Launching from Earth (contributed by Jason Davis)

Here on Earth, it'll be a quiet month for human spaceflight comings and goings. Expedition 46 lasts until March, when one-year ISS crewmembers Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko return to Earth with Sergey Volkov. There aren't any ISS cargo flights scheduled in February, either. Two Russian resupply vehicles, Progress M-29M and Progress MS, will remain docked to the station throughout the month. Orbital ATK's OA-4 Cygnus spacecraft, which arrived in December, is enjoying an extended stay to collect extra trash for destructive reentry, but no firm departure date has been released. On February 3, cosmonauts Sergey Volkov and Yuri Malenchenko will perform a spacewalk to install hardware and science experiments on the station's Russian segment.

In U.S. commercial launcher news, SpaceX may launch the SES-9 communications satellite sometime in February. The company will likely attempt to land the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket on either a drone ship or back at Cape Canaveral. United Launch Alliance has two missions in February. An Atlas V will launch GPS IIF-12 from Cape Canaveral on Feb. 3, and a Delta IV will blast off with NROL-45 from Vandenberg Air Force Base on Feb. 10.

In international launch news, Japan's ASTRO-H X-ray astronomy satellite takes flight atop an H-IIA on February 12. The European Space Agency's Sentinel-3A earth-observing satellite is expected to launch in the second half of February on a Eurockot Launch Services Rokot vehicle. Additionally, Spaceflight Now reports that Russia, China and India all plan to send navigation satellites into orbit this month.

In Earth's Neighborhood

Up at the Moon, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is still reliably returning data from an orbit that passes very low over the south pole (within around 20 kilometers). According to deputy project scientist Noah Petro, this is a quasi-stable orbit, minimizing fuel consumption; they can last about 7 more years at the current rate. They are looking into ways to conserve fuel to keep the spacecraft going even longer than that. The camera team has been releasing lots of cool anaglyph images recently. Anaglyph images are one benefit of such a long-lived mission; they've achieved enough coverage of the Moon that it's scientifically valuable to spend data bits imaging previously imaged areas a second time from a different angle.

China's Chang'e 3 lander is still returning data to Earth as of earlier this month. No signal from the Yutu rover has been detected this month, so its status is unknown. Also unknown are the status of the Chang'e 2 and Chang'e 5 T1 orbiters, but have been operated for some time to test Chinese deep space communications capability. Still, the last official update that I know of on Chang'e 2's status is from October 30, 2014. Chang'e 3 fans may enjoy the archive of its lander and rover image data that I posted yesterday.

According to an email from scientist Jasper Halekas, the ARTEMIS probes are currently in good health and operating as planned in very stable, highly elliptical orbits; "we should be able to keep them there for years to come." They are focused on heliophysics, working cooperatively with the other THEMIS probes, the Van Allen Probes, and the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission, but by virtue of their location in space they study the interaction of the solar wind with the Moon as well.

Having completed the Earth swingby successfully, Hayabusa2 has shifted out of three-axis attitude control into a state called "one-wheel control," in which the spacecraft maintains its attitude using only one reaction wheel plus solar radiation pressure on its solar panels. This mode reduces wear on the reaction wheels, prolonging the life of the mission, and is also just plain cool. JAXA's navigators are now experienced in solar sailing, having used a similar mode on the original Hayabusa out of necessity, and on the IKAROS mission by design.