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NASA teams tried partially fueling the SLS rocket core stage’s liquid hydrogen tank to assess the newly replaced seals, hoping to counter leaks observed during the full-fueling test on February 2 which didn’t go as planned and therefore delayed the launch of the Artemis II mission to fly four astronauts around the Moon and back to no earlier than March. But during the latest partial fueling test, teams noticed a reduced propellent flow, a new problem now being inspected. In the meanwhile, Stephen Clark has reported how NASA relaxed its fueling safety limit vis-à-vis hydrogen leaks by four times in the period between Artemis I and II:

During the first Wet Dress Rehearsal earlier this month, hydrogen gas concentrations in the area around the fueling connection spiked higher than 16 percent, NASA’s safety limit. This spike was higher than any of the leak rates observed during the Artemis I launch campaign in 2022. Since then, NASA reassessed their safety limit and raised it from 4 percent—a conservative rule NASA held over from the Space Shuttle program—to 16 percent.

Seeing China’s steady strides towards landing humans on the Moon by 2030, the US and NASA decided to focus on accelerating their Artemis efforts and reopened the Artemis III landing contract last year due to SpaceX Starship delays. Jeff Bezos-owned Blue Origin bid for it, and also decided to pause its other internal projects to focus the company’s resources and efforts on Luna. Ergo, SpaceX and founder Elon Musk have now prioritized the Moon.

Artemis astronauts practice emergency rescue drills to test the mobility of Axiom-developed lunar spacesuits in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory at the agency’s Johnson Space Center. Image: NASA / Axiom Space

NASA provided an update on the development of Artemis III lunar spacesuits, contracted to Axiom Space.

NASA and Axiom Space have conducted over 850 hours of pressurized testing with a person inside the AxEMU. Leading up to the review, teams conducted underwater and simulated lunar gravity tests of the AxEMU in facilities at NASA Johnson that demonstrate how the spacesuit’s capabilities will offer increased mobility as astronauts explore the Moon’s surface.

Agency and Axiom Space teams recently finished the first series of test runs in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory at NASA Johnson. While in the 40-foot-deep [12-meter] pool, they weighted the AxEMU to match lunar gravity and assessed functionality and ease of movement.

NASA will now conduct a critical design review to evaluate and confirm the development status of the suits against Axiom’s own assessment. Stephen Clark recently reported on the many operational and safety challenges in the suit’s development. After SpaceX Lunar Starship, the Axiom-provided lunar suits remain the second biggest pacing item for flying and landing Artemis III astronauts on the Moon.

More Moon

Sierra Space’s carbothermal reactor, funded and aided by NASA, successfully extracted oxygen from simulated lunar soil on Earth using concentrated solar energy. Being built at a gradual pace as part of NASA’s Game Changing Development program, the agency ultimately intends to demonstrate the system on the Moon on a future CLPS mission. Such future systems on the Moon could provide breathable oxygen for astronauts and fuel for spacecraft without having to rely on only the supplies lugged from Earth’s gruesome gravity well. Here’s a note on the collaborative nature of the test setup from the NASA release:

The integrated prototype brought together a carbothermal oxygen production reactor developed by Sierra Space, a solar concentrator designed by NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, precision mirrors produced by Composite Mirror Applications, and avionics, software, and gas analysis systems from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Relatedly, in the FY2026 Presidential Budget Request, NASA did not even request funds for its LIFT-1 mission to extract oxygen from lunar soil. Previously, NASA had said it would fund $200-250 million in total for the mission but later pivoted to stating in the budget request that the agency will “prioritize ground-based high-fidelity systems testing” instead.

Many thanks to Catalyx Space, Henry Throop, and Deepika Jeyakodi (who kindly wishes me to link to the cause of PARI instead) 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:

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Related tangent to my space writing: My writing goals and methods this year 🌱

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When ISRO loses a PSLV rocket, India loses a launchpad in the present and the future

Jatan Mehta — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 17:25:03 +0530

A PSLV rocket, and its fairing being prepared pre-launch. One human on the bottom right of the left image for scale. Images: ISRO

The January 12 launch of India’s PSLV rocket failed due to the third stage’s mysteriously anomalous performance, the resulting tumbling of which was visible even on telemetry screens in the mission control and livestream. 16 spacecraft were lost to the air and sea, spanning a key national hyperspectral satellite, seven private Indian ones, five from Brazil, and one each from the UK, Nepal, and Europe. The European one, called KID, briefly survived and transmitted some information despite experiencing loads up to 30g.

This was the 64th flight of a PSLV, a vehicle which has served India for three decades and is supposed to be the country’s workhorse in space. The flight being PSLV’s second consecutive failure, following the one in May 2025, has invited heightened public criticism and scrutiny, three of which I feel are notable to link and summarize below:

Mukunth called for transparency in the failure investigation and timely public communications so as to avoid a culture of deviance and complacency, the kind NASA suffered from during the Space Shuttle era.
Bosky Khanna wrote for The New Indian Express how none of the private Indian company satellites aboard had taken insurance due to cost concerns that exist more so for small satellites than large ones.
Sidharth MP noted how three national satellite losses over just one year will now cost India several years to replace. This also means India’s dependency on foreign satellite data buys will increase, not decrease.

Now let’s discuss several more key aspects that I haven’t seen talked about so far to understand how it’s non-optional for India to fly the aging PSLV nominally again even as the country expands its launch vehicle options and capabilities—an endeavor in itself throttled. We will also illustrate how the safety of our astronauts on Gaganyaan missions is ultimately linked to the PSLV failure and its misleading communications.

The launchpads of India

A birds-eye panoramic view of India’s orbital launch complex in Sriharikota captured in 2023. A PSLV rocket is at the first launch pad while the second pad lies in the distance. Image: ISRO

India’s only active orbital spaceport is the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota on the country’s south-eastern coast, a low-latitude location (13.7°N) suitable for many kinds of launches. The port primarily houses two launchpads, and their many associated facilities. The two pads are literally called the First Launch Pad (FLP) and the Second Launch Pad (SLP) respectively. India built the FLP in the early 1990s for ISRO to launch the then-new PSLV rocket. Today, the pad also supports launches of the new SSLV rocket, a PSLV-derived but much smaller vehicle dedicated for lofting small satellites.

As for the SLP, it can also host PSLV launches but does so less frequently as ISRO built that pad in 2005 to primarily launch the heavier rockets GSLV Mk II and LVM3. While these vehicles share some aspects like the liquid Vikas engine with the PSLV, their biggest differentiator lies in their cryogenic upper stages which deliver enhanced performance. However, the same stages make the FLP unable to launch the Mk II or the LVM3. The increased preparatory requirements for these cryogenic stages are hard to retrospectively fit on a launchpad that predates them.

Given these launchpad availability dynamics, it becomes clear that when a PSLV rocket fails, India effectively loses the value of its First Launch Pad. The SSLV exists but is not a sufficiently distinct rocket. Its second stage motor is derived straight from the PSLV’s third stage one—precisely the stage that has now failed twice in a row. As such, the PSLV getting grounded has been pulling down the SSLV along with it. Similarly, the PSLV and the GSLV Mk II share their core stage S139 solid rocket booster.

When the PSLV was flying reliably like a workhorse all these years, ISRO rightly considered the modular reuse from it for the SSLV or other vehicles to be an advantage. Now, however, that has become a restraint. Even when the SSLV gets its own launchpad, planned for later this decade, the issue of potential two-way technological dependency of one vehicle on the other would remain.

No place is building a PSLV replacement

The PSLV rocket in various stages of its assembly. Technicians for scale. Images: ISRO (1, 2)

People have expressed hope that upcoming private Indian launch vehicles will resolve India’s launch bottlenecks soon, particularly the PSLV. It’s hard to reconcile this hope with reality. Of all the launch vehicle companies in India, the only one that might launch this year for real is Skyroot. Their rocket, named Vikram-I, though falls in the same category as the SSLV in terms of lift capacity, both lifting six to seven times lower mass than the PSLV for equivalent orbits. In fact, Vikram-I is designed by many ex-ISRO people who were associated with the PSLV or the SSLV, and possibly may be using many common contractors. It’s therefore not a strictly distinct vehicle. Even if Vikram-I is successful in its very first orbital launch attempt, a tall order for any new vehicle, its lift capacity is simply not enough to replace the PSLV. Even its eventual upgrade, Vikram-II, does not come close to the PSLV’s prowess as the latter will still be able to lift about three times more mass to space at once. Another Indian rocket company hoping to launch later this decade, Agnikul, has an even smaller lift capacity to offer than Vikram-I.

There’s also the aspect that the SSLV and Vikram rockets all utilize, or will utilize, the FLP to launch. Even when flying successfully, using the same pad means they will effectively keep blocking PSLV’s FLP launches due to pre-launch planning and post-launch refurbishments while not putting enough mass in orbit by themselves. It’s a tradeoff between the PSLV’s greater lift capacity and the swiftness but low capacity of small rockets.

Now, yes, to improve the SSLV’s own launch rate and lift capacity, ISRO is making a dedicated launchpad optimized for polar orbits. The agency is also aiming to production-ize the SSLV through a technology transfer contract with Indian aerospace industry giant HAL. Skyroot’s Vikram rockets will use this new pad as well. But the fruits of these efforts are not expected to begin until at least 2028, which is when the new launchpad is supposed to host its first orbital launch. And that’s assuming no further delays for the pad that’s already slipped past an originally intended 2025 debut.

If India leans on the SSLV and private Indian rocket companies in their current state for small-to-medium-lift space launches this decade, the country will end up launching far less useful mass to orbit than through PSLVs. There is simply no place in India building a PSLV replacement.

The ambitious transitions ahead

The PSLV rocket being transported in India’s launch complex at Sriharikota. Image: ISRO

The SLP is the pad India will use to launch its astronauts in the near future using the human-rated variant of the LVM3 rocket. As such, the SLP will further deprioritize PSLV launches to cater to human spaceflight over and above heavier launches. The PSLV will thus increasingly launch from the FLP as years go by. The dedicated PSLV Integration Facility which ISRO built to double the rate of PSLV launches is also at and for the FLP. Moreover, the government’s intent of productionizing the PSLV this decade through the industry also depends on these same existing facilities for the foreseeable future. The PSLV and FLP are two sides of the same coin.

In its early days, the PSLV was a humble rocket that allowed India to place modest satellites in orbit to meet the country’s most basic space applications needs. ISRO then evolved the PSLV with variants to increase and optimize the vehicle’s overall performance and payload capacity. Through continuous refinements, ISRO has been able to use a PSLV in some form to successfully launch a lunar orbiter, a Mars orbiter, a space telescope, a solar observatory to the Earth-Sun L1 point, a record 104 satellites in one flight, and also important missions for other space agencies such as the recent launch of the Proba-3 Sun-studying craft for ESA. This is what people mean when they say India takes pride in the PSLV.

As India’s space ambitions have risen this century, and this decade in particular, the PSLV has reached its ceiling of novelty at last. The next set of complex space missions executed by ISRO involved much heavier launch vehicles to get the job done. To launch Chandrayaan 2 and 3, ISRO required its LVM3 rocket to enter operations. India also needed the LVM3 to loft satellite constellations and heavy commercial craft. A Venus orbiter will also await a ride at the end of the decade. Even more complex missions India has announced to fly soon enough include the Chandrayaan 4 sample return, Gaganyaan human spaceflight missions, the first module of the Bharatiya Anthariksh Station (BAS) astronaut habitat in Earth orbit, and indigenously launched heavy geostationary satellites. But for all of these to work, the LVM3 core stage needs to be upgraded with a semi-cryogenic engine, a project that has been delayed for years now.

In the meanwhile, the Indian Government has approved the building of a third launch pad (TLP) in Sriharikota for $460 million, which will support launches of ISRO’s upcoming heavy-lift NGLV rocket starting next decade. The TLP will also act as a secondary pad for robotic LVM3 launches, and be a standby for human spaceflight ones to handle contingencies and emergencies. The TLP can support launching the GSLV Mk II as well but ISRO is planning to phase out the vehicle itself since the LVM3 is superior to it in performance, price, and reliability beyond bespoke launches.

It’s important to note that just like how the LVM3 and Mk II can’t launch from the FLP, the upcoming NGLV rocket won’t be able to lift off from the SLP. From a technical standpoint, this is obvious. But it’s interesting that the same dynamic that ties the PSLV with the FLP also ties the LVM3 and SLP. This means India cannot afford to lose an LVM3 even more so than a PSLV. And that’s why ISRO’s culture and communications being authentic matter even more today than it did in the past.

Our astronauts on the line

The first four Gaganyaan astronauts. Image: ISRO

While India can manage a PSLV failure or two, the LVM3 failing would be far more disastrous. The PSLV and LVM3 do share the liquid Vikas engine for the foreseeable future, visibly tying technological reliability of one vehicle to the other. Thankfully, the LVM3 has never failed in its eight orbital flights so far. But then so didn’t the PSLV for 18 years, or a SpaceX Falcon 9 for almost a decade, NASA’s Space Shuttle until its 25th flight, and so on and so forth. We are talking about rockets after all. With LVM3 selected to launch astronauts in the near future, we simply cannot afford it to fail. It’s important to look at any aspect that we can inspect. This is why it’s prudent to note ISRO’s lack of transparency vis-à-vis the PSLV as a sign of the organization’s culture issues.

In 2022 when the SSLV failed on its inaugural flight, we got some decent details like “Cause of anomaly” and “Recommendations & Correction actions”, as probed and implemented by ISRO with the involvement of the failure analysis committee. But for the PSLV rocket which failed in May 2025, we did not get any such details. And that’s despite the fact that the failure triggered multiple mission delays since the launch vehicle’s modules and component designs are also utilized by other ISRO rockets. Even the second PSLV failure last month has still not prompted the taxpayer-funded space organization to release the failure analysis report of the first one, much less its key findings along with a list of corrective measures ISRO took as with the SSLV failure.

You typically expect companies, not tax-funded organizations, to be reserved and even deflective when dealing with failures. Yet even among those there have been companies which lead with transparency. ispace Japan faced two out of two failures of its Moon landers in 2023 and 2025 respectively. Yet, despite being a publicly traded company, it showed remarkable transparency by not only immediately accepting the outcomes in plain words but also by sharing detailed findings of what went wrong within weeks. Shouldn’t our taxpayer-funded agencies be at least as transparent as a good faith space company?

What we have instead are not only no details but outright false statements on ISRO’s website. The mission page for the last PSLV mission, which ISRO published before the launch and its failure, states the following [emphasis mine]:

PSLV is the workhorse launch vehicle of ISRO that has completed 63 flights including notable missions like Chandrayaan-1, Mars Orbiter Mission, Aditya-L1 and Astrosat Mission. In 2017, PSLV set a world record by launching 104 satellites in a single mission.

Except that the 63rd flight of 2025 itself failed. And so did three others in the past. It’s deceiving to call all PSLV flights completed. In the aftermath of the two PSLV failures, India’s Union Minister of Science & Technology and Space, Jitendra Singh, said the following as reported by Soumya Pillai for The Print:

The success rate of our launches is still pretty high compared to any other country around the world. We have been riding high on success, and yes, these failures have come as a disappointment, but we are working to rectify them and be back in the game.

The spirit of the statement resonates but to say that the success rate of our rockets is still pretty high compared to any other country is obviously incorrect when you contrast India’s launch statistics with any major rockets from the US, China, Russia, or even Europe. The PSLV’s success rate may be high but it’s not high enough, and certainly not among the best. That India again had a mixed year in space in 2025 continues to show there’s much more work to do.

There’s no doubt that engineers at ISRO take failures seriously internally. But those efforts also need to be communicated by the agency with honest clarity and effectiveness to retain trust. If an LVM3 fails on a robotic mission, what if ISRO’s opaqueness continues despite the lives of our astronauts being linked to essentially the same vehicle? The world lost astronauts on two human spaceflight disasters with the Space Shuttle due to NASA’s cultural complacency. ISRO would be wise to not repeat history.

The PSLV and Indian space await a new dawn. Image: ISRO

The PSLV has a unique place in India’s space program and launch complex. It has to return to flight. But it’s not enough to merely fly the rocket again successfully. The PSLV and ISRO itself need to be made more robust, fixing fundamentals issues and mistakes instead of taping over them, just as ISRO methodically achieved Chandrayaan 3’s triumphant touchdown on the Moon after Chandrayaan 2’s landing failure by carefully planning and testing a more robust and realistically redundant spacecraft.

Many thanks to Takshashila Institution, PierSight, Gurbir Singh and Catalyx Space for sponsoring Indian Space Progress. Thanks also to Deepika Jeyakodi, who kindly wishes me to link to the cause of PARI instead.

If you too appreciate my efforts to capture nuanced trajectories of India in space, provided to space communities worldwide for free and without ads, kindly support my independent writing:

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Moon Monday #261: A shortfall in Artemis II testing and NASA’s communications

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 16:49:31 +0530

A tribute before we begin: I’m saddened to share that we have lost a pioneering international lunar collaboration diplomat in Steve Durst [1943-2026]. As the lead & founder of the US-based non-profit International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA) and Space Age Publishing, Steve forged unique relationships across and between the US, China, India, Europe, and Canada against many odds. Perhaps as a fitting tribute to Steve, ILOA’s ILO-C telescope is slated to be onboard China’s Chang’e 7 Moon lander later this year to capture inspiring images of our galactic center from Luna. Personally, I’m thankful for his work to unite people across space organizations, and that my paths crossed with him before it was too late. It’s because of Steve and ILOA that I could bring you all first hand lunar coverage from Wenchang, Hong Kong, and IAF-ISRO GLEX. I know how much Steve cared about diverse representation of our species at the Moon. Even in his 80s, Steve worked tirelessly to advance all of these goals for humanity. May we all imbibe his spirit. Aloha Steve. 🌔 🔭

Sharing an international panel with Steve Durst at IAF-ISRO GLEX 2025.

Launch of Artemis II astronauts delayed

The Artemis II SLS rocket at its launchpad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with our Moon providing the ultimate backdrop. Image: NASA / Ben Smegelsky

NASA’s fueling test of the SLS rocket on February 2 in preparation to launch the Artemis II mission to fly four astronauts around the Moon and back did not go as planned. There were repeat hydrogen leaks beyond acceptable thresholds at multiple points despite trying gentle liquid hydrogen flows and all such related techniques NASA tried during Artemis I, which itself needed seven fueling attempts across months to then finally have the rocket fly. The core leak area this time was the same that nagged Artemis I, the tail service mast umbilical at the bottom of the SLS rocket’s mobile launcher used for fueling. Stephen Clark noted how the core objectives of the test at the end of the launch countdown couldn’t be met:

The objective was to stop the countdown clock 33 seconds prior to launch, about the same time the rocket would take control of the countdown during a real launch attempt. Instead, the clock stopped at T-minus 5 minutes and 15 seconds. NASA said the countdown terminated “due to a spike in the liquid hydrogen leak rate.” The countdown ended before the rocket switched to internal power and fully pressurized its four propellant tanks. The test also concluded before the rocket activated its auxiliary power units to run the core stage’s four main engines through a preflight steering check, all milestones engineers hoped to cross off their checklist.

NASA did achieve two other aspects of the test: 1) a specialized team went up the launcher and closed the Orion spacecraft’s hatches as they would on launch day for astronauts inside the capsule, and 2) safe defueling of the SLS rocket. Teams then began reviewing the test data to form mitigation plans, and will return for a fueling test at some point before setting an official target launch date, which now can be March at the earliest.

Dear NASA, Chinese space missions exist too

NASA recently published a post on how the agency will track the Artemis II mission using a network of ground stations. In the release, NASA included the following statement [emphasis mine]:

Orion will experience a planned communications blackout lasting approximately 41 minutes. The blackout will occur as the spacecraft passes behind the Moon, blocking radio frequency signals to and from Earth. Similar blackouts occurred during the Apollo-era missions and are expected when using an Earth-based network infrastructure. When Orion reemerges from behind the Moon, the Deep Space Network will quickly reacquire Orion’s signal and restore communications with mission control. These planned blackouts remain an aspect of all missions operating on or around the Moon’s far side.

All missions? These kinds of blackouts have been solved by China, who have had two relay satellites, Queqiao 1 and Queqiao 2, for communicating with its Chang’e 4 and Chang’e 6 landers respectively on the lunar farside. As such, NASA saying that the blackouts remain an aspect of all farside missions is incorrect. The statement needs to be qualified by noting that the issue stands for all US missions.

Relative locations between the Earth, the Moon and the Queqiao 1 relay satellite, which communicates with the Chang’e 4 lander on the farside. Not to scale. Image: CNSA LESEC

This isn’t the first time NASA has made statements about global missions while discarding what China does or aims to. In 2024, when the US agreed to land Japanese astronauts on the Moon in return for Japan providing an advanced pressurized crewed rover for the Artemis program, the announcement called “a Japanese national to be the first non-American astronaut to land on the Moon”, conveniently ignoring China’s plans to land astronauts on Luna end of decade.

What science will Artemis II do? Zilch?

A simulated view of what the Artemis II astronauts might see during their flyby around the Moon. Image: NASA SVS / Ernie Wright

NASA has proudly pioneered effective science and technical communications with the public for decades, elevating understanding of space exploration worldwide. But the agency’s communications over the last few years haven’t been as eloquent, with fluffy narratives taking the driver’s seat even in aspects that aren’t politically charged. This is the case with Artemis II as well. When inaugurating the Artemis Science Team Flight Control Room in June 2025, NASA wrote the following in a release on its website:

Artemis II astronauts will observe the Moon during their 10-day mission around the Moon and back, taking photographs and verbally recording what they see. Their observations will support science objectives and provide data for potential landing sites for future Moon missions.

Now, Artemis II is not even an orbiter mission. The four astronauts inside the Orion capsule will be flying more than 7000 kilometers from the Moon at their closest approach. What science can they even do from such large distances? And so in less than 10 days? Certainly no landing sites will be selected.

For selecting actual landing sites, NASA has used over a decade worth of observations from its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) which flies within 100 kilometers of the Moon’s surface. NASA is also getting aid from India’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter to leverage its superior imagery and radar system for filtering Artemis landing site candidates. Are we now supposed to believe that a few days worth of Artemis II observations several thousands of kilometers from the Moon will help NASA select landing sites? This fluffy communications ultimately disrespects NASA’s own LRO efforts.

There is a nuanced element to the Artemis II observations. All Artemis II activities will certainly be useful operationally to feed forward into coordinating the science team with astronauts on Artemis III and missions beyond. But doing science as an objective in itself is a different ballgame altogether. There are also limits to what a few days of coordination can teach us when astronauts are this far from the Moon. The work that the science team is doing is important but not for the fluffy reasons being conveyed by NASA around this topic.

The Orion spacecraft, part of NASA’s Artemis I mission, captured this view of our Moon and Earth in November 2022. This vantage point in its lunar orbit lies roughly 70,000 and 430,000 kilometers away from the Moon and Earth respectively. Image: NASA

Of course, like the beautiful images from Artemis I, views of the Moon and our Earth from near Luna can have great impact on people’s minds. With Artemis II, we have an opportunity again to view our Moon and Earth through the eyes of astronauts, and their iPhones, building on the beauty of the Apollo 8 Earthrise. As such, Artemis II’s lunar observation campaign has a lot of emotional value. It just doesn’t have a scientific one, especially when the same agency does real science missions.

Now, every space agency does PR pieces. But NASA’s science communications have had the highest bar. We should hold them to that high standard while pushing other agencies to match.

Many thanks to The Orbital Index and Deepika Jeyakodi (who kindly wishes me to link to the cause of PARI instead) 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:

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- Jatan 🌙

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How NASA has planned to keep Artemis II astronauts safe throughout their Moon mission

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:10:03 +0530

Announcement: Before we begin the article, I’m thrilled to share that apart from running my flagship Moon Monday blog+newsletter, I’m continuing with the Open Lunar Foundation and its nice team for another year to help communicate the non-profit’s research work of forging technical and policy building blocks for cooperative and peaceful lunar exploration globally. It’s a mission that aligns extremely well with the ethos of Moon Monday. 🌙

Disclaimer for transparency: Open Lunar has been one of the sponsors of Moon Monday for about five years now. As such, my public Editorial Independence Policy has applied to my coverage of Open Lunar too, and will continue to. This includes continuing to disclaim about them being a sponsor of any kind every single time I mention their work just as I’ve been doing all year last year.

The top of the Artemis II SLS rocket at its launchpad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with our Moon providing the ultimate backdrop. Bottom left: Artemis II mission crew patch. Images: NASA / Sam Lott / Greg Manchess

The Artemis II flight crew (in their mission suits) and the mission closeout crew (in clean room apparel) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida prior to test operations of the Orion lunar capsule. The flight crew from left to right: Mission Specialists Jeremy Hansen and Christina Koch, Pilot Victor Glover, and Commander Reid Wiseman. Image: NASA / Rad Sinyak

On February 1, NASA powered up the SLS rocket’s core stage at its launchpad at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Today, February 2, the agency began preparing for a fueling, launch countdown, and defueling test suite. If this “wet dress rehearsal” with cryogenic propellants is successful, the agency is clear to launch the Artemis II mission to fly four astronauts around the Moon and back, knowing that the launch procedures are working as expected. The earliest possible launch dates for the astronauts are February 8, 10, and 11, each having five-hour windows. If the wet dress rehearsal finds issues to be fixed, the next available launch dates are in March and April.

In the meanwhile, astronauts remain in quarantine to keep them safe against exposure to pathogens. To ensure the astronauts are safe and keeping well during the entire mission, NASA has planned to guard many aspects at once. Other than having global-standard safety measures like an emergency rocket escape system for the Orion crew capsule and an urgent launchpad egress system for astronauts, NASA has also developed systems to have real time monitoring of the Artemis II mission and its crew so as to tweak things as needs arise.

This applies to pre-launch preparations too. The SLS rocket’s aforementioned fueling test was delayed to stick to the mission’s weather criteria amid cold conditions and avoid potentially unwarranted effects on the mission hardware while also ensuring testing in conditions similar enough to actual launch. NASA also noted the following in an update on January 26:

During an evaluation of the emergency egress system, the baskets used to transport the crew and other pad personnel from the mobile launcher in an emergency stopped short of the terminus area located inside the pad perimeter. Since then, the brakes of the system have been adjusted to ensure the baskets fully descend.

