Tag: Moon

Former NASA insiders form commercial company to launch satellites to lunar orbit

9:43 am

Capitalism in space: Two former NASA managers have teamed up with two commercial businessman to form a startup, dubbed Quantum Space, to launch an unmanned platform to lunar space to provide support for NASA’s Artemis program.

The team includes Steve Jurczyk, who spent thirty years at NASA and finished his career there before retiring serving as acting NASA administrator for the first three months of the Biden administration.

Jurczyk is one of the three co-founders of Quantum Space. Another is Ben Reed, former division chief of exploration and in-space services at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and who worked on satellite servicing projects there. He is the chief technology officer of Quantum Space. The third co-founder is Kam Ghaffarian, who also helped start commercial space station company Axiom Space and lunar lander developer Intuitive Machines after selling Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies. They’re joined by Kerry Wisnosky, the co-founder and former principal owner of Millennium Engineering and Integration, who is the chief operating officer of Quantum Space.

Their plan is to launch their platform and robots to the Earth-Moon L1 point, the spot where the gravitational spheres of influence of the Earth and Moon meet, about 40,000 miles from the Moon.

The outpost … would consist of two components. One is a spacecraft bus that serves as a platform for hosting payloads, using modular “plug-and-play” interfaces. The other is a spacecraft that would deliver payloads to the platform and install them using robotic manipulators.

Those payloads could include communications, navigation, remote sensing, space domain awareness and space weather sensors, Jurczyk said. Those payloads would primarily come from customers, but he said the company is looking at developing its own payloads, particularly for imaging of the Earth and moon.

They hope to launch their first satellite by ’25.

Like the insiders who run Axiom, these guys are taking advantage of their experience at NASA to build a private space company that will serve NASA’s needs. They are also recognizing that in the coming years, everything NASA “does” will be done by private companies. This company is their effort to jump on that bandwagon.

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ISRO to launch Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander mission in August

9:33 am

The new colonial movement: India’s space agency ISRO today announced that it has scheduled the launch of its Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander mission for August 2022.

The launch date was revealed by a government official, who also said that this launch will be one of eight total by India in 2022. If that number is completed, it would be the most India has ever accomplished in a single year, topping the seven launches that lifted off in 2018. It would also signal that India has finally put aside its fear of COVID that has shut down its aerospace industry for the last two years.

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Ispace extends schedule for its 1st two private moon lander missions

10:37 am

Capitalism in space: The Japaneses company Ispace has revised its schedule for its first two private moon lander missions, delaying the second by one year while confirming that it is on target to launch the first before the end of ’22.

That second mission will also include a small rover, now being developed.

The only reason Ispace provided for delaying the second mission was “internal and external conditions.” My guess is that the internal conditions refers to that rover development, while the external conditions means they want more time to find customers to fly on the mission. Ispace won’t likely have trouble finding customers, but this gives them more time for others, mostly universities, to propose and create projects for that mini-rover.

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India’s new Vikram lunar lander almost ready for launch

9:41 am

The new colonial movement: India’s new Vikram lunar lander, planned for launch later this year on Chandrayaan-3, is now undergoing final tests and assembly.

All payloads for tracking the lunar activity, the alpha-particle X-ray spectrometer and the ChaSTE — the lone instrument to touch the lunar surface to perform thermal measurements of lunar high-latitude regions — and others are being integrated with the rover. These are getting ready for tests and launch later this year,” said Kiran Kumar, who is currently the chairman of the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) Council and a member of the Apex Science Board of the ISRO.

A launch date has not yet been set. Moreover, for this mission to fly India has got to get its rocket program flying again. It has been essentially shut down for two years because of its panic over the Wuhan virus.

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Russia schedules July 23rd for launch of its first unmanned lunar lander in decades

9:37 am

The new colonial movement: The Russia design bureau that is building Luna-25, Russia’s first unmanned lunar lander since the 1970s, has announced that it is targeting July 23, 2022 for launch.

The lunar mission will be launched atop a Soyuz-2.1b carrier rocket with a Fregat booster from the Vostochny spaceport in the Russian Far East. Under the lunar project, the Luna-25 automatic station will be launched for studies in the area of the lunar south pole. The lander is set to touch down in the area of the Boguslawsky crater.

Boguslawsky crater is about 125 miles from the nearest known permanently shadowed craters, and about 250 miles north of the south pole. It is thus not landing in what is presently thought to be the most valuable real estate on the Moon because of the possible presence of water ice, though there might be other resources at Boguslawsky that interest the Russians.

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Falcon 9 upper stage to impact Moon

9:18 am

A Falcon 9 upper stage launched in February 2015 is apparently now on a course to impact the Moon this coming March.

According to Bill Gray, who writes the widely used Project Pluto software to track near-Earth objects, asteroids, minor planets, and comets, such an impact could come in March.

Earlier this month, Gray put out a call for amateur and professional astronomers to make additional observations of the stage, which appears to be tumbling through space. With this new data, Gray now believes that the Falcon 9’s upper stage will very likely impact the far side of the Moon, near the equator, on March 4.

