Tag: Moon

China to launch its second lunar relay communications satellite next year

9:01 am

China now plans to launch its second Queqiao lunar relay communications satellite early next year in order to support several upcoming missions, including Chang’e-6 mission to bring samples back from the far side of the Moon.

Queqiao-2 is set to launch on a Long March 8 rocket from the coastal Wenchang spaceport in early 2024, according to Zhang Lihua of DFH Satellite under the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC), the satellite’s developer. The 1,200-kilogram satellite will feature a 4.2-meter-diameter parabolic antenna and a mission lifetime of more than eight years, Zhang said during a presentation at the 74th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Baku, Oct. 3.

It will also be used later to provide relay communications to two additional Chang’e missions to the Moon’s south pole.

The satellite is an upgrade from the first Queqiao relay satellite, which is still operational but now at one of the Lagrange points rather than in orbit around the Moon. This new satellite is intended to be the first in a future constellation of lunar communications satellites, and is also being considered for the same use at Venus and Mars.

Once again it seems that China’s long term plan for the exploration of the solar system is not only rational and carefully thought out, it is also being implemented with increasing speed. Meanwhile in the U.S. our federal government seems schizophrenic, with one agency (NASA) trying to put together a long term plan using commercial space while other departments (FAA, FCC, Fish & Wildlife) doing everything they can to stymie this effort.

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Axiom partners with clothing fashion company Prada on its spacesuit design

9:33 am

Capitalism in space: The commercial space station company Axiom is now partnering with the Italian fashion company Prada to create its lunar spacesuits, being developed under a $228.5 million NASA contract.

Prada will assist Axiom in working on the outer layer of its spacesuit, which has to protect the suit’s inner layers from the space environment, including lunar dust, without hindering its mobility. “When it comes to the design side of that piece of it makes a lot of sense because Prada has a lot of experience in the design, the look and feel,” Suffredini said. “More importantly, there’s these technological challenges to try to overcome as well.”

The article at the first link emphasizes Prada’s experience with high tech fabrics, including composites, but this deal is inspired as much by good public relations. Both companies get some good publicity by this deal.

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Nova-C ready for launch in mid-November

9:15 am

The Moon's south pole, with Nova-C landing site indicated
Click for interactive map.

Capitalism in space: The commercial lunar lander company Intuitive Machines yesterday unveiled its now ready-for-launch Nova-C lander, set for launch on a Falcon 9 rocket during a six-day launch window beginning on November 16, 2023.

Steve Altemus, chief executive of Intuitive Machines, estimated the odds of success at “upwards of 65% to 75%,” higher than the historical average. That’s based, he said, on the experience the company has built up with key technologies on the lander, such as precision landing and its propulsion system.

It is also based on lessons learned from those failed missions. “Each one of those things that we witnessed in terms of anomalies that caused the failures of those missions, we have internalized,” he said. “Therefore, I think our odds are higher.”

If successful, Nova-C will land closer to the Moon’s south pole than any previous lander, as shown on the map to the right, and will function like India’s Pragyan rover for one lunar day, about two weeks. It will also land right next to a crater with a permanently shadowed interior, though it will have no way to travel into it. The company also two more lunar lander contracts with NASA, with the second Nova-C mission scheduled for 2024, and a third not yet scheduled.

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SLIM leaves Earth orbit and is on its way to the Moon

8:51 am

SLIM's planned route to the Moon

The Japanese lunar lander SLIM fired its engines on September 30, 2023 to begin its journey to the Moon. The map to the right indicates the planned route after this trans-lunar injection burn, first flying past the Moon to put it on a trajectory that will bring it back to the Moon at the proper speed and direction for its landing several months hence.

The main goal of this mission is engineering, to test the ability of an autonomous unmanned spacecraft to land precisely within a small target zone about 300 feet across. If proven, this ability will make it possible to send unmanned landers to many places that are presently impossible due to their rough topography.

The route that SLIM is taking to the Moon is also unusual, and is probably also an engineering test of its own. Flybys of planets to change a spacecraft’s path is not a new technique, but in the past it has been used to slingshot the probe to another object, not send it back to that planet.

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Updated map of Yutu-2’s travels on far side of the Moon

3:01 pm

Map showing Yutu-2 full route on Moon
Click for original image.