The astronauts have also been trained to handle various permutations of such escape scenarios. Teams at NASA also work to ensure the crew’s Orion spacecraft and its life support systems keep functioning nominally, as noted in the same release:

In the coming days, technicians also will take additional samples of Orion’s potable water system to ensure the crew’s water is drinkable. Initial samples showed higher levels of total organic carbon than expected.

This brings us into the next aspect, monitoring the health of the astronauts themselves during the mission. To that end, NASA includes a wristband and multiple advanced tools for astronauts to check their physiological patterns. Since space and payload mass aboard Orion is limited, many of these experiment packages are miniaturized versions of those previously flown on the International Space Station. Some of them will report metrics and outputs in real time for NASA to monitor while others will be analyzed post-flight.

Radiation protection

Given the scarcity of data on human health in lunar and deep space environments, Orion will carry even more radiation sensors than on Artemis I to review post-mission. A notable upgrade comes from a partnership with the German Space Agency (DLR):

NASA has again partnered the German Space Agency DLR for an updated model of their M-42 sensor—an M-42 EXT—for Artemis II. The new version offers six times more resolution to distinguish between different types of energy, compared to the Artemis I version. This will allow it to accurately measure the radiation exposure from heavy ions which are thought to be particularly hazardous for radiation risk. Artemis II will carry four of the monitors, affixed at points around the cabin by the crew.

This collaboration builds on results from Artemis I whose radiation data was evaluated by NASA, ESA, and DLR scientists last year. They found that radiation exposure to future astronauts will vary not only based on time spent at locations within the capsule but also on Orion’s orientation in space. For example, the paper says when Orion’s orientation was altered during an engine burn, exposure levels dropped nearly in half due to the highly directional nature of the radiation in the Van Allen belt. NASA will continue to study lunar and deep space radiation environments with scientific payloads on the upcoming NASA-led Gateway orbital habitat.

The Artemis I Orion spacecraft carried multiple radiation experiments onboard, including anatomically accurate female torsos and various radiation sensors. Images: Stuart George, at al. / NASA / Lockheed Martin / DLR

From August 4 through 7 in 1972, the Sun blurted several bursts of flares and associated energetic particles between the Apollo 16 and 17 missions to the Moon. Had the astronauts been in lunar orbit or on the surface, they could’ve faced damaging levels of radiation. This could, in turn, lead to increased cancer risk. Likewise, radiation particles from such strong solar events can reach Artemis II astronauts within hours. Since we are around the peak of solar activity in this cycle, teams will be monitoring bursts from the Sun that might pass through Orion in its flight paths. Sensors onboard Orion will also provide warnings when radiation influx crosses a certain threshold. For such events, NASA’s strategy is for the crew to increase their radiation protection by repositioning items inside Orion:

To protect themselves, astronauts will position themselves in the central part of the crew module largely reserved for storing items they’ll need during flight and create a shelter using the stowage bags on board. The method protects the crew by increasing mass directly surrounding them, and therefore making a denser environment that solar particles would have to travel through, while not adding mass to the crew module itself. If the warning were to sound, the crew would create the shelter within an hour and in some cases would need to stay inside for as long as 24 hours.

Related article: A Sun watcher at the Moon 🛰️

Mission monitoring

In terms of real-time monitoring of the mission, there are specific aspects too. For example, in Eric Berger’s interview of the Artemis II astronauts last year, which provided a good rundown of the mission’s timeline and key checkpoints & fallbacks post launch, the Mission Pilot Victor Glover shared an interesting detail:

The first workout [for astronauts] is a checkout of that exercise hardware, but it's also a checkout of the environmental control system. Because I'm going to be breathing, I'm going to be sweating, making more humidity and more CO2 for the life support system to scrub out. And then if that's good, that's another check that means we can go to the Moon.

Back to a broader scale, NASA built a new Orion “Mission Evaluation Room” (MER) at the agency’s Johnson Space Center which didn’t exist for Artemis I. NASA built MER last year to complement flight control teams during the mission. The MER team comprises about 48 engineers from across NASA, ESA, Lockheed Martin, and Airbus with deep knowledge of Orion’s subsystems. They will analyze technical data as the mission unfolds, assisting flight control with optimizations as well as any anomalies.

The Orion Mission Evaluation Room inside the Mission Control Center at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Image: NASA / Rad Sinyak

Complementary to MER is NASA having trained the astronauts to fly Orion in a realistic emulator:

Inside the Orion Mission Simulator at Johnson, the crew [has] rehearsed every phase of the mission, from routine operations to emergency responses. Simulations are designed to teach astronauts how to diagnose failures, manage competing priorities, and make decisions with delayed communication from Earth.

For the most happening events during the mission, like the tumultuous launch and the fiery atmospheric reentry, NASA has developed the Orion Crew Survival System (OCSS). It’s a specialized spacesuit with a flame-resistant outer layer which astronauts will wear during such mission phases to protect themselves against potential anomalies. Astronauts would also wear OCSS if other high risk events occur during the mission since the suit is their lifeboat if and when critical systems in Orion fail. It may seem like an extended feature but it’s quite central to astronaut safety. From a 2019 NASA release:

Even though it’s primarily designed for launch and reentry, the Orion suit can keep astronauts alive if Orion were to lose cabin pressure during the journey [...]. Astronauts could survive inside the suit for up to six days as they make their way back to Earth.

This pairs well with another safety aspect of the mission. NASA has designed a free return trajectory for Orion’s flight around the Moon such that if the spacecraft’s engines stopped working for some reason, Orion will be pulled back towards Earth due to the net result of the natural gravitational forces acting on the craft. The OCSS can keep astronauts alive amid several such anomalies near the Moon.

Artemis II mission trajectory and milestones. Image: NASA

The OCSS suit can also help the astronauts after splashdown on Earth. From NASA:

The suits are also equipped with a suite of survival gear in the event they have to exit Orion after splashdown before recovery personnel arrive. Each suit will carry its own life preserver that contains a personal locator beacon, a rescue knife, and a signaling kit with a mirror, strobe light, flashlight, whistle, and light sticks.

Should there be some issue or delay for the recovery teams and their vessels to arrive post-splashdown, the astronauts have been trained to stabilize the capsule if necessary, exit it, and board a raft on their own and then use the OCSS survival kit as necessary. Their suits are also bright orange to make them easier to spot amid ocean waters.

Our Moon is valuable even beyond itself ✨

Communicating with Orion

Getting back to the mission-wide systems, NASA will track the Orion spacecraft near-continuously and ensure safety of the astronauts by having multiple communications channels. Chiefly, NASA will use a combination of its Near Space Network (NSN) and Deep Space Network (DSN) to track the mission. Managed by the agency’s Goddard and JPL centers respectively, these networks have antennae spread worldwide so that Orion can be in reach despite facing any part of Earth.

Near Space Network antennas at NASA’s White Sands Complex in New Mexico. These will play a key role in getting data from the Artemis II Orion spacecraft during various mission phases, from launch and Earth orbit to reentry and splashdown. Image: NASA

Use of NSN and DSN networks during Artemis II. Image: NASA / Dave Ryan

Orion will also carry a NASA-MIT-developed optical laser communications terminal called O2O to send some mission data independently, albeit it’s primarily intended to be a test. O2O aims to demonstrate sending more data with lower size, weight, and power requirements compared to traditional radio systems. During the mission, NASA hopes to beam 4K HD videos and pictures during minimal cloud coverage over to likewise two suitably located ground stations. This demonstration is part of the agency’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program’s optical infusion effort, which has been demonstrating laser communications on multiple missions. However, the Artemis III Moon landing mission will not have a laser communications unit from NASA.

The heat shield

The Artemis I Orion spacecraft lost big chunks of its heat shield material in several places during atmospheric reentry on Earth. Some of its bolts also melted and eroded. Image: NASA / OIG

And now we come to the final major aspect, the one that’s been contended publicly: the Orion capsule’s heat shield. Two independent investigations by NASA circa 2024 analyzed the unexpected damage caused to Orion’s shield during reentry in 2022 for the uncrewed Artemis I Moon mission. The agency concluded that the heat shield’s ablative Avcoat material was not porous enough to vent and dissipate hot gas buildup during its bounced atmospheric reentry, which led to cracks and loss of entire chunks. NASA then decided to change Orion’s reentry profile for Artemis II to manage the heat buildup, deeming it a safe measure for astronauts.

Jared Isaacman’s first priority after becoming the NASA administrator in December 2025 was to review Orion’s heat shield and its effectiveness in saving the lives of Artemis II astronauts during atmospheric reentry. NASA decided that the altered reentry profile proposal would work. Eric Berger, one of the two reporters with (preferential?) access to the review meeting, noted the worst case scenario as follows:

The NASA engineers wanted to understand what would happen if large chunks of the heat shield were stripped away entirely from the composite base of Orion. So they subjected this base material to high energies for periods of 10 seconds up to 10 minutes, which is longer than the period of heating Artemis II will experience during reentry. What they found is that, in the event of such a failure, the structure of Orion would remain solid, the crew would be safe within, and the vehicle could still land in a water-tight manner in the Pacific Ocean.

Not all experts seated in the meeting were convinced, with one publicly citing limitations of the tools used for said analyses. Here’s hoping the Artemis II astronauts fly and get back to Earth safely.

On the other hand, there’s poignant irony in unequivocally debating so much about saving the lives of astronauts but not of those on the ground too, including not only having protective measures for launch teams but also looking out for the safety of passengers in flight against rocket debris, engineers on ground testing hardware, and simply caring about lives of people at large. The pursuit of space does not place us above human life.

Many thanks to Open Lunar Foundation, Gurbir Singh and Henry Throop 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:

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Moon Monday #259: Lunarbound astronauts enter quarantine as Artemis II launch approaches

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 15:44:05 +0530

The Artemis II astronauts pose in front of an Orion spacecraft simulator at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on January 23. Image: NASA / Robert Markowitz

As NASA targets a Q1 launch for the Artemis II mission flying humans around the Moon and back, the four astronauts set to be aboard entered quarantine on January 23 to reduce their exposure to pathogens. This period typically starts 14 days before launch, although other hardware tests remain for NASA as the agency aims to verify cryogenic fueling and de-fueling operations as well as launch countdown procedures with the crew’s SLS rocket by February 2. More quarantine details from the NASA release:

The crew begin quarantine in Houston, and if testing continues to go well and activities progress toward a possible launch next month, they will fly to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida about six days ahead of launch. There, the Artemis II crew will live in the astronaut crew quarters inside the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building, before launch day. During quarantine, the crew can continue regular contact with friends, family, and colleagues who are able to observe quarantine guidelines, and will avoid public places, wear masks, and maintain distance from others they come into contact with as they continue their final training activities. Those training activities will continue in the days ahead with mission simulations and medical checkouts.

An interesting, related tangent to this is the article ‘Defending against hypothetical moon life during Apollo 11’, where Georgia Ray lays down the story of how concerns about two-way biological contamination between Earth and space objects vis-à-vis the Apollo missions led to the birth of planetary protection as a field and set of norms.

From 1959, concern over back contamination risk was extremely niche. By 1966, mitigation of back contamination risk had become a requirement for the entire moon landing mission. How did this happen? In 1957, Sputnik launched, and the USA became very aware that it was losing the space race. Also in 1957, an American biology professor named Joshua Lederberg was talking with a British biologist, J. B. S. Haldane about the possibility of the USSR setting off a nuclear weapon on the moon as a show of force. While this would be bad for US morale, it would also be terrible for future research on the moon–would there be life up there? A nuke would disturb moon dust and scatter radioactive isotopes all over the moon. It would be impossible to study the moon in its untouched state and might interfere with finding delicate chemical structures that could even relate to the origin of life. Shortly after, Lederberg began pushing the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to avoid taking actions in space that would permanently close off aspects of research.

In the meanwhile, NASA selected 34 volunteers from across 14 countries to track the crew’s Orion spacecraft’s signals during the mission, an increase from 10 volunteers who tracked Artemis I. The Artemis II trackers comprise space agencies, companies, universities, communities, and even individuals. Notably, the Canadian and German space agencies are on the list, as is Intuitive Machines which hopes to build its own lunar communications network. NASA will evaluate the tracking data shared by these volunteers against the canonical data to validate their abilities for potential use in future missions. From the release:

These volunteers will submit their data to NASA for analysis, helping the agency better assess the broader aerospace community’s tracking capabilities and identify ways to augment future Moon and Mars mission support. There are no funds exchanged as a part of this collaborative effort. This initiative builds on a previous effort in which 10 volunteers successfully tracked the Orion spacecraft during Artemis I in 2022. That campaign produced valuable data and lessons learned, including implementation, formatting, and data quality variations for Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems, which develops communications and data standards for spaceflight. To address these findings, SCaN now requires that all tracking data submitted for Artemis II comply with its data system standards.

A diagram showing major elements of the Ranger spacecraft. Image: NASA

NASA also announced that the Artemis II Orion spacecraft will carry several mementos, two of which stood out to me:

Orion also will carry a copy of a 4-by-5-inch negative of a photo from the Ranger 7 mission, the first US mission to successfully make contact with the lunar surface. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California managed the Ranger series of spacecraft, built to help identify safe Moon landing sites for Apollo astronauts.

On Artemis I, a variety of tree seeds flew and were distributed to educational organizations and teachers after the mission, following in the footsteps of tree seeds flown aboard the Apollo 14 mission sprouted into “Moon Trees” after being returned to Earth. The seeds have since taken root at 236 locations across the US to become their own Artemis I Moon Trees. Soil samples collected from the base of established Artemis I Moon Trees planted at NASA’s 10 centers will fly aboard Artemis II, representing the full cycle of exploration: launch, flight, growth, and return to space again. The CSA (Canadian Space Agency) will fly various tree seeds in the kit with the intention of distributing them after the mission.

More Moon

As part of a broader move within the planetary science arm of NASA, the agency announced that it will cease funding and support for the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) starting May alongside other such formal community planetary science groups spread US-wide. LEAG helped NASA forge and shape its Moon exploration objectives with scientific, technical, commercial, and operational analysis.
As expected, Blue Origin’s first robotic Moon lander called Mark I will not launch this quarter. The company announced last week that it completed the spacecraft assembly, and has dispatched the Moonbound vehicle over sea to NASA’s Johnson Space Center where it will undergo space environmental tests. Considering that Mark I aims to land on the Moon’s south pole, the launch will take place only later this year when the landing site will have access to maximum sunlight.

NASA has selected three scientific payloads to be delivered to the Moon on as-yet-unselected CLPS landers during 2028 or later. These payload suites, intended to study the nature of the Moon’s regolith, interior, and radiation environment respectively, are agnostic to specific locations and therefore can be sent on any lander that is otherwise compatible in terms of mass, volume, power, and other operational requirements.
NASA replaced a faulty oxidizer valve actuator on an RS-25 engine—which was removed from the Artemis II SLS rocket—and retested and qualified it on January 22 to power the SLS rocket for the future Artemis IV mission.

Hot fire test of an RS-25 engine at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi on January 22. Image: NASA / Chris Russell

Many thanks to Astrolab and Subha Comandur 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:

Support Moon Monday 🌙

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Publicly sharing my poetry booklet’s downloads & sales stats

Jatan Mehta — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 20:55:43 +0530

One of my kind readers sent this picture after getting a copy of my poetry pamphlet ^_^

It’s been two months since I released Seven uni-verses as a celebratory poetry booklet on humanity’s exploration of space. Some friends and readers have been curious about how it has fared, especially considering my unusual open access approach that also rejects traditional publishing norms. And so for public curiosity as well as for transparency on this experiment, I share below how many times my booklet has been downloaded and/or ordered as of January 20. Note that these numbers represent the lower limit since tracking every single copy of a globally available multi-format and multi-platform book is impossible.

My own website: 1206
Ebook platforms: 172
Paperback: 61
Audiobook: 89
Internet Archive & Libraries: 54

So that’s about 1600 copies in total. I don’t know how you’d interpret these numbers but personally I’m happy with it, especially when considering my no-nonsense approach to publishing as an indie author:

The booklet is self-published, meaning there were no external publisher payments or promotions. Tools-wise, I used a combination of Apple Pages, isbn.gov.in, IngramSpark, Draft2Digital, Pothi, Google Play Books, Internet Archive, and several more services. These turned out to be the right ones for me only after trying too many services. You’re welcome.
I did not do any paid ads or sponsored placements anywhere.
There were only a couple of announcements on my blog & newsletter, which gladly drove most of the downloads & sales as intended—a good sign for future booklets I want to publish.
I did do a few social media posts (ugh) but which very gladly did not bear much fruit. Instead, sharing the news directly with many friends I thought might be interested worked better and led to interesting conversations as well. I like this because it’s not as much promoting as it’s sharing and answering the curiosities of people about the publishing process.
I vehemently avoided exclusive distribution of my booklet on any platform, especially Amazon, even if it meant lower visibility. I care more about diverse global access and my long-term independence as a writer. Among other issues, going Amazon-exclusive would’ve meant I wouldn’t be able to provide my booklet digitally for free at all.
I did not ask any media outlet, journalist, or creator to talk about my booklet, especially out of editorial ethical considerations. Obviously, I did not approach any stupid influencers either; this one doesn’t need any considerations.
Marketing departments of some publishing platforms I used either reached out or emailed lengthy ads to ask me to promote my booklet in various paid ways, so as to upsell, all of which I rejected. I’d be more interested if they simply did organic shares of some sort for all authors using their platform by default.
Lastly, I did not promote the booklet at any bookstore with an author event or such. Although this isn’t an inorganic method, and so I’d actually love to engage with real readers at some point if a store is genuinely interested.

Of all the pictures readers have sent of my poetry booklet, my personal favorite is people reading my verses on e-paper devices like the Kindle. 🤓

If you’re one of the people who has read my verses, thank you. I’d certainly like it if you wished to share your organic thoughts about the poems on any book platform, like this review on Goodreads. Or best, blog about it. If you’ve not yet picked up a copy of my space poetry, you can get one here:

Get Seven uni-verses ✨

It’s free digitally and priced minimally in print because I wanted my verses to be globally accessible. As such, I don’t make money from any sales directly and instead rely on reader donations to support all my space writing.

Meme: Jatan Mehta

What’s next?

Figuring out how to independently publish my poetry on platforms globally in multiple formats with non-exclusive open access has laid a solid logistical foundation for me to publish future booklets & books for public good. These numbers will now help me streamline my publishing process. I’m very excited for this next phase of my career: Merge the worlds of blogs & books to bring affordable and accessible writing on important but undercovered space exploration themes to people all around the world. I aim to publish at least one booklet later this year for which you can get notified via Email or RSS.

If you value my open access approach to globally publishing my poetry, articles, and future booklets, kindly directly support independent writing & journalism as a reader:

Support my work 🌙

- Jatan 🌙

Thanks for using RSS the best.

The next 10 years in space

Jatan Mehta — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 18:57:44 +0530

On January 7, The Orbital Index (a Moon Monday sponsor) published a sweeping overview of what to expect and track over the next 10 years in space globally. The last section aptly captures the point that our pursuit of space should not and cannot be mutually exclusive with caring for Earth:

Space and Earth: the decade ahead. The next decade is vanishingly small on the timescale of planets, but it is likely to be a critical one for humanity, with space playing its own crucial role. And while the current US administration is pushing to cut Earth Science programs, personnel, and missions (both in development and operational; c.f. recent NCAR shutdown news), that doesn’t change the fact that modern climate science emerged in part from the truly global vantage point provided by our ability to put people, cameras, and sensors in orbit. While budgets are under fire at NASA/NOAA/USGS/etc, much of the rest of the world seems to understand that this work remains existential. ESA has more Earth Science missions in development and operation than ever before (we’re particularly excited for FORUM, Copernicus CO2M, and FLEX), JAXA is staying the course on its own small set of missions (ISS-hosted MOLI and PMM), China is beginning to add its version of Earth Science missions (TanSat-2 and DQ-2), and multiple smaller nations have missions in progress (Canada’s WildFireSat, Norway’s AOS-P, and South Korea’s recently launched KOMPSAT-7). These missions and the data they’ll produce are critical, as humanity is blowing past its +1.5 ºC warming limit after a decade of record average global temperatures and mounting climate-induced disasters. These realities firmly place us in uncharted territory; we don’t know how quickly or how drastically climate patterns will shift as a result, particularly given our limited understanding of climate tipping points that will likely accelerate warming (if you like board games, Daybreak is fun and our favorite that includes tipping points). Our ability to mitigate atmospheric methane and its sources (leaks, flaring, etc.); understand cloud behavior at particle, single-cloud, and weather system scale; measure carbon cycle components like biomass; and, monitor resilience metrics like surface temperature, moisture levels, and wildfires will only grow in importance as humanity comes face-to-face with its most daunting self-inflicted problem to date (AI may very well be next). As we’ve shared before (c.f. Issue № 48), here at Orbital Index we’re unabashedly in support of treating climate change as the massive problem and opportunity that it is and of focusing humanity’s substantial ability to produce, problem-solve, and build on securing a livable and pleasant future—one where we can turn our focus toward the stars without ignoring existential threats at home.

Edition #350 was also The Orbital Index’s last one.

Some of my readers know that Moon Monday was partly inspired by The Orbital Index, a fact I’m proud of because the Index has been a unique resource to track global space activities and not just US ones. In a world where neither traditional media nor social media channels tend to provide linked citations—much less external or even canonical ones—the Index being link-heavy made it one of the few of such archival value. And, to produce the lengthy editions for seven whole years is remarkable. I know firsthand how hard it is to consistently show up every Monday with something useful and thoughtful for thousands in the industry. Kudos and thank you to Andrew Cantino⁩ and ⁨Ben Lachman⁩—as well as contributors like Sarajane—for pulling it off all this while to provide a quality, free resource to Earth. Even as their last edition links to several space sources to follow, it’s a fact that the specific value provided by the Index is now a vacuum.

- Jatan 🌙

Thanks for using RSS the best.

Moon Monday #258: Tests China will conduct this year in prep towards landing humans on Luna

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 16:47:40 +0530

In 2025, China progressed on many elements which will help the country land humans on the Moon by 2030, notably including successful tests of the launchpad escape system, lander propulsion, and the rocket booster core stage. This year, China aims to complete testing several more aspects, as outlined by the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA):

Perform integrated testing of the Lanyue lunar lander systems.
- Note: This would very likely include tests of the propulsion module. As Ling Xin previously reported, Lanyue comprises a crewed lander and an attached heavy propulsion module. It’s the latter which will initiate lunar descent and shave off the bulk of the combined craft’s orbital velocity. When the crew reaches a few kilometers above the lunar surface, the propulsion module will jettison from the lander, thereby lightening the load for the final landing and touchdown of the crew.
Conduct another abort test of China’s next-generation Mengzhou crew capsule, this time to verify successful working of safety mechanisms during the period of maximum aerodynamic pressure on the craft.
- Note: Mengzhou flights aim to carry all future taikonauts to Earth orbit starting later this year, replacing the now old design of Shenzhou. A lunar variant of Mengzhou called ‘Mengzhou Y’ will carry astronauts to lunar orbit and dock with the Lanyue lander system so Lanyue can then land crew.
Launch low-altitude flights of the Long March 10A rocket, clearing the way for lofting an uncrewed flight of Mengzhou to China’s Tiangong space station so as to prove the readiness of the new rocket and capsule.
- Note: The lunar Mengzhou Y will incorporate lessons and tweaks from these tests and mission before its first uncrewed flight sometime by 2029.
Complete ground infrastructure for launch, tracking, and landing of Long March 10A boosters.

High-level diagram of the typical architecture to be employed for China’s crewed Moon landing missions. Image: Kaynouky

Moreover, as Jack Congram reported recently, work on lunar spacesuits called Wangyu will progress as well:

CMSA aims to conduct comprehensive testing of the Wangyu lunar spacesuit design, including verifying its structural integrity and functioning—like that of thermal control and electrical systems—inside Moon-simulating facilities. Engineers then hope to arrive at the final suit prototype by the end of this year.

At some unspecified point, there are also tests expected of other crewed lunar elements:

A prototype fairing separation test of the lunar Long March 10 rocket.
Verification of payload development schedules, and subsequent selection of payloads for the first crewed Moon landing mission based on the previously sought proposals.

Of course, there will be many more tests across various aspects but these are all the specific ones we know of. It would be interesting to see how many of these milestones China accomplishes by the end of this year as the country takes on a very ambitious and fast-paced schedule for landing humans on the Moon by 2030. In any case, China’s lapses would not be as long as that of Artemis barring an unexpected major failure or technical holdup. It will be great to watch a second nation from Earth land humans on Luna. 🌙

Please tell me your Moon time

A three-stage concept of developing a cislunar navigation and communications constellation proposed by Chinese researchers. Image: SCMP

In 2025, China cemented and further advanced its lead in building a lunar communications and navigation network, including demonstrating automated navigation at the Moon, and achieving the first ever daytime Earth-Moon laser distance measurements with a retroreflector on a lunar orbiter. As lunar activity increases globally as well as from China itself towards its Moonbase plans, it’s becoming increasingly important to coordinate time differences between lunar spacecraft and Earth to operate not just safely but synergistically. To that end, Chinese researchers have released a first-of-its-kind software package to enable engineers to coordinate Moon and Earth times for multiple lunar missions in an integrated manner. The authors consider the timing accuracy of this initial work to be sufficient for coordinating spacecraft over the next decade, and note that improvements will follow. What’s commendable is that the software is public on GitHub, the paper describing the work and methodology open access, and the project is being funded by the Chinese government institutions of CAS and NSFC.

More Moon

NASA’s Artemis II SLS rocket and integrated Orion spacecraft at Launch Complex 39B in Florida, with a truck nearby for scale. Image: NASA / Keegan Barber

As NASA targets a Q1 launch for the Artemis II mission to fly four astronauts around the Moon and back, on January 17 the agency transported the mission’s mammoth SLS rocket from the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to the complex’s Launchpad 39B. The ~6.5-kilometer journey took almost 12 hours. Next in the series of the final set of pre-launch tests, NASA aims to verify cryogenic fueling and de-fueling operations as well as launch countdown procedures for the rocket by February 2. If all goes well, we would then see crew put on their spacesuits and enter Orion on the pad for a countdown demonstration test in tandem with ground teams to verify mission procedures.
In the meanwhile, NASA has released the Artemis II press kit. CSA’s Artemis II page is also pretty good.
ESA led a realistic communications test at their Moon-simulating LUNA facility in Germany, emulating messages between an astronaut, various lunar elements, and mission control to lay the groundwork for planning future missions. In the meanwhile, Italian researchers have identified the country’s Mount Etna’s volcanic material to be remarkably similar to Apollo 14 samples, making the place a good training ground for future astronauts and payload tests.

