4/5&12/19: AAS-19 and what's next

Congratulations to MH and the group on a successful presentation on Saturday 3/30/19! The next step is getting the submitted paper accepted, revised, and published.

Here are the threads underway.

1. Satellite data analysis. 

• VK suggested as a measure, for each year, launches*averageLifeSpan. 
• DB suggested lifespan/mass as a figure for each satellite, to be graphed as an average for each year, because cubesats may have lower mass, but lower lifespan, and still be an advance in technology. Thus lifespan alone might stop working pretty soon. Is mass data available for satellites? (It is for extraterrestrial spacecraft).
• New satellite data from planet4589. Merge with SATCAT and mine. VB is working on it.
• An analysis of lifespan trends on a per-country basis or per-organization basis would be interesting (MH suggested finding out to what extent the variation in satellite lifespan might be caused by new space programs). Same with lifespans and perigees.
• What if we analyze only SATCAT reentry status dates, and compare with the present analysis of all statuses except "in orbit." Probably would make little difference, but should compare to test this.
• Some potentially relevant background reading is at http://www.spaceworkscommercial.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/SpaceWorks_Spacecraft_Mass_Trends_2014.pdf.
• VK has applied for Affiliate Graduate Faculty Status so he could officially help advise VB.

2. Teaching track. DB used the google sheet to illustrate operator precedence in class. RS teaches engineering stat and may have some use for the trend and envelope analyses he's done on the data. These could be used for a future publication as well. 4/12/19: HA will be teaching python soon and could potentially use our data for class exercises and so on. We need to support that and work in that direction.

3. NEO/NEA analysis track: VK has some preliminary reports. What are the prospects?

4. Deep space exploration: we still need to do an analysis of missions/craft on a per-craft rather than per-year basis. Also, a per-year analysis is still needed for international missions since we just did NASA in our 2018 AAS paper. In addition:

• Comparison of different countries' space technology would be interesting. For example, comparing NASA vs. USSR in having similar lifespan doubling times, but different lifespan-over-time curves is interesting. Maybe other countries would also provide different curves. This might be good for an article in The Space Review, since short, focused articles seem good for that forum.
• It would be interesting to check lifespan/mass over time for deep space craft to see if it is an improvement over lifespan alone. (Doing this for satellites is mentioned above.)

5. Article discussion: we discussed 3 articles in room.eu.com. For next time we will discuss the first page of: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733315001699#sec0130.