Lunar Landings News and Discussions

[wjfox]

Live coverage: ispace poised for moon landing attempt today

April 25, 2023 Stephen Clark

Live coverage of the landing of ispace’s commercial Hakuto-R spacecraft on the moon. The landing attempt is scheduled for around 12:40 p.m. EDT (1640 UTC). Text updates will appear automatically below; there is no need to reload the page. Follow us on Twitter.

https://spaceflightnow.com/2023/04/25/i ... us-center/

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[weatheriscool]

Bezos' Blue Origin wins NASA astronaut moon lander contract to compete with SpaceX's Starship

Source: CNBC

WASHINGTON — Jeff Bezos has his NASA moon ticket. The billionaire’s space company Blue Origin won a key contract from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on Friday to develop a crewed lunar lander for delivering astronauts to the moon’s surface later this decade under the agency’s Artemis program.

The Blue Origin-led effort is effectively a more than $7 billion project. NASA’s contract award is worth just over $3.4 billion, officials said Friday, while Blue Origin Vice President John Couluris said the company will contribute “well north” of the contract’s value as well.

“We’re making an additional investment in the infrastructure that will pave the way to land the first humans on Mars,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in announcing the Blue Origin award. “Our shared ambitions now are no less lofty than when President Kennedy dared a generation of dreamers to journey to the moon.” Bezos said in a tweet Friday he’s “honored to be on this journey with @NASA to land astronauts on the Moon — this time to stay.”

The Blue Origin-led team – which includes Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Draper, Astrobotic and Honeybee Robotics – topped the proposal of a team led by Leidos-owned Dynetics. Other proposals were expected, but likely won’t be revealed until NASA releases documents explaining its selection process.

Read more: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/19/nasa-aw ... tract.html

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[caltrek]

NASA Return to the Moon Could be Imperiled by Politics
by Miriam Kramer
May 23 , 2023

Introduction:

(Axios) NASA's flagship program to get people back to the Moon is at risk in the debate over the country's budget.

Why it matters: The Artemis program has survived two presidential administrations and has bipartisan support in Congress.

• Both administrations have worked to reduce the political risk of the multibillion-dollar program, awarding multiple contracts to commercial companies in multiple states and partnering with international space agencies.

What's happening: Efforts to insulate Artemis from possible cuts, delays and cancellation are facing a major test with the current budget fight on Capitol Hill.

• If NASA's funding is stalled at the 2022 enacted level or reduced, agency administrator Bill Nelson has warned Artemis II and Artemis III could be delayed. The current launch dates are 2024 for Artemis II and 2025 for Artemis III.

Read more here: https://www.axios.com/2023/05/23/nasa- ... -politics

[weatheriscool]

[Nanotechandmorefuture]

Lemme guess if its not the Chinese themselves it will be Chinese or Asian Americans from NASA who land on the Moon livestreamed to Earth. Of course!

[weatheriscool]

India shoots for the moon with historic Chandrayaan-3 mission
Rhea Mogul
By Rhea Mogul, CNN
Published 8:38 PM EDT, Thu July 13, 2023
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/13/indi ... index.html

India is bidding to become only the fourth country to execute a controlled landing on the moon with the launch Friday of its Chandrayaan-3 mission.

Chandrayaan, which means “moon vehicle” in Sanskrit, is expected to take off from the Satish Dhawan Space Center at Sriharikota in southern Andhra Pradesh state at 2:30 p.m. local time (5 a.m. ET).

It’s India’s second attempt at a soft landing, after its previous effort with the Chandrayaan-2 in 2019 failed. Its first lunar probe, the Chandrayaan-1, orbited the moon and was then deliberately crash-landed onto the lunar surface in 2008.

Developed by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), Chandrayaan-3 is comprised of a lander, propulsion module and rover. Its aim is to safely land on the lunar surface, collect data and conduct a series of scientific experiments to learn more about the moon’s composition.

Only three other countries have achieved the complicated feat of soft-landing a spacecraft on the moon’s surface – the United States, Russia and China.

Indian engineers have been working on the launch for years. They are aiming to land Chandrayaan-3 near the challenging terrain of the moon’s unexplored South Pole.

India’s maiden lunar mission, Chandrayaan-1, discovered water molecules on the moon’s surface. Eleven years later, the Chandrayaan-2 successfully entered lunar orbit but its rover crash-landed on the moon’s surface. It too was supposed to explore the moon’s South Pole.

At the time, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed the engineers behind the mission despite the failure, promising to keep working on India’s space program and ambitions.

India has since spent about $75 million on its Chandrayaan-3 mission.
Decades in the making

India’s space program dates back more than six decades, to when it was a newly independent republic and a deeply poor country reeling from a bloody partition.

When it launched its first rocket into space in 1963, the country was no match for the ambitions of the US and the former Soviet Union, which were way ahead in the space race.

[eacao]

Lemme guess if its not the Chinese themselves it will be Chinese or Asian Americans from NASA who land on the Moon livestreamed to Earth. Of course!

The Chinese lunar programme is going to be delicious to watch. They've burned through so many design iterations for the Long March 9 over the past five years that it'll be downright impressive if they can launch an integrated test article this decade.

That being said, renovating the Long March 5 to carry lunar missions in a multi-launch format is thrifty and shows initiative.