On January 11, Portugal became the 30th European country to sign the US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration.
JAXA has tentatively selected ispace Japan to demonstrate a precision landing on the Moon’s south pole later this decade with aid from communications relay satellites in lunar orbit. This development is interesting because JAXA has already achieved a precision robotic landing with the SLIM mission in 2024 without needing any external spacecraft. The move therefore denotes other considerations such as cost and abstracting out the advanced capability to a persistent infrastructure layer at the Moon so every lander can utilize it.

Articles on Japan’s Moon missions

Flight model of the SLIM Moon lander at the Spacecraft and Fairing Assembly Building at Japan’s Tanegashima launch complex. Image: JAXA

Many thanks to Catalyx Space and Adithya Kothandhapani 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:

Support Moon Monday 🌙

- Jatan 🌙

Thanks for using RSS the best.

Moon Monday #257: NASA preps to send astronauts to Luna

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 18:08:48 +0530

Artemis updates galore

Three of four Artemis II astronauts are seen here practicing entering their Orion spacecraft for a pre-launch countdown test on December 20, 2025. Image: NASA / Joel Kowsky

The US Senate voted and confirmed Jared Isaacman as NASA’s administrator on December 17, 2025, closing a long drawn process of having the entrepreneur, pilot, astronaut, and Trump’s original but later withdrawn nominee be the person leading NASA.
In parallel, the US White House issued an Executive Order, effectively yet another national policy directive from the country, to try landing humans on the Moon before China. In 2025, due to three back-to-back failures of SpaceX Starship, an explosion during testing, and another booster lost, NASA’s long road to putting humans on the Moon significantly slowed down, making Lunar Starship the pacing item. As such, the executive order formally pushes the Artemis III crewed lunar landing target from 2027 to 2028, hoping that the reopening of the mission’s contract for accelerated proposals—which was done last year by Isaacman’s predecessor Sean Duffy as Acting Administrator—would help the US achieve the feat before the next Presidential elections more so than before China lands humans on Luna. The optimistic executive order also calls for the US to work towards a “permanent lunar outpost by 2030”, and continues the decision to reinvest in nuclear power on the Moon.
NASA is targeting a Q1 launch this year to fly four Artemis II astronauts around the Moon and back. The agency is executing the final string of tests only after the successes of which can it safely liftoff the SLS rocket carrying the crew’s Orion spacecraft. The latest of these tests involved the crew donning their spacesuits and entering Orion as a pre-launch countdown demonstration test in tandem with ground teams to verify mission procedures. Next up, NASA is preparing to roll out the SLS rocket from the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to the complex’s Launchpad 39B no earlier than January 17. The agency also identified and fixed some problems in the process:

During final checkouts before rollout, technicians found a cable involved in the flight termination system was bent out of specifications. Teams are replacing it and will test the new cable over the weekend. Additionally, a valve associated with Orion’s hatch pressurization exhibited issues leading up to a Dec. 20 countdown demonstration test. On Jan. 5, the team successfully replaced and tested it. Engineers also worked to resolve leaky ground support hardware required to load gaseous oxygen into Orion for breathing air.

The Artemis I Orion spacecraft lost big chunks of its heat shield material in several places during atmospheric reentry on Earth. Some of its bolts also melted and eroded. Image: NASA / OIG

In the meanwhile, Isaacman’s first priority after becoming the NASA administrator has been to review the Orion capsule’s heat shield and its effectiveness in saving the lives of Artemis II astronauts during atmospheric reentry on Earth at the end of the mission. Previously, two independent investigations by NASA analyzed the unexpected damage caused to Orion’s shield during reentry in 2022 for the uncrewed Artemis I Moon mission. The agency concluded that the heat shield’s ablative Avcoat material was not porous enough to vent and dissipate hot gas buildup during its bounced atmospheric reentry, which led to cracks and loss of entire chunks. NASA then decided to change Orion’s reentry profile for Artemis II to manage the heat buildup, deeming it a safe measure for astronauts. Following the latest shield review led by Isaacman, wherein two specific reporters were (preferentially?) allowed to attend, NASA has decided to continue with the changed reentry profile proposal. Eric Berger, one of the two reporters with access to the meeting, noted the worst case scenario as follows:

The NASA engineers wanted to understand what would happen if large chunks of the heat shield were stripped away entirely from the composite base of Orion. So they subjected this base material to high energies for periods of 10 seconds up to 10 minutes, which is longer than the period of heating Artemis II will experience during reentry. What they found is that, in the event of such a failure, the structure of Orion would remain solid, the crew would be safe within, and the vehicle could still land in a water-tight manner in the Pacific Ocean.

Not all experts seated in the meeting are convinced, with one publicly citing limitations of the tools used for said analyses. Here’s hoping the Artemis II astronauts fly and get back to Earth safely.

On the other hand, there’s poignant irony in unequivocally debating so much about saving the lives of astronauts but not of those on the ground too, including not only ensuring protective measures for launch teams but also looking out for the safety of passengers in flight against rocket debris, engineers on ground testing hardware, and simply caring about lives of people at large. The pursuit of space does not place us above human life.

More mission updates

Structural models of Firefly’s Blue Ghost 2 lander and orbiter stacked at JPL. Image: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Firefly

US-based Firefly Aerospace has tested and qualified through NASA a structural model of its upcoming second Blue Ghost CLPS Mooncraft for launch vibrations and acoustic stress at JPL’s Environmental Test Laboratory.

A structural qualification model of the full stack was clamped to a “shaker table” inside a clean room at JPL and repeatedly rattled in three directions while hundreds of sensors monitored the rapid movement. Then, inside a separate acoustic testing chamber, giant horns blared at it from openings built into the room’s 16-inch-thick (41-centimeter-thick) concrete walls. The horns use compressed nitrogen gas to pummel spacecraft with up to 153 decibels, noise loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss in a human.

Relatedly, the company announced recently that the mission’s lander will host Volta Space’s CSA-funded wireless power receiver aboard. It’s a technology demonstrator ahead of building receivers for a planned lunar power network and service called LightGrid. It’s unclear when will Firefly launch in 2026 since the spacecraft stack’s flight model hasn’t been built yet.
Slow but some progress continues on the upcoming NASA-led Gateway lunar orbital habitat as the agency has shared that it successfully tested powering on the station’s critical Power and Propulsion Element at some unspecified time last year. This element’s solar-electric propulsion system will not only maneuver and attitude-control the Gateway but also provide power and communications for astronauts aboard the station. Gateway’s initiating launch is targeted around 2028.
Jack Congram reports that the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) trained 28 taikonauts in cave training exercises in Wulong, Chongqing last month to mentally prepare them for upcoming crewed missions, which are aimed to begin from the end of this decade. Wu Bin, the deputy chief designer of astronaut systems at the China Astronautic Scientific Research and Training Center (CARTC), stated the training’s rationale as follows for an official state release:

The training was designed to sharpen astronauts’ capabilities in hazard response, autonomous operation, teamwork, emergency decision making and scientific survey, as well as to improve physical endurance and mental toughness in extreme environments. It was also a comprehensive evaluation of them.

Taikonauts coordinating to carry a scientific sample upward through the cave. Image: CNSA / CMSA / CARTC

More Moon

US-based Intuitive Machines and Europe-based Leonardo & Telespazio have agreed to have interoperability between their future communications and navigation orbiters, a welcome move since Moon missions can be cheaper, safer, and better if more countries share navigation and timing infrastructure.
NASA is soliciting industry-wide feedback for considering a v2 of its CLPS program.
Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor) is hiring a Development Director to support the non-profit’s building of policy infrastructure blocks, like the Lunar Ledger, for peaceful and cooperative global exploration of the Moon.

Many thanks to Open Lunar Foundation and Adithya Kothandhapani 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:

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Coverage of India’s exploration of Mars

Jatan Mehta — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 19:30:51 +0530

Global view of Mars from the Mangalyaan spacecraft, captured on October 4, 2014. Image: ISRO / Emily Lakdawalla

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All the rovers heading to the Moon over the next 10 years | Moon Monday #256

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 16:57:34 +0530

As lunar exploration ramps up worldwide, our celestial companion is slated to be explored by increasingly advanced rovers of all sorts over the next 10 years. Not all of them will be successful, and so the reason for this post is not just to garner excitement about the possibilities of near future lunar exploration but also to archive in one place the promises being made so we can assess them in the future instead of only reporting, sharing, and amplifying grand plans. The same rationale is why I do a year-end review of global lunar activities: to see what we actually achieved and what we did not.

Alright, with that in mind, here’s a comprehensive and contextualized list of upcoming lunar rovers & mobile robots from around the world, categorized as small, sophisticated, and astronaut-supporting. To learn more about any rover, click its link—that’s what the Web is for. :)

Small but mighty

Illustration of Firefly’s Blue Ghost 2 lander and UAE’s Rashid 2 rover on the Moon’s farside. Image: Firefly

Building on the success of its first Moon landing, US-based Firefly’s next three lunar landers, all part of NASA’s CLPS program, will carry rovers. The second Firefly lander will carry UAE’s Rashid 2 rover to the Moon’s farside whereas the third lander will deploy Honeybee Robotics’ first planetary rover on one of the two Gruithuisen Domes, a unique volcanic site on the lunar nearside. Firefly’s fourth lander, heading to the lunar south pole, will carry a versatile CubeRover from US-based Astrobotic called Moonranger and Canada’s first lunar rover through CSA. NASA has also awarded future contracts for Astrobotic CubeRovers to demonstrate power transmission and lunar night survival.
Intuitive Machines’ third Moon landing attempt will be in the swirl of Reiner Gamma in 2026. The region has a weak local magnetic field, possibly a remnant from the time the Moon had a global magnetic field. The mission’s primary payload suite is Lunar Vertex, a collection of spectrometers and magnetometers on the lander and a rover to study the swirl’s composition and map the strength & direction of magnetic fields on the surface. This will shape our understanding of the Moon’s magnetic evolution and also help us better understand the effects of solar wind and bombarding micrometeorites on planetary bodies across our Solar System. The Intuitive lander will also deploy three shoebox-sized CADRE rovers by NASA. The rovers will autonomously navigate the landed region to demonstrate collectively better mapping it than a single rover would. The rovers will have multistatic ground penetrating radars to create 3D images of the subsurface structure up to 10 meters deep.
Later on, ispace US’ first CLPS mission through Draper Laboratory is targeting landing on the Moon’s farside in 2027, carrying NASA payloads onboard as well as a rover from ispace Europe.
China’s Chang’e 8 lander, targeting a 2028 launch, will deploy Pakistan’s first rover and two small mobile bots from private Chinese company STAR.VISION. The latter is being developed in collaboration with universities from China and Turkey. This would be the first payload from a Chinese company flying on a Chang’e spacecraft.
NASA has announced that on the future crewed Artemis IV Moon landing mission, the astronauts will also deploy a rover made by Lunar Outpost, which will study lunar dust and surface plasma.
Australia’s first lunar rover called Roo-ver—made with involvement from US-based Lunar Outpost—will launch by 2030 on an as-yet-unidentified CLPS lander to explore the Moon’s south pole for water ice.
An as-yet-unspecified CLPS rover is intended to study the unique mound-like volcanic feature of Ina on the Moon by the end of this decade as well.
South Korea’s first Moon lander plans to deploy a rover on the Moon by 2032 though details are unavailable at the moment. The country’s interest is certainly substantial though since South Korea is transforming its former mining site of Taebaek into a testing ground for advanced mobile lunar exploration technologies, owing to the mine’s environmental resemblance to the darkness, coldness, and ruggedness of the Moon’s south pole.

Sophisticated

A hopper will separate from the Chang’e 7 lander to directly explore permanently shadowed regions and cold traps on the Moon’s south pole which likely host water ice. Images: CNSA / CCTV

Launching this year, China’s Chang’e 7 mission will have a rover sporting an intended eight-year lifespan and a panoramic camera, a Raman spectrometer, a ground penetrating radar, a mass spectrometer, and a magnetometer to explore the Moon’s south pole and map water ice. The Chang’e 7 lander will also deploy a small hopper with shock absorbing legs. It will jump into nearby permanently shadowed areas for its onboard Lunar Water Molecular Analyzer (LWMA) to detect water ice and other volatile resources like ammonia. Chang’e 7 will be China’s first attempt to gain such a ground truth understanding of the accessibility, movement, and storage of surface and near-surface water ice on the Moon’s poles, which is crucial to appropriately plan sustained robotic as well as crewed lunar exploration. Virtually all recent missions funded by NASA have failed to advance on this goal despite it being the foundational to the US Artemis program.
Two years after Chang’e 7, the Chang’e 8 lander will deploy a rover and a dextrous mobile robot to characterize with many instruments the lunar south polar geology and environment. The dextrous robot will melt lunar soil, make 3D-printed parts and bricks from it, and use those to assemble basic structures. That’s a fantastic sounding first demonstration of in-situ utilization of lunar resources. The robot will also fetch rock and soil samples for the lander’s spectrometers to determine their chemical composition, which will likely include water ice. CNSA might leave some intriguing samples on the Moon for future missions to retrieve them and bring them to Earth.
Astrobotic’s large Griffin lander aims to land on the Moon’s south pole as part of NASA CLPS later this year. It will deploy the FLIP rover by Astrolab (a Moon Monday sponsor), which got manifested last year after NASA decided not to fly the critical VIPER rover for studying water ice aboard Griffin. NASA has now tentatively chosen Blue Origin’s second Mark I lander to hopefully fly VIPER in 2027.

The joint Indo-Japanese LUPEX lunar rover plans to carry instruments from multiple space countries. Image: JAXA / M. Ohtake, et al.

The joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX rover mission later this decade plans to drill and analyze water ice on the Moon’s south pole. The mission will bring a giant leap in lunar capabilities for both ISRO and JAXA, and it can provide NASA with critical data that is currently missing in Artemis planning.
As an aside, ispace’s European subsidiary led team won a ~€2.7 million ESA contract to collaborate with the agency on the MAGPIE rover mission to study lunar polar water ice and other such volatiles. The mission is not official yet.

Astronaut support

Desired capabilities of the upcoming Artemis Lunar Terrain Vehicle for astronauts. Image: NASA

NASA plans to have a competitively sourced, cutting-edge Lunar Terrain Vehicle being used by Artemis astronauts across missions starting at the end of this decade. It will be a giant leap in roving range, terrain handling, and lift capacity over the Apollo rover.
China is progressing with prototypes of a competitively sourced crewed rover to be used during the country’s ambitious first human Moon landing by 2030.
JAXA will provide NASA with an even more advanced rover next decade, which will be pressurized, enabling astronauts to spend weeks in it. In return, NASA has agreed to land two Japanese astronauts on the Moon.
CSA wants in on that strategy too. The agency has, so far, awarded initial study contracts totaling $10.6 million to three companies—Canadensys, MDA Space, and Mission Control—towards developing a “Lunar Utility Vehicle” (LUV). This kickstarted Canada’s intent from 2023 to invest $1.2 billion over 13 years to develop an assistance rover for future Artemis astronauts. Canada hopes that just like how contributing their Canadarm3 robotics servicing system to the upcoming NASA-led Gateway lunar orbital habitat bagged seats for their astronauts on circumlunar Artemis missions, contributing a large, durable LUV rover for Artemis surface missions will enable a Canadian to walk on the Moon.
While not a rover, Italy’s 15,000-kilogram astronaut habitat module being made for Artemis Basecamp usage next decade will have wheels so it can reposition itself as needed on the dynamically lit lunar polar surface.

So that was a comprehensive look at all the rovers promising to explore the Moon over the next 10 years. I wrote it for you, not social media or SEO, and so if you enjoyed my coverage, please share it with other space buffs by grabbing this link.

Many thanks to The Orbital Index and Gurbir Singh 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:

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Articles on Japan’s Moon missions

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 14:42:01 +0530

Flight model of the SLIM Moon lander at the Spacecraft and Fairing Assembly Building at Japan’s Tanegashima launch complex. Image: JAXA

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Poem: The dawn of your light

Jatan Mehta — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 16:51:48 +0530

Like the dawn of the blaze
of a lander over the grays
touches your light
and spans the open lunar sky

A descent energetic yet graceful
methodical and careful
Spawned from the blue marble verse
you bring the best in us.

Shadow of Firefly’s Blue Ghost Moon lander performing its final descent before touching down on the Moon. Our Earth adorns the sky. Image: Blue Ghost landing video

Poem notes: I’ve had the privilege and pleasure of working with amazing editors, bosses, and managers over my space writing career across organizations and media publications worldwide. I wrote this poem recently to appreciate someone I’ve worked with and learnt from last year. Though the gratitude in my verses is also meant for others who have shaped me and my words. :)

If you liked this space poetry of mine, read Seven uni-verses, my globally published poetry pamphlet.

Seven uni-verses (booklet)

By Jatan Mehta. Poetry on all that space evokes.

About & Read →

- Jatan 🌙

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Achievements and shortfalls in global lunar exploration in 2025

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 16:34:30 +0530

Like last year’s overview of a happening 2024 in global lunar exploration, I present to you a comprehensive, curated, and contextualized linked rundown of lunar technology and science developments across 2025, organized by country or region. There is also a section on progressive cooperative & collaborative international efforts—because these are the gems we need more of—as well as a section discussing shortcomings in the same. Each linked article in the overview explains the importance of that development, and I’ve made a conscious effort to highlight events and trends that actually happened instead of amplifying speculative coverage of upcoming events that may or may not be as successful and/or as timely as they’re being touted and reported to be.

Note: Moon Monday will continue in 2026 after my usual year-end break. A warm thank you for reading and supporting my labor of lunar love through the year, and to those who read—and reviewed!—my poetry booklet on humanity’s exploration of the cosmos. I published it globally in multiple formats as open access to celebrate 5 years, 250 editions, and 10,000 subscribers of Moon Monday, and to lay the foundation for the next phase of my space writing: Merge the worlds of blogs and books 🌙

Alright, let’s dive into our worldwide lunar tour. If someone asks you what’s happening at the Moon, say all of this is. When you see this global activity in one place, the scale of the world’s march to explore Luna really hits home. 🌏

China

Chinese researchers published a volcano of novel lunar science results based on freshly fetched Chang’e 6 Moon samples, and presented it at a symposium. These findings have changed our understanding of our Moon’s origin and evolution, and have helped scientists globally identify new, specific measurements future missions should make for better outcomes.
China also announced the first set of international organizations whose proposals were selected to study unique lunar samples fetched to Earth by CNSA’s Chang’e 5 mission in 2020. And the nation displayed Chang’e samples at the United Nations headquarters for the first time.
China progressed on many elements which will help it land humans on the Moon by 2030, notably including successful tests of the launchpad escape system, lander propulsion, and the rocket booster core stage.
The country cemented and further advanced its lead in building a lunar communications and navigation network, demonstrated automated navigation at the Moon, and achieved the first ever daytime Earth-Moon laser distance measurements with a retroreflector on a lunar orbiter.
China progressed well in preparations towards the launch of its Chang’e 7 mission to the Moon’s south pole in the second half of next year as planned to study water ice and other volatile resources.
Building on Chang’e 7’s international cooperation, CNSA announced more international payloads that will be onboard the Chang’e 8 mission to further explore the Moon’s south pole starting 2028.

The US

The Blue Ghost lander’s shadow standing tall on the Moon, lying under a black sky with our Earth hanging by the distance; Inset left: Blue Ghost with its X-band antenna deployed; Inset right: The Blue Ghost lander on Earth prior to launch. Images: Firefly

With rigor and abundant caution, Firefly’s Blue Ghost spacecraft part of NASA’s CLPS program brought the first true soft landing for the US in the 21st century, involving operations of its science & technology payloads, a precision landing, the first GPS/GNSS lock on the Moon, and a stunning solar eclipse capture. Firefly also won its fourth CLPS Moon landing contract, which will deliver three NASA-funded instruments as well as two rovers to the Moon’s south pole end of decade.
In March, Intuitive Machines’ second CLPS craft hard-landed on the Moon’s south pole and came to rest on its side, which led to the mission being unsuccessful across all of NASA’s primary goals of studying local water ice.
NASA completed a majority of the preparations and safety improvements planned this year to fly four Artemis II astronauts around the Moon and back sometime early next year.
Due to three back-to-back failures of SpaceX Starship, an explosion during testing, and another booster lost, NASA’s long road to putting humans on the Moon with Artemis III significantly slowed down. This led NASA’s Acting Administrator Sean Duffy to reopen the landing contract for accelerated proposals. Duffy also named Amit Kshatriya as the agency’s new Associate Administrator to accelerate Artemis III. Kshatriya previously led NASA’s Moon to Mars Program Office for planning and implementing Artemis missions.
In the meanwhile, Blue Origin’s successful launch of its New Glenn rocket in January followed by another in November finally opened up a second line of pursuit for NASA to send lunar astronauts vis-à-vis Blue Moon. Blue Origin aims to launch its first robotic Blue Moon ‘Mark I’ lander next year as testing and design validations ahead of crewed flights. Based on that, NASA tentatively chose Blue’s second Mark I lander flight to carry the agency’s VIPER rover, whose mission to study polar water ice has been critical yet deprioritized.
The Trump administration’s budget request for NASA for FY 2026 proposed a historic ~25% cut while the agency went a whole year without an official Administrator. Notably, the Moon-related proposals of the budget and its evaluations do nothing to address the fact that the US has been failing to explore lunar water as the principal goal of Artemis.
After nearly six months of trying to establish communications with the Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft post its February launch, NASA declared an end to the rescue efforts and the mission. The agency-funded Trailblazer was supposed to provide scientists with unprecedented, high-resolution global orbital maps of the amount, distribution, and state of lunar water.
In February, Blue Origin simulated two minutes of lunar gravity inside the New Shepard crew capsule. NASA funded this project, and tested 17 lunar-relevant payloads onboard. As such, NASA continues leveraging New Shepard’s suborbital flights to help verify and refine new lunar technologies at relatively low costs before they can be sent to the Moon.
NASA un-nuked its decision to not use nuclear power on the Moon. Relatedly, Zeno Power raised $50 million, a major chunk of which will go towards developing and demonstrating the company’s nuclear electric power system on the Moon for NASA by 2027.

India

Graphic: Jatan Mehta | Individual images of the LVM3 rocket, the two Chandrayaan 4 spacecraft stacks, and the Moon’s south pole: ISRO / NASA / GSFC / Timothy McClanahan / LOLA

Results from the thermal probe experiment on India’s Chandrayaan 3 lander expanded the possible locations for finding water ice beyond the Moon’s poles, thereby benefiting future scouting missions. There are also several notable outcomes from other instruments on the lander.
The Chandrayaan 3 rover may or may not have stumbled upon the Moon’s mantle material when studying the composition of the local lunar soil using its X-ray spectrometer.
ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter helped international researchers produce a galore of science results, notably including continued characterization of the lunar poles using its advanced radar to map potential water ice deposits and gauge surface roughness, densities, and porosities. The orbiter also helped scientists better understand the Sun’s activity and how it affects the Moon’s exosphere.
ISRO continued development and planning of the ambitious Chandrayaan 4 mission to bring lunar polar samples—albeit at a slower pace than expected.
India finally approved the joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX mission to drill and analyze water ice on the Moon’s south pole. The mission will bring a giant leap in lunar capabilities for both ISRO and JAXA, and it can provide NASA with data critical for Artemis planning currently missing from US missions.
ISRO revealed its eventual crewed Moon mission’s initial architecture.

More Asia-Pacific

Left: ispace Japan’s second Moon lander, named RESILIENCE, at JAXA’s Tsukuba Space Center pre-launch. Also seen integrated into the lander is ispace’s first rover TENACIOUS; Right: Our Earth as imaged by RESILIENCE from lunar orbit. Images: ispace

ispace Japan’s second Moon lander RESILIENCE crashed on the Moon due to performance issues of the laser rangefinder. The outcome underscores the need for resilience in private lunar landing missions through expansive and collaborative testing. ispace notably continued its remarkable transparency from the first failed landing attempt, sharing detailed findings of what went wrong in mere weeks.
In October, Japan successfully demonstrated a cargo delivery to the International Space Station using its next-generation HTV-X spacecraft. A variant of it called HTV-X(G) will deliver astronaut supplies to the upcoming NASA-led Gateway lunar orbital habitat starting 2030.
ispace was selected as part of Japan’s 1-trillion yen “Space Strategy Fund” initiative to develop, launch, and operate a lunar orbiter which will use a terahertz wave sensor system to locate and map water ice deposits on the Moon’s poles. Data from this orbiter will be analyzed in tandem with direct surface and subsurface measurements made by the upcoming joint Indo-Japanese LUPEX mission.
South Korea approved plans made by the country’s newly forged space agency KASA to build a Moon lander by 2032 as part of a broader $500+ million annual investment in indigenous space technologies. South Korea is also transforming the former mining site of Taebaek into a testing ground for advanced mobile lunar exploration technologies, owing to the mine’s environmental resemblance to the darkness, coldness, and ruggedness of the Moon’s south pole.
The Australian Space Agency (ASA) continues funding local companies to build lunar technologies. In February, ASA particularly supported EntX to develop a radioisotope heater unit to enable future landers and rovers to survive frigid lunar nights.

Europe

An ‘astronaut’ and a robot in the Moon-simulating LUNA testbed on Earth. Image: DLR / ESA

ESA started testing instruments, mission concepts, modern astronaut tools, and water ice detection strategies at its new, versatile Moon-simulating LUNA facility in Germany. A simulated habitat module now adjoins LUNA to better test complex mission scenarios wherein humans and robots interact in varied ways for long periods so as to plan future Moonbases.
ispace’s European subsidiary led team won a ~€2.7 million ESA contract to collaborate with the agency on the MAGPIE rover mission to study lunar polar water ice and other such volatiles.
In January, ESA announced a $882 million contract to a European consortium led by Thales Alenia Space for developing the Lunar Descent Element of the agency’s upcoming large Moon lander Argonaut. Launching no earlier than 2031, Argonaut plans to deploy about 2,000 kilograms of infrastructure payloads or astronaut supplies on the Moon with each flight.
The Italian Space Agency (ASI) awarded a preliminary design contract to a group led by Thales Alenia Space to develop a multi-purpose astronaut habitat module which will be part of NASA’s hoped for Artemis Basecamp on the Moon next decade. The 15,000-kilogram module will have wheels so it can reposition itself as needed on the dynamically lit lunar polar surface.

