Tag: Moon

LADEE impact site located

8:47 am

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has spotted the impact crater formed when engineers sent the probe LADEE crashing into the lunar surface in April 2014.

Compared with asteroid and meteoroid impacts on the moon, LADEE was actually traveling pretty slow, ‘only’ 3,800 miles per hour (1,700 meters per second). That combined with the relatively low mass and density of the spacecraft, a fairly neat crater of only 10 feet (3 meters) across was created. The crater barely registered in LROC’s image resolution, making it a very difficult task to identify the fresh man-made divot.

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Chinese lunar mission launches

5:36 pm

The competition heats up: The Chinese have launched their next lunar mission, a fly-by around the Moon to test their return-to-Earth engineering in anticipation of a future sample return mission.

Chang’e 5-T1, one of the test models for Chang’e-5, was developed using a Chang’e 2 type spacecraft (acting like a service module) featuring the Chang’e-5 return capsule. This return capsule is very similar to the Shenzhou manned return technology, so it is assumed that it was developed using the Shenzhou as a baseline model. The service module will be used for trajectory corrections, power supply using two solar panels and batteries, along with telemetry and commands transmission to and from the control center.

Following launch, Chang’e 5-T1 will be injected into a lunar free-return orbit, loop behind the Moon once and return to Earth to test the high speed atmospheric reentry of a capsule returning from the translunar voyage at 11.2 km/s.

This launch marks the start of this nine day mission. Stay tuned for updates.

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China to launch two payloads to the Moon

9:37 am

The competition heats up: On Thursday China plans to send a capsule on a mission around the Moon and back to Earth to test its heat shield.

The rocket’s upper stage, which will also round the Moon but not return to Earth, will also carry a privately funded cubesat designed to study the radiation levels during the entire journey.

Twenty minutes after launch on October 23, (at 1:59 p.m. U.S. Eastern time), the Long March’s upper stage will separate from the test capsule, and both will continue on a trajectory that takes them around the moon. The capsule will return to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere on October 31. In early discussions with the Chinese, LuxSpace was told that the upper stage [carrying the private cubesat] would re-enter the atmosphere as well, but it’s now expected to enter a wide, looping orbit around Earth. The main battery is only designed to last 10 days, although it may go longer.

Radio receivers on Earth will be able to tune in to 4M’s signal shortly after separation, and will be able to follow it as it rounds the moon, coming as close as 7,500 miles to the surface. The payload also includes a radiation sensor that will take measurements throughout the journey into Earth-moon space. Anyone with the proper equipment will be able to receive the compressed radiation data and decode it.

Though this private mission is definitely breaking new ground by sending a small payload to lunar space for very little money, the article is incorrect when it states that this is the first privately funded Moon mission. In 1997-1998 HGS 1, a Hughes commercial communications satellite that was placed in an incorrect orbit by a Russian rocket, was sent on a wide elliptical orbit to fly past the Moon twice and thus use this sling shot effect to get the satellite into a usable orbit.

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Recent volcanism on the Moon

4:53 pm

New data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter suggests that lunar volcanism petered out slowly and occurred more recently that previously believed.

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has provided researchers strong evidence the moon’s volcanic activity slowed gradually instead of stopping abruptly a billion years ago. Scores of distinctive rock deposits observed by LRO are estimated to be less than 100 million years old. This time period corresponds to Earth’s Cretaceous period, the heyday of dinosaurs. Some areas may be less than 50 million years old. Details of the study are published online in Sunday’s edition of Nature Geoscience. “This finding is the kind of science that is literally going to make geologists rewrite the textbooks about the moon,” said John Keller, LRO project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

In a way, this new conclusion is an example of science discovering the obvious. It seems to me quite unlikely that volcanic activity on the Moon would have “stopped abruptly” under any conditions. That’s not how these things work.

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Yutu is slowly dying

4:00 pm

China’s lunar rover Yutu, unable to move since its first few weeks on the moon, is slowly dying.

The rover is currently in good condition and works normally, but its control problem persists, said Yu Dengyun, deputy chief designer of China’s lunar probe mission. “Yutu has gone through freezing lunar nights under abnormal status, and its functions are gradually degrading,” Yu told Xinhua at an exclusive interview. He said that the moon rover and the lander of the Chang’e-3 lunar mission have completed their tasks very well. The rover’s designed lifetime is just three months, but it has survived for over nine.

As China’s first planetary rover mission, the limited roving success of Yutu is well balanced by its ability to continue functioning on the lunar survey for so long. The engineering data obtained from this mission will serve Chinese engineers well as they plan future missions.

