Archive for the ‘Space News’ Category
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July 16th, 2023
Image credit: ISRO
India’s Moon-bound Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander/rover is toting a NASA laser retroreflector array. In NASA acronym-land, better known as an LRA.
The device, mounted atop the lander, is from the LRA project based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
NASA LRA mounted on Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander.
Image credit: ISRO/NASA
Daniel Cremons and Xiaoli Sun are leading the LRA project for the Chandrayaan-3 lander. They are also supplying LRA hardware for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services missions and the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) mission to be staged by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Cremons told Inside Outer Space.
At NASA Goddard there is a small team dedicated to designing, building, and flight-qualifying miniature LRAs.
Cremons also helped integrate the LRA on the SpaceIL Beresheet lander in November 2018. Beresheet was Israel’s first lunar mission and the first attempt by a private company to land on the Moon. That craft, however, was lost during an April 2019 landing attempt.
Small and compact, the laser retroreflector array.
Image credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Tiny retroreflectors
The Laser Retroreflector Array (LRA) is too small to be used from Earth. They are designed to use reflected laser light from a laser altimeter or lidar on a spacecraft orbiting the Moon or landing on the Moon.
An LRA consists of eight tiny retroreflectors mounted on a small, high hemispherical platform. Total mass of the LRA is 20 grams, and requires no power.
According to LRA documentation, “retroflectors, unlike simple plane mirrors, reflect radiation from a broad range of incident angles back to its source, with minimal scattering, and brighter reflection.”
Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander undergoes testing. It is a NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services mission.
Image credit: Intuitive Machines
Lander location
Another LRA is being carried by the Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander, scheduled to drop in on the crater rim of Malapert A near the south pole of the Moon. The Nova-C lander is expected to launch on a Falcon-9 rocket on its IM-1 mission later this year.
Mounted to the lander, the LRA reflects laser light directly backward to the orbiting spacecraft that emitted the laser light to precisely determine the lander’s location on the surface of the Moon.
As noted by Intuitive Machines, LRAs continue to be used as precision landmarks for guidance and navigation during the lunar day or night. “A few LRAs surrounding a landing site can serve as precision landmarks to guide the arriving landers by aiding in autonomous and safe landing,” the company explains.
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On the prowl at Jezero Crater, NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover is loaded with scientific equipment.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust – a French novelist, literary critic, and essayist who wrote the novel In Search of Lost Time.
A new line of evidence points to the presence of a more intricate organic geochemical cycle on Mars than previously understood. It suggests the existence of several distinct reservoirs of potential organic compounds – and potential for the Red Planet to support life.
The new research makes use of data gathered by a first-of-its-kind instrument: The Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals.
Perseverance places SHERLOC about two inches above its target to gather data. It operates day or night on Mars.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
That’s a Mars instrument mouthful, mercifully called SHERLOC. This device is onboard NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover now dutifully wheeling about Jezero Crater.
The why go there premise was clear.
That landing locale offers a high potential for past habitability: As an ancient lake basin, it contains an array of minerals, including carbonates, clays, and sulfates. These minerals have the potential to preserve organic materials and possible signs of ancient life.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Bingo!
“The potential detection of several organic carbon species on Mars has implications for understanding the carbon cycle on Mars, and the potential of the planet to host life throughout its history,” said astrobiologist Amy Williams, an assistant professor in the University of Florida’s Department of Geological Sciences in Gainesville.
“We didn’t initially expect to detect these potential organics signatures in the Jezero crater floor,” Williams said, “but their diversity and distribution in different units of the crater floor now suggest potentially different fates of carbon across these environments.”
Williams is a co-author of the just-published paper – “Diverse organic-mineral associations in Jezero Crater, Mars” — in the journal Nature.
Lead author of the new research is Sunanda Sharma, an interdisciplinary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech focused on astrobiology research and currently supporting the SHERLOC instrument on the Mars Perseverance rover.
Jezero Crater – home base for Perseverance rover.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/JHU-APL
Building blocks for life
The paper focuses on samples analyzed in two formations within Jezero crater that yielded detections by both fluorescence and Raman spectroscopy “consistent with organic material that is collocated with specific mineral assemblages.”