The Chinese agency operating the Yutu-2 rover on the far side of the Moon today released an updated map showing the rover’s full route since landing, the first update since January 2023. That map is to the right, reduced to post here. The landing site is in the lower right, with the rover presently in the upper left.

Since January the rover has apparently traveled only about 300 feet, even though it has had about eight lunar days to travel. Note too that the last update was also the first in three months. It appears the Chinese are either having issues with the rover (not surprising as it has been operating on the Moon for almost five years, since January 2019), or they have decided they don’t need to tell anyone what they are doing.

Since the rover was not expected to last more than a few lunar days (several Earth months), the former is more likely.

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Ispace wins $55 million NASA contract for lunar landing mission

9:17 am

The Japanese company Ispace, which is also establishing operations in the U.S., has won a $55 million NASA contract to send a lunar landing plus communications relay satellites to the Moon in 2026.

Ispace’s Hakuto-R1 lander attempted a landing on the Moon in April, but crashed. The company has a second Hakuto-R mission presently targeting launch next year. The NASA contract would the company’s third, which will be built in its new U.S. facility and be called Apex-1.

In today’s briefing, Ispace representatives announced that the primary customer for its upcoming Mission 3 is NASA, which has selected the company as part of its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program (CLPS). Ispace stated during the briefing that it has signed a $55 million contract with NASA for Mission 3 in order to land near the lunar south pole carrying approximately 210 pounds (95 kg) of scientific payloads.

But that’s not all the mission will do. On its way to the lunar surface, Mission 3 will deliver relay satellites that will remain in orbit around the moon to serve as communication relays.

Though it will not be surprising if these launch dates slip, Ispace is in a strong position to succeed, considering it is presently the only private company to launch a Moon lander, and got very close to putting it down on the lunar surface successfully.

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Image released of permanently shadowed floor of Shackleton Crater

11:01 am

Shadowcam-LRO mosaic
Click for original image.

NASA today released a mosaic combining images from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s high resolution camera LROC and the Shadowcam camera on South Korea’s Danuri lunar orbiter that shows for the first time the entire permanently shadowed floor of Shackleton Crater at the Moon’s south pole.

That mosaic, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, is to the right. I have added the black cross to mark the location of the south pole, just inside Shackleton, the large crater on the right. The inset shows the floor of the crater at higher resolution.

LROC can capture detailed images of the lunar surface but has limited ability to photograph shadowed parts of the Moon that never receive direct sunlight, known as permanently shadowed regions. ShadowCam is 200-times more light-sensitive than LROC and can operate successfully in these extremely low-light conditions, revealing features and terrain details that are not visible to LROC. ShadowCam relies on sunlight reflected off lunar geologic features or the Earth to capture images in the shadows.

Thus, in the mosaic to the right the interior of Shackleton was imaged by Shadowcam, and then placed on a mosaic of LROC pictures.

If you click on the full image at high resolution and look closely at the crater floor, it is difficult to determine if there is any ice there. There are several mounds that could be ice, but could also be accumulated dirt and debris. What is most significant however is the smooth interior walls of the crater. It appears it will very possible for a rover to drive down those walls and into Shackleton.

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Russian investigators pin down cause of Luna-25 failure

10:03 am

Though the investigation is not yet complete, reports out of Russia indicate that the cause of the failure of Luna-25 during an engine burn while in orbit around the Moon has been identified.

The article at the link provides the details, which involve problems with two “BIUS-L accelerometers” during the flight, which for reasons not yet understood were switching from the primary to the secondary randomly during the journey to the Moon, apparently because of some failure.

However, ahead of the fateful lunar orbit correction on August 19, both accelerometers worked correctly, but once the maneuver started, one set failed again, while the flight control system never switched to data from the second set. As a result, onboard computers were not receiving data about critical parameters required for properly completing the orbit correction, such as orientation of the spacecraft in space, velocity and altitude.

If confirmed, this crash scenario would likely implicate deficiencies in the development or testing of the flight control system and its software rather than any mechanical problem of the propulsion system, which was implied in the initial statement about the incident. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted sentence says it all. The serious quality control problems that have hampered Russia’s space efforts remain, and in fact appear systemic throughout its entire aerospace industry. In fact, this failure of a planetary probe helps explain the many difficulties Russia has been having in its war in the Ukraine, attributable to these same issues.