[weatheriscool]

NASA Will Land Three Autonomous Mapping Robots on the Moon
The CADRE rovers will demonstrate the potential of multi-robot missions for NASA's new era of lunar exploration.
By Ryan Whitwam August 4, 2023

NASA is headed back to the Moon, and this time the goal is to set up a long-term human presence on Earth's natural satellite. Astronauts spending time on and around the Moon may find an army of robotic helpers at their disposal, the first of which is being built and tested at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The CADRE project will deploy a trio of autonomous mapping robots on the Moon, and if successful, they could help NASA understand how best to build that army of bots.

The three CADRE (Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration) rovers are currently in the engineering prototype phase. NASA plans to deploy CADRE in 2024 via the CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative. The lander will touch down in the Reiner Gamma region of the Moon, but unlike past rover missions, NASA does not intend to control exactly what each robot does.

https://www.extremetech.com/science/nas ... n-the-moon

[weatheriscool]

Indian lunar landing mission enters moon's orbit
https://phys.org/news/2023-08-indian-lu ... orbit.html
An Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) rocket carrying the Chandrayaan-3 lifts off on July 14, 2023.

India's latest space mission entered the moon's orbit on Saturday ahead of the country's second attempted lunar landing, as its cut-price space program seeks to reach new heights.

The world's most populous nation has a comparatively low-budget aerospace program that is rapidly closing in on the milestones set by global space powers.

Only Russia, the United States and China have previously achieved a controlled landing on the lunar surface.

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) confirmed that Chandrayaan-3, which means "Mooncraft" in Sanskrit, had been "successfully inserted into the lunar orbit", more than three weeks after its launch.

If the rest of the current mission goes to plan, the mission will safely touch down near the moon's little-explored south pole between August 23 and 24.

India's last attempt to do so ended in failure four years ago, when ground control lost contact moments before landing.

Developed by ISRO, Chandrayaan-3 includes a lander module named Vikram, which means "valor" in Sanskrit, and a rover named Pragyan, the Sanskrit word for wisdom.

The mission comes with a price tag of $74.6 million—far smaller than those of other countries, and a testament to India's frugal space engineering.

Experts say India can keep costs low by copying and adapting existing space technology, and thanks to an abundance of highly skilled engineers who earn a fraction of their foreign counterparts' wages.

[wjfox]

Russia launches first space mission to Moon in 47 years

7 hours ago

Russia launched its first mission to the surface of the Moon in nearly half a century, in a bid to be the first country to land on the lunar south pole.

Moscow's Luna 25 mission lifted off on schedule from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Russian Far East.

The Moon's south pole is believed to hold deposits of water.

The Russian mission is racing against India, which sent up its own lander last month that is already orbiting the Moon.

Russia's space chief told Interfax the lander is expected to touch down on 21 August. As of earlier this week, India's Chandrayaan-3's spacecraft was due to reach the surface on 23 August.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-europe-66470294

[weatheriscool]

Russia's moon craft starts processing first data - space agency
Guy Faulconbridge
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/russian-scien ... Y0F_JVkOdu

MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russia on Sunday switched on the scientific instruments aboard its lunar lander and scientists began processing its first data as the space craft sped towards the moon in a bid to be first to find ice on the Earth's only natural satellite.

The Russian Luna-25 mission, the first since 1976, is racing against India, which launched its Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander last month, to complete a soft landing on the moon's south pole where scientists believe there are pockets of water ice.

A Soyuz 2.1 rocket carrying the Luna-25 craft blasted off from the Vostochny cosmodrome in Russia's Far East at 2:11 a.m. on Friday Moscow time and was boosted out of Earth's orbit an hour later.

As it hurtles towards the moon, which is 384,400 km (238,855 miles) from our planet, the scientific instruments were switched on with the first data on the flight measured, Russia's space agency said.

"The first measurement data on the flight to the Moon has been obtained, and the project's scientific team has begun processing it," Roscosmos said.

"Luna-25 continues its flight to the Earth's natural satellite - all systems of the automatic station are working properly, communication with it is stable, the energy balance is positive," it said.

Luna-25, roughly the size of a small car, will aim to operate for a year on the moon's south pole, where scientists at NASA and other space agencies in recent years have detected traces of water ice in the region's shadowed craters.

There is much riding on the Luna-25 mission for Russia: if it succeeds, Russia is likely to say it shows that the West's sanctions over the Ukraine war cannot hold Russia back.

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

Penetrating radar aboard the Chang'E-4 rover reveals layers of the moon's history

https://phys.org/news/2023-08-penetrati ... rover.html
A team of space scientists at the Planetary Science Institute, working with colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen University and the University of Aberdeen, has used data from China's Chang'E-4 rover to learn more about the history of the moon. In their study, reported in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, the group analyzed lunar-penetrating radar (LPR) data sent back from the rover.

China's Chang'E-4 rover has been wandering around on the far side of the moon since 2018. And during its meanderings, it has been sending radio signals downward using its LPR device. That same device detects and records signals that are bounced back—a form of radar. Three years ago, another team of researchers used a subset of the same data to create a subsurface map extending 40 meters below the surface. In this new paper, the research team has built on that effort, creating a subsurface map extending 300 meters below the surface.

The research team has found that the top 300 meters of the moon's surface is made up of several layers of material, some broken rock, some dust and some soil. The researchers have also found evidence of a hidden crater. Below that, they found layers of lava—evidence of the moon's volcanic past.

[spryfusion]

[raklian]

Yeah, saw that earlier. Congratulations to India for a job well done!

[wjfox]

Stunning achievement by India. The south pole is the most promising region in terms of future human settlements. Big milestone for lunar exploration!

[weatheriscool]

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