The confirmation of organic origin and specific identification of these molecules, the paper adds, “will require samples to be returned to Earth for laboratory analysis.”
In summary, key building blocks for life may have been present over an extended period of time on Mars, along with other as yet undetected chemical species that could be preserved within the two potentially habitable paleo-depositional settings in Jezero crater.
a: High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) image of the region studied with the rover’s traverse marked in white, the boundary between the Séítah and Máaz formations delineated by the light blue line, and each rock target labelled. b: Average number of fluorescence detections (out of 1,296 points) from survey scans for each target interrogated by SHERLOC, arranged in order of observation. c: WATSON images of natural (red box) and abraded targets (Máaz is the blue box, Séítah is the green box) analysed in this study, with SHERLOC survey scan footprints outlined in white.
Image credit: Sharma, S., Roppel, R.D., Murphy, A.E. et al.
Significant step forward
The research paper concludes: “Our findings suggest there may be a diversity of aromatic molecules prevalent on the Martian surface, and these materials persist despite exposure to surface conditions. These potential organic molecules are largely found within minerals linked to aqueous processes, indicating that these processes may have had a key role in organic synthesis, transport or preservation.”
Those findings mark a significant step forward in exploring and understanding the intricacies of Mars, laying the groundwork for more research into the possibility of life beyond Earth.
“We are just now scratching the surface of the organic carbon story on Mars,” Williams said in a university statement, “and it is an exciting time for planetary science!”
To read the entire paper — “Diverse organic-mineral associations in Jezero Crater, Mars” – go to: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06143-z
Image credit: Dongfang Hour/Inside Outer Space screengrab
China’s Landspace booster is one signal of the rise of Chinese liquid-fueled commercial rockets.
From the Dongfang Hour: “Landspace achieved a groundbreaking success on July 12, 2023 with the first orbital launch of a methalox rocket worldwide: the Zhuque-2.”
Image credit: Dongfang Hour
“This new rocket also triples the payload capacity of the largest Chinese commercial rocket to date, and showcases the growing importance that commercial companies are playing in Chinese launch.”
For informative video, go to: https://youtu.be/lOAjpmdaiYw
Image credit: Astrostrom
Switzerland startup, the Astrostrom company, has designed a Greater Earth Lunar Power Station, or GE⊕-LPS for short.
The Greater Earth Lunar Power Station (GE⊕-LPS) is a habitable space station in lunar orbit that is designed to provide solar energy for lunar operations.
According to the European Space Agency (ESA), the study envisages a solar power satellite constructed mainly from lunar resources (including Moon-manufactured solar cells) that could deliver megawatts of microwave power down to receivers on the lunar surface, serving the needs of surface activities, including future crewed bases.
The study found that solar power satellite-enabled development via the Moon would not only be cheaper than any comparable Earth-developed solar power satellite, but that the electricity generated for Earth would also be cost-competitive with any terrestrial power alternative.
Image credit: Astrostrom
Component manufacturing
(GE⊕-LPS) is a part of ESA’s Open Space Innovation Platform Campaign on “Clean Energy – New Ideas for Solar Power from Space.”
ESA’s SOLARIS R&D initiative is focused on the feasibility of Space-based Solar Power for serving terrestrial clean energy needs.
Image credit: ESA
“Launching large numbers of gigawatt-scale solar power satellites into orbit from the surface of the Earth would run into the problem of a lack of launch capacity as well as potentially significant atmospheric pollution,” explains Sanjay Vijendran, the lead for ESA’s Solaris initiative on Space-based Solar Power.
“But once a concept like GE⊕-LPS has proven the component manufacturing processes and assembly concept of a solar power satellite in lunar orbit,” Vijendran adds “it can then be scaled up to produce further solar power satellites from lunar resources to serve Earth.”
For more information, go to this Executive Summary, Greater Earth Lunar Power Station (GE⊕-LPS) at:
https://nebula.esa.int/sites/default/files/neb_study/2753/C4000136309ESR.pdf
Image credit: CCTV/Inside Outer Space screengrab
China’s LandSpace group launched its liquid oxygen and liquid methane-powered booster from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, Gansu Province, China, on July 12.