Collaboration and cooperation progress

Zhongmin Wang, Director of international cooperation for China’s lunar and deep space missions, speaking at GLEX 2025 on international cooperation in the Sino-led ILRS Moonbase project. Image: CNSA / DSEL / IAF

The US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration reached 60 signatories.
China hosted an international symposium on lunar samples with the right intent and effort to enhance its planetary science cooperation. China also formally welcomed India to cooperate on Moon missions and the Sino-led ILRS Moonbase project.
- Relatedly, I delivered a talk at a lunar samples symposium in Hong Kong on the Chandrayaan 4 sample return mission and made the case for India and China to exchange lunar samples. 🌜..<>..🌛
Cooperative analog astronaut missions and related training continued worldwide.
ESA and NASA progressed on building technologies for future lunar construction.
An assortment of lunar papers from around the world
- Also see: Our Moon’s wild places and wonderful samples
Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor) launched the Lunar Ledger (Registry) project. The Ledger aims to be a database of global lunar objects and activities to improve mission operator transparency by enhancing information sharing wherever possible.
A great example of asynchronous collaboration: To enable efficient exploration by small lunar rovers, which have limited resources and function under the harsh lunar environment, the Japan-based company JAOPS built a lunar surface simulation suite (here’s a demo video) aided by simulated rover camera and sensor data and past missions. This is helping train rover operators amid real mission control setups. Notably, much of the work is open source on GitHub and also converges open source elements from actors worldwide.

Cooperation shortfalls

Our Earth on the Moon’s horizon as imaged by South Korea’s KPLO lunar orbiter. Image: KARI

We’re building future technologies for the Moon without closing missed milestones. 🕳️
Western media narratives misrepresent Chinese space, which reduces trust and deters cooperation and collaboration. Also see Jack Congram’s piece China is not racing to the Moon. Moreover, Erika Nesvold made the case of the US not having presented a coherent argument for the country’s self-imposed claim of defeating China in the new lunar “Space Race”.
Why Moon missions need their own Wikipedia and beyond and improved information sharing
- Also see: Science does not exist in a (lunar) vacuum
A giant leap in orbital imagery is what we need to realize advanced Moon missions
- Moon missions can be cheaper, safer, and better if more countries share navigation and timing infrastructure. Relatedly, US-based Intuitive Machines and Europe-based Leonardo & Telespazio agreed to have interoperability between their communications and navigation orbiters.

So that was a comprehensive look at all the ways countries explored our Moon this year. I wrote it for you, not social media or SEO. If you enjoyed my coverage, please share it with other space buffs by grabbing this link.

A heartfelt thank you to Open Lunar Foundation, Astrolab, The Orbital Index, Catalyx Space, Gurbir Singh, Kris Zacny and many individual supporters for sponsoring Moon Monday editions through the year!

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:

Support Moon Monday 🌙

Lastly, do not ever forget:

Why explore our Moon 🌗

- Jatan 🌙

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ISRO and India had a mixed year in space in 2025

Jatan Mehta — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 17:31:21 +0530

While 2023 was an incredible year for ISRO in terms of execution of space missions and projects, and 2024 was about those successes giving the Indian government’s Department of Space (DOS) the confidence to plan an ambitious next decade, 2025 can be characterized more by slower progress, shortfalls, and delayed updates amid the same budget. Below is a linked rundown contextualizing India’s developments across domains of space. Like every year’s review, I’ve made a conscious effort to highlight events and trends that actually happened instead of focusing on upcoming events that may or may not be as successful and/or as timely as they’re being touted and reported as. And so if any big news aspect seems missing, it’s likely intentional :), including discarding pure fund raising announcements by startups in the context of this coverage.

Orbital launches and shortfalls

The LVM3 captured by rocket photographer Dheeraj Khandelwal as it emerged out of the clouds during its launch of Chandrayaan 3. Images: Chandrayaan gallery by Dheeraj

ISRO successfully launched the cutting-edge & collaborative NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) satellite in July, and initialized its Earth observation operations shortly after.
The agency also launched a communications satellite in November.
India’s workhorse PSLV rocket failed in May, triggering multiple mission delays since the launch vehicle’s modules and component designs are also utilized by other ISRO rockets. ISRO did not share any specific findings of the PSLV’s failure analysis through the remainder year.
Considering numerous launch delays over the last 10 years, a review of the state of ISRO’s space rockets reveals a bleak picture of ambitious goals sliding to the right—in stark contrast to the incessant chest thumping about efficiency.
In January, the Indian Government Union Cabinet approved the establishment of a third launch pad at India’s Sriharikota spaceport for $460 million. After it’s ready by end of decade, it will be used for additional launches of the LVM3 rocket as well as for the later arrival of the in-development heavy-lift NGLV rocket which requires horizontal integration.

Human-to-space flight

Axiom-4 (Ax-4) Mission Pilot Shubhanshu Shukla in the Cupola at the International Space Station. Image: Ax-4 crew / ISRO

Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla flew to the International Space Station—but was it worth it for ISRO? [Analysis]
In preparation towards indigenously launching astronauts to space later this decade, ISRO completed parachute deployment tests of the Gaganyaan crew module with an intentionally delayed deployment scenario and an abort mode so as to qualify the system for extreme situations.
ISRO also successfully completed development of the Gaganyaan service module’s propulsion system in July. The flight module would feature five 440-newton engines and sixteen 100-newton reaction control thrusters. Post Gaganyaan mission launches, the module will inject astronauts in the Crew Module into orbit, circularize it to a 400-kilometer altitude and maintain it, and eventually de-boost the crew module for Earth return before separating from it.

Chandrayaan progress

Graphic: Jatan Mehta | Individual images of the LVM3 rocket, the two Chandrayaan 4 spacecraft stacks, and the Moon’s south pole: ISRO / NASA / GSFC / Timothy McClanahan / LOLA

Results from the thermal probe experiment on India’s Chandrayaan 3 lander expanded the possible locations for finding water ice beyond the Moon’s poles, thereby benefiting future scouting missions. There are also several notable outcomes from other instruments on the lander.
The Chandrayaan 3 rover may or may not have stumbled upon the Moon’s mantle material when studying the composition of the local lunar soil using its X-ray spectrometer.
ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter helped international researchers produce a galore of science results, notably including continued characterization of the lunar poles using its advanced radar to map potential water ice deposits and also gauge surface roughness, densities, and porosities. The orbiter also helped scientists better understand the Sun’s activity and how it affects the Moon’s exosphere.
ISRO continued development and planning of the ambitious Chandrayaan 4 mission to bring lunar polar samples—albeit at a slower pace than expected.
India approved the joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX mission to drill and analyze water ice on the Moon’s south pole. The mission will bring a giant leap in lunar capabilities for both ISRO and JAXA, and it can provide NASA with data critical for Artemis planning currently missing from US missions.
ISRO revealed its eventual crewed Moon mission’s initial architecture.

Satellites up and down

A table showing health status and orbital behavior of India’s NavIC navigation satellites. Having all seven satellites touting either a “Healthy” or “Fair” status would’ve been the minimum viable success state for the constellation. Data analysis and table credit: Adithya K Pani, Krishi Tiwari, Aditya Jhunjhunwala

January’s unfortunate failure of the next-generation NVS-02 satellite left India’s NavIC national satellite navigation system in an even more incomplete and underperforming state. ISRO did not share the findings of the NVS-02 failure analysis throughout the year.
ISRO successfully docked and undocked its twin SPADEX (space docking experiment) satellites and demonstrated power transfer between them, achieving milestones in preparation for Chandrayaan 4 and complex multi-module coordinations required for human spaceflight.
ISRO released its internal ‘Space Situational Assessment Report’ for the year 2024, whose public executive summary published in May talks about the agency continuing to dynamically dodge orbital debris, avoid congestion, and prevent collisions.
India’s newest space-based telescopes Aditya-L1 and XPoSat continued uniquely observing solar explosions and cosmic bursts respectively. In January, ISRO released the first datasets from Aditya-L1 on the agency’s ISSDC and PRADAN portals. XPoSat data became available from October.

Private and commercial space

Pixxel Space’s Firefly satellite constellation specs. Image: Pixxel

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket’s Transporter 12 launch in January carried five payloads from private Indian companies, including three hyperspectral satellites for Earth observation from Pixxel Space called Fireflies, Digantara’s SCOT satellite for space-based object tracking and situational awareness, and XDLINX Space Labs’ Elevation-1 satellite touting an advanced miniaturized communications payload. Pixxel launched three more Fireflies on another Falcon 9 in August.
Skyroot progressed through multiple testing milestones of various modules of its Vikram-I rocket, and finally seems set to attempt its first orbital launch in Q1 2026 assuming no more hiccups.
- Related: Challenges for small rocket companies in India
After conducting their first orbital demonstration of edge-computing-based smart Earth imaging last year, Bengaluru- and Cupertino-based SkyServe tested NASA JPL’s AI models in space through their software platform on a partner satellite.
The Indian government through private space promoter and regulator IN-SPACe launched a ~$57 million “Technology Adoption Fund” to encourage the private sector to develop and manufacture space components that can help India reduce its reliance on foreign imports while commercializing them. These funds will be provided on a co-investment basis.

Cooperation and collaboration

Roughly two-billion year old lunar sample brought to Earth by Chang’e 5. Image: CNSA / CAS / HKU

China formally welcomed India to cooperate on Moon missions and the Sino-led ILRS Moonbase project.
Relatedly, I delivered a talk at a lunar samples symposium in Hong Kong on the Chandrayaan 4 sample return mission and made the case for India and China to exchange lunar samples. 🌜..<>..🌛
Since last year, ISRO, in collaboration with organizations like Protoplanet, formally started terrestrial testing for what living and conducting research on the Moon and Mars could be like for its astronauts via baseline analog missions at dry and mountainous Ladakh, adding to global efforts.
ISRO provided ground tracking support for Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 Moon landing mission part of NASA’s CLPS program.
Former ISRO Chief K. Kasturirangan passed away in April. His numerous contributions to India’s space program span astrophysics, Earth observation and communications satellites, operationalization of the PSLV rocket, the first GLSV flight test, and laying the foundations for India’s first planetary mission and space telescope as Chandrayaan 1 and AstroSat respectively.

So that was a sweeping look at India’s space activities in 2025. I wrote this for you, not social media or SEO. If you liked my coverage, please share it with other space buffs by grabbing this link.

Many thanks to Takshashila Institution, PierSight, GalaxEye Space, Gurbir Singh and Catalyx Space for sponsoring Indian Space Progress editions through the year!

If you too appreciate my efforts to capture nuanced trajectories of India in space, provided to space communities worldwide for free and without ads, kindly support my independent writing:

Support my writing 🛰️

Aside: I’m giving a talk with Q&A on the history and future of lunar exploration in my hometown Mumbai on Sunday, December 21. On popular demand from Pint of View, this a repeat of the session I conducted in Bangalore past September. The event is offline-only to make the audience comfortable in engaging freely with their curiosities. Bring all your questions about our Moon and how we’re exploring it in India and worldwide! For my readers, the hosts have voluntarily offered a 10% discount with the coupon code “MOONMONDAY”. (Note: My honorarium for the talk is fixed regardless of the tickets sold so there are no commission incentives for me sharing this.)

I may not be a Moonwalker but I’m certainly a Moontalker. 🌝

- Jatan 🌙

Thanks for using RSS the best.

Moon Monday #254: The one following last week’s embarrassing typo

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 16:23:55 +0530

Last week’s now-corrected headline & intro of a peak-peek at lunar samples had a peak typo (pun intended). I wish I could conveniently blame it on the very productive yet equally tiring Hong Kong trip to cover the international lunar sample science symposium coupled with the excitement of having seen fresh Moon samples. Or perhaps put it on Hong Kong itself because you can’t peek at its towering structures—they peak at you. But the reality is that it was just me being sloppy while rewriting the headline to use the word peak as a quality indicator of new lunar science results. Though not factually fatal, it was still an ignorant mistake. Being an independent writer is fun; you can’t hide behind a team or your editor. They are all you.

Mission updates

Since US President Donald Trump renominated Jared Isaacman last month for the NASA Administrator position, after abruptly withdrawing his first nomination earlier this year just as the US Congress was about to confirm said position, Isaacman went through his second confirmation hearing last week in the US Senate on a similar vein to his first one. Marcia Smith reports the full US Senate vote can be expected before December 19 to confirm Isaacman’s new job as the head of the premier US space agency. In the meanwhile, the US Congress continued its incessant red hearings about how the US has to beat China in landing humans the Moon, displaying a clear lack of any other core motivation to explore our Moon for itself or “for humanity” as is often claimed.
ispace Japan has shared a tentative schedule for its next set of Moon missions, including confirmed and anticipated ones through its US subsidiary which can carry NASA CLPS payloads. The next launch to watch out for is ispace US’ first CLPS mission through US-based Draper Laboratory. It’s targeting landing on the Moon’s farside in 2027, carrying NASA payloads onboard as well as another rover from ispace Europe. ispace US will also provide ground communications and relay services for the mission. The ones after that are as follows:

Timeline graphic: ispace

NASA announced that on the future crewed Artemis IV Moon landing mission, the astronauts will deploy two competitively selected scientific payloads costing $25 million each. These are:
- DUSTER, comprising a lunar dust analyzer and plasma monitoring instrument duo which will be mounted on a rover made by Lunar Outpost
- SPSS, a seismic station succeeding and exceeding the one on Artemis III to better understand Moonquakes and what they teach us about the lunar interior and safety of future astronauts.

A graphic showing the EDA dust analyzer and RESOLVE plasma monitoring instrument duo on the future Lunar Outpost provided rover for Artemis IV. Image: LASP / CU Boulder / Lunar Outpost

More Moon

Astrobotic plans to integrate special imaging sensors across its future landers as well as other hardware on the Moon to track spacecraft in low lunar orbit for the US government.
NASA awarded University of Alabama a potential $37 million contract to develop freezers for bringing Artemis lunar polar samples to Earth with a minimum high fidelity.
An interesting article by the Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor): An affordable approach to lunar timekeeping in an accelerating industry
While this article reviewing India’s space rockets is written more in the Indian space context, the assessment and arguments have direct implications for India’s planning of its increasingly complex series of Chandrayaan missions leading up to the goal of sending humans to the Moon circa 2040, which is discussed in the final sections along with ISRO’s current architecture.

Make no mistake, it will be the pinnacle of India’s space program if it launches humans to the Moon circa 2040. Imagine that future for a moment. The only country in the world after the US and China to achieve the immense feat, and one bagged within 100 years of independence from colonial claws. Had ISRO’s founder Vikram Sarabhai been alive, he’d probably tear up at the sight of this feat. He’d also know that a scalable heavy-lift rocket investment was indispensable so that India could orchestrate the increasingly complex sprawls of its space program.

Render of two maxed out variants of the NGLV rocket, which will be used to launch Indian astronauts and their lander to the Moon in the future. The illustration shows two multi-module spacecraft from Chandrayaan 3 and 4 respectively at the Moon to represent many spacecraft modules of a crewed lunar mission. Graphic: Jatan Mehta | Images and background: ISRO / LPSC / Footy2000 / TeamIndus

Many thanks to Astrolab and Gurbir Singh 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:

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A space program can only move as swiftly as its rockets. It’s India’s time to act on that.

Jatan Mehta — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 18:08:00 +0530

The Launch Vehicle Mark III (LVM3), India’s most powerful rocket to date, mounted on its launchpad in Sriharikota. Image: ISRO

Before we begin, I’m very happy to welcome globally published space writer & author Gurbir Singh as a sponsor of both my Moon Monday and Indian Space Progress newsletters for the third year! 🚀
Not sponsored: Among his several books, India’s Forgotten Rocket Pioneer is most relevant to this edition of Indian Space Progress. I also encourage you to check his in-depth podcast episodes on Indian space with experts.

ISRO’s Chief, and more importantly simultaneously the Secretary of India’s Department of Space (DOS), recently stated that India will be able to launch 50 orbital rockets every year by 2029. As a number that sounds fantastic and is coming from the country’s topmost space official, media outlets in India and abroad propagated the news. This isn’t the first time official claims have been made on growing India’s national space launch capacity. Previous official claims and targets include almost 30 launches in two years during this decade and one almost a decade ago of lofting a rocket every month. Virtually every media outlet tracking space nationally and internationally covered these claims too, without checking and reporting later on if any of them were actually realized.

So what’s the maximum number of successful launches ISRO has conducted in a year? Less than 10. Likewise, ISRO’s payload lift capacity has also expanded slower than expected, meaning continued reliance on foreign rockets to launch the nation’s heaviest satellites. It has kinked ISRO’s core mandate of achieving full self sufficiency for the country’s civil as well as strategic missions. The low launch frequency and capacity combined has also affected strategic programs such as the NavIC national satellite navigation system, which has been lingering in an incomplete and underperforming state for years now. The unfortunate failure of the next-generation NVS-02 satellite earlier this year only worsened the situation.

In the meanwhile, recent big ticket successes in other domains of space such as the epitome that was Chandrayaan 3’s landing on the Moon soared India’s civil space ambitions and vision to include the Bharatiya Anthariksh Station (BAS) astronaut habitat in Earth orbit and even humans on the Moon by the end of the next decade. [Translations for non-Indian readers: Bharat = India and Anthariksh = Space in Hindi and several other Indian languages].

How can India grow its space launch capabilities and performance to realize its faster expanding ambitions while ensuring its fundamental needs across civil and strategic space domains are met?

A launch trifecta

To fulfill the nation’s needs and wants in space, three conditions of launch capacity need to be achieved simultaneously:

Have substantially greater lift mass. The current maximum, by India’s most powerful rocket Launch Vehicle Mark III (LVM3), is only ~8,000 kilograms to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and barely above 4,000 kilograms to Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO). For comparison, the SpaceX Falcon 9 and China’s Long March 5 each have more than double LVM3’s lift performance. Amping up the lift capacities of India’s rockets will allow the country to launch all of its heavy satellites by itself, loft multiple sizable satellites at once, and also execute complex human spaceflight & planetary missions which require heavy spacecraft and modules to be increasingly meaningful.
Increased launch cadence, the other side of the coin to greater lift capacity. A high launch frequency is a core requirement to sustain crewed space habitats, build and maintain constellations, and—crucially—execute multiple projects in parallel. Having more number of launchpads is necessary to enable high launch frequency, especially to avoid single points of failure or choke points.
Have dissimilar design redundancy in launch vehicles so that failure of one rocket doesn’t stall launches of others, like the case of the recent PSLV failure due to its modules and component designs also being utilized by other ISRO rockets. Versatile launch vehicles also automatically imply having more and flexible launchpads.

It may be tempting to point to the US and its fleet of medium-lift and heavy-lift rockets as the embodiment of this launch capacity trifecta. But when you consider the last 10 years of global spaceflight, the Falcon 9’s exceptional performance has been an anomaly. More so when you remove the fact that SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are what self-generate high demand for the company’s rockets. Without the Falcon 9 and its relatively sparsely used derivative Falcon Heavy, the rest of the US rocket fleet has not been a spectacle. Certainly not a sustained one. Either way, India simply has neither the sheer funds nor the aerospace industrial strength of America to model the country’s launch capacity on the US rocket portfolio and program management style.

However, China’s multi-faceted approach of prioritizing multi-launcher availability over per-rocket efficiency comes close enough to meeting the three conditions of ideal launch prowess. China’s wide range of national rockets spawned from internal competition and spread across multiple launch sites have allowed it to innovate from Earth orbit to the Moon & beyond in parallel. In the last few years, state-catalyzed operational commercial launchers have also entered the turf, successfully supplementing the country’s launch capacity and frequency. In fact, space launch statistics from 2024 and 2025 show that these non-national Sino orbital rockets alone have launched more times than India could manage across its entire ISRO and private fleet during that period. If we include China’s more frequent & capable national launches of its Long March rockets which support a diversity of national projects, India’s output pales in comparison.

Graphic: Jatan Mehta | A non-exhaustive but representative view of the wide range and configurations of China’s recently operational Long March (CZ) rockets, including new ones on their way to the skies soon. Images: Amaury67 / Shujianyang / NSF / CALT / SAST

Put another way, China is already doing what India wants and needs: simultaneously maintain strategic space assets, undertake ambitious civil human and planetary exploration missions, and launch commercial & private rockets. Furthermore, just last month China successfully demonstrated an emergency launch to ensure astronaut safety at its space station. It was a grateful verification of working redundancy measures. To reduce the con of cost in its current approach, the country is also on the cusp of achieving reusability within a year with not just one but multiple rocket boosters. Instead of relying on a single flagship rocket like the Falcon 9, China’s resilient orbit access approach is more suitable and desirable for India to draw from.

A shortfall of performance and timing

In October when India indigenously launched its heaviest single satellite yet, it was celebrated as an “efficient” implementation which “tricked” the LVM3 rocket into carrying more weight on its shoulders to GTO than it could otherwise. Of course, the laws of physics haven’t changed. The reality is that said communications satellite, CMS-03, was dropped into a sub-GTO orbit. And so it had to raise its orbit to achieve the desired altitude, a forced maneuver inevitably reducing the satellite’s would-be lifespan.

Had the long-promised upgrade of the LVM3 with a semi-cryogenic core stage engine been realized on time, or even a few years late, it would have unequivocally increased CMS-03’s lifespan. More broadly and importantly, the upgraded vehicle would help India achieve its civil space goals in human spaceflight and lunar exploration faster since both the Chandrayaan 4 lunar sample return mission and India’s first space station module explicitly rely on this yet-to-be-upgraded LVM3 to be available. Now a new report by Sidharth MP claims that India might buy semi-cryogenic engines from Russia for the LVM3 core stage upgrade, suggesting a possible change from the country’s ongoing efforts consistently projected to be achieving “breakthroughs”. However, ISRO is yet to officially comment on this matter. Either way, a semi-cryogenic LVM3 core stage is not sitting on the near-term horizon.

The LVM3 payload fairing, housing the CMS-03 spacecraft, being lifted for integration atop the rocket in an assembly bay. Image: ISRO

Since 2017, when it first launched as a complete vehicle, LVM3 has lifted off Earth only seven times. Its low production capacity and launch readiness—though acknowledged and stated to be increased—has already led to the delayed launch of Chandrayaan 3 as well as the postponing of India’s upcoming, scientifically important Venus orbiter mission by five years.

A small but important aspect the LVM3 did demonstrate during the CMS-03 mission post-satellite-deployment was to reignite the thrust chamber of the upper stage—but the engine did not restart. This is part of ISRO’s ongoing effort to have multiple engine restarts of the upper stage for future missions. It will be a useful capability for complex orbital deployments of satellites as well as for de-orbiting the rocket stage to ensure space sustainability. But this capability too is coming later than expected, and only gradually so.

Small yet not nimble

The small-lift SSLV rocket on its launchpad in Sriharikota. Image: ISRO

Even ISRO’s new SSLV rocket dedicated to launching small satellites has taken more time to be operationalized commercially than projected while its direct global competitors like Rocket Lab and Firefly moved ahead. ISRO through its commercial arm NSIL had said it would launch at least five SSLVs this year. It launched none.

To improve the SSLV’s launch rate and lift capacity, ISRO is making a dedicated launchpad optimized for polar orbits and is also aiming to production-ize the SSLV through a technology transfer contract with Indian aerospace industry giant HAL. But the fruits of these efforts are not expected until at least 2028, which is when the new launchpad is supposed to host its first orbital launch. And that’s assuming no further delays for the pad that’s already slipped past an originally intended 2025 debut. By 2028, the small satellite launch market will also evolve to have fiercer competition.

A similar intent of industry-driven production for ISRO’s workhorse PSLV rocket too hasn’t manifested yet, with the first demonstration flight slipping by at least two years after initially targeting 2024. There has also been no official clarity for years on the realization timeline of the upcoming reusable spaceplane called Pushpak, specifically as to when it will move beyond its current terrestrial subscale landing tests by launching to orbit and subsequently becoming operational. Even though India’s workhorse PSLV rocket failed in May, triggering multiple mission delays since the launch vehicle’s modules and component designs are also utilized by other ISRO rockets, the agency did not share any specific findings of the PSLV’s failure analysis through the remainder year.

ISRO’s Pushpak spaceplane’s subscale test vehicle autonomously landing on a runway. Image: ISRO

Claims by private rockets companies in India like from Skyroot and Agnikul about their orbital launch readiness have sadly been in Elon Musk times. Both companies missed the year 2025 as well for their first orbital launch attempts against their own revised projections. Now, one does need to account for the fact that India’s private orbital launch companies are fighting an uphill battle in a constrained financial environment. These companies are not state-catalyzed technologically either like the Chinese launchers are, thus taking time to gestate. Skyroot finally seems set to attempt its first orbital launch in Q1 2026. Even though maiden orbital launches of new rockets globally have a poor track record, I hope it achieves a successful trajectory.

Even when India’s private companies eventually launch successfully and then hopefully operationalize soon, it’s doubtful if small lift launchers have a sizable market to serve to begin with in order to be revenue positive. Instead of supplementing national capacity in the vein of Sino commercial rockets and turning Indian launches into a good export business, these might end up directly battling against ISRO’s own SSLV rocket for the small number of small launch customers. In the meanwhile, claims about demand and expected profits from these companies have kept soaring but the reality is most of them might not make it in their current forms. It would be better if ISRO instead technologically catalyzed these rocket companies to let them innovate faster and thus expand national launch offerings instead of the companies being left to reinvent wheels that may not even be round.

Many thanks to Takshashila Institution, PierSight, Gurbir Singh and Catalyx Space for sponsoring Indian Space Progress. If you too appreciate my efforts to capture nuanced trajectories of India in space, provided to space communities worldwide for free and without ads, kindly support my independent writing:

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The next decade and NGLV

As is evident by the trajectories of India’s rockets in the last 10 years, even though a trickle of efficiencies have come in here and there, the overall launch output has grown far slower than projected, expected, and necessary. Especially when not isolated from the global context. Mukunth captured this well when he said in his own piece on the trajectory of India’s rockets:

The fact is the Indian space programme can take great strides and still remain uncompetitive with the other countries belonging to the same elite club to which it has repeatedly claimed to belong. While the U.S. and Russia (including the erstwhile USSR) had a head start of many decades, China, Japan, and Europe for a long time enjoyed more funding, technological sophistication or both [than India].