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New analysis of Chandrayaan-1’s lunar orbital data might explain its detection of widespread surface hydrogen on the Moon

9:52 am

The Earth's magnetic field, shaped by the solar wind
The Earth’s magnetic field, shaped by the solar wind

One of the significant finds coming from India’s first lunar orbiter, Chandrayaan-1, was the detection of hydrogen in many places across the entire lunar surface, in places where it seemed impossible for hydrogen to be there, even if it was locked in a molecule like water.

Researchers in Hawaii now think they have found an explanation by linking that data to the Earth’s long magnetotail, formed by the solar wind pushing against the Earth’s magnetic field. The graphic to the right illustrates that process. The scientists focused on the kind of weathering processes that occurred both when the Moon was inside that tail, and when it was not.

Li and co-authors analyzed the remote sensing data that were collected by the Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument onboard India’s Chandrayaan 1 mission between 2008 and 2009. Specifically, they assessed the changes in water formation as the Moon traversed through Earth’s magnetotail, which includes the plasma sheet.

“To my surprise, the remote sensing observations showed that the water formation in Earth’s magnetotail is almost identical to the time when the Moon was outside of the Earth’s magnetotail,” said Li. “This indicates that, in the magnetotail, there may be additional formation processes or new sources of water not directly associated with the implantation of solar wind protons. In particular, radiation by high energy electrons exhibits similar effects as the solar wind protons.”

In other words, the evidence suggests that the hydrogen signal seen by Chandrayaan-1 might have been a very temporary implacement of that hydrogen by the solar wind, which ceases during the Moon’s periodic passages through the magnetotail. The Moon’s harsh environment then causes that hydrogen to vanish, only to reappear when it is once again exposed to the solar wind.

None of this is confirmed, so some skepticism is required. If true, however, it would provide further evidence that the hydrogen signal seen at the lunar poles that scientists hope is evidence of ice in the permanently shadowed craters might be nothing of the sort, and we shall find little ice there.

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Moon’s south pole permanently shadowed regions are younger than expected

1:26 pm

Map of Moon's south pole, with permanently shadowed regions indicated
Click for original image.

A new long range model of the Moon’s orbit and rotational tilt now suggests that the permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) in its south polar regions are much younger than previous predicted, which reduces the likely amount of ice that has been preserved there.

The map of the south pole region to the right, reduced, sharpened, and annotated to post here, shows the locations of those shadowed regions, with their predicted ages indicated by the colors (Gyr = billion years). Note that the Nova-C lander, planned for launch in mid-November, will land somewhat near some relatively young PSRs, as indicated by the red cross. From the press release:

“We calculated the lunar spin axis orientation and the extent of PSRs based on recent advances for the time evolution of the Earth-Moon distance,” he said. Early in its history, the Moon (which is 4.5 billion years old) was bombarded by comets and volcanism released water vapor from its interior, but continuously shadowed areas started to appear only 3.4 billion years ago. By that time these processes had started to die down, so most of the water that was delivered to the Moon or outgassed from its interior could not have been trapped in the polar regions. Any ice in the polar regions today must have a more recent origin.

“We have been able to quantify how young the lunar PSRs really are,” Schorghofer said. “The average age of PSRs is 1.8 billion years, at most. There are no ancient reservoirs of water ice on the Moon.”

Since other data suggests the presence of ice, it is possible that these reserves are regularly renewed by the arrival of impacts. It also suggests however that there might be less ice available than hoped. Above all, the red colored regions appear to be the most valuable real estate to explore first.

Note: The landing sites for both India’s Vikram lander and Russia’s Luna-25 lander were well beyond the map’s upper right edge, far outside the region where any permanently shadowed craters are located. The news outlets that talked about finding water or ice on either mission were simply illustrating their ignorance and sloppy reporting.

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Repeating moonquakes on Moon found to be caused by remaining sections of Apollo 17’s LM

10:41 am

Scientists reviewing the archive seismic data produced by the seismometers placed on the Moon by the Apollo missions have discovered that repeating small moonquakes in that data were actually caused by base of Apollo 17’s Lunar Module (LM) that provided a launchpad for the part of the LM that lifted the astronauts off the Moon.

