Western Australia's homegrown spacecraft, Binar-1, has been shot into the vacuum of space- deployed into Low Earth Orbit from the International Space Station (ISS), five weeks after blasting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

Director of Curtin's Space Science and Technology Centre (SSTC), John Curtin Distinguished Professor Phil Bland, joined SSTC staff and students yesterday to watch a live feed as Binar-1 was placed into the tiny airlock of the Japanese Experiment Module Kibo on the ISS and sent into space.

Professor Bland explained WA's first homegrown spacecraft is now on a journey to make first contact before testing critical systems, collecting data and taking photographs from 400 kilometers above Earth.

"The launch of WA's first homegrown spacecraft on the Space-X rocket was exciting, but this moment and the coming few days are the really crucial points for our Binar Space Program and the team of staff and students who designed and built Binar-1 from scratch," Professor Bland said.

"We can't wait to hear Binar-1's 'first words' from space—that will be the time when we will be able to declare the success of our first space-mission and put us firmly on the path to proving that our technology can deliver.

With Artemis, NASA will establish a long-term presence at the Moon, opening more of the lunar surface to exploration than ever before. This growth of lunar activity will require new, more robust communications, navigation, and networking capabilities. NASA's Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program has developed the LunaNet architecture to meet these needs.

LunaNet will leverage innovative networking techniques, standards, and an extensible framework to rapidly expand network capabilities at the Moon. This framework will allow industry, academia, and international partners to build and operate LunaNet nodes alongside NASA. These nodes will offer missions four distinct services: networking, navigation, detection and information, and radio/optical science services.

Networking

Typically, when missions launch into space, their communication down to Earth is reliant on pre-scheduled links with either a space relay or a ground-based antenna. With multiple missions journeying to the Moon, the reliance on pre-scheduled links could limit communications opportunities and efficiencies. LunaNet offers a network approach similar to the internet on Earth, where users maintain connections with the larger network and do not need to schedule data transference in advance.

On Saturn's giant moon Titan, liquid methane and other hydrocarbons rain down, carving rivers, lakes and seas in a landscape of frozen water. The complex chemistry on this icy world could be analogous to the period when life first emerged on Earth, or it might yield an entirely new type of life.