Commenting on the launch that placed it successfully into orbit, Dai Zheng, deputy chief designer and deputy commander of the Zhuque-2 carrier rocket mission, told GLOBALink/China Central Television (CCTV):
“Liquid oxygen methane has great advantages in future application scenarios where low-cost commercial carrier rocket can be reused. This is a very useful supplement to China’s space industry, and also fills in a blank in China’s liquid oxygen-methane rocket spectrum.”
Image credit: CCTV/Inside Outer Space screengrab
Reusable rocketry
Dai said the rocket engine has been tested seven times for a total of 2,800 seconds, with only minor carbon buildup, making it a viable option for reusable rockets.
“The engine has worked seven times on the test bed in Huzhou for a total of 2,800 seconds with only minor carbon buildup in the end. So, from this point of view, it may take a long working time before the rocket needs to be overhauled, which is very friendly for reusable rockets,” said Dai.
ZhuQue-2 is powered by four 80-tons thrust TQ-12 liquid oxygen and liquid methane (LOX+LCH4) rocket engines.
Image credit: CCTV/Inside Outer Space screengrab
Growing pains
The booster has gone through growing pains.
In October 2018, ZhuQue-1 was launched, but the rocket’s payload failed to reach orbit due to an issue with the third stage. LandSpace also developed the ZhuQue-2, based on its methalox TQ-11 and TQ-12 engines, whose maiden launch failed to orbit in December 2022.
Zhuque-2 became the first methalox rocket in the world to reach orbit after its second flight on July 12, 2023.
For a view of the launch, go to:
Image credit: CCTV/Inside Outer Space screengrab
The China Manned Space Agency released Wednesday a preliminary plan for landing a Chinese crew on the Moon before 2030.
The China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) noted use of two carrier rockets to transfer a Moon lander and a crewed spacecraft into lunar orbit. The two would then rendezvous and dock with each other. Crew transfer into the Moon lander would be done in lunar orbit.
After crew touchdown on the Moon and lunar tasks are finished, the explorers would then rocket back into lunar orbit to dock with their orbiting spacecraft for return to Earth.
International Lunar Research Station. Image credit: CNSA
In development
According to China Central Television (CCTV), Chinese researchers are working on the development of the Long March-10 carrier rocket, a new generation of piloted spacecraft, a lunar lander, a lunar landing spacesuit, a wheeled lunar rover for Moon explorers, and other equipment, said Zhang Hailian, deputy chief designer with the CMSA at a space industry forum in Wuhan, capital of central China’s Hubei Province.
Image credit: CCTV/Inside Outer Space screengrab
The lunar rover would weigh 440 pounds (200 kilograms) and can accommodate two taikonauts.
Image credit: China Manned Space Engineering Office
As noted by CCTV, the spacesuit being developed for China’s human Moon effort will have a single working time of no less than eight hours. It will also feature enhanced mobility to help taikonauts walk, climb, squat, drive, and operate machinery on the Moon.
CCTV added that Zhang said China would also explore the construction of a lunar scientific research station, to further systematic and long-term exploration of the Moon.
Image credit: China Manned Space Engineering Office
Trial run
China has completed the sixth trial run for the main rocket engine of its future crewed lunar missions, according to the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation in June.
Image credit: CCTV/Inside Outer Space screengrab
The 130-ton class liquid oxygen kerosene rocket engine brought its cumulative test run time to 3,300 seconds after this recent trial, setting a new record for the longest trial of a single 100-tonne class engine in China, said the corporation.
According to CCTV, as the main engine for the country’s future crewed lunar missions, it needs higher comprehensive performance and reliability.
The trial broke the previous record for the longest test run which was achieved less than six months before this latest trial. Meanwhile, the trial working time of the engine exceeded its required mission working time by more than 10 times, which verified its reliability, the corporation said.
Image credit: CCTV/Inside Outer Space screengrab
French researchers are ready to begin studies of lunar samples retrieved by China’s Chang’e-5 mission, rocketed back from the Moon to Earth in December 2020.
The lunar samples are from the 1,700 grams returned to Earth from the Statio Tianchuan in the northeastern Oceanus Procellarum on the near side of the Moon.
Two containers of lunar specimens were transported to Paris in June and have since been secured in storage at the Natural History Museum of Paris. They weigh around one gram and 0.5 grams of lunar drill material, with both being stored inside sealed containers in dry chambers.