Triangulating the origin of the mystery quakes, researchers surprisingly realized they came from the Apollo 17 lunar lander base, which expands and vibrates each morning as it becomes heated by the sun.

“Every lunar morning when the sun hits the lander, it starts popping off,” Allen Husker, a Caltech research professor of geophysics who worked on the project, said in a statement. “Every five to six minutes another one, over a period of five to seven Earth hours. They were incredibly regular and repeating.”

That the extreme range of temperatures experienced by the LM could cause detectable quakes as the LM base expanded suggests strongly how difficult it is for a spacecraft to survive the lunar night lasting 14 Earth days. For all we know, that base has now literally fallen apart due to these stresses. This in turn suggests it is highly unlikely that India’s Pragyan rover will come back to life when the sun rises on September 22, 2023.

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Ridge in Martian lowland plains

11:47 am

Tiny ridge in Martian lowlands
Click for original image.

Today’s cool image is interesting not because it shows us some spectacular Martian terrain, but because the most distinct feature is a thin ridge only a few feet high that pokes up out of the northern lowland plains for apparently no reason.

The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 1, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The ridge is about 1.8 miles long, and is only about five feet high on its western end, rising to about 25 feet on its eastern end.

The colors differences indicate that the ridge’s peak is likely bedrock, and the surrounding greenish/blue hue suggesting sand and rocks covered with dust. The ridge might be the top of a deeper buried topological feature but that is only a guess.
» Read more

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Japan successfully launches XRISM X-ray space telescope and SLIM lunar lander

4:57 pm

SLIM's landing zone
Map showing SLIM landing zone on the Moon.
Click for interactive map.

Japan today (September 7th in Japan) successfully used its H-2A rocket to place both the XRISM X-ray space telescope and SLIM lunar lander into orbit.

As of posting XRISM has been successfully deployed. SLIM has not, as it needs to wait until after a second burn of the rocket’s upper stage about 40 minutes later. The map to the right shows SLIM’s landing target on the Moon, where it will attempt a precision landing within a zone about 300 feet across.

This was Japan’s second launch this year, so it does not get included in the leader board for the 2023 launch race:

62 SpaceX
39 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

In the national rankings, American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 71 to 39. It also still leads the entire world combined, 71 to 64, while SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) only 62 to 64.

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LRO takes image of Vikram on Moon

9:02 am


Click for interactive map. To see the original
image, go here.

The science team for Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) yesterday released an oblique image taken of India’s Vikram lander, on August 27, 2023, four days after the lander touched down about 370 miles from the south pole.

The LROC (short for LRO Camera) acquired an oblique view (42-degree slew angle) of the lander. … The bright halo around the vehicle resulted from the rocket plume interacting with the fine-grained regolith (soil).

That image is shown in the inset to the right. I have cropped it to focus on Vikram itself, which is in the center of the inset, with its shadow to its right, the opposite of all the surrounding craters. Pragyan is in this image, but neither it nor its tracks appear visible. The rover had moved west from the lander, which would be downward to the line of three craters near the bottom of the inset. To get a better sense of Pragyan route, compare this image with the map India’s space agency ISRO released on September 2nd.

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Marilyn Lovell, wife of Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell, passes away at 93

11:18 am

Marilyn Lovell, holding son Jeffrey, watches the Saturn 5 lift-off with daughters Susan, right, and Barbara, left
Marilyn Lovell, holding son Jeffrey, watches Apollo 8 lift-off on
December 21, 1968 with daughters Susan, right, and Barbara, left

On August 27, 2023, Marilyn Lovell passed away at the age of 93 in Lake Forest, Illinois, where she and her astronaut husband had lived since he had retired from NASA following his last space mission, Apollo 13.

Jim Lovell of course is the famous one. In the 1960s space race he was the leading space cadet, spending more time in space than any other person, with flights on Gemini 7 (the longest mission yet), Gemini 12 (proved it was possible to do work on a spacewalk), Apollo 8 (first mission ever to another planet), and Apollo 13, which was supposed to be Lovell’s crowning achievement, a walk on the Moon. Unfortunately an explosion in the Apollo service module on the journey out to the Moon forced the crew to use its Lunar Module as a lifeboat so that the three astronauts could get back home safely. That failure meant Lovell would never step on the Moon, despite a life dedicated to taking the first tentative steps in the exploration and the eventual settlement of the solar system by the human race.

