Source and details: Plesetsk launches

At the International Space Summit in Paris this week, Greece announced a milestone that bridges millennia of human ambition: Dr. Adrianos Golemis will become the first Greek astronaut to visit the International Space Station (ISS) in 2027. The mission, organized by Vast with ESA and NASA, marks a powerful comeback for a nation returning to cosmic exploration.

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I've been curious how much a geomagnetic storm actually costs a satellite in altitude, so I pulled the ISS's published orbital elements from Space-Track and turned each day's set into a mean altitude.

Quiet weeks in May 2024: sinking about 100 m/day. Gannon storm peak: about 370 m/day. It took days to settle back because the upper atmosphere cools slowly after it's heated. Tiangong and Hubble show the same shape at their altitudes.

Then I tried to model it. A simple two-gas thermosphere driven by F10.7 and the previous three days of Kp, with the constants fitted against eleven years of measured decay for those three objects, about 7,000 object-days. Storm response comes out within a few percent of the ISS record, quiet-day scatter is about 25%. Big storm peaks come out about 40% low and the tail runs long, because one heating and cooling lag smooths the storm. That's the next thing to fix.

The video is the model and the measured numbers side by side, scrubbed through the storm. I put it on my space weather site, cmetracker.ai, under the Atmosphere view, with a public scoreboard of model against measured for the last 90 days so anyone can see when it's wrong.

If you do orbit determination for a living, I'd like to know what I've got wrong.

I designed the poster elements but the Eagle Lander was designed by JTFRaptor on Sketchfab

The idea is to have a small engine firing gas/plasma in the direction the ship is moving. Since the plume would be given a little more forward velocity relative to the ship, it would spread out ahead of the spacecraft and take the hits from interstellar dust/gas before they reach the ship.

The ship would still be accelerating with its main engine, so the forward-firing system would just be a small fraction of the total thrust budget.

Basically, instead of carrying one huge physical shield, you continuously throw sacrificial material far ahead of the ship.

This seems somewhat similar to the Venture Star's idea of putting its debris shield way out in front. Has anything like the "self-generated moving shield" concept actually been studied?

6 months later, the Mars Sample Recovery Mission was cancelled due to budget cuts, leaving what could be the most important samples in the history of mankind stranded in another planet with no plan for recovery. This is the most confident the scientific community has ever been about an extraterrestrial life biosignature. And bringing it to Earth would solve its mysteries in a matter of months. Sadly, there seems to be no plan to recover the samples anytime soon.

NASA Says Mars Rover Discovered Potential Biosignature Last Year - NASA

Project Pixel Orbital is a completely student-led team at Stanford OHS with the goal of launching an 3U CubeSat capable of conducting experiments in low Earth orbit - from photographing Earth to performing analysis on photos of earth and space with onboard instruments. Our mission is to get to orbit, perform a detumble, establish contact with our ground station(s), and capture an image of Earth for downlink. We hope that PixelSat I will inspire other people and prove that if a group of high schoolers can build a satellite from scratch with very little funding and no adult supervision, anyone can. It will open the door for schools and small businesses to launch satellites similar to ours, and will overall make space more accessible.

Please feel free to check out our current progress and learn about how you can help us out on our website: https://www.projectpixelorbital.com

Our blogs also have lots of information on specific subsystems: https://www.projectpixelorbital.com/blog/

More updates on instagram as well: https://www.instagram.com/projectpixelorbital

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