To work towards a change of scale, last year the Indian Government Union Cabinet did approve ISRO’s proposal to develop a partially reusable heavy-lift rocket for $982 million. Called the Next Generation Launch Vehicle (NGLV), the cryogenic rocket will be capable of lofting up to 30,000 kilograms to Low Earth Orbit in expendable mode, and 10,000 to 12,000 kilograms to GTO. That’s about thrice the oomph of the LVM3. The NGLV will also have engine restart capabilities; the booster will leverage that to return to Earth for launch reuse, and the upper stage will relight to perform complex orbital maneuvers and deployments. There are tentative plans for a version of the NGLV with powerful strap-on boosters, called NGLV-H, to further improve lift mass.

Renders of the NGLV rocket, its heavy variant, and key components. Graphic: Jatan Mehta | Images: LPSC / Footy2000 / ISRO

The Indian Government has also approved the building of a third launch pad at Sriharikota for $460 million, which will be used for NGLV launches. It will also provide LVM3 with a second launchpad. Combined, the NGLV and the upgraded LVM3 have the potential to approach the ideal trifecta of launch characteristics and thus meet India’s needs and ambitions in space.

However, ISRO is targeting the first half of the next decade to realize the NGLV and make it operational. A major part of it has to do with India’s long-constraining yearly space budget. The NGLV project’s budget allocations are distributed across many years, stretching the realization timeline beyond the fastest viable technical path. In other words, ISRO’s engineering talent will not be utilized efficiently due to fundamental budget constraints that have no viable technological design alternatives. Despite the recent government approvals of multiple ambitious national space projects, India’s space budget for FY 2025-26 essentially remains flat at about $1.5 billion. That’s less than a tenth of the funding enjoyed by both CNSA and NASA respectively.

To the Moon?

Graphic: Jatan Mehta | Individual images of the LVM3 rocket, the two Chandrayaan 4 spacecraft stacks, and the Moon’s south pole: ISRO / NASA / GSFC / Timothy McClanahan / LOLA

The budgetary reality hasn’t stopped India from becoming the third nation this century to announce the goal of sending humans to the Moon by itself. The official timeframe is 2040. Realizing monetary constraints, ISRO’s Moonshot approach is to explicitly not make an ultra expensive, single purpose Saturn V class mega rocket. Instead, ISRO will utilize docking of multiple spacecraft elements that are launched separately on maxed-out heavy-lift rockets to then achieve the same goal. This is a scaled up version of the docking-based architecture that Chandrayaan 4 will employ to fetch lunar samples later this decade. With this approach, the same rocket that launches humans to the Moon can also serve other projects in India’s space program, saving costs and ensuring efficient use of taxpayer money.

However, getting to repeatedly and reliably launching India’s largest rockets will still cost substantially more money by itself than is available to ISRO. Per the current but morphing plan, Moonbound Indian astronauts will blast off from Earth on a maxed out NGLV rocket variant. As will their lander in another such launch. Developing this central crewed Moon rocket in itself relies on the baseline NGLV launch vehicle coming online and becoming operational faster than its current official projections. Moreover, using a scaled up Chandrayaan 4 architecture implies having reliable back-to-back launches of the largest rocket India will have ever flown. And, redundancy for astronaut safety necessitates ensuring that an alternate launchpad is available for emergency launches and crew-cargo-supplies to Luna instead of just the one pad planned at the moment. The recent Soyuz rocket launch which damaged Russia’s singular launchpad for human spaceflight and associated cargo supplies reinforces the importance of this aspect.

As such, even without a super heavy-lift rocket to blow money onto, the minimum viable cadence and scale of heavy-lift launches necessary for sending crew safely to the Moon and back can neither come for cheap in itself nor can it be achieved with any amount of pure efficiency attained with subpar hardware. Let’s not forget that the small robotic Chandrayaan 3 spacecraft alone filled LVM3’s payload capacity to the brim. For a crewed Moon rocket, a giant leap is an immutable requirement.

Just like India bagged Chandrayaan 3’s triumphant touchdown on the Moon by cutting through the cloud of Chandrayaan 2’s failure with an approach of expansive testing coupled with uncompromising performance, the time is here again to reinforce and scale that philosophy to the largest playground in space this century.

The LVM3 captured by rocket photographer Dheeraj Khandelwal as it emerged out of the clouds during its launch of Chandrayaan 3. Images: Chandrayaan gallery by Dheeraj

Make no mistake, it will be the pinnacle of India’s space program if it launches humans to the Moon circa 2040. Imagine that future for a moment. The only country in the world after the US and China to achieve the immense feat, and one bagged within 100 years of independence from colonial claws. Had ISRO’s founder Vikram Sarabhai been alive, he’d probably tear up at the sight of this feat. He’d also know that a scalable heavy-lift rocket investment was indispensable so that India could orchestrate the increasingly complex sprawls of its space program.

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Moon Monday #253: A peek at new lunar samples and mission updates

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 16:16:25 +0530

Here is a peek at some lunar samples from China’s Chang’e 5 nearside landing mission as well as the Chang’e 6 farside one! Holding them is an incredible feeling that vividly reminds you of the immense and irreplaceable value of exploring our Moon. 🌙

Roughly two-billion year old lunar sample brought to Earth by Chang’e 5. Image: CNSA / CAS / HKU

Roughly 2.8-billion year old lunar sample brought to Earth by Chang’e 6. Image: CNSA / CAS / HKU

Chang’e 5 and 6 samples. Image: CNSA / CAS / HKU

Check my coverage of the volcano of new science results presented at the University of Hong Kong last weekend about what we’ve unlocked by studying such Chang’e lunar samples. And, my idea pitch there for India and China to exchange future Chandrayaan 4 lunar polar samples with Chang’e ones has garnered some interest at CAS. Here’s hoping something comes out of it if ISRO and CNSA decide to engage. 🚀

Mission updates

NASA has conducted 8 of 10 integrated tests in the lead up to preparations to launch the crewed Artemis II Moon mission. Image: NASA

NASA states that it has completed critical communications tests between the SLS rocket, the Orion spacecraft, and between them and the agency’s Deep Space Network ground stations in the lead up to preparations for launching four Artemis II astronauts around the Moon and back next year.
SpaceX’s first Starship v3 booster stage got damaged during early testing on November 21, leading to yet another delay in SpaceX’s slow progress in working towards landing humans on the Moon for NASA.
New datasets are available from NASA’s ultra-sensitive ShadowCam imager aboard South Korea’s first lunar orbiter KPLO. ShadowCam has been capturing unique observations of permanently shadowed regions on the Moon’s poles to help scientists & engineers plan future surface resource prospecting missions.
The lifespans of the upcoming Chang’e 7 orbiter and lander is designed to be at least eight years each! Thanks to Jack Congram for noting that in his coverage.

A render of the Chang’e 7 lander and orbiter going around the Moon. Image: CMG

ESA’s critical Ministerial Council meeting held last week to decide the space agency’s budget for the next three years went well as two dozen members (including Canada’s increased investment by 400%) cumulatively committed a record budget of €22.25 billion, a 17% increase over the previous 3-year budget for 2022-2025 when adjusted for inflation. However, the human and robotic exploration component of the budget is receiving only €2.98 billion, about €800 million less than was requested. As such, this will likely affect ESA’s robotic plans for lunar exploration such as Argonaut and Moonlight. In the best case, it will stretch their already delayed timelines further.
In related and unsurprising news, ESA’s Director General Josef Aschbacher announced that the three ESA astronauts that will fly on future crewed Artemis missions will come from three biggest ESA contributors: Germany, France, and Italy. These three seats from NASA are in return for ESA’s contributions to the Artemis Orion spacecraft’s critical service module and for providing major parts of the upcoming NASA-led Gateway orbital habitat like the Lunar I-Hab, the Lunar Link communications module, and the Lunar View refueling and cargo module.

Many thanks to The Orbital Index and Space Age Publishing (ft. ILOA) 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:

Support Moon Monday 🌙

More Moon

ESA tested use of multiple instruments to map water ice in a mock layered lunar simulant soil setup at the agency’s LUNA facility so as to optimize the detection and mapping approach of future missions going to the Moon’s poles.
NASA is hosting a public challenge with prizes for solutions which will improve optical recognition of lunar craters, a technology employed by lunar landers to navigate with respect to identified terrain, avoid landing on hazardous craters and other such features, and land with precision.
If you too want to change the frustrating misconception about people at large calling our Moon’s farside as its “dark side”, send them this rebuttal article by Ethan Siegel and blame Pink Floyd and the Transformers.

Our Moon’s nearside (left) and the not dark farside (right). Image: NASA LRO / Jatan Mehta

- Jatan 🌙

Thanks for using RSS the best.

Lunar sample science updates straight from Hong Kong | Moon Monday #252

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 16:56:57 +0530

I attended the International Lunar Sample Research Symposium (ILSRS) at the University of Hong Kong the past two days. It was fantastic, especially when you consider the sheer flux of novel lunar science results that researchers presented based on analysis of fresh lunar samples brought to Earth by China’s Chang’e 5 and Chang’e 6 missions. While it’s not possible to cover everything that was presented and discussed at the packed symposium, below is my attempt to pick out all the globally relevant highlights along with links to either their published papers or their submitted & accepted abstracts as reviewed by an international scientific organizing committee.

I’d like to express my gratitude to Space Age Publishing (ft. ILOA) and Mahesh Anand for helping sponsor this Moon Monday through my attendance of the symposium, thereby making it possible for me to bring you these updates first hand. It was quite the work to put all of this together in a single day. And so if you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource on global lunar exploration for free, without ads, your support will definitely be appreciated. 😬

To set the stage, here is a look at Moon samples from China’s Chang’e 5 nearside landing mission as well as the Chang’e 6 farside one. 🌙

Chang’e 5 sample. Image: CNSA / CAS / HKU

Chang’e 6 sample. Image: CNSA / CAS / HKU

Chang’e 5 and 6 samples. Image: CNSA / CAS / HKU

The right intent

Images: CNSA / CLEP / CAS / Chunlai Li, Shuhui et al. | Graphic: Jatan Mehta

The ILSRS conference organizers were the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IGG CAS). They made efforts to reach out to many scientists and people in lunar communities internationally to attend the symposium as the stated intent was to exchange lunar science findings with the global community and enhance international coordination mechanisms for planetary exploration in China. It’s precisely why the symposium was held in Hong Kong, which allows visa-free access for 170 countries worldwide (including India where I come from) as opposed to hosting one in mainland China for which a roundtrip might be more difficult, especially for US researchers. Even the symposium’s abstract submission format was identical to the popular US-based Lunar and Planetary Science Conference to make it easy for international as well as Chinese researchers to propose their findings to be evaluated for ILSRS talks and posters.

Fuyuan Wu, a leading organizer of ILSRS and a professor at IGG CAS, stressed when he said the following in his opening remarks:

There is a need for more international collaboration and information exchange in lunar exploration.

Guochun Zhao, a professor at HKU and a co-organizer of ILSRS, followed up with similar introductory remarks and noted the following:

No single nation can tackle the complexity of planetary exploration alone.

A volcano of lunar sample science findings

A study at the heart of ILSRS concerns Chang’e 6 samples helping determine the age of the massive South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin—within which the spacecraft landed—as 4.25 billion years. Spanning 2500 kilometers, the SPA basin is the Moon’s largest, deepest, and oldest impact crater. Researchers analyzed 1600 fragments from five grams of Chang’e 6 samples and found 20 relevant pieces to determine this truest age yet of the massive basin. SPA’s exact age and nature of formation has huge implications for understanding how our Moon evolved, and our Solar System too. Many implications were debated at the symposium to work towards a consensus on the next set of measurements we should make globally on future missions to advance this frontier. A presentation by Huijuan Zhang et al (abstract link) discussed one such aspect of structural and chemical differences between the interiors of farside and nearside lunar regions.

Fuyuan Wu on Chang’e 6 sample studies helping determine the age of the Moon’s massive South Pole-Aitken basin. Image: Jatan Mehta / ILSRS

The impact that created the SPA was so colossal that scientists think it changed the physical and chemical makeup of the Moon’s mantle down to hundreds of kilometers. And that’s exactly what Chang’e 6 sample studies presented at ILSRS have found, such as a morphed mantle source for volcanism on the Moon’s farside. The dominant Chang’e 6 samples are lava bits which erupted ~1.4 billion years after the SPA event, which morphed the mantle. The Chang’e 6 volcanic materials thus exhibit a unique makeup compared to other volcanic lunar samples. A study of 16 fragments scooped up by Chang’e 6 found them severely lacking elements such as titanium and thorium.

a) An illustration showing the effect of the 4.25-billion-year old SPA impact on the Moon’s deep mantle. b) The altered mantle makeup then reflects in the 2.8-billion-year aged volcanic basalts, some of which were fetched by Chang’e 6. See full legend | Image: Fu-Yuan Wu et al.

James Head of Brown University presented puzzling findings and observations about young volcanic features on the Moon which are potentially only a few hundred million years old. Chang’e 5 samples have confirmed 2-billion-year old lunar volcanism on the Moon while also finding what seem like 120-million-year young volcanic beads. Collectively, these studies have opened up more enigmas about the Moon’s interior and its evolution. Head noted that combined with new observations from orbiters around the world—including Chandrayaan 2 and KPLO—these studies are helping set the stage for specific measurements to be made by a future NASA CLPS mission which will land in the unique volcanic place of Ina later this decade to help resolve some fundamental mysteries.

James Head speaking on mysteriously young volcanic features on the Moon. Image: Jatan Mehta / ILSRS

Quentin Parker of HKU presented about their upcoming 12U-CubeSat based Lunar Flash orbiter being built in collaboration with Chinese-mainland-based ASES. Largely funded by the Hong Kong government at almost $100 million HKD, the 100-kilometer altitude polar-orbiting satellite will monitor flashes of meteorite impacts on the Moon’s farside to determine its poorly constrained sizes, rate and potential impact (pun intended) on long-term robotic and crewed exploration. Combined with more such data from other missions, it will help us understand risk from micrometeorites to better plan future humans, habitats, and hardware on the Moon’s south pole. Relatedly, last year ESA approved the LUnar Meteoroid Impacts Observer (LUMIO) CubeSat mission with a similar purpose. ESA aims to launch LUMIO in 2027 to the second Earth-Moon Lagrangian point (EM-L2) from where it can continuously observe the Moon’s farside. The CubeSat also aims to demonstrate autonomously determining its position in space and navigating accordingly, independent of communications with Earth, something China pioneered with its DRO lunar craft recently.

Quentin Parker on the anticipated outcomes of systematically measuring meteorite impact flashes on the Moon’s farside. Image: Jatan Mehta / ILSRS

Sen Hu of IGG CAS spoke about how the Moon’s farside mantle contains less water than within the nearside as measured by Chang’e 6 and 5 samples respectively. These new measurements have added to the debate on the topic by lending tactile credence to the hypothesis that our Moon indeed lost most of its water during its fiery formation. CASC’s previous news release on the Chang’e 6 study had noted how Francis McCubbin, NASA’s Astromaterials Curator and a peer reviewer of the paper, called the work “a landmark study on the water abundance of the lunar farside.”

Locations of samples collected by nearside Moon missions are both farther away and geologically distinct from the Chang’e 6 landing site inside the farside SPA basin. The sizes of outer circles around location dots reflect the maximum estimated water abundance in the mantle sources beneath the sampled sites. The inset image shows how measurements of farside Chang’e 6 samples indicate lower abundance than the nearside Apollo, Luna, and Chang’e 5 ones. Images: Yangtin Lin, et al.

Sen Hu discussing the possible sources of water on the Moon. Image: Jatan Mehta / ILSRS

Qi Zhao of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University presented how China is making the largest 3D image dataset of lunar regolith particles to date. Relatedly, Ke Xu of Peking University spoke about the importance of better modeling how volatiles diffuse in lunar soil and rock structures to efficiently study and utilize water ice on the Moon on future missions. This work also allows for more efficient studies of the same sample grains across multiple institutions, using what Ke Xu called the “facial recognition system for regolith particles”.

Ke Xu on having better imagery of lunar regolith particles as a shared database for efficient sample studies. Image: Jatan Mehta / ILSRS

Qi Zhao on making the largest 3D image dataset of lunar regolith particles to date. Image: Jatan Mehta / ILSRS

Alsabti Athem of the University College of London proposed studying supernovae remnants embedded in lunar soil. This is the context of the Moon’s regolith being a layered record of the interstellar medium and galactic environments our Solar System passed through and has been amid over time.

🌙

Related: A whole list of how our Moon is valuable beyond itself

Alsabti Athem on studying supernovae remnants in lunar samples. Image: Jatan Mehta / ILSRS

Sonia Tikoo of the Stanford University presented how soon after the Moon’s formation its global magnetic field deteriorated over time and how our understanding of the same has changed too with new evidence, including from Chang’e samples. Tikoo noted how combined with sample studies, targeted surface-based observations from the upcoming rover on China’s Chang’e 7 mission as well as the Lunar Vertex lander-rover instrument suite flying to the swirl of Reiner Gamma aboard Intuitive Machines’ third Moon mission will help resolve key mysteries related to the Moon’s magnetic evolution, which in itself it tied to that of the Moon’s evolution.

Sonia Tikoo on the Moon’s magnetic mysteries. Image: Jatan Mehta / ILSRS

A related study result mentioned by Tikoo is about how micrometer-sized iron grains embedded in Chang’e 6 volcanic fragments have revealed a surprising increase in the global magnetic field strength of the Moon around 2.8 billion years ago, providing the first ground truth constraints for farside lunar magnetism. From the paper:

These results record a rebound of the field strength after its previous sharp decline of around 3.1 Ga [billion years ago], which attests to an active lunar dynamo at about 2.8 Ga in the mid-early stage and argues against the suggestion that the lunar dynamo may have remained in a low-energy state after 3 Ga until its demise.

Evolution of our Moon’s magnetic field strength over time—called paleointensity—as measured in Apollo and Chang’e samples. Chang’e 6 sample measurements show a possible rebound of the lunar dynamo starting around 3 billion years ago. See full legend | Image: Shuhui Cai et al.

Researchers analyzing Chang’e 6 samples have also found the first hematite crystals (rust) on the Moon. The samples also contain the iron oxide of maghemite. The CNSA release captures the importance of the discovery as follows:

This discovery reveals a previously unknown oxidation reaction mechanism on the moon. It provides direct sample evidence supporting the origin of magnetic anomalies around the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) Basin. [...] The study proposes that hematite formation may be closely related to significant impact events in lunar history.

Lastly, Jatan Mehta (aka me) delivered a talk on India’s upcoming Chandrayaan 4 sample return mission and made the case for India and China to exchange lunar samples. 🌜...<>...🌛

Yours truly, speaking on India’s Chandrayaan 4 sample return mission. Image: ILSRS

The lunar sample science symposium concluded with the organizers explicitly seeking feedback from international attendees, a good show of intent and effort. Wei Yang, a professor at IGG CAS and a symposium co-organizer, expressed a forward looking sentiment on behalf of the feedback received from the attendees:

I hope [that] in the future China and [the] US can exchange Moon samples.

This was in the context of China’s announcement earlier this year of the first set of international organizations whose proposals were selected to study Chang’e 5 samples. International researchers, including many who attended the symposium, are already analyzing the samples and expect to publish their findings soon whereas US researchers are facing access issues from the American side itself.

Note: There were even more notable results presented at the symposium but which I’m not including here because these works are yet to be published.

Many thanks to Space Age Publishing (ft. ILOA), Mahesh Anand and Sonia Tikoo for helping sponsor this week’s Moon Monday through my attendance of the lunar sample science symposium in Hong Kong!

If you liked this special edition of Moon Monday and appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource on global lunar exploration for free, without ads, kindly support my independent writing:

Support Moon Monday 🌙

- Jatan 🌙

Thanks for using RSS the best.

Moon Monday #251: Prepping to live on Luna via analogs on Earth

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 17:41:24 +0530

A personal note before we begin:

Dear readers, thank you so much for your personal & wondrous responses to my globally published space poetry in celebration of Moon Monday completing 5 years & 250 editions while crossing 10,000 subscribers. Hearing early readers express curiosity and awe has meant more than questionable labels and checkmarks on social media ever will. 💛

Figuring out how to independently publish my poetry on platforms globally with non-exclusive open access in multiple formats has laid a solid logistical foundation for me to publish future booklets & books for public good. I’m very excited for this next phase of my writing: Merge the worlds of blogs & books to bring affordable and accessible booklets on important but undercovered space exploration themes to people all around the world. I’m so excited that I’ve captured it in a meme.

Meme: Jatan Mehta

Get your free copy officially from anywhere you like: Read Seven uni-verses

If you find value in my open access approach to publishing my writing worldwide, kindly support independent writing & journalism as a reader.

Support my work 🌙

Astronauts prep to live on the Moon via analogs on Earth

The harsh and frigid lunar night lasting 14 Earth days is a fundamental blocker in our ability to sustain robotic hardware as well as astronauts long term on the Moon. Recent landers like India’s Chandrayaan 3 and Firefly’s Blue Ghost both ended their missions at the end of their respective lunar day. Even larger scale Apollo astronauts over five decades ago returned before the onset of lunar nights. Among many challenges imposed by the lunar night, such as technical ones like keeping spacecraft electronics warm, is also a psychological one of astronauts surviving the frigid darkness in a heavily constrained environment of a small habitat while ensuring its continued operations.

A mock lunar habitat on Earth. Image: University of Adelaide / Isaac Freeman

To help develop effective operational procedures for prolonged living off-Earth, a multi-site analog habitat mission part of the World’s Biggest Analog project took place around the world this past October. One of these organized by ICEE.Space in Australia specifically mimicked astronauts surviving the lunar night in an intentionally constrained habitat. [A dear Moon Monday reader and supporter, Louis-Jérôme Burtz, participated in it.]

This is the latest in a series of expansive global efforts to use analog missions and adjacent research styles on Earth to iteratively tackle the herculean task of living and exploring the Moon and objects beyond for months, not days. Below is a non-exhaustive but representative summary of other such recent developments worldwide.

ESA’s Pangaea project trains future astronauts from multiple space agencies in lunar geology and related new tools, such as an assistant tablet, to efficiently explore the Moon like never before.

ESA’s Andreas Mogensen (left) and NASA’s Kate Rubins (right) standing next to an exposed Moon-like anorthosite rock in Norway as part of their Pangaea astronaut training course in geology. Image: ESA / V. Crobu

For Artemis III and beyond, NASA is making astronauts conduct high fidelity Moonwalk simulation exercises with simulated lunar south pole lighting, such as in last year’s analog mission in a lunar-esque volcanic field in Arizona. Science writer Alexandra Witze covered the activities, their rationale, and importance right from the mission’s backroom.

To mimic the lighting conditions at the lunar south pole, JETT5 organizers built a ‘Sun cart’ — essentially a giant spotlight wheeled onto the landscape. To Rubins and Douglas, the light looked like the distant Sun hovering just above the horizon. The astronauts carefully navigated their way across the dim landscape, relying on a few personal lights to aid their work. [...] The point of JETT5 was to develop tools and procedures that will work for Artemis III astronauts on the lunar surface.

[...]

Not everything went smoothly during the night-time EVA. The flight-operations team deliberately built in some challenges, including dropping video communications with the astronauts any time they travelled too far from the lander. An artificial, 20-minute delay on downloading imagery meant that the science team often couldn’t see real-time photos of the rocks the astronauts were picking up.

In parallel, ESA is training astronauts at its versatile Moon-simulating LUNA facility in Germany, with tests of instruments, mission concepts, modern astronaut tools. There’s even use of virtual reality. A simulated habitat module adjoining LUNA will soon be used to better test complex mission scenarios where humans and robots interact in varied ways for long periods.
The Russian Academy of Sciences completed a year-long analog on Earth late last year to study isolation effects on humans who will live for extended periods on the Moon in the future.
Chinese taikonauts (astronauts) have begun initial training for lunar missions since late last year across lunar transit and surface operations as part of the country’s preparations to land humans on the Moon.
Since last year, ISRO, in collaboration with organizations like Protoplanet, formally started terrestrial testing of what living and conducting research on the Moon and Mars could be like for its astronauts via baseline analog missions at dry and mountainous Ladakh.

India’s new HOPE analog astronaut habitat in Ladakh, India. Image: Protoplanet / ISRO

NASA, ESA, and Nikon are collaborating on an ergonomic handheld camera for Artemis III astronauts to capture good low light images in the dark environment of the Moon’s south pole. Called the Handheld Universal Lunar Camera (HULC), its prototypes have been tested and refined by ESA and NASA in several analog missions. One scenario included using the camera with a telephoto lens because new research based on the Apollo missions shows that astronauts’ perception of distances and slopes gets altered on the Moon’s surface. A telephoto lens would thus better guide Moonwalks. A radiation-hardened and thermally protected HULC camera is supposed to be tested on the International Space Station before using it on Artemis missions.
South Korea is transforming its former mining site of Taebaek into a testing ground for advanced mobile lunar exploration technologies, owing to the mine’s environmental resemblance to the darkness, coldness, and ruggedness of the Moon’s south pole.

Having multi-site as well as concurrent analog missions worldwide also provides researchers an opportunity to conduct similar experiments in high volumes so as to gather statistically useful data about their scientific effectiveness and operating procedures.

