Minutes to September 10 Oklahoma Space Alliance Meeting
Oklahoma Space Alliance met September 10, 2022, at the McMurray’s house in Norman, Oklahoma. Attending were Clifford and Claire McMurray. Adam Hemphill, Tim Scott, Dave Sheely, and Syd Henderson. OSA President Clifford (Kip) McMurray presided over the meeting He did an Update discussing links to material covered in the meeting and this is online at http://osa.nss.org/Update2209.pdf so I’ll cover the details that aren’t covered there.
There were 11 privately owned commercial Earth-observing satellites in 2006, but 500 in 2022. These could become targets if Russia gets more aggressive in space.
We watched a video of the Russian satellite Kosmos buzzing a US satellite.
We watched a video of the launch of a classified satellite by SpaceX and of a Russian spy satellite.
The lunar landing sites for the US have to be capable of accommodating Starship. We watched a video on possible landing sites.
Britain’s proposed Solar Power Satellite would require 300 Starship launches and build something a mile in diameter.
The Sutter Ultra telescopes can potentially detect three hundred times as many asteroids as currently known. [This is for finding potentially exploitable asteroids, but also should detect a lot of ‘Earth grazers.]
Axiom will start launching its modules to the ISS in 2024. These modules will eventually separate and become part of an Axiom space station.
Would SpaceX want to do is round the Moon mission before Artemis 2 when this could embarrass NASA, which is SpaceX’s biggest customer?
We watched a video taken from the ISS (apparently by Samantha Cristoforetti) of the Aurora Australis. [A still of this graced the cover of the September Update.]
We listened to a transposed audio of sound waves from the supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy in the Perseus cluster (transposed 57 octaves, to be exact). Not sure how you can get soundwaves from so far; maybe we can see the vibrations in the gas clouds, or they’re from radio waves. We also heard the same from M87.
The space probe Lucy has discovered a moon around the (Jupiter) Trojan asteroid Polymele. [This is only the second moon ever discovered around a Trojan. The first was in 2020.]
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Minutes by OSA Secretary Syd Henderson
Contact person for Oklahoma Space Alliance is Claire McMurray.
PO Box 1003
Norman, OK 73070
Webmaster is Syd Henderson.
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