Plus: Chinese scientists plan to send a cubesat swarm to a passing asteroid.
| Welcome to our roundup of top SpaceNews stories, delivered every Friday! This week, Janet Petro hinted at a "top-level" restructure for NASA, ispace diagnosed Resilience's crash landing, Jared Isaacman discussed his future plans and more.
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| | | | | OUR TOP STORY
| | By Jeff Foust NASA's acting administrator expects to decide on a new "top-level" structure for the agency within weeks, but a Senate-confirmed administrator may not be in place until next year.
Agency leadership, including acting administrator Janet Petro, held a town hall for NASA employees June 25. The town hall webcast was not open to the public but a recording of it was obtained by SpaceNews and separately posted online.
At the town hall, Petro said she was working on a reorganization of the agency that could change how the agency is structured and alter lines of reporting within it.
| | | | | | | CIVIL
| | Scientists from a number of Chinese universities, including Beihang, Tsinghua and Sun Yat-sen University, are proposing a rapid response mission to make the most of a rare opportunity presented by asteroid 99942 Apophis to advance planetary science and planetary defense.
A celebration of the long-awaited first images from a major new observatory is overshadowed by the fears astronomers have about proposed severe budget cuts at the agency funding them.
Former NASA administrator nominee Jared Isaacman said at an awards ceremony that he is interested in pursuing some of the goals he had for the agency, including privately funded science missions, from outside it.
| | LAUNCH
| | The company launched Mission Possible, a 1.6-ton reentry capsule, on SpaceX's Transporter-14 rideshare mission. Mission Possible was the last payload scheduled to be deployed on Transporter-14, about two hours and 45 minutes after liftoff. The capsule would then perform a controlled reentry and splashdown in the north Pacific Ocean and then be recovered by a ship.
Rocket Lab announced June 25 it received a contract from the European Space Agency for the launch of two smallsats to test a proposed future low Earth orbit positioning, navigation and timing, or LEO-PNT constellation. Rocket Lab will launch the satellites on an Electron from its New Zealand launch complex no earlier than December. | | | | | | | COMMERCIAL
| | Isar announced June 25 it raised the funding from Eldridge Industries, a Miami-based company that invests in a variety of industries, including technology. The investment is in the form of a convertible bond, a debt instrument that can later be converted into equity in the company.
Company executives said a review of the failed landing by its Resilience spacecraft June 5 led it to conclude that the laser rangefinder on the spacecraft suffered a hardware problem of some kind that kept it from providing timely data on the lander's altitude. The laser rangefinder was designed to provide altitude data when the spacecraft was at least three kilometers above the surface, triggering engines for the final landing burn. However, the unit did not provide its first altitude measurement until it was less than 900 meters high.
Maxar Intelligence launched a new monitoring product called Sentry, part of a broader effort to move beyond satellite imagery and become a provider of actionable geospatial intelligence. | | | | | | | SPONSORED |  | | Space Inventor Launches First Danish Arctic Satellite
By Space Inventor Together with Terma, Gatehouse SatCom, DTU, and Sweden's Unibap Space Solutions, satellite manufacturer Space Inventor, based in Aalborg, Denmark, has spent the past seven years developing the BIFROST surveillance satellite. On Monday 23 June, the satellite launched into orbit aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket – Transporter 14. It marked the first time in history that a satellite has been launched specifically to monitor Greenland and the Arctic.
| | | | | | | OPINION
| | By Daniel N. Baker With recent changes in administrations in Washington, the White House and the Office of Management and Budget have proposed massive reductions in federal support for science and engineering in almost all discipline areas. These proposed cuts in funding would have devastating impacts on a science-support system that has provided amazing results in virtually all STEM areas. Reflecting on my own career in space science, I feel it is inadvisable to tamper with something that has worked so well.
| | By Michal Anne Rogondino
By Brian Chow
By Stewart Marsh
| | SpaceNews is committed to publishing our community's diverse perspectives. Whether you're an academic, executive, engineer or even just a concerned citizen of the cosmos, send your arguments and viewpoints to opinion@spacenews.com to be considered for publication online or in our next magazine. The perspectives shared in these op-eds are solely those of the authors.
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