Many thanks to Open Lunar Foundation, Astrolab and Karan Maindan 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, without ads, kindly support my independent writing:

Support Moon Monday 🌙

Mission updates

The first New Glenn rocket booster to land after launch. Humans to scale. Image: Blue Origin

On November 13, Blue Origin’s heavy-lift New Glenn rocket successfully launched NASA’s ESCAPADE spacecraft pair on a trajectory ultimately headed for Mars. Crucially, Blue Origin successfully landed the rocket’s first stage booster on a sea landing platform, allowing its potential reuse to launch the company’s first robotic Moon lander called the Mark I by early next year; hopefully in January. This company’s first Moon mission in itself is crucial for Blue’s bet to carry NASA’s VIPER rover to the Moon on the second Mark I lander in 2027. And, Mark I’s hoped for success is in turn what Blue wants to leverage to land humans on the Moon for the US.
A few months after the Chandrayaan 3 lander touched down on the Moon in August 2023, ISRO had pulled the mission’s propulsion module (PM) from lunar orbit to Earth orbit against the nominal plan. At the time, ISRO stated the move’s purpose being space debris management by “avoiding uncontrolled crashing of the PM on the Moon’s surface at the end of life of PM thus meeting the requirements of no debris creation.” Two years later, the spacecraft’s high Earth orbit has not been stable and instead expanded due to the dynamic gravitational environment it’s amid. ISRO says the PM craft made two lunar flybys on November 6 and 11 respectively. It appears from ISRO’s release that while it was able to monitor the spacecraft’s trajectory, it did not fire any engines on the spacecraft to control or direct its trajectory. This suggests that either the craft has run out of fuel or its engines may not be performing nominally. Enthusiastic spacecraft tracker Scott Tiley surmises that because of this dynamic gravitational environment, the Chandrayaan 3 propulsion module could later in the decade either end up in solar orbit or crash with the Moon.
After three years of work, ESA has completed the fourth European Service Module which will take astronauts on the attached Artemis IV Orion spacecraft to lunar orbit and back. It will also provide them with power and life support systems.

More Moon

Marcia Smith reports that the US Congress finally managed to end the 43-day government shutdown. However, it currently only funds NASA until January 30, 2026, and so bills for its FY 2026 budget need to pass before that.
US-based Star Catcher wants to deliver power wirelessly & optically from orbit to hardware on the Moon. Intuitive Machines is interested to tap into it for its upcoming rover.
Thanks to fresh lunar samples brought to Earth by Chang’e 5 and Chang’e 6 missions, there has been a new influx of sample science results which have transformed our understanding of lunar volcanism and the Moon’s farside. Scientists from around the world will share more such results from studying little bits of Luna at the International Lunar Sample Research Symposium hosted later this week by the University of Hong Kong. I’ll eagerly attend the symposium in person, and will deliver a talk on India’s Chandrayaan 4 sample return mission. 🌕

Bonus memes for those of you who read till the end:

Can’t stop, won’t stop. Level 3 unlocked. The next several years will be interesting. Meme: Jatan Mehta

Meme: Jatan Mehta 🌝

- Jatan 🌙

Thanks for using RSS the best.

Celebrating 5 years and 10,000 subscribers of Moon Monday with globally published poetry on space

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 16:51:49 +0530

Dear readers,

About two months ago, my Moon Monday blog+newsletter crossed 10,000 subscribers. I did not announce it until now because I wanted to celebrate it in some way. Having readers and supporters be truly spread around the world in various space communities is something I’m not just proud of but very grateful to be able to serve. Today, as Moon Monday also completes a unique 5-year archive of 250 editions covering & contextualizing humanity’s global lunar exploration missions, I’m elated to release & share my poetry pamphlet on space worldwide in multiple formats. Presenting Seven uni-verses, poetry on all that space evokes. 🌙

Seven uni-verses (booklet)

By Jatan Mehta. Poetry on all that space evokes.

Read for Free →

Seven uni-verses is a pamphlet of poems dedicated to humanity’s exploration of the universe. There’s nothing quite as bold and beautiful as committing to venturing the brutal colossal desolation that is space. Every (civil) space launch carries not just hardware but hope. The act of exploring the void makes humans special.

As someone who has dedicated his work life to space, I’ve written these verses over the years to attempt and capture the sheer intensity of emotions and intellectual ambition the cosmos and its exploration evokes. I love poetry, and have an innate desire to merge it with my first love—space. While my poems are intended to be read by everyone, many lines allude to technical concepts for those in the know to savor. A few key references as well as backstories are mentioned in the endnotes.

Get your copy for free

Seven uni-verses is available worldwide in multiple formats to support enhanced accessibility, which is important to make reading equitable. To that end, I’m also providing the booklet officially for free digitally and at minimal cost in print. :)

Ebook, Print, Audio, Libraries, and Public Archives:

Get Seven uni-verses ✨

Bookmark & Review

Goodreads | Open Library
Fable | StoryGraph | Hardcover | Literal
Bookwyrm | Micro.blog
Search for ISBN number 9789334418880 in book tracking apps

If you like what you read and find value in my open access approach to publishing this as well as future books worldwide, kindly directly support independent writing & journalism as a reader:

Support my work 🌙

Merging the worlds of blogs and books

Publishing Seven uni-verses is also a foundational step for the next phase of my space writing: Merge the worlds of blogs and books. The last three months have been a sprawling journey of discovery and knowledge about how to publish a book worldwide across ebook, print, and audio formats and have it also be available in libraries and public archives—all while not granting exclusivity to any platform or distributor, especially not to Amazon.

Getting my poetry pamphlet out in the world in an independent and open access manner has helped me lay the foundation to publish my writing as books and booklets in a streamlined way in the future. Ditching traditional book publishing norms, I’m instead following the same philosophy here that has worked well for my blog so as to bring the benefits of independent web publishing to books:

Enable free access to my writing worldwide, with zero ads, as opposed to the inaccessibility of expensive books
Avoid publisher whims like retrospective paywalls and abrupt price increases
Have extensive links for citations plus easy discovery in the Ebook format alongside good search
Build a highly reference-able archive like Moon Monday
Continue sustaining independent writing with community support, enabled by a transparently run sponsorships program whose terms are public

I’m excited about this next phase of my space writing. I’ll be aiming to publish a couple of books or booklets next year on important but undercovered global space developments. Subscribe to be notified of new books & articles I publish for free:

or use RSS →

If you find value in my open access approach to publishing my writing worldwide, kindly directly support independent writing & journalism as a reader:

Support my work 🌙

- Jatan 🌙

Thanks for using RSS the best.

Moon Monday #250: One small step, mission updates, and a much needed giant leap

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 16:48:11 +0530

Welcome to the 250th edition of my Moon Monday blog+newsletter! 🚀🌕

One small step: About two months ago, Moon Monday crossed 10,000 subscribers. I did not announce it until now because I wanted to celebrate it in some way. Having readers and supporters be truly spread around the world in various space communities is something I’m not just proud of but very grateful to be able to serve. Today, as Moon Monday also completes a unique 5-year archive of 250 editions covering & contextualizing humanity’s global lunar exploration missions, I’m elated to release & share my poetry pamphlet on space worldwide in multiple formats. Presenting Seven uni-verses, poetry on all that space evokes. 🌙

Seven uni-verses (booklet)

By Jatan Mehta. Poetry on all that space evokes.

About & Read →

Getting my poetry pamphlet out in the world in an independent manner has also helped me lay the foundation for the next phase of my space writing: Merge the worlds of blogs and books

Mission updates

Radar scattering maps of the Moon’s north (left) and south (pole) as observed by the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter. Image: ISRO / SAC / DFSAR

ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter continues characterizing the lunar poles using its advanced dual frequency radar by mapping potential water ice deposits and gauging surface roughness, densities, and porosities. With the agency’s new announcement of processed Level 3C data products from the instrument now being available, ISRO noted the following:

The Dual Frequency Synthetic Aperture Radar (DFSAR) is the first instrument that has mapped the Moon using L-band in full-polarimetric mode and in highest resolution (25m/pixel). This advanced radar mode sends and receives signals in both vertical and horizontal directions, making it ideal for studying surface properties.

Studies of DFSAR’s enhanced datasets can add to the ISRO orbiter’s ongoing trickle of lunar water results while also furthering NASA’s collaboration with ISRO to have the orbiter aid Artemis landing site selections by prospecting for lunar polar water, classifying hazards, and gaining better topographic data about polar sites.

The Artemis II flight crew (in suits) and the mission closeout crew (in clean room apparel) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida prior to test operations of the Orion lunar capsule earlier this year. The flight crew from left to right: Mission Specialists Jeremy Hansen and Christina Koch, Pilot Victor Glover, and Commander Reid Wiseman. Image: NASA / Rad Sinyak

Eric Berger interviewed the NASA Artemis II astronauts that are preparing to fly around the Moon and back next year. The piece provides a good rundown of the mission’s timeline and key checkpoints & fallbacks post launch. The Mission Pilot Victor Glover shared an interesting detail to that end:

The first workout [for astronauts] is a checkout of that exercise hardware, but it's also a checkout of the environmental control system. Because I'm going to be breathing, I'm going to be sweating, making more humidity and more CO2 for the life support system to scrub out. And then if that's good, that's another check that means we can go to the Moon.

NASA wants to target February 2026 for Artemis II’s launch although quite a few pre-launch preparations remain for this year and next. The ongoing US government shutdown is also likely to impact the schedule at some point as contractors are not getting paid—even though efforts are on to resume nominal country operations.

US President Donald Trump has renominated Jared Isaacman for the NASA Administrator position, after abruptly withdrawing his first nomination earlier this year just as the US Congress was about to confirm the position. The re-nomination now has to go through the US Senate again. With the ongoing US government shutdown, there’s lack of clarity on if Isaacman will be required to pass another confirmation hearing like the last time. Marcia Smith captures the overall situation well:

The [US] House has not met since September 19. The Senate is still working with hearings taking place, nominations being approved, and votes on whether to reopen the government [sic] rejected 14 times. Eventually it will reopen—what it will take is being vigorously debated at the White House and on Capitol Hill—but the FY2026 appropriations bills still need to pass both chambers and be signed into law. None have so far.

Eric Berger notes in his report on the news that “if Isaacman is not confirmed before the end of this calendar year, he must resubmit conflict-of-interest paperwork, and the process could be drawn out into next spring.”

Many thanks to Gurbir Singh and Vishnu Viswanathan 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, without ads, kindly support my independent writing:

Support Moon Monday 🌙

A giant leap in orbital imagery is what we need to realize advanced Moon missions

At over 1.6 petabytes, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission hosts by far the largest dataset from any planetary science spacecraft ever launched. LRO’s high-resolution lunar imagery and topographic data has been the bedrock for selecting landing sites of most Moon missions launched this century from around the world. But the 2009-launched LRO has gracefully aged now, with limited capabilities left for its latest mission extension compared to before. LRO’s inertial measurement unit has degraded, and it can no longer maintain an orbit that can study the lunar poles from directly above them; its orbit is now inclined. NASA has not approved any LRO successor like LExSO nor does the agency’s FY2026 Presidential budget request ask for any such funding.

India’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter, touting a better radar and 2x the imaging resolution of LRO, has fulfilled a few advanced needs such as helping JAXA’s SLIM spacecraft achieve a precision Moon landing and aiding NASA with Artemis landing site selections. But leveraging of the orbiter’s capabilities has been limited in scope. Moreover, the orbiter is likely to end its nominal operations by the end of the decade, with no immediate replacement planned or announced by ISRO.

Images: NASA / GSFC / ASU / LROC / ISRO / C. Tungathurthi | Graphic: Jatan Mehta

Commercial companies are entering the landscape to fill some gaps in orbital imagery and mapping, like the upcoming US-based services of Firefly’s Ocula and Blue Origin’s Oasis. While welcome, these are specialized and have relatively limited use cases. The expansive scope of future missions leading up to Moonbases requires having the whole spectrum of orbital datasets, especially for unravelling unknown ground truths about water ice on lunar poles—something the US has been failing at despite it being central to Artemis.

Recognizing existing constraints and anticipating future needs, a specialized team of US scientists released a report in 2022 formally recommending NASA to plan replacing the LRO with a cooperative multi-orbiter, commercial-international approach so as to support the increasingly complex and diverse upcoming robotic CLPS and crewed Artemis missions.

The Lunar Ledger project by the Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor) aims to help catalyze acting on this advice by allowing more mission operators to reliably share technical data at mutual discretion. Six companies have signed up for the Ledger at launch: ispace, Firefly, Astrolab (a Moon Monday sponsor), JAOPS, Dymon, and SpaceData. Similar to how NASA, ESA, and ISRO have been planning coordinated imaging and scientific observations of Venus with their respective upcoming missions, lunar orbiters from around the world could do the same to accelerate progress and improve output while saving costs. Christine Tiballi, the Lunar Ledger’s Lead, is particularly excited about the possibilities. Orbital data from one entity could enable better rover missions for others, which in turn enhance the quality of orbital datasets themselves that later missions by others still can leverage. “Suddenly competition can become very lucrative cooperation,” says Tiballi.

🛰️ Read the full article →

This section was originally published by me on the newsletter of Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor) as their Science Communications Lead. The article is republished here because of its relevance to my Moon Monday readers.

More Moon

ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer uses virtual reality to train for lunar missions at ESA’s Moon-like LUNA facility in Germany. Image: ESA

ESA has started conducting virtual reality training for astronauts at its versatile Moon-simulating LUNA facility in Germany, adding to prior tests of instruments, mission concepts, and modern astronaut tools. A simulated habitat module also adjoins LUNA to soon better test complex mission scenarios where humans and robots interact in varied ways for long periods.
The South East Asian countries of Malaysia and Philippines have signed the US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration. The European country of Latvia also signed, making the total number of Accords signees 60. Payload Space has neat charts and graphs.

I’m very happy to publish this 250th edition of Moon Monday. Thank you so much to every single one of you who reads my labor of lunar love, to those who have provided feedback and shared editions, and to all supporters in every form. 💛

If you’d like to help sustain and flourish my one-of-a-kind globally read community resource and support independent writing in the process, kindly sponsor Moon Monday:

Support Moon Monday 🌙

- Jatan 🌙

Thanks for using RSS the best.

A giant leap in orbital imagery is what we need to realize advanced Moon missions

Jatan Mehta — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 16:49:53 +0530

Illustration of the LRO spacecraft orbiting our Moon. Image: NASA / GSFC / Chris Meaney

At over 1.6 petabytes, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission hosts by far the largest dataset from any planetary science spacecraft ever launched. LRO’s high-resolution lunar imagery and topographic data has been the bedrock for selecting landing sites of most Moon missions launched this century from around the world. Many of these landers though were planned as short or mid duration missions at best, whereas the next generation of landers and rovers will explore unknown ground truths about water ice and other resources amid unfavorable lighting conditions at the Moon’s south pole. These will not only need more granular orbital imagery to plan precision landings but comprehensive environmental datasets that allow missions to last long enough.

But NASA’s 2009-launched LRO has gracefully aged now. While it still has utility which led to its latest mission extension evaluation, the orbiter has limited capabilities left. LRO’s inertial measurement unit has degraded, and it can no longer maintain an orbit that can study the lunar poles from directly above them; its orbit is now inclined. Recognizing these constraints, a specialized team of US scientists released a report called CLOC-SAT in 2022 urging NASA to plan replacing the LRO with an enhanced approach so as to support the increasingly complex and diverse upcoming robotic CLPS and crewed Artemis Moon missions.

Three years since, NASA has not approved any LRO successor despite the LExSO mission being proposed by members from the LRO team itself. NASA’s FY2026 Presidential budget request does not ask for any funding for the same.

What will stand on the shoulders of the giant?

On the US’ side, there is NASA’s ShadowCam imager, which launched aboard South Korea’s KPLO lunar orbiter in 2022. It images polar craters that are permanently shadowed. However, it has found no reflectance differences that can be uniquely attributed to surface water ice in most of the areas it has mapped so far. To be clear, this isn’t a failure of ShadowCam, the instrument. But given that KPLO’s mission will likely end this year, the dull outcome highlights the pressing need for higher-resolution studies from orbit and the surface, neither of which are taking place substantially.

India’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter, a full-fledged reconnaissance spacecraft like LRO, has fulfilled a few advanced needs. Having launched a decade later, it’s also more capable in certain areas, such as having a better radar as well as a better imaging resolution of up to 0.25 meters/pixel—twice LRO’s finest. Scientists who authored the aforementioned report for NASA recognized the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter’s capability in mission planning:

Additional imaging of the lunar surface at sub-meter scales (e.g., 30 cm) is highly desirable to facilitate identification of roughly m-scale hazards that are often relevant to finding safe landing sites. As an example, the Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter High Resolution Camera (OHRC) has a nominal pixel scale of 30 cm from a 62 km altitude orbit.

Images: NASA / GSFC / ASU / LROC / ISRO / C. Tungathurthi | Graphic: Jatan Mehta

Through its instruments, the ISRO orbiter has been producing a trickle of this next layer of lunar water results. The orbiter also helped JAXA’s SLIM spacecraft achieve the most precise Moon landing ever for a robotic vehicle, touching down only 55 meters from its targeted point. ISRO shared Chandrayaan 2 data with JAXA for final landing site selection as well as for SLIM’s onboard last-mile navigation maps. Without the world’s sharpest lunar imager, it wouldn’t be possible for SLIM to spot and navigate to a safe touchdown point without compromising on the landing accuracy—the primary mission goal. The two agencies are now collaborating on the joint LUPEX rover mission to study water ice on the Moon’s south pole.

Similarly, NASA has been collaborating with ISRO to have the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter aid Artemis landing site selections by prospecting for lunar polar water, classifying hazards, and gaining better topographic data about polar sites. But NASA’s leveraging and ISRO’s promoting of the orbiter’s optical and radar capabilities have been limited in scope. Moreover, the orbiter is likely to end its nominal operations by the end of the decade if not before that with no immediate replacement planned or announced by ISRO.

Commercial services coming up

Illustration of the Ocula lunar imaging service. Image: Firefly

Seeing the opportunity to fill gaps in the apt planning of future, more complex Moon missions, especially in the case of NASA, commercial companies are entering the landscape of orbital imagery and mapping.

US-based Firefly announced a commercial lunar imaging and mineral detection service called Ocula to hope to carry forward a part of LRO’s foundational role. The service will commence with the first Elytra Dark orbiter next year from low lunar orbit. The orbiter will do so after completing its services for Firefly’s upcoming second Moon lander mission part of NASA’s CLPS program. Firefly says Ocula’s best case optical imagery will tout a then-best resolution of 20 cm/pixel.

Blue Origin has announced that it will send an “ultra-low” polar orbiter called Oasis-1 to the Moon to “create the most detailed high-resolution maps to date of lunar water ice, Helium-3, radionuclides, rare earth elements, precious metals, and other materials”. The mission will be in partnership with the Luxembourg Space Agency, ESA’s space-resources-focused ESRIC institute, and GOMspace. The company has not yet specified when Oasis-1 will launch or what its altitude range will be to enable the required outcomes.

On the other side of the world, ispace has been selected as part of Japan’s 1-trillion yen “Space Strategy Fund” initiative to develop, launch, and operate a lunar orbiter which will use a terahertz wave sensor system to locate and map water ice deposits on the Moon’s poles. Data from this orbiter will be analyzed in tandem with direct surface and subsurface measurements made by the upcoming joint Indo-Japanese LUPEX rover mission.

Coordinate to catalyze

All of these commercially driven orbiters, while welcome, are specialized and have relatively limited use cases. The expansive scope of future missions leading up to Moonbases still requires having the whole spectrum of orbital datasets, especially for helping locate and explore swaths of water ice and permanently shadowed regions on lunar poles—something the US has been failing at despite it being central to Artemis.

To that end, scientists have formally recommended NASA through the aforementioned CLOC-SAT report as well as other means to coordinate future lunar orbital measurements and capabilities. This, the report has argued, necessitates having a slew of interconnected lunar orbiters—both long-lived ones like LRO & Chandrayaan 2 as well as specialized ones—instead of a single successor.

Meeting these [future mission] goals will require multiple approaches involving several orbits and/or orbiters, but there are a large number of stakeholders in our return to the Moon, including commercial and international partners, whose resources can be shared and leveraged to meet diverse goals while minimizing cost.
[…]
NASA should establish a single office tasked with coordinating across space agencies and within NASA for sharing resources, such as communications networks and orbital strategies. For example, a spacecraft’s orbit altitude and orbit plane could be chosen partially based on the requirements of other orbiters.

The Lunar Ledger project by the Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor) aims to help catalyze acting on this advice by allowing more commercial and national mission operators to reliably share technical data at mutual discretion. Six companies have signed up for the Ledger at launch with an eye towards mission data sharing: ispace, Firefly, Astrolab (a Moon Monday sponsor), JAOPS, Dymon, and SpaceData. Similar to how NASA, ESA, and ISRO have been planning to perform coordinated imaging and scientific observations of Venus with their respective upcoming missions, lunar orbiters from across the world could coordinate and build atop their respective observations to accelerate progress and improve output for all while saving costs. Christine Tiballi, the Lunar Ledger’s Lead, is particularly excited about the possibilities of orbital data enabling better rover missions, which in turn enhance quality of orbital datasets that later missions can leverage:

We've included market signals like data sharing and available payload space, so that any mission can communicate their interest as a provider or a consumer of these assets. So say an upcoming rover is to traverse projected operational coordinates of another future mission, capturing data at unprecedented resolutions. Tapping into it will not only improve calibration of public orbital datasets and significantly increase the chances of future mission successes but also signal operational orbiters to enable planning for that rover traverse in the first place.

This way you have the opportunity to be the supplier and enabler as well as the customer while reducing building costs. “Suddenly competition can become very lucrative cooperation,” adds Tiballi.

Originally published by me on the blog of Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor) as their Science Communications Lead. The article is republished here on my blog because of its relevance to my Moon Monday readers as well as for archival.

- Jatan 🌙

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Moon Monday #249: The one published on Sunday

Jatan Mehta — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 19:20:46 +0530

This edition of Moon Monday is being published a day early on Sunday since I’m attending a conference on science journalism in Ahmedabad, India on Monday and Tuesday. Also see: Fun with Moon exploration headlines

China and Luna

Top: A panorama of the Moon’s surface shot by the Chang’e 5 lander, which shows its robotic sampling arm and marks made in lunar soil by its scoop; Bottom: A close look at a Chang’e 5 lunar sample, labelled CE5C0000YJYX03501GP. Images: CLEP / CNSA | Graphic: Jatan Mehta

Following on this year’s announcement by CNSA of the first set of international organizations whose proposals it selected to study unique lunar samples fetched to Earth by the Chang’e 5 mission in 2020, China has now opened up applications for the second round of international research proposals. Applications can be submitted through China’s Lunar Sample Release System until November 30.
Following on the recent string of successful tests of elements part of China’s architecture for landing humans on the Moon, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) has outlined the next set of tests to be accomplished in the near future:

A series of crucial upcoming tests include – integrated testing for the Lanyue lunar lander, thermal tests and maximum dynamic pressure escape tests for the Mengzhou manned spacecraft, and low-altitude and technology verification flights for the Long March-10 carrier rocket.

The release goes on to note that:

Payload designs for scientific research and applications have been finalized, and ground-based infrastructure, such as the launch site, tracking network and landing site on Earth, is under accelerated development.

Artemis III updates

A new illustration of SpaceX’s Lunar Starship showing it having landed Artemis astronauts on the Moon for NASA. Image: SpaceX

After NASA reopened the contract for Artemis III’s crewed Moon landing aspect, the agency now says they have received the accelerated lander development plans from SpaceX as well as Blue Origin, which involve simplified mission architectures and streamlined concept of operations. Marcia Smith reports NASA’s official statement in response to a query on the next steps:

NASA has received and is evaluating plans from both SpaceX and Blue Origin for acceleration of HLS production. Following the shutdown, the agency will issue an RFI to the broader aerospace industry for their proposals. A committee of NASA subject matter experts will be assembled to evaluate each proposal and determine the best path forward to win the second space race given the urgency of adversarial threats to peace and transparency on the Moon.

It would seem that reopening the Artemis III landing contract originally assigned to SpaceX has compelled the company to share the progress on Lunar Starship in public with more detail and context than ever before, including the following:

While many of SpaceX’s remaining HLS contract milestones are tied to flight tests, such as a ship-to-ship propellant transfer demonstration, SpaceX has started fabricating a flight-article Starship HLS cabin that will include functional avionics and power systems, crew systems and mechanisms, environmental control and life support systems, cabin and crew communications systems, and a cabin thermal control system. This flight-capable cabin will enable engineers to demonstrate high design maturity of the various systems required to support a human landing on the Moon, enable integrated system-level hardware testing, and provide a highly realistic training experience for future lunar explorers.

SpaceX also notes that Artemis III requirements have been changing over time (presumably from NASA’s side too), and separately points out that former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who made statements against the company’s slow progress on Starship in a US Congressional hearing, is a lobbyist.

Many thanks to The Orbital Index, Parvathy Prem and Planetary scientist David Blewett 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:

More Moon

Illustration of Japan’s HTV-X(G) cargo supply spacecraft approaching the NASA-led Gateway lunar orbital habitat. Image: JAXA

On October 29, Japan successfully demonstrated a cargo delivery to the International Space Station using its next-generation HTV-X spacecraft. A variant of this craft called HTV-X(G) will deliver astronaut supplied to the upcoming NASA-led Gateway lunar orbital habitat starting 2030. Between this and building an advanced crewed, pressurized lunar rover for Artemis astronauts, Japan’s strategic collaborative approach for the Moon is to be a critical logistical supplier for NASA’s Artemis program. Previously, Japan got an astronaut seat aboard the Gateway in return for JAXA providing critical life support systems and infrastructure components for the station’s Lunar I-Hab crew habitat module. The HTV-X(G)’s cargo deliveries to the Gateway will allow the lunar orbital habitat to sustain crewed and uncrewed operations for long periods. In February 2023, JAXA recruited two new astronaut candidates, one of which could fly to the Gateway.
Intuitive Machines has received a $8.2 million contract from the US Air Force to develop low-power, compact nuclear fission systems that can power lunar infrastructure elements such as beacons that provide navigation services to hardware at the Moon.
Related developments:
- ESA moonlit their lunar navcom constellation ambitions
- NASA un-nukes its decision to steer away from using nuclear power on the Moon
Last month, Hungary became the 57th country and 23rd European nation to sign the US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration.
A great photo essay: How Lunar Photography Brought the Heavens Down to Earth

- Jatan 🌙

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Moon Monday #248: The one that starts with a meme

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 18:47:47 +0530

Meme: Jatan Mehta 🌝

China is progressing well in preparations towards the launch of its Chang’e 7 mission to the Moon’s south pole in the second half of next year. The complex multi-month mission primarily aiming to study lunar water ice spans several elements: a lander, an orbiter, a rover, a hopper, and an existing lunar satellite Queqiao 2 whose previous mission was to relay communications between Earth and Chang’e 6 spacecraft modules so as to fetch farside lunar samples.

Each element of Chang’e 7 has scientific instruments and goals of its own.