Box indicates Chang’e-5 lander on the basaltic plains of Oceanus Procellarum (“Ocean of Storms”) in December 2020.
“We are starting to develop a program to be able to open the containers, which is not easy because they have to be opened in a strictly-controlled atmosphere. You must not contaminate them. This is what we are going to do in the months to come: we will open the containers with our colleagues from the IPGP and then afterwards, we will extract the grains,” said Jean Duprat, an expert at the museum, told China Central Television (CCTV).
Photo taking during Chang’e-5 surface sampling.
Credit: CCTV/Inside Outer Space screengrab
Gifted samples
At the L’Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP), or the Paris Institute of Earth Physics, researchers there are setting up a clean room to carry out a comprehensive study of the lunar collectibles.
“What we will do is to measure the very precise chemical compositions of these samples in our laboratory. These lunar samples brought back by Chang’e-5 come from an area of the Moon that had never been sampled before. The new information that these samples will bring us will be extremely important,” said IPGP’s Frederic Moynier in the CCTV interview.
Chang’e-5 return capsule holding lunar specimens.
Credit: National Astronomical Observatories, CAS
The gifted samples will be studied in a joint effort by the IPGP, the French National Center for Space Studies (CNES), the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), and the University of Paris-Sorbonne for the next five to seven years.
Go to this CCTV video detailing the study of lunar samples in France at:
Image credit: Roscosmos Television Video/Inside Outer Space screengrab
Russia’s Luna-25 robotic Moon lander is at the Vostochny cosmodrome in Amur Oblast, Russia. The craft will be headed for the south pole of the Moon, reportedly targeted for launch on August 11, 2023.
Image credit: Roscosmos Television Video/Inside Outer Space screengrab
At the cosmodrome, Luna-25 will undergo pre-flight checkout and undergo ground tests, and then fitted to a Fregat upper stage and placed atop a Soyuz-2.1b booster.
Image credit: Roscosmos Television Video/Inside Outer Space screengrab
Russia’s Roscosmos reports that the main task of the mission is to develop the basic technologies for a soft landing in the circumpolar region and conduct contact studies of the south pole of the Moon.
Go to this Roscosmos Television Video at: http://www.tvroscosmos.ru/print/7408/
Image credit: BIG Idea Challenge/NASA/Advanced Concepts Lab
As NASA revs up its plan to “re-boot” the Moon through the Artemis program, a long-term aim calls for explorers to hunker down thanks to “sustainable” infrastructure on the lunar landscape.
The key to doing so is use of on-the-spot lunar resources, known in NASAese as in-situ resources utilization, or ISRU for short.
Cutting the umbilical to Earth for transporting materials is a cost-saver – and also serves as good practice, enabling humankind to take ever-deeper dives into space, such as destination Mars.
For the moment, a top priority for ISRU system development has been the extraction of oxygen, and other volatiles, since they are the easiest to extract from the topside surface called regolith.
Image credit: NASA
The next priority is the extraction of metals from the Moon, making it possible to fabricate pressure vessels, pipes, power cables, as well as roads, landing pads, and other need-to-haves.
Practical, affordable ways
To this end, NASA’s Lunar Surface Innovation Initiative is working to develop and demonstrate technologies to use the Moon’s resources to produce water, fuel, and other supplies as well as capabilities to excavate and construct structures on the Moon.
“We need practical and affordable ways to use resources along the way, rather than carrying everything we think will be needed. Future astronauts will require the ability to collect space-based resources and transform them into the products needed for a sustained presence,” according to the 2023 BIG Idea Challenge.
NASA’s 2023 annual Breakthrough, Innovative and Game-Changing (BIG) Idea Challenge asked college students to design technologies that will support a metal production pipeline on the Moon – from extracting metal from lunar minerals to creating structures and tools.
Image credits: BIG Idea Challenge/NASA/Advanced Concepts Lab
The Breakthrough, Innovative, and Game-Changing (BIG) Idea Challenge is managed by the National Institute of Aerospace on behalf of NASA.
Lunar forge
The 2023 BIG Idea Challenge is “Lunar Forge: Producing Metal Products on the Moon.” It provides undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to design, develop, and demonstrate technologies that will enable the production of lunar infrastructure from ISRU-derived metals found on the Moon.