It could however be argued that none of that laudable career would have happened had he not had Marilyn Lovell for a wife.
» Read more

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JAXA schedules last H-2A rocket launch, carrying X-Ray telescope and lunar lander

9:06 am

SLIM's landing zone
Map showing SLIM landing zone on the Moon.
Click for interactive map.

Japan’s space agency JAXA today announced that it has finally rescheduled the launch of its XRISM X-Ray telescope and its SLIM lunar lander launch for September 7, 2023, lifting off using the last flight of its H-2A rocket.

The previous launch attempt several weeks ago was scrubbed due to high winds. This new launch date has a window of seven days, which means if weather scrubs the September 7th launch they will be able to try again immediately within that window.

The white dot on the map to the right shows the targeted landing site of SLIM, which is testing the ability of an unmanned probe to land precisely within a tiny zone of less than 300 feet across.

Meanwhile, with the retirement of the H-2A rocket and its replacement having not yet flown successfully (its first launch failed in March), Japan after this launch will be in the same boat as Europe, without a large rocket and lacking the ability to put large payloads into orbit.

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Engineers had Vikram do short flight hop prior to shutting down

8:36 am

Indian engineers revealed today that prior to putting the Vikram lander to sleep for the long lunar night, they had the lander use its rocket engines to do a short up and down flight. From the first link:

“On command it (Vikram lander) fired the engines, elevated itself by about 40 cm as expected and landed safely at a distance of 30 to 40 cm away,” ISRO said in an update on ‘X’.

Before doing the hop engineers stored Vikram’s instruments and rover ramp, then redeployed them afterward to gather a tiny bit of new data before putting everything into hibernation.

The hop test proved that Vikram’s engines could be restarted even after being on the Moon for almost two weeks, and thus could potentially be used on a future sample return mission. It also suggested a future mission could choose to change its landing site periodically by use of its landing engines.

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Engineers place Pragyan into sleep mode

9:26 am

With lunar sunset looming, engineers have completed all work on both the lander Vikram and the rover Pragyan and have prepared Pragyan as best as possible to survive the long 14-Earth-day long lunar night.

Currently, the battery is fully charged. The solar panel is oriented to receive the light at the next sunrise expected on September 22, 2023. The receiver is kept on.

All data from Vikram’s instruments has been transmitted back to Earth, through the rover. It appears that the mission has been using the rover has the main communications relay, not the lander. It also appears there is no expectation of the lander surviving the lunar night.

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Pragyan rover moves more than 300 feet away from Vikram

11:01 am

Map of Pragyan's traverse
Click for original image.

India’s space agency ISRO today released a map, shown to the right, that shows the entire traverse so far completed by its Pragyan rover in the Moon’s high southern latitudes. It has so far traveled more than 100 meters, or 300 feet, and continues to operate as planned.

The part of the traverse just south of the Vikram lander is where the lander filmed the rover doing several quick maneuvers and a 360 degree spin as engineers tested its operation before heading out on a longer journey. The rover’s image of the crater that the rover avoided, though released first, was actually taken afterward, after the rover had moved to the west.

Lunar sunset is in two days. Though engineers are preparing both Vikram and Pragyan for hibernation during that long lunar night, neither was designed to survive that extreme environment.

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Vikram takes movie of Pragyan rover as it roves

9:30 am

Pragyan as seen by Vikram
Click for movie.

Using one of Vikram’s lander cameras, engineers have produced a short movie of India’s Pragyan rover as it rotated to avoid a small crater about ten feet ahead.

The picture to the right is from that 16-second movie, near its end. It appears that the engineers operating Pragyan were unhappy with almost any route ahead from its present position, as they rotated Pragyan almost 360 degrees, and even attempted forward motion at one point and then resumed rotation.

It is not clear if any of the craters visible in this picture are the crater that caused the detour. The movie however does provide a sense of scale. Pragyan is small, but it is able to maneuver easily using its six wheels.

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