The Chang’e 7 orbiter will sport a high-resolution stereo mapping camera, a miniature synthetic aperture radar, an infrared spectrometer, a set of high-resolution neutron and gamma ray spectrometers, and a magnetometer.
The lander will operate two cameras, a seismometer, a lunar dust & plasma analyzer, and a telescope. It will also host a retroreflector. The seismometer in particular will help scientists better understand the lunar interior as well as constrain the rate of moonquakes and amount of micrometeorite impacts on the lunar south pole, which will help safely plan long duration crewed missions to the region in the future.
The rover will tout a panoramic camera, a Raman spectrometer, a ground penetrating radar, a mass spectrometer, and a magnetometer.
The hopper, also referred to as a mini flying probe, will have a water analyzer.
The relay satellite will conduct a radio experiment using one of its payloads, and will continue studying uncharged energetic particles and the extreme ultraviolet environment around Earth with two instruments for those tasks respectively.

A render of the Chang’e 7 lander and orbiter going around the Moon. Image: CMG

Some of the Chang’e 7 candidate landing sites on the Moon’s south pole. Image: DSEL

A taste of lunar water

After a two month survey of key lunar south polar locations using the orbiter’s instruments, the Chang’e 7 lander aims to perform a precision landing at the finally selected location by mission operators. Post touchdown, the lander will deploy the rover and activate the hopper to explore around. The surface mission’s primary goal across its three elements is to locate and study water deposits frozen inside cold traps within permanently shadowed regions on the lunar south pole. Many of the instruments listed above, like the infrared & mass spectrometers and the ground penetrating radar, will directly help scientists get a tactile understanding of lunar water ice. The Chang’e 7 hopper, with its shock absorbing legs, will jump into nearby permanently shadowed areas for its onboard Lunar Water Molecular Analyzer (LWMA) to detect water ice and other volatile resources like ammonia.

The Chang’e 7 hopper will separate from the lander to directly explore permanently shadowed regions and cold traps hosting water ice on the Moon. Images: CNSA / CCTV

The paper on Chang’e 7 science by Chi Wang, et al. captures the mission’s approach to studying lunar water and its importance as follows:

Previous studies of water and volatiles were mainly based on orbital remote sensing neutron spectrometers, synthetic aperture radars, spectrometers and other methods; only indirect evidence of the existence of water ice in the shadowed area was obtained, and it is difficult to judge its depth, abundance and forms, etc. By using more advanced high-precision neutron gamma spectrometers and synthetic aperture radars, and by conducting direct in-situ measurements of H2O molecules and their H isotopes in PSRs at the same time, we can not only confirm the existence of water ice and reveal its origin, but also obtain the distribution and content of water ice in the PSRs through a comparative analysis of in-situ measurement results with the remote sensing detection results of PSRs on the entire lunar surface. Combined with laboratory test analysis and research on water and volatile components in lunar samples, we may address fundamental questions on the origin and distribution of lunar water ice and volatile components.

Chang’e 7 will be China’s first attempt to gain such a ground truth understanding of the accessibility, movement, and storage of surface and near-surface water ice on the Moon’s poles, which is crucial to appropriately plan long-term lunar exploration and sustained off-Earth living. Virtually all recent missions funded by NASA have failed to advance on the same despite it being the foundational goal of the US Artemis program. Given China’s exceptional track record of virtually no major failure despite undertaking increasingly complex lunar missions, there’s little reason to doubt that Chang’e 7 and its successor Chang’e 8 will not be successes. China is poised to prepare well for an eventual Moonbase with crew and robots under the Sino-led project called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS).

There’s another mission aspect that’s interesting that’s mentioned in the same paper. Chinese researchers have suggested that when coupled with Earth-based ground stations, China’s in-progress network of lunar navigation and communications satellites can help CNSA track its deep space missions with sub-kilometer accuracy all the way to Jupiter and even beyond. As noted by Chi Wang, et al., the Queqiao 2 relay satellite will use its radio payload to test an element of this during Chang’e 7’s mission:

The LOVEX [payload] on the relay satellite is used to construct a 400000-km baseline Moon–Earth VLBI measurement and observation experiment system to improve the accuracy of orbit determination in deep space and to carry out astrometry and astrophysics observation and study.

International instruments onboard

Of all the Chang’e 7 instruments, seven are international contributions, a welcome move as China seeks to increase global participation in its Moon missions in the lead up to its ILRS Moonbase plans. Ling Xin recently reported that according to Chang’e 7’s deputy chief designer Tang Yuhua, the international instruments that will be aboard the mission’s various elements have all been delivered to CNSA.

The orbiter’s hyperspectral mineral mapping camera is made by Egypt and Bahrain, a space radiation measuring instrument duo is from Thailand, and a monitor which will measure incoming and outgoing radiation to and from Earth got aid from Switzerland. For Egypt, Bahrain, and Thailand, this mission represents their first study of our Moon. On the lander end, the lunar dust & plasma analyzer is from Russia, the ILO-C telescope from the US-based International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA), and the retroreflector is from Italy-based SCF Lab just like Chang’e 6.

In July, ILOA’s telescope passed payload acceptance tests. 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. In August, Thailand’s National Astronomical Research Institute (NARIT) delivered its ~5-kilogram radiation monitoring MATCH payload to CAS and CNSA. It will study solar storms and cosmic rays respectively with two instruments. MATCH was developed by over a dozen Thai researchers in collaboration with seven professors across Chinese scientific institutions. Thailand was the first country to sign on to the Sino-led ILRS Moonbase project as well as the US-led Artemis Accords. Senegal is the only other country to sign both. I hope many more join.

Upcoming missions globally this decade which are similar to Chang’e 7’s surface mission of aiming to find and characterize lunar water include the joint Indo-Japanese Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX mission and NASA’s VIPER rover which might fly on a Blue Origin lander. All of these missions will provide enhanced context for analyzing ISRO’s Chandrayaan 4 samples, which aims to bring lunar polar material to Earth in 2028.

Related: Western media narratives misrepresent Chinese space, which reduces trust and deters cooperation and collaboration.

Many thanks to Space Age Publishing, Astrolab and Mahesh Anand 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:

NASA reopens Artemis III human landing contract

Illustrations of SpaceX’s Lunar Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon landers respectively, which were selected by NASA to land astronauts on Luna this decade and beyond starting with Artemis III and V respectively. Images: SpaceX / Blue Origin

A year later than expected, SpaceX finally hit all suborbital testing milestones it needed from the second version (v2) of its Starship Super Heavy rocket thanks to October 13’s eleventh integrated test flight IFT-11. Like IFT-10’s August flight, IFT-11 achieved its primary goals, from a demonstration of deploying simulated Starlink satellites to heat shield tests as well as precise core & upper stage return and splashdowns. SpaceX will next test an upgraded v3 Starship early next year from a new launchpad, only after the success of which can the many remaining milestones leading up to a lunar landing be checked off one after another—slowly but hopefully surely.

Between those still pending milestones, the three back-to-back failures of Starship this year, and an explosion of a test pad, the slow progress of SpaceX in building its contracted crewed lunar lander for NASA’s Artemis III mission has shook the US in finally realizing that it will likely not meet its self-imposed goal of “beating China” to the Moon. To that end, NASA’s Trump-appointed Acting Administrator Sean Duffy has acknowledged that Starship’s crewed landing will be delayed by at least two years from 2027, and has thus gone ahead and reopened the Artemis III contract to all entities who can propose a faster turnaround. SpaceX is allowed to put in an accelerated timeline proposal as well.

I’m not interested in covering man child like tantrums in reaction to this development as news. Between that and sticking to Moon Monday’s approach of avoiding (Artemis) hot takes and speculative coverage, it’s better to wait for all bidders to send in their accelerated Artemis III crewed landing proposals to NASA. These proposals are due by October 29, and we’ll see where things are headed once more formal information about them is out. In the meanwhile, Marcia Smith has covered well how Artemis III’s timeline has kept moving to the right.

Note that this whole development was not announced on NASA’s website; the US government shutdown is not supposed to affect Artemis II and III related activities and yet here we are. If NASA can announce this change on social media, and undertake its logistics, it can also put out said announcement on its website as its canonical presence on the web.

More Moon

The Artemis II Orion spacecraft (with the NASA and ESA logos) is seen here about to be stacked atop the SLS rocket. Image: NASA

Also without an announcement on NASA’s website, we got to know through Duffy’s X account instead that the integration of the Orion spacecraft onto the SLS rocket for the upcoming crewed Artemis II circumlunar mission is now complete. The four astronauts flying around the Moon and back for the mission have named their Orion craft “Integrity”. NASA wants to target February 2026 for Artemis II’s launch although quite a few pre-launch preparations remain for this year and next.
Astrobotic announced that the launch of the company’s Griffin lander to the Moon’s south pole as part of NASA’s CLPS program is now postponed from this year to no earlier than July 2026. The large lander’s primary payload will be the FLIP rover by Astrolab (a Moon Monday sponsor), which got manifested earlier this year after NASA decided not to fly the VIPER rover aboard Griffin.
The Rice University in Texas, USA is hiring a postdoctoral associate for a NASA-funded project dedicated to developing next-generation radiometric dating methods specifically to analyze samples from Apollo and future Artemis missions.

- Jatan 🌙

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Shining light on solar activity and the Moon’s exosphere—a Diwali gift from Chandrayaan 2

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 17:48:19 +0530

Illustration visualizing the Sun’s radiation wind bombarding the Moon, and various spacecraft observing its activity and effects. Background image: E. Masongsong / UCLA EPSS | Derivative graphic and annotations: Jatan Mehta

Theoretical and computational models of highly energetic solar storms have predicted for more than a decade that the density of the Moon’s nearside exosphere increases by at least ten times during such events. Between our Moon having no global magnetic field to shield its surface and the charged, energetic solar wind particles bombarding the ground like a machine gun, solar storms release a greater number of atoms to the exosphere than during normal solar activity. But until now there have been no confirmed measurements to know the real rate increase.

Last year’s heightened solar activity which caused widespread auroras on Earth provided an opportunity to Indian researchers for utilizing the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter to confirm or deny these predictions as well as refine them. A newly published paper based on data from the orbiter’s neutral gas mass spectrometer (named CHACE-2) taken during the time of the heightened solar activity now confirm that the nearside lunar exosphere became at least tenfold denser. Said solar storms were also observed by the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter’s X-ray solar monitor.

You probably wouldn’t get a clear enough picture of this if you read ISRO’s only-jargon-filled release about the discovery on its website, which also needs multiple typo fixes. The release meant for science popularization does not even attempt to capture the unique importance of studying our Sun from the vantage point of our Moon as opposed to elsewhere. That ISRO does not even consider leveraging any of the fairly large number of science writers in the country for such releases, much less think about actively supporting the growing talent, is inefficient. In any case, with the aforementioned discovery explained in brief above, here’s my attempt at capturing its broader picture: why the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter studies the Sun from the Moon, what scientists have found through it, and why the endeavor is unique and relevant to future exploration.

Sponsored job listings: PierSight Space is hiring for 11 roles—and particularly a senior Embedded Software developer, a lead for Antenna Design, and AIT Mechanical & Electrical engineering leads—to join their teams in Ahmedabad and Bangalore who are building a constellation of SAR-AIS satellites for persistent, all-weather ocean monitoring.

The Sun watcher

By now it’s clear that the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter doesn’t just study the Moon’s surface and aid its exploration but observes the Sun too. Specifically, scientists use the orbiter’s high-resolution Solar X-ray Monitor (XSM) to study solar flares. In turn, XSM provides a reference for the orbiter’s Chandrayaan-2 Large Area Soft X-ray Spectrometer (CLASS) instrument so it can map elements on the lunar surface. Scientists have published multiple results in international journals based on XSM’s unique observations of the Sun’s surface and atmospheric activities. These include results from statistical measurements of micro-flares and nano-flares crucial to understanding our Sun’s dynamic nature.

Panel (a) shows a micro-flare on the Sun detected by India’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter. Panels (b) and (c) show its locations in images captured by NASA’s SDO spacecraft. Image: Santosh Vadawale, et al.

XSM studies of micro-flares and nano-flares are especially important because scientists think they’re relevant to unlocking a fundamental mystery about our Sun: why is its extended atmosphere, the corona, much hotter than its surface? Scientists have been debating since the 1940s how the Sun’s atmosphere is heated to a million degrees Celsius while the surface barely crosses 6,000. Recent close-up observations of many tiny eruptions across the Sun’s surface by ESA’s Solar Orbiter mission coupled with coronal measurements made by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe have helped scientists almost solve the coronal heating mystery.

In that context, having abundant micro-flare and nano-flare observations over time from other spacecraft at different vantage points, like the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter, has helped scientists contextualize and refine these results to improve our understanding of the Sun. Furthermore, through high-resolution measurements of the Sun’s background X-ray emissions, the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter’s XSM data has provided the first elemental abundances of magnesium, aluminum, and silicon in the Sun’s corona during quiet times, refining our understanding.

A high-resolution image of the Sun from ESA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft, captured on May 30, 2020. The lower left circle indicates Earth’s size for scale. The arrow points to one of the many nano-flares. Image: ESA

Protecting future lunar explorers

Other than XSM, the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter’s aforementioned CLASS instrument can detect some solar events too. In January 2022, CLASS detected two highly energetic proton emission events in the solar wind. NASA’s GOES-16 satellite couldn’t detect one of these two events because Earth’s magnetic field shielded it from said particles. The Chandrayaan 2 orbiter being at the Moon though could detect them, as could other Sun-studying spacecraft lying outside Earth’s magnetic field.

The rate of protons recorded by India’s Chandrayaan 2 lunar orbiter (blue) and NASA’s GOES-16 Earth orbiter (red) circa January 20, 2022. Image: ISRO / NASA

During August 4-7 in 1972, the Sun released several bursts of flares and associated energetic particles. This places its time between the Apollo 16 and 17 missions to the Moon in the same year. Had any of the astronauts been in lunar orbit or on the surface during the solar event, they could’ve faced damaging levels of radiation with the potential to cause cancer. As we prepare to send astronauts on much longer Moon missions and beyond, we’ll need to protect our explorers from such solar storms whose particles reach the Earth-Moon space in a matter of hours.

NASA’s Artemis I mission in 2022 studied solar radiation effects inside the Orion spacecraft that will host crew on future missions. The agency’s upcoming Artemis II flight will advance these studies further. India’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter is aiding these safety efforts by improving our understanding of solar flares themselves as well as by helping scientists model how solar events affect the Moon, its exosphere, and the surrounding radiation environment as an overall place which will host future astronauts. Dedicated efforts from India for studying solar weather itself obviously include data from the recently launched Aditya-L1 solar observatory and its ongoing contributions but also specific institutional research such as the CESSI lab in IISER Kolkata, which focuses on the fundamental physics of stellar dynamics and modeling solar weather.

Chandrayaan’s Moon-based solar observations are helping extend all solar weather studies to an environment that future astronauts will be exposed to during long-duration missions as well as at Moonbases.

The Moon's environment illustrated to show the complex interactions between solar wind radiation, space plasma, flux of impacting meteorites, and the Moon’s surface, dust, and exosphere. Image: Jasper Halekas

Many thanks to Takshashila Institution, PierSight, GalaxEye Space, Gurbir Singh and Catalyx Space for sponsoring this week’s special combined edition of Moon Monday and Indian Space Progress.

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Lunar water and exosphere

With the above context, let’s come back to the discovery we started with up top about the Sun’s wind affecting the lunar ionosphere. It affects water on the Moon too.

Shadows on the Moon due to terrain can enable water ice to survive on the sunlit lunar surface. Instead of being trapped within lunar soil and rocks, where water is largely immobile, a new study suggests that water molecules remain as frost on the surface in cold shadows and move to other cold locations via the Moon’s thin exosphere. Image: NASA / JPL-Caltech

The Sun’s wind of charged particles is one of the key sources of lunar water, and so understanding how the solar wind shapes the lunar exosphere simultaneously helps us understand processes fundamental to it, which includes mechanisms of how water is altered and moves across the Moon, and how it’s lost. Lunar missions wanting to map and analyze surface water, like the upcoming joint ISRO-JAXA LUPEX rover, will be best served when accounting for all of these factors. The overall work also enables planetary scientists to make better water cycle models on other airless bodies across the Solar System like Mercury, gas giant moons, Ceres, etc.

Instead of explaining such interconnected aspects of the solar wind, the lunar exosphere, and human lunar exploration, ISRO’s aforementioned jargon-filled release about the importance of the discovery only states the following with no specifics or elaboration:

Apart from pushing the edge of our scientific understanding about the Moon and the lunar space weather (effect of the Sun’s emissions on the Moon), this observation also indicates the challenges of building scientific bases on the Moon. Lunar base architects need to account for such extreme events, which would temporarily alter the lunar environment, before the effects subside.

More lunar exosphere studies by Chandrayaan 2

Illustration showing source, sink, and release processes for sodium on the Moon’s surface and in its exosphere. See full caption | Image: A. Devaraj et al.

Indian researchers finally recently made ground-based telescopic observations of sodium in the lunar exosphere, building up on the first ever global-scale sodium maps of the Moon as seen by the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter.
Indian scientists analyzed how two-way radio signals between the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter and an Indian Deep Space Network antenna were affected, and used that to infer the first electron density profile of the Moon’s ionosphere for when the Moon passes through Earth’s geomagnetic tail. They found the density to be substantially higher than expected.
In a related study, a probe on the Chandrayaan 3 lander has taken the first in-situ plasma environment measurements from near the Moon’s south polar surface. The study also begins the long process of characterizing the lunar polar environment for planning long-duration human and robotic missions as well as at Moonbases.

Read previous editions on Indian space

Indian Space Progress #31: Chandrayaan 4 will bring unique Moon materials—and maybe a giant scientific leap for India
Indian Space Progress #30: Notable nuances about NISAR and how it flows into planetary science for NASA and ISRO
Indian Space Progress #29: Was Shubhanshu Shukla’s Axiom-4 flight to the International Space Station worth it for ISRO?

- Jatan 🌙

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An assortment of lunar papers from around the world | Moon Monday #246

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 17:40:36 +0530

A lot of interesting lunar science results have been published this year. Here’s a non-exhaustive but curated set of papers with a brief takeaway from each along with a representative graph or illustration of the discovery or finding. 🌙

A study of lunar soil simulants on biological cells conducted by Australian researchers suggests that inadvertent inhaling of lunar dust by future astronauts during missions might be less toxic than our current relationship with air pollution in terrestrial cities. – Paper | Article

Inflammation response to the introduction of lunar soil simulants LMS-1 and LHS-1 in biological cells BEAS-2B and A549 was lower than by polluted Earth dust. Image: Michaela B. Smith et al.

More comprehensive impact simulations conducted by US researchers suggest that at least 22.6% of all material ejected from the Moon by crater impacts and more such mechanisms end up hitting Earth over time. – Paper | Article

The team were able to conclude that, following lunar impacts, Earth collects about 22.6% of the ejected material over 100,000 years, with half of these collisions occurring within the first 10,000 years. The collision rate follows a power-law distribution over time (a relationship where a change in one quantity results in a proportional relative change in another) independent of the initial size of those quantities. Material launched from the Moon's trailing side has the highest Earth collision probability, while the leading side produces the lowest. When hitting Earth, lunar ejecta travel at 11.0-13.1 km/s and predominantly strike near the equator (with 24% fewer impacts at the poles). These impacts are nearly symmetrically distributed between morning and evening hours, peaking around 6 AM/PM.

Distribution of lunar ejecta colliding with Earth over time. Graphs: Jose Daniel Castro-Cisneros et al.

Watch out for meteor showers caused by the 60-meter-wide asteroid 2024 YR4, which is currently estimated to have a 4% chance of hitting the Moon in 2032.

🪨 ... 🌒 ... 💥 ... 🌍 ... ☄️

A collaboration between Chinese and US researchers have found that oxygen particles blown from Earth’s atmosphere to the Moon can react with lunar minerals to form hematite (rust). – Paper | Article

An example formation of hematite (blue) upon oxygen bombardment in iron-rich crystals known to exist on the Moon. A high-resolution Transmission Electron Microscopy image shows the bombarded layer containing nano-crystals of hematite. Image: Ziliang Jin et al.

US researchers combining and analyzing gravity, topography, and elemental abundance data under a NASA Lunar Data Analysis grant found that Artemis astronauts might pick up rocks from the Thorium-rich ejecta blanket deposited during the formation of the massive 2500-kilometer South Pole-Aitken basin—the largest, deepest, and oldest lunar crater. These samples will help further constrain the basin’s age, building upon its age finally determined by Chang’e 6, and likewise further enrich our understanding of the Moon’s farside-nearside dichotomy by better sampling the early lunar crust and possible mantle materials. – Paper | Article

The southward ejecta blanket (visualized in red) deposited over the surface during the formation of the South Pole-Aitken impact basin on the Moon’s farside. Illustration: Jeff Andrews-Hanna / University of Arizona / NASA / NAOJ

The first detailed examination of sintered Apollo lunar samples by a team of scientists & engineers at ESA has found sufficient similarities in desired quality to sintering of simulated lunar-like soil. This means a diverse set of the latter can be a good proxy to test future lunar construction technologies especially since real samples are expensive and difficult to obtain in bulk. – Paper | Article

Sintered Apollo lunar samples (left) and their closeup views (right) as seen using X-ray Computed Tomography (XCT). Image: ESA / Bethany Lomax et al.

Chinese researchers opportunistically studied water-hosting near-surface lunar soil fragments, which got exposed to the surface by the engine plumes of the Chang’e 6 lander when it touched down on the Moon’s farside last year. The study helps us better understand the Sun’s wind of charged particles as one of the key sources of lunar water. It also allows planetary scientists to make better models of the same for other airless bodies across the Solar System like Mercury, gas giant moons, Ceres, etc. – Paper | Article

Illustration showing how the Chang’e 6 lander engine plumes exposed water bearing lunar-soil fragments and their layers to the now-morphed surface. Image: Bin Liu et al.

By studying Apollo-sampled boulders, accounting for seismic measurements, and analyzing imagery from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, US researchers have predicted the frequency and magnitudes of moonquakes at the Apollo 17 landing site. They now aim to do the same for active faults on the Moon’s south pole to protect future astronauts and hardware on long-term missions especially since unlike Earthquakes, moonquakes can last for hours, thereby posing a stability risk to structures and vehicles operating nearby. – Paper | Article

Predicted seismic ground motion and shake intensities due to an active fault near the Apollo 17 landing site. See full caption | Image: Thomas Watters / Nicholas Schmerr

Indian researchers have finally made ground-based telescopic observations of sodium in the lunar exosphere, building up on the first ever global-scale sodium maps of the Moon as seen by the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter. – Paper 1 | Paper 2 | Article

Illustration showing source, sink, and release processes for sodium on the Moon’s surface and in its exosphere. See full caption | Image: A. Devaraj et al.

Many thanks to The Orbital Index and Mahesh Anand 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:

🌗 Visualize a new Moon based on scientific discoveries by Chang’e 6

More paper briefings

⚙️ Chandrayaan 3 research updates

🛰️ Lunar science galore from Chandrayaan 2

More Moon

Editorial disclaimer: The next bit is about an announcement from the Open Lunar Foundation, which is one of the Moon Monday sponsors. I’m also Open Lunar’s Science Communications Lead. As such, to cover the following news on Moon Monday while ensuring editorial independence and transparency, I did not communicate with Open Lunar about if I’ll write on this topic or even mention it, much less how so.

After three collaborative years of research, development, and community consultations, the Open Lunar Foundation has launched the Lunar Ledger (Registry) project. The Ledger aims to be a database of global lunar objects and activities which hopes to improve mission operator transparency by enhancing information sharing wherever possible. Information sharing is known to enable cutting-edge space missions. Unfortunately though, there are currently no institutionalized mechanisms that do so while also scaling with the increasing pace of Moon missions worldwide. Different states share different & limited information at different times, in disparate formats, dispersed through different channels at varying levels. Amid competition, companies remain tightfisted about sharing information even on mission aspects that aren’t sensitive to intellectual property. The current state of lunar information sharing and coordination is thus neither safe nor efficient for abundant progress. The Lunar Ledger aims to improve this situation by accommodating more actors to reliably share technical data with mutual discretion. And that’s why it’s notable that five companies have signed up for the Ledger at launch and agreed to share mission information to some as-yet-unspecified level through the project. The companies are ispace, Firefly, Astrolab (a Moon Monday sponsor), JAOPS, and Dymon.
Thanks to fresh lunar samples brought to Earth by Chang’e 5 and Chang’e 6 missions, there has been a new influx of sample science results which have transformed our understanding of lunar volcanism and the Moon’s farside. For scientists globally to share more such results, the University of Hong Kong is hosting the International Lunar Sample Research Symposium this November 21-24. I plan on being there to cover the event, and eager to learn more about the process of drawing fundamental planetary science insights from little bits of Luna. 🌕

- Jatan 🌙

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Moon Monday #245: Blue origin to hunt for a lunar oasis

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 15:56:55 +0530

Rendering of the Oasis-1 polar orbiter flying over the Moon’s pole. Image: Blue Origin

Blue Origin announced that it will send an “ultra-low” polar orbiter called Oasis-1 to the Moon to “create the most detailed high-resolution maps to date of lunar water ice, Helium-3, radionuclides, rare earth elements, precious metals, and other materials”. The mission will be in partnership with the Luxembourg Space Agency, ESA’s space-resources-focused ESRIC institute, and GOMspace.

Blue Origin noted in its blog post that the orbiter will use “neutron spectroscopy to quantify subsurface water ice concentrations to one-meter depths”. That’s a reasonable yet indirect method to detect lunar water ice as what it really does is detect hydrogen as a presumed sign of water molecules. There will be more instruments aboard Oasis-1:

Additional instruments include magnetometers for metal detection and multispectral imaging for Helium-3 and geological mapping, with controlled impact sequences maximizing data collection for precise extraction site selection.

When asked what is the planned altitude range for the “ultra-low” lunar polar orbiter, Blue Origin responded with the following:

Nothing further to share than what was in the blog post.

The company did not specify when Oasis-1 is supposed to launch either. As such, the project can be assumed to be in early stages, with the announcement being a starting point for more to come.

Upcoming missions globally aiming to find and characterize the nature of lunar polar water include China’s Chang’e 7 and Chang’e 8 spacecraft, NASA’s VIPER rover, and the joint Indo-Japanese Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX mission. These missions will also provide context for analyzing ISRO’s Chandrayaan 4 samples, which aims to bring lunar polar material to Earth in 2028. Considering that the US has been failing to explore lunar water as the principal goal of Artemis, Blue’s announcement of Oasis-1 is welcome despite the fuzziness on details.