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Private lunar lander completes test landing

9:40 am

The competition heats up: One of the competitors in the Google Lunar X-Prize has successfully completed its first landing test, on Earth, of its lander.

The article does not really provide a lot of information about the test itself, spending most of its copy describing what the test was supposed to do. Still, they did complete it successfully, which means they will now revise, rebuild, and retest.

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Russian umanned space program pushed back three years

9:32 am

Because of the increased workload imposed on Russia when the U.S. suddenly pulled out of the European ExoMars mission, the Russians have imposed a three year delay on their entire program of unmanned science probes.

Although all previously approved projects still remain on the table, the nation’s series of lunar missions face a domino effect of delays. Russia’s first post-Soviet attempt to land on the surface of the Moon was pushed back from 2016 to 2019. Known as Luna-Glob or Luna-25, the unmanned lunar lander was designed to test landing techniques for future lunar missions. On the political front, the successful landing of the Luna-Glob would be a signal to the international scientific community that Russia is back in the planetary exploration business after the 2011 fiasco of the Phobos-Grunt mission.

This report above is a more nuanced analysis than yesterday’s story about the presentation given by the head of the Russia’s Space Research Institute at Saturday’s science conference in Moscow. Today’s story gives the reasoning for the delays, as explained by the Russians themselves, as well as outlines the entire program more thoroughly.

The story describes a string of planned Russian lunar probes, beginning with Luna-Glob. This program was probably approved by the government when the U.S. decided to return to the Moon in 2004 under George Bush. The Russians don’t seem to be able any longer to be self-starters, but instead need the competition from the U.S. to get them jump-started.

Even so, while the U.S. has already flown most of the unmanned probes to the Moon that were proposed in 2004, the Russian program had not yet gotten off the ground.

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How the Earth gave the Moon a lemon shape

9:36 am

Scientists have found that the Earth’s gravity combined with the Moon’s rotation forced the satellite to become “lemon-shaped.”

As the Moon solidified, its rotation caused it to elongate along its polar axis. But because the length of the Moon’s rotation was the same as its orbit, with one hemisphere always facing the Earth, the tidal force of the Earth’s gravity then pulled at the center, distorting the Moon’s shape so that one hemisphere bulged Earthward.

This theory is not new, but these new calculations are more robust, lending greater weight to it.

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The first lunar close-up

9:28 am

Fifty years ago tomorrow Ranger 7 took the first close-up images of the Moon, just before the spacecraft crashed onto the surface.

“It was like looking at a soft quilt or something, no jagged edges on anything,” muses Jim Burke, as if he’s describing something every school kid hasn’t seen a hundred times. “It looked like fresh snow in a way, except it was grey instead of white.”

At the time—50 years ago tomorrow—Burke was one of the first people on Earth to see what the surface of the Moon looks like up close. Early on the morning of July 31, 1964, he joined his colleagues in poring over a series of printed photographs, the pockmarked Moon getting closer and closer until one final blurred image marked the moment when Ranger 7 impacted the surface, making its own brand-new crater. A stripe of static along one side of that last photo indicated the interruption of the final transmission.

The article details the frustrating history of the Ranger program, with the first six attempts all failing. Ranger 7 succeeded, however, working so well that the last image actually got truncated at impact. The full set of images revealed the surprising cratered history of the Moon, with the impact rate of large to small craters far more complex than expected.

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Was Yutu stopped by rough ground?

8:39 am

One of the designers of the Chinese lunar rover Yutu said in a news interview today that the rocky nature of the Moon’s surface, far rougher than expected, was what caused it to stall.

The rover was tested in Beijing, Shanghai and the desert in northwestern China before its launch, but the terrain of the landing site proved to be much more rugged than expected, said Zhang Yuhua, deputy chief designer of the lunar probe system for the Chang’e-3 mission. “It is almost like a gravel field.”

Data from foreign researchers projected that there would be four stones, each above 20 cm, on average every 100 square meters, but the quantity and size of the stones that Yutu has encountered has far exceeded this expectation, Zhang said in an exclusive interview with Xinhua. “Experts’ initial judgement for the abnormality of Yutu was that the rover was ‘wounded’ by colliding with stones while moving,” she said. [emphasis mine]

The implication of the highlighted quote is that it isn’t their fault, it was the fault of those evil Americans and Russians who incorrectly estimated the roughness of the ground. This article also doesn’t fit the information released when Yutu first stalled, where they explained that their problem was partly an inability to retract equipment in preparation for lunar night. While this story could be true, it isn’t the whole story.

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