll ever need. We polled the team, asked readers for input, and consulted with the top DJs in the galaxy to come up with this space-inspired playlist. Shout out to Payload readers Erin B. and Jared Richard for their submissions, which were incorporated into the playlist.

Use this for parties, rocket launches, or for some fun interstellar vibes. Check out the curated tunes here:

Space Jams is a work in progress and we'll be continuously updating the playlist. Suggestions welcome. Drop us a line by replying to this email and let us know what we're missing!

In Other News

• A group of SpaceX employees were fired, the NYT reports, after sending an open letter to execs saying Elon Musk’s recent public behavior has been a “distraction and embarrassment” to the company.

• NASA will send two astronauts, Barry Wilmore and Suni Williams, to the ISS aboard the first crewed flight test of Boeing’s Starliner capsule.

• The ISS fired its thrusters yesterday to maneuver around a piece of debris from the November Russian ASAT test.

• SpaceX has a launch triple header planned for this weekend, starting with a Starlink mission set to lift off from KSC shortly after noon today.

Geek Out: Space Volcano

Not everything that ends up in space from the Earth’s surface is traveling on a rocket. In January, the island volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai erupted, causing shockwaves across the Pacific…

...and in the ionosphere, the region of space between 80-1000km above the Earth’s surface. Up there, Earth’s weather mixes together with that of space. Space weather encompasses changing radiation conditions caused by events like solar flares and geomagnetic storms. 

We know that space weather occasionally gets through our atmosphere, when solar flares wreak havoc on Earthly power grids and communications systems. It works the other way around, too.

New research

Scientists working with NASA’s Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) satellite found that the Hunga Tonga eruption sent “a giant plume of gases, water vapor, and dust” flying at up to 724 km/h into the ionosphere. Hunga Tonga also sent shockwaves traveling through the atmosphere at speeds of 300 meters per second. These wild conditions produced strange electrical currents in the ionosphere. 

• “The volcano created one of the largest disturbances in space we’ve seen in the modern era,” said Brian Harding, UC Berkeley physicist and lead author of the research paper.

• Particles in the ionosphere tend to flow together in an eastward-bound electric current. Readings from ICON showed that the eruption caused the current to switch directions for a short period of time and surge to five times its normal power.

Payload’s takeaway: We know little about the complex interactions that take place right at the edge of space. This research arms us with a brand-new understanding of how conditions on Earth may extend out into space.

The View from Space

The ESA’s retired Herschel space telescope captured intricate images of galactic gas and dust—but it couldn’t detect regions where these clouds were more spread out.

Now, by combining its photos with data from three other retired telescopes, the ESA and NASA released more complete new images of our nearby galaxies, including this, the Large Magellanic Cloud.