The first of two ARTEMIS spacecraft has successfully entered lunar orbit.
Another astonishing space photograph, this time from lunar orbit, taken by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter on June 11, 2011.
The image looks down at the central peak of Tycho crater, with enough detail to make out individual boulders at the summit. Go the link to see some closeups.
China’s second lunar probe, Chang’e 2, has been boosted out of lunar orbit and beyond.
A new analysis of a moon rock brought back by Apollo 17 has suggested that the water content of lunar magma is 100 times higher than previously thought.
Fifty years ago today, John Kennedy stood before Congress and the nation and declared that the United States was going to the Moon. Amazingly, though this is by far the most remembered speech Kennedy ever gave, very few people remember why he gave the speech, and what he was actually trying to achieve by making it.
Above all, going to the Moon and exploring space was not his primary goal.
For Kennedy — whose presidential campaign included an aggressive anti-communist stance against the Soviet Union — the months before the speech had not gone well. Five weeks earlier, for instance, the CIA-led attempt to invade Cuba and overthrow Castro’s communist government had ended in total failure. When Kennedy refused to lend direct military support to the Bay of Pigs invasion, the 1,200 man rebel force was quickly overcome. “How could I have been so stupid as to let them go ahead?” Kennedy complained privately to his advisors.
In Berlin, the tensions between the East and the West were continuing to escalate, and would lead in only a few short months to Khrushchev’s decision to build the Berlin Wall, sealing off East Berlin and the citizens of East Germany from the rest of the world.
In the race to beat the Soviets in space, things were going badly as well. NASA had announced the United States’ intention to put the first man into space sometime in the spring of 1961. The agency hoped that this flight would prove that the leader of the capitalist world still dominated the fields of technology, science, and exploration.
Originally scheduled for a March 6, 1961 launch, the short fifteen minute sub-orbital flight was repeatedly delayed. The Mercury capsule’s first test flight in January, with a chimpanzee as test pilot, rose forty miles higher than intended, overshot its landing by a hundred and thirty miles, and when the capsule was recovered three hours later it had begun leaking and was actually sinking. Then in March another test of the Mercury capsule included the premature firing of the escape rocket on top of the capsule, the unplanned release of the backup parachutes during descent, and the discovery of dents on the capsule itself.
These difficulties caused NASA to postpone repeatedly its first manned mission. First the agency rescheduled the launch to late March. Then early April. Then mid-April. And then it was too late.
» Read more
The next Moon mission, launching this summer.
A review of India’s troubled GSLV rocket has put a hold on its next moon probe.
Space Adventures and tourists to the Moon.
After consultation with Rocket Space Corporation Energia, modifications to the Soyuz TMA configuration have been agreed upon. The most important of which is the addition of a second habitation module to the Soyuz TMA lunar complex. The additional module would launch with the Block DM propulsion module and rendezvous with the Soyuz spacecraft in low-Earth orbit.
“Space Adventures will once again grace the pages of aerospace history, when the first private circumlunar mission launches. We have sold one of the two seats for this flight and anticipate that the launch will occur in 2015,” said Richard Garriott, Vice-Chairman of Space Adventures. “Having flown on the Soyuz, I can attest to how comfortable the spacecraft is, but the addition of the second habitation module will only make the flight that more enjoyable.”
Did a microbe survive 2.5 years attached to Surveyor 3 on the Moon, and then come home on Apollo 12? New research says no.
Confirmed: one of two tickets for a lunar flyby on a Soyuz has been sold. More here.
Software engineers to the Moon!
Crazy? Absolutely! Impossible? Probably not! There are a growing number of people who believe that with federal funding for our space program getting scarce, the future lies in private-public partnerships. Entrepreneur Elon Musk’s third job (after leading electric car company Tesla and acting as the Chairman of solar installer SolarCity) is heading up SpaceX, which was the first private company to successfully launch, orbit and recover a rocketship. Virgin’s Richard Branson has a similar private space venture.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter website recently announced a new way to tour the Moon. The website, called QuickMap, allows a user with any home computer to zoom into any spot on the lunar surface and see the high resolution images being taken by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Using QuickMap, I spent a few hours this past weekend strolling about on the northern half of the floor of the crater Copernicus. It is in this area, annotated in the image on the right, that NASA engineer James Fincannon has already located a slew of collapse features and possible caves, the images of which I have posted previously on behindtheblack. (Click on the image or here to see a larger version of this updated index map.)