In early March, NASA announced the selection of seven university teams to develop concepts supporting metal production on the Moon.
NASA’s Artemis program wants to establish a sustainable presence on the Moon.
Image credit: NASAThe awards total about $1.1 million, with values between $120,000 and $180,000 based on each team’s proposed concept.
The challenge is a unique collaboration between NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate’s (STMD) Game Changing Development (GCD) program and NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement Space Grant Project.
Variety of themes
Teams were asked to submit proposals on a variety of themes, such as:
- Prospecting for metal-bearing ores
- Ore extraction from bulk regolith
- Beneficiation/Refining processes
- Smelting and other metal reduction methods
- Feedstock forming and alloying from ISRU-derived metals
- Handling of materials used in metal production
- Additive manufacturing and joining with ISRU-derived feedstock
- Production of metal matrix composites
- Extrusion and drawing methods tailored for use in the lunar environment where a complex infrastructure is not available
- Test and qualification of ISRU-derived metal products such as storage vessels for liquids and gases, extrusions, pipes, power cables, and supporting structures
Once funded, teams are continuing their work on designing, building, and testing their concepts in advance of a November 2023 forum, where their concepts will be showcased to the public and judged by a panel of NASA and industry experts.
What equipment can work well while withstanding the tough lunar environment?
Image credit: Contour Crafting and University of Southern California
Abundant minerals
Wrap your mind around what the Moon has to offer.
There are several abundant minerals containing potential metals on the lunar surface that make them prime targets of opportunity, including, but not limited to:
Ilmenite (FeTiO3) ore, a key lunar resource is the fourth most abundant mineral on the Moon’s surface. Ilmenite is a titanium-iron oxide mineral and is a likely candidate for oxygen production with the byproducts being iron and titanium dioxide. Ilmenite is “paramagnetic, thus it can be sorted with magnetic fields.
Also, iron can be extracted through a smelting process and converted into feedstock. Titanium Dioxide can be reduced to titanium and oxygen. Titanium can be formed into wire feedstock for electron beam free form fabrication production of large objects such as pressure vessels. The lunar near vacuum environment is ideal for free form fabrication production.
Image credit: NASA
On the Moon, look for Anorthite (CaAl2Si2O8), most commonly proposed as a lunar substitute for Bauxite. Anorthite could be separated from the lunar highland material with mechanical methods. It could then be reduced through various chemical and electrochemical methods to produce aluminum.
For detailed information on the 2023 BIG Idea Challenge – “Lunar Forge: Producing Metal Products on the Moon” – go to this informative website at:
https://bigidea.nianet.org/2023-challenge/
Check out the finalists here at:
https://bigidea.nianet.org/wp-content/uploads/2023-BIG-Idea-Finalist-Team-Synopses.pdf
India’s Chandrayaan-3 Moon lander/rover.
Image credit: ISRO
India’s Chandrayaan-3 Moon lander/rover has completed launch rehearsal by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).
Target for liftoff is July 14. The lunar lander is headed for the southern region of the Moon’s near side, soft landing about 13 miles (20 kilometers) west of Manzinus U crater rim, at coordinates 69.367621 S, 32.348126 E, as stated by the ISRO.
Projected touchdown: around August 23.
Image credit: Quickmap.lroc.asu.edu/projections
Neighborhood watch
India’s landing site is not too far from where Russia’s Luna-25 is targeted to land, following its launch in August.
Luna-25’s main landing site is at 69.545 S, 43.544 E, north of Boguslavsky crater. The reserve landing site is at 68.773 S and 21.21 E, southwest of Manzini (Manzinus) crater.
Ship and shoot! Russia’s Luna-25 ready for launch next month.
Image credit: JSC “NPO Lavochkina”
The center of Boguslawsky crater is roughly 93 miles (150 kilometers) south of the coordinates issued by ISRO for the prospective Chandrayaan-3 landing locale.
Topographic map of the southern sub-polar region of the Moon showing the location of Boguslawsky crater.
Credit: Ivanov et al., 2015 via Arizona State University/LROC
Everybody’s going to the Moon!
Note: Special thanks to Mark Robinson, Arizona State University’s Moon reckoning man.