Grey’s call out for more measurements is because there are uncertainties about this prediction. To prepare for observations of the impact by a variety of lunar orbiters, researchers need better data.

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NASA: No further Artemis Moon landings for at least two years after first in 2025

11:53 am

The tortoise appears to be dying: NASA today announced that there will be a two-plus year pause of Artemis missions to the lunar surface after it completes its hoped-for first manned Moon landing in 2025.

In presentations at a two-day meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s Human Exploration and Operations Committee Jan. 18 and 19, agency officials said the Artemis 4 mission, the first after the Artemis 3 mission lands astronauts on the moon, will not attempt a landing itself.

Instead, Artemis 4 will be devoted to assembly of the lunar Gateway. The mission will deliver the I-Hab habitat module, developed by the European Space Agency and the Japanese space agency JAXA, to the Gateway. It will be docked with the first Gateway elements, the Power and Propulsion Element and Habitation and Logistics Outpost, which will launch together on a Falcon Heavy in late 2024 and spend a year spiraling out to the near-rectilinear halo orbit around the moon.

Essentially, the Biden administration appears to be switching back to NASA’s original plans, to require use of the Lunar Gateway station for any future lunar exploration, thus delaying that exploration considerably. Do not expect any of this schedule to take place as promised. The 2025 lunar landing will be delayed, as will all subsequent SLS launches for Artemis. The rocket is simply too complicated and cumbersome to even maintain one launch per year, while inserting Gateway into the mix only slows down lunar exploration even more.

NASA officials also revealed that they are limiting their lunar landing Starship contract with SpaceX to only that single planned ’25 Moon mission. For future manned missions to the Moon the agency will request new bids from the entire industry.

NASA’s Human Landing System (HLS) Option A award to SpaceX last year covers only development of a lander and a single crewed flight on Artemis 3. NASA will acquire future landings through a separate effort, called Lunar Exploration Transportation Services (LETS). The goal of LETS is to select one, and possibly more, companies to provide “sustainable” landing services.

The timing of LETS — a draft request for proposals is scheduled for release this spring — means there will be a gap of a couple years before the first landing service acquired through that program would be ready. “It’ll be about two years from the Option A award to the LETS award before we’ll have this sustainable lander,” Kirasich said. “It’s a different lander with more aggressive requirements than Option A.”

It appears that Jeff Bezos’ political lobbying efforts have paid off, and that NASA is now reopening bidding so that his consortium, led by Blue Origin, can once again compete for that lunar lander contract. Whether the Bezos’ team will be able to propose anything comparable to Starship is however very questionable.

None of this really hurts SpaceX. Its contract with NASA helps them develop a Starship lunar lander. Then, while NASA twiddles its thumbs building Gateway, it will be free to fly its own lunar missions, selling tickets on the open market. I suspect that — should NASA succeed in landing humans in ’25 — the next American manned landing on the Moon will be a bunch of SpaceX customers, not that second Artemis mission sometime in the late 2020s.

SpaceX of course will also be able to bid on that second lunar landing competition. And it will be hard for NASA not to award Starship a further contract, even if others are competing against it. Starship will be operational. The others will merely be proposed.

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Yutu-2 scientists find soil “cloddy” during its journey

10:46 am

Chinese scientists today published a paper describing results from Yutu-2’s two year journey on the far side of the Moon, with the most interesting discovery being that the soil is “cloddy” there.

They found that the bearing property of the regolith is similar to that of dry sand and sandy loam on Earth, stronger than the typical lunar soil of Apollo missions.

But they estimated, based on the cloddy soil observed in Yutu-2’s wheels, that the soil there is stickier than the landing site of its predecessor Chang’e-3 which soft-landed on the moon’s Bay of Rainbows in Dec. 2013, according to the study.

The researchers attributed the increased soil cohesion to the higher percentage of agglutinates in the regolith, which make the soil particles more likely to hold together when ground by the wheels.

Since the blocky soil has adhered onto the rover’s wheel lugs instead of its meshed surface, they suggested that the lug’s surface could be coated with a special anti-adhesion material in future missions to improve the machine’s ability of traction.

The rover also traveled by the number of small and relatively fresh secondary craters.

Yutu-2 continues to operate. It is at present in hibernation during the lunar night, and will resume operations when the Sun comes up in about a week or so.

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Data from China’s Chang’e-5 lander detects very tiny amounts of water in lunar soil

9:29 am

The uncertainty of science: In a paper published yesterday, Chinese scientists revealed that data from an instrument on the Chang’e-5 lunar lander has detected evidence of very tiny amounts of water in lunar soil, amounts that confirm past data showing the Moon is very dry.

From China’s state-run press:

The study published on Saturday in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances revealed that the lunar soil at the landing site contains less than 120 ppm water or 120g water per ton, and a light, vesicular rock carries 180 ppm, which are much drier than that on Earth. … The additional 60 ppm water in the rock may originate from the lunar interior, according to the researchers. [emphasis mine]

It is believed that most of this water is the result of hydrogen in the solar wind.

