Moon Monday #235: Artemis and other mission updates

Artemis updates

• NASA has completed a series of eight tests of ground systems and associated launch infrastructure ahead of an eventual second SLS rocket launch which will push four astronauts in an Orion spacecraft towards the Moon for the Artemis II mission next year. The final prep test involved testing flowing of cryogenic liquid hydrogen from a new tank at the launch complex. For those who remember the pain of the big orange rocket crawling back and forth between the launchpad and its assembly building for Artemis I, this new tank should provide some relief as it will shave off some time between launch attempts of Artemis II.
• Efforts continue to reduce damage to NASA Science & Exploration against the deep effects of its proposed and initiated cuts and cancellations by the Trump administration—all of which affect Artemis too. The US House and Senate are proposing budget bills that would roughly maintain last year’s NASA funding if passed. Separately, the US Congress passed a supplementary $6.7 billion fund on July 3 as part of a megabill for NASA to continue all Artemis hardware projects regardless of what the agency’s FY2026 budget proceedings output. More than 60 US Congress members from both parties have written to the Trump-chosen Acting Administrator Sean Duffy to request stopping the preemptive cuts to NASA. Agency employees from every center and mission directorate have also written to the Administrator expressing concerns of scientific brain drain and mission & program cancellations. However, with more than 3,000 NASA employees having taken voluntary departure options last week, and more reductions expected still, NASA’s capacity to execute the US’ ambitions will reduce even if the budgets are somehow maintained.
• NASA is seeking proposals from US companies for high-bandwidth, high-reliability lunar communications and navigation services to support future Artemis missions. Relatedly, US-based Advanced Space (which leads the NASA-funded CAPSTONE lunar orbiter mission) has partnered with Firefly Aerospace (who is building orbiters and recently demonstrated a soft Moon landing) to study design reference missions for NASA for the same. This is an area of lunar infrastructure which China currently leads—as the country aims to meet its own ambition of sustained crewed missions and a lunar base.
• On July 24, Senegal became the 56th country and the fourth African nation to sign the US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration. Notably, the continent’s nation of South Africa has not signed the Accords so far while it is participating in the China-led ILRS Moonbase project. CNSA recently announced that their upcoming Chang’e 8 mission to explore the Moon’s south pole for water ice and other resources will carry a radio astronomy array from South Africa and Peru as one of many international payloads.

More mission updates

• JAXA-ISAS has a good article on some of the behind-the-scenes of Honeybee Robotics’ PlanetVac sample collection payload and its operation earlier this year during US-based Firefly’s first Moon landing mission:

Both the Blue Ghost PlanetVac and the MMX sampler have a pneumatic design, ejecting pure nitrogen to sweep surface material into a tiny tornado, with a second jet to guide that lifted material into the collection chamber. One additional requirement for MMX is that the sampler would be able to collect material even if the sampling head could not be positioned flush against the moon surface. Since PlanetVac was mounted close to the fourth Blue Ghost leg that was not firmly on the lunar soil, this requirement was about to get an unexpected test.
[...]
A boom arm lowered PlanetVac towards the Moon surface. The team sent the command to collect a lunar sample. It was over in one second. To discover if PlanetVac had successfully gathered material, the Honeybee Robotics team had mounted a camera inside the sample container. The pristine container had colored plates on the inside. But when Blue Ghost transmitted the newest image back to Earth, this pretty scene was coated in dust and dirt.

• The ILO-C telescope of the International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA) has passed payload acceptance tests to be onboard China’s upcoming Chang’e 7 mission, which is targeting landing on the Moon’s south pole near the Shackleton crater in late 2026. Developed through collaboration with China’s NAOC and the University of Hong Kong, ILO-C is a wide-field optical telescope which aims to capture inspiring images of our galactic center from the Moon.

• ESA’s Pangaea campaign to train future lunar astronauts in geology continues with the latest batch exploring the Norwegian fjords of Lofoten and its well preserved anorthosite rocks—the same kind that make up bulk of our Moon’s light-colored crust. Such training will help astronauts pick better lunar samples on future missions and return more suitable crustal materials from its highlands, which includes the polar regions.
• Jack Congram has posted about China’s updated regulatory guidelines for its private and/or commercial companies. These also generally apply to companies sending things to the Moon, starting with the two five-kilogram mobile robots developed by ‘STAR.VISION’ in collaboration with universities from China and Turkey. The bots are targeted to fly to the Moon’s south pole aboard China’s Chang’e 8 national lander in 2028. It’s interesting how the steady cadence of China’s Moon landers could mean that Chinese firms can drop rovers and other infrastructure on the Moon regularly while skipping the most difficult part of landing by themselves for the time being. It would be an approach t0 commercialization that’s in stark contrast to NASA CLPS.

Many thanks to Catalyx Space, Gurbir Singh and Ajay Kothari for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource on global lunar exploration for free, and without ads, kindly support my independent writing:

A Moon-catalyzed Jupiter update

Just like how Earth observation satellites image the Moon to calibrate the performance of their imagers, spacecraft on their way to explore other Solar System objects do so too at times. When ESA’s Jupiter-bound JUICE spacecraft flew past our Moon in August 2024, the mission operations team activated JUICE’s radar system to characterize its detections against a well known airless object—🌝—before it can study the Jovian icy moons. Lorenzo Bruzzone, principal investigator of JUICE’s radar instrument, said:

The measurements collected will also allow us to tune the processing algorithms to reduce the effects of radio frequency interference generated by the probe’s subsystems in the radar band.

Now ESA has provided an update that JUICE’s radar system has been algorithmically calibrated by engineers thanks to the lunar flyby. JUICE is now all set to map layers below the icy surfaces of Jovian moons.

Relatedly, when NASA’s Cassini spacecraft flew by the Moon in 1999, en route to Saturn, its infrared spectrometer detected water-bearing minerals at most lunar latitudes, with higher concentrations towards the poles. However, the team didn’t publish their findings until the US instruments on Chandrayaan 1 discovered water on the Moon a decade later.

Relatedly, here are more ways our Moon is valuable beyond itself:

• As a platform for radio cosmology
• To repurpose Moon missions for enabling deep space exploration
• To monitor the Sun and its wind from its unique vantage point
• As a geological time capsule and an age reference for events across the Solar System.