(You also can go sightseeing there if you wish. Go to QuickMap and zoom in on 10.1 latitude and -20.1 longitude to get to the floor of Copernicus. Or pick your own spot on the lunar surface and do some of your own exploring!)
What I found in the northern half of Copernicus’s floor was a plethora of possible caves and collapse features. Literally, the crater floor is littered with what appear to be pits, fissures, rills, and sinks. More significantly, sometimes the cave entrances line up with long straight collapse features, suggesting strongly the existence of extensive underground passages beyond the initial entrance pits.
» Read more
The winners of the 18th annual Great Moonbuggy Race.
China’s second lunar orbiter, Chang’e 2: still in operation after 180 days.
Unfortunately, little of its scientific results have been released.
No, the “supermoon” didn’t cause the Japanese earthquake.
29 teams, one purchased ride, and one mystery for the Google Lunar X Prize.
The discovery of new caves on the Moon keep coming. Today I have two new stories. The first is a discovery by professional scientists of a giant lava tube cave in the Oceanus Procellarum or Ocean of Storms. The second is the detection of a plethora of caves and sinks on the floor of the crater Copernicus, found by a NASA engineer who likes to explore the gobs of data being accumulated by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and made available to all on the web.
The image below of the Moon’s near side, taken by India’s Cartosat-2A satellite and taken from the science paper, shows the location of lava tube in Oceanus Procellarum (indicated by the red dot) and the crater Copernicus.
First the professional discovery. Yesterday, the Times of India reported the discovery of lava tube more than a mile long on the Moon. I did not post a link to the article because I didn’t think the news story provided enough information to make it worth passing along. Today however, fellow caver Mark Minton emailed me the link where the actual research paper could be downloaded [pdf]. This I find definitely worth describing.
» Read more
The Google Lunar X Prize has announced the final roster of teams competing for its $30 Million prize.
We need to find them! Trees from space, planted here on Earth. You can see the known list here.
More images of lunar cave pits have been posted by the scientists of Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). They have also published their first paper [pdf] about these cave pits for the 2011 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference taking place in March. The paper summarizes, with images, what is know about the three pits on the Moon that have each been imaged a number of times at different angles and lighting situations.
One of the competitor’s for the Google Lunar X prize has signed a contract with SpaceX to use the Falcon 9 to get its spacecraft to the Moon. Key quote:
The Falcon 9 upper stage will sling Astrobotic on a four-day cruise to the Moon. Astrobotic will then orbit the moon to align for landing. The spacecraft will land softly, precisely and safely using technologies pioneered by Carnegie Mellon University for guiding autonomous cars. The rover will explore for three months, operate continuously during the lunar days, and hibernate through the lunar nights. The lander will sustain payload operations with generous power and communications.
If you’re interested, seats are available for a tourist trip around the moon in a Soyuz capsule. And the Russians say the Soyuz is ready to go!
An Israeli team has entered the Google Lunar X Prize competition, hoping to land a nanosat on the moon for only $8 million.
Keith Cowing is trying to locate a missing spectacular blow-up poster of the Lunar Orbiter “Earthrise” image from 1966, shown here.
The early Lunar Orbiter images, taken in the mid-1960s, have been reprocessed and recovered, in a spectacular manner.
Using old Apollo data, scientists have detected the Moon’s molten core.
Amateur astronomer Thierry Legault traveled to Oman to not only photograph the Moon as it eclipsed the Sun on January 4, but also capture the International Space Station at the same moment. The image he took of both as they crossed in front of the Sun is amazing.