The paper can be found here.

Before we begin dancing in joy that the Moon is wet, reread the highlighted words. This data instead simply confirms past data that the Moon is very dry. In the paper itself, it is made very clear that this high water content, small as it is, was only detected in a single rock, with all of the surrounding terrain much much drier. From the paper:

The water contents are less than 30 ppm in most measured regolith spots except for [areas] D12 and D17, which may be due to the disturbance of the top layer of the more space-weathered/solar wind–implanted regolith by the lander exhaust and the subsequent sampling process. The unsampled areas of D12 and D17 may have been shielded by [a rock] from the lander exhaust and thus retain the top space-weathered layer that contains higher water content. We predict that higher water content may be found in surface regolith than that from the subsurface of the returned borehole samples if the original stratigraphy is preserved. The estimated water contents of the regolith in the landing area are in agreement with those measured in the Apollo regolith samples and the orbital observations.

In other words, the higher water content, still very dry, appears to only exist on the surface, which is why they suspect it is produced by the solar wind and is also very temporary.

Moreover, there are many uncertainties in this result. The detection might not even be water, but hydroxyl molecules.

What this study suggests is that the patches of suspected water that some orbiters think they have identified in low latitudes on the Moon may simply be these surface molecules left by the solar wind, and that if there is usable water on the Moon, it will only be found in those permanently shadowed craters at the poles, if there.

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Yutu-2 approaches boulder, has now traveled more than 1,000 meters

12:31 pm

Yutu-2's square boulder
Click for original image.

The Chinese state-run press has released some more images from its rover Yutu-2, including a new image of the square-shaped lunar rock that was first identified a month ago. This new image is to the right, cropped and reduced to post here.

In the original image, the rock appeared very square as it was on the horizon and silhouetted by the black sky. As is usual in our emotion- and movie-run society, many began to push wild theories about the rock, proposing it was anything from an alien spacecraft to the monolith from the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The picture confirms what any thoughtful person would have concluded, that it was simply a rock. The available image does not provide a scale, so I cannot tell you whether this is a large boulder, or a small piece of gravel. However, a wider image taken by Yutu-2 shows that the rock is on the edge of a small crater, which suggests the boulder is probably somewhere between three to ten feet across. The rover has completed only about half of its 260-foot journey to it, and won’t reach it until its next lunar day of operations in February.

The same report also revealed that the rover has now traveled just over 1,000 meters on the far side of the Moon, or about 3,280 feet, since it began operations in early 2019.

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India outlines new schedule for lunar and manned missions

10:07 am

According to press statements by India’s Minister for Science & Technology, Jitendra Singh, the schedule for that country’s next unmanned lunar lander/rover and its first manned missions have now been firmed up.

First, Singh announced that the lunar lander/rover, Chandrayaan-3, is now aiming for a launch to the Moon in the second quarter of ’22. The mission is essentially a rebuild of Chandrayaan-2, which got within a few hundred feet of the lunar surface before losing control and crashing in 2019. Chandrayaan-3 had initially been scheduled for launch in late 2020, but the COVID panic essentially shut down India’s entire space industry in both ’20 and ’21.

Second, Singh announced that India’s manned orbital Gaganyaan mission is now scheduled for launch in ’23.

Jitendra Singh said that the major missions like Test vehicle flight for the validation of Crew Escape System performance and the 1st uncrewed mission of Gaganyaan (G1) are scheduled during the beginning of the second half of 2022. This will be followed by a second uncrewed mission at the end of 2022 carrying “Vyommitra” a spacefaring human robot developed by ISRO and finally the first crewed Gaganyaan mission in 2023.

Like Chandrayaan-3, Gaganyaan was delayed significantly by the panic in India over COVID. It was originally scheduled for launch in December ’21, but the panic caused all work to stop for most of ’20 and ’21. During that time period India’s planned annual launch pace of 6 or more launches per year shrank to a mere three launches over two years, with little sign yet that ISRO is ready to resume launches.

Hopefully, these announcements are a signal that India will fully return to flight in ’22. Stay tuned.

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Yutu-2 continues its travels on Moon’s far side

9:06 am

The square boulder being targeted by Yutu-2

An update on the Chinese lunar rover Yutu-2 has revealed that its science team has now decided to head towards a square boulder that the rover had recently spotted on the nearby horizon.

The photo from Yutu-2 to the right shows that boulder. The original update was at this Chinese-language website.

The boulder is presently about 260 feet away, which at pace Yutu-2 travels, about 100 feet per lunar day, will take about two to three lunar days to get there.

Yutu-2 has been traversing the floor of 115-mile-wide Von Kármán crater since January, 2019, a total of 36 lunar days, each about 14 Earth days long. The rover goes into hibernation during the lunar night, is then awakened each lunar morning to operate for about two-thirds of that lunar day, during which it travels about 100 feet, and is then returned to hibernation with the setting of the sun.

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