Oasis-1 is the opening part of Blue’s multi-phase initiative to locate, map, characterize, and utilize lunar resources. And the closing end is Blue’s Alchemist project, which recently passed Critical Design Review (CDR). The project currently involves making solar cells using silicon and metals extracted from lunar soil simulants. This milestone is part of a broader goal set in 2023, when the company received $34.7 million from NASA as part of public-private Tipping Point contracts to build advanced lunar technologies. Said broader goal is to demonstrate the autonomous operation of Blue Alchemist solar cells in a “simulated lunar environment” by 2026. The latest CDR milestone clears the way for trying to achieve that goal.

While Blue Alchemist is an undeniably intriguing project, the sheer complexity and scale of producing infrastructure on the Moon to power habitats means that at least for a decade from now, NASA’s plans for getting power—solar and nuclear—for surface activities continues to be through the annoying tradition of pulling material out of Earth’s gruesome gravitational well. It should be noted though that Blue Alchemist includes systems for extracting oxygen from lunar soil while getting metal byproducts so that will be useful in the meanwhile when it comes.

Between Project Oasis, the company’s bet to carry NASA’s VIPER rover to the Moon, and using in-space refueling as a central architectural component for aiming to land humans on Luna, Blue Origin is positioning itself as an end-to-end lunar transportation and resource company.

Many thanks to Open Lunar Foundation and Gurbir Singh 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:

More Moon

The Artemis II SLS rocket being integrated inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The stage adaptor upon which the Orion spacecraft will be stacked is visible on an upper platform. Image: NASA

NASA completed integrating all hardware modules of the SLS rocket for the upcoming crewed Artemis II circumlunar mission with the latest addition of the stage adaptor. The adaptor sits atop the rocket’s upper stage, and is upon which the crew’s Orion spacecraft will come next. NASA says a composite diaphragm in the adaptor protects the Orion spacecraft from hazardous gases generated during launch. The four astronauts flying around the Moon and back on the mission have named their Orion craft “Integrity”. NASA continues to target April 2026 as the official date for Artemis II’s launch although quite a few pre-launch preparations remain for this year and next.
ispace has been selected as part of Japan’s 1-trillion yen “Space Strategy Fund” initiative to develop, launch, and operate a lunar orbiter which will use a terahertz wave sensor system to locate and map water ice deposits on the Moon’s poles. Data from this orbiter will be analyzed in tandem with direct surface and subsurface measurements made by the upcoming joint Indo-Japanese LUPEX rover mission.
ispace Europe has bagged a $22 million contract from Magna Petra to carry a NASA-developed mass spectrometer on its second lunar micro-rover. [The first rover was aboard the parent company ispace Japan’s second Moon lander RESILIENCE, which crashed on the Moon due to performance issues of the laser rangefinder.] The second rover will be aboard ispace Japan’s US subsidiary’s first lander part of the NASA-funded CLPS program through Draper. It is targeting a landing on the Moon’s farside in 2027.
Relatedly, a South Korean company called Unmanned Exploration Laboratory (UEL) is building two micro rovers and intends to send them on future Moon landing missions by ispace.
Last year we learnt that the launch of Australia’s first lunar rover called Roo-ver has been delayed to 2028—two years later than originally intended. Roo-ver is to launch on an as-yet-unidentified NASA CLPS lander to explore the Moon’s south pole for water ice. Now it seems that the launch year is pushed further, with a NASA release on the partnership stating “by the end of this decade” as the timeframe. Even the instrument being contributed by NASA is talked about murkily:

Australia is developing a semi-autonomous lunar rover, which will carry a NASA analysis instrument intended to demonstrate technology for scientific and exploration purposes.

A NASA analysis instrument intended to demonstrate technology for scientific and exploration purposes? To borrow a phrase I’ve picked up from a friend: “I understood all the words but not the sentence.”

- Jatan 🌙

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Moon Monday #244: Towards lunar construction

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 18:42:30 +0530

Before we begin, a clarifying note about the title of the previous Moon Monday: An Amazon delivery for NASA’s VIPER rover? Well, I’ve received many emails saying how Amazon has a distinct space entity from Blue Origin. It’s fair to point that out but I do know that 😄. I just hoped my readers would enjoy offbeat titles sometimes. Most media outlets are either too clickbait-y or too drab with their headlines. There’s no space for fun in there. But I don’t care about SEO and don’t host ads so why not be a little creative? If wonky titles really bother you though, maybe you should NOT read my list of fun Moon exploration headlines and SLS ones. 🌝

Sintered Apollo lunar samples (left) and their closeup views (right) as seen using X-ray Computed Tomography (XCT). Image: ESA / Bethany Lomax et al.

Space agencies and companies worldwide hope to build infrastructure on the Moon from lunar soil, including by heating it into compressed & reinforced structural material. The first detailed examination of sintering Apollo lunar samples by a team of scientists & engineers at ESA has found sufficient similarities in desired quality to sintering simulated lunar-like soil. This means a diverse set of the latter can be a good proxy to test future lunar construction technologies especially since real samples are expensive and difficult to obtain in bulk. The study did find though that the process is sensitive to surface weathering maturity of the lunar soil and particle sizes as well so real lunar soil can always surprise you. From the paper:

The mare samples from Apollo 11 and Apollo 15 exhibited a rapid onset of sintering, indicating it would be easier to accidentally over-sinter or melt mare soil. The sintering temperature of all Apollo samples fell within the range of temperatures required to sinter regolith simulant using the same experimental set-up. Regolith maturity appeared to lower the sintering temperature relative to what would be predicted by composition alone. Sintering simulant regolith with added agglutinates and dust indicated that the smaller average particle size contributed more to the sintering temperature of mature regolith than the higher glass and nanophase iron content.

Work globally towards lunar landing pads

Illustration showing a road and a landing pad on the Moon made using melted lunar soil. The inset image on the left shows interlocked 20-centimeter blocks made by laser-melting simulated lunar soil. Images: PAVER consortium / LIQUIFER

Future infrastructure on the Moon part of long-term robotic or human bases will need protection against lunar sandblasting by incoming landers. For that, ESA has the aptly named PAVER project. It uses powerful lasers to melt simulated lunar soil into glassy solid surfaces, which can then be used to create blocks of landing pads and roads. On the Moon, ESA plans to use a Fresnel lens to focus sunlight instead of using lasers. Landing on the pads instead of loose regolith will drastically reduce sandblasting.

Relatedly, as part of project MOONRISE, which was funded by Germany at €4.74 million, research teams at LZH and TU Berlin have been developing an ML-supported compact laser system to build pads with 3D-printing. The team says they’ve had successful basic terrestrial demonstrations, including under simulated lunar gravity in an Einstein-Elevator. A space-grade MOONRISE hopes to fly on an Astrobotic Griffin lander in late 2026 for a lunar demonstration.

In the meanwhile, a group of researchers at the Indian Institute of Science have been progressing slowly on bacteria-based lunar simulant bricks that are repairable.

NASA is funding the development of entire lunar landing pads.

In 2023, as part of multiple public-private Tipping Point contracts, NASA funded a Redwire-led project with $12.9 million to develop microwave heating technologies that could solidify and strengthen lunar soil for building infrastructure such as roads, foundations for habitats, and landing pads. The funding hasn’t included a lunar surface demonstration though.
As part of a Lunar Surface Technology Research (LuSTR) solicitation in 2022, NASA awarded ~$2 million to the Colorado School of Mines who in partnership with Lunar Outpost and others were to develop a rover-enabled lunar landing pad construction system for a demonstration on Earth.
NASA has also awarded a small contract to Astroport to prototype parts of the technology that can melt lunar regolith, convert it to manufacturing feedstock, and use that to robotically assemble landing pads.
As part of DARPA LunA-10’s selection of 14 companies in 2023 to conduct lunar infrastructure studies on how best to build key pieces for long-term human presence, ICON was to advance its work on building structures using lunar soil. In 2022, NASA awarded a $57 million contract to ICON for continuing to develop said technologies, with a test structure build targeted as early as 2026. A demonstration on the Moon is not in sight for at least two more years.

Illustration of ICON’s lunar construction technology in action on the Moon. Image: ICON / BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group

Furthermore, Jack Kuhr reported last year about the new startup Ethos Space Resources, which has melted lunar soil simulants on Earth and demonstrated the resulting material’s ability to withstand rocket plumes. Ethos plans to build large landing pads for future Lunar Starships with the help of the FLEX rover from Astrolab (a Moon Monday sponsor) in the future. Ethos plans for its landing pads to have embedded navigational beacons, which would aid precision landing—because otherwise a lander touching down anywhere besides the pad would defeat the purpose of it all.

China’s upcoming Chang’e 8 mission, targeted for launch in 2028, aims to not only melt lunar soil but also transform it via 3D printing into bricks and assemble basic structures out of them. With Chang’e 8, China aims to test techniques for constructing future lunar infrastructure like habitats and landing pads in the build up to the ambitious Sino-led Moonbase called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS).

Many thanks to Astrolab, Marc Rayman and Pint of View 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:

Mission updates

The Artemis II SLS rocket core stage being transported towards NASA’s Pegasus ferry barge near the agency’s Michoud Assembly Facility. Image: NASA / Eric Bordelon / Michael DeMocker

The four astronauts flying around the Moon and back next year on the Artemis II mission have named their Orion spacecraft “Integrity”. NASA continues to target April 2026 as the official date for Artemis II’s launch although quite a few pre-launch preparations remain for this year and next.
US-based Firefly’s first Moon landing mission was so productive that NASA has awarded a $10 million data buy contract to the company over and above its base CLPS contract of $101 million for the mission. Looking ahead, Firefly is gearing up for its second, third, and fourth Moon missions this decade. From Firefly’s announcement of NASA’s extended data purchase:

The scope of this data buy encompasses images captured by Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander during its 45-day transit to the Moon and more than 14 days of surface operations. This includes the first high-definition images of a solar eclipse and sunset captured from the Moon’s surface, that could provide insight into outstanding questions regarding lunar dust levitation and the horizon glow phenomenon.

The data buy also includes communications data and transmit speeds from Blue Ghost’s S-band and X-band antennas, propulsion data from Firefly’s Spectre thrusters during critical burns and the final lunar descent, and other lander performance data. Firefly will also provide NASA with additional payload science data as well as lander and payload temperature data captured during a 500°F [260°C] temperature delta on the Moon.

More Moon

NASA has launched the Lunar Melt citizen science project for enthusiasts to help it map flows of now-cooled melt deposits formed by asteroidal/cometary impacts using data gathered by the agency’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Erika Nesvold makes the case of the US not having presented a clear and coherent argument for the country’s self-imposed claim of defeating China in the new “Space Race” to the Moon.
Related: How Western media narratives of Chinese lunar activities misjudge capabilities and intent and China is not racing to the Moon

- Jatan 🌙

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Moon Monday #243: An Amazon delivery for NASA’s VIPER rover?

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 16:06:50 +0530

Illustration showing Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark I lander having deployed NASA’s VIPER rover on the Moon’s south pole. Image: Blue Origin

NASA’s planned lunar-water-studying VIPER rover mission, whose launch fate has been uncertain for over a year now, has gotten a new hope to cling to with the agency’s latest announcement of awarding a potential contract to Blue Origin for delivering the rover to the Moon’s south pole in late 2027. The Jeff Bezos owned Blue Origin is preparing two of its “Mark I” robotic lunar landers for launch, with the first one targeted to fly later this year. If this first flight goes well, and if Blue Origin can separately demonstrate to NASA how the lander’s mechanisms should safely deploy the 450-kilogram VIPER rover onto the lunar surface post landing, NASA will award Blue a $190 million contract for delivering VIPER to the Moon on the second Mark I lander. The contract will be part of NASA’s CLPS program.

Notably, the announcement also states that NASA will itself conduct operations and science planning of the VIPER rover as opposed to the agency’s prior considerations when it tried finding a private company to both fly and operate the rover at the latter’s own cost—an approach many argued decidedly failed at VIPER’s original goal. It’s good of NASA to not have followed that path and instead retain VIPER science execution with itself.

The Apollo lander size compared to Blue Moon Mark I. Image: Blue Origin

The Mark I landers are large in size, on the same scale as the Apollo landers, and yet the first one is carrying only two small NASA payloads, representing a low value bet for the agency despite the higher risk postures that CLPS orders are supposed to accept. I elaborated on this aspect earlier in Moon Monday #226 (May 2025):

Note that the Mark I lander has a large payload capacity of 3,000 kilograms. That’s more than the entire fueled mass of smaller landers like Firefly’s Blue Ghost and India’s Chandrayaan 3! And yet NASA hasn’t stated any plans to fly any other scientific instruments on either of the two Mark I flights. Considering that the US has been failing to explore lunar water as the principal goal of Artemis, and that the Mark I’s landing site is the lunar south pole, it would be remiss for NASA to skip flying any lunar water related payloads on the Mark Is as a bare minimum. Whether that be through Artemis, CLPS, or other funding sources does not ultimately matter.

And thus I’m glad that at least for the second Mark I flight, NASA has gone ahead with the intention of flying VIPER onboard, with what is perhaps the most apt payload for Blue and the US at this juncture. Let’s hope VIPER’s resource prospecting mission finally actually happens.

Upcoming missions globally which are similar to VIPER—also aiming to find and characterize the nature of lunar water at the lunar south pole—include China’s Chang’e 7 and Chang’e 8 spacecraft as well as the joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX mission. These missions will also provide context for analyzing ISRO’s Chandrayaan 4 samples, which aims to bring lunar polar material to Earth in 2028.

Related: Hope in desolation (verses) 🌙

Chandrayaan 3 research updates

Top left: The Chandrayaan 3 rover rolling out of the lander’s ramp during pre-launch testing; Bottom left: The co-added spectrum from all 23 lunar surface soil and rock measurements by the rover’s APXS instrument; Right: An artist’s concept of our Moon shortly after its formation, with a magma ocean and a newly forming rocky crust. Images: ISRO / Santosh Vadawale, et al. / NASA Goddard

ISRO is seeking competitive proposals from the national scientific community to study Chandrayaan 3 lander, rover, and orbiter data with support in the form of partial funding, infrastructure access, data analysis help, and conference attendance aid. It was a year after the landing in August 2023 that ISRO finally made available an initial set of peer-reviewed Chandrayaan 3 payload data online, accessible by anyone after free registration. ISRO’s data portal, called Pradan ISSDC, is compliant with NASA’s Planetary Data System (PDS). And so just as with the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter, Chandrayaan 3 data is available in the latest PDS4 format for international researchers to easily utilize it. The latest announcement is specifically for Indian researchers nationwide who may have good ideas but would benefit from ISRO’s institutional support. It’s a good step in growing India’s nascent planetary science community.

Relatedly, I’ve compiled below notable research outcomes from Chandrayaan 3.

Results from the thermal probe experiment on the Chandrayaan 3 lander have expanded the possible locations for finding water ice beyond the Moon’s poles, thereby benefiting future scouting missions.
The Chandrayaan 3 rover lunar soil composition measurements contributed to knowledge of our Moon’s origin, and it may or may not have stumbled upon the Moon’s mantle material when analyzing local lunar soil using its X-ray spectrometer.
Researchers have been using the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter’s high-resolution camera, which is the world’s sharpest lunar imager, to identify sub-resolution tracks of Chandrayaan 3’s rover based on illumination changes. Scientists are also using the imager to study interactions between the lander’s engine plumes and lunar regolith during when Chandrayaan 3’s lander hopped towards the end of its surface mission.
The Chandrayaan 3 propulsion module (orbiter) observed Earth as an exoplanet.
The first geological map of Chandrayaan 3’s landing region reveals it to be 3.7 billion years old. The region has been significantly altered since its formation by subsequent crater impacts and their material ejections.
The composition of high-latitude lunar soil measured by the Chandrayaan 3 rover is being used to create lunar soil simulants from Moon-like anorthositic rocks in the UAE—whose second lunar rover is flying on Firefly’s second lander with a targeted launch next year.
A probe on Chandrayaan 3 has taken the first in-situ plasma environment measurements from near the Moon’s south polar surface which revealed the ground truth about the nature of ions in the region.

Many thanks to Astrolab and Marc Rayman 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:

China’s march to the Moon 🌗

More Moon

The Artemis II SLS rocket being integrated inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Image: NASA / Frank Michaux

NASA has made notable safety improvements to the next SLS rocket which will launch the Orion spacecraft hosting four astronauts towards the Moon for the Artemis II mission:

The Artemis II rocket includes an improved navigation system compared to Artemis I. Its communications capability also has been improved by repositioning antennas on the rocket to ensure continuous communications with NASA ground stations and the U.S. Space Force’s Space Launch Delta 45 which controls launches along the Eastern Range. An emergency detection system on the ICPS [upper stage] allows the rocket to sense and respond to problems and notify the crew. The flight safety system adds a time delay to the self-destruct system to allow time for Orion’s escape system to pull the capsule to safety in event of an abort.

NASA is preparing to demonstrate 4G/LTE on the Moon during the Artemis III crewed lunar surface exploration mission with the aim of streaming high-definition video and audio from astronauts as they explore first hand the strange new world that is the lunar polar terrain.
The Orbital Index (a Moon Monday sponsor) highlighted an interesting paper recently related to lunar rover testing:

Explaining why rovers get stuck in sand in low-gravity environments, like the Moon and Mars, requires understanding how sand grains themselves interact in low gravity. “On Earth, sand is more rigid and supportive—reducing the likelihood it will shift under a vehicle’s wheels. But the moon’s surface is “fluffier” and therefore shifts more easily—meaning rovers have less traction, which can hinder their mobility.” Computational models of sand in lower gravity (using the open source Project Chrono simulation engine) show that gravitational offsets (suspension systems) or light-weighted rover models during terrestrial testing are insufficient to predict how wheels will actually behave on arrival (paper).

Fly me to the Moon!

I’m giving a talk with Q&A on the history and future of lunar exploration this Sunday, September 28, in Bangalore. Bring all your questions about the Moon and how we’re exploring it worldwide! You can book tickets online. The event is offline-only to make the audience comfortable in engaging freely with their curiosities. (Note: My honorarium for the talk is fixed regardless of the tickets sold so there are no commission incentives for sharing this.)

- Jatan 🌙

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Verses: Hope in desolation

Jatan Mehta — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 16:21:12 +0530

Space just desolate…
and yet humans launch hope
to explore some more

Image: Xinhua | See the first note at the end

On our Moon
from where the Sun never shines,
a new era will dawn.

The rim of the 10-kilometer-wide Erlanger crater on the Moon’s north pole. The crater floor is in permanent darkness. Image: NASA / GSFC / ASU / LRO | See the second note below

Poem notes:

There’s nothing quite as bold and beautiful as committing to venturing the brutal colossal desolation that is space. Every (civil) space launch carries not just hardware but hope. The act of exploring the void makes humans special.
From “where the sun never shines” is a reference to permanently shadowed regions on our Moon’s poles which were discovered to host water ice deposits. These could be crucial for sustained exploration of our Moon as well as the Solar System.

Both the haiku and the verse are part of Seven uni-verses, my globally published poetry pamphlet.

Seven uni-verses (booklet)

By Jatan Mehta. Poetry on all that space evokes.

About & Read →

- Jatan 🌙

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Moon Monday #242: Artemis II advances, and so does Long March 10 🔥

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 17:10:56 +0530

The Artemis II flight crew (in suits) and the mission closeout crew (in clean room apparel) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida prior to test operations of the Orion lunar capsule. The flight crew from left to right: Mission Specialists Jeremy Hansen and Christina Koch, Pilot Victor Glover, and Commander Reid Wiseman. Image: NASA / Rad Sinyak

NASA’s crewed Artemis II circumlunar mission targeting launch in early 2026 will see astronauts participate in multiple advanced health monitoring experiments. Given the scarcity of data on human health in deep space environments, the aim with the experiments is to collectively understand how the four astronauts are physiologically affected by their 10-day deep space transit and its radiation influx. The Orion capsule hosting the astronauts will carry even more radiation sensors than in Artemis I, with a notable upgrade coming from a partnership with the German Space Agency (DLR):

NASA has again partnered the German Space Agency DLR for an updated model of their M-42 sensor—an M-42 EXT—for Artemis II. The new version offers six times more resolution to distinguish between different types of energy, compared to the Artemis I version. This will allow it to accurately measure the radiation exposure from heavy ions which are thought to be particularly hazardous for radiation risk. Artemis II will carry four of the monitors, affixed at points around the cabin by the crew.

This collaboration builds on results from Artemis I whose radiation data was evaluated by NASA, ESA, and DLR scientists last year. They found that radiation exposure to future astronauts will vary not only based on time spent at locations within the capsule but also on Orion’s orientation in space. For example, the paper says when Orion’s orientation was altered during an engine burn, exposure levels dropped nearly in half due to the highly directional nature of the radiation in the Van Allen belt. These results are supporting understanding and preparedness for radiation exposure for Artemis II crew and beyond.

The Artemis I Orion spacecraft carried multiple radiation experiments onboard, including anatomically accurate female torsos and varied radiation sensors. Images: Stuart George, at al. / NASA / Lockheed Martin / DLR

More Artemis II progress

On other fronts of Artemis II, NASA recently completed the new “Mission Evaluation Room” to complement flight control. Said team will consist of about 48 engineers from across NASA, ESA, Lockheed Martin, and Airbus with deep knowledge of Orion’s subsystems. They will analyze technical data as the mission unfolds, assisting flight control with optimizations as well as during any anomalies.

In August, the crew put on their spacesuits and headed to the launchpad to simulate a possible nighttime launch. They also practiced an emergency escape scenario should something go wrong in the launch complex. And in July, the crew entered the fuel-loaded Orion to practice activities and operations they’d have to perform before launch and during the transit to Luna. This excercise had high fidelity since the crew not only used the original capsule but also put on their spacesuits and tested Orion’s interfaces while the capsule operated on full power with its communications and life control systems turned on.

Next up, Orion will be integrated with its emergency escape system. In the lead up to the eventual second SLS rocket launch for Artemis II, NASA will conduct a series of 10 integrated tests over the remainder year.

The 10 integrated tests NASA will conduct in the lead up to the crewed Artemis II Moon mission launch on an SLS rocket. Image: NASA

While Artemis III lags..

In the meanwhile, Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy named Amit Kshatriya as the agency’s new Associate Administrator with the hope of accelerating the slow progress of the Artemis III crewed Moon landing mission. Kshatriya previously led NASA’s Moon to Mars Program Office for planning and implementing Artemis missions. The slow progress of SpaceX’s human lunar landing system for Artemis III, Lunar Starship, has implied that the US will likely not meet its self-imposed goal of “beating China” to the Moon, leading to continued chatter in the US Congress. The only exceptions to mere fear-mongering are seen in an op-ed by three former Artemis leaders and notably what former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine—under whom Artemis was conceived—spoke at a US Senate meeting on September 3. From Jeff Foust’s apt summary on The Space Review:

Bridenstine, in his opening remarks, criticized that need for in-space refueling of a propellant depot. “We’ll need to launch—nobody really knows, nobody knows—but it could be up to dozens of additional Starships to refuel the first Starship,” he said. “By the way, that whole in-space refueling thing has never been tested, either.” He added that, once that depot Starship fuels the lunar lander Starship, it’s unclear how long the lander version can then loiter in lunar orbit, waiting for the crew to arrive on an SLS-launched Orion.

The Acting NASA Administrator responded in anger:

That was shade thrown on all of NASA. I was angry about it. [...] I’ll be damned if that is the story that we write. [...] We are going to beat the Chinese to the Moon.

Given China’s bagging of a quicker succession of milestones in 2025 than expected, this story may not be for the Americans to write.

The article linked above takes the longer view of sustaining exploration of our Moon through robustness of approach and collaboration. No matter who lands humans on the Moon first in this century, it’s important that we take a global view if, after all, we really are going to Luna for “humanity” as is often proclaimed. As I noted in the article on Starship being slow to ship:

It’ll be great to have a second nation from Earth land humans on Luna. We should be happy that we now have two distinct efforts to sustain crewed and robotic exploration of our Moon. It gives humanity a better chance to do so since a dichotomic political system can apparently only do better under a competitive mindset and internal fear-mongering.

A Long March 10 booster roars thrice with Luna in sight

Left inset: A test first stage structure of the upcoming Long March 10A rocket. See the technician humans standing beside for scale; Right inset: Second static fire test run of the rocket’s seven YF-100K engines roaring in tandem. Images: CMSA / CCTV / CALT

On September 12, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) and the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT) conducted multiple test fires for the upcoming Long March 10 series of crew-capable rockets using a high fidelity first stage structure. This follows the first test in August when they simultaneously fired the seven YF-100K high-thrust kerolox engines for 30 seconds to validate the design system, components, and materials which will power Long March 10A rockets. These will launch China’s next-generation human spacecraft named Mengzhou to Earth orbit for Tiangong space station visits. To launch humans to the Moon, China will combine three Long March 10A first stages to form the core stage of the Long March 10. This rocket—as China’s most capable—will loft a lunar Mengzhou Y capsule with humans and, in a separate launch, the Lanyue lander towards lunar orbit.

The second Long March 10A booster test fire involved simultaneous roaring of the engines for longer than the first time, engine gimbaling, restarting of four engines, and then of one. The latter two modes were to test engine performance for China’s plan to recover Long March 10A boosters post launch with reentry and landing burns. The cumulative firing time in the second test was 320 seconds, an order of magnitude more than the first. CMSA noted the importance of the milestone in its release:

The move marks a breakthrough in developing the initial prototype of the Long March-10 series of carrier rockets. [...] This test focused on evaluating the capabilities of the seven clustered engines of the rocket's first stage for low-thrust operating condition and secondary restart condition, obtaining complete test data.

To see all recent milestones hit by China in the lead up to its first crewed Moon landing aimed to be accomplished by 2030, read my review article linked below:

Many thanks to Catalyx Space, Gurbir Singh and Arun Raghavan 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:

More mission updates

Illustration of the Chang’e 7 lander and orbiter. Image: CMG

In August, Thailand’s National Astronomical Research Institute (NARIT) delivered its ~5-kilogram MATCH payload to CAS and CNSA. The country’s first to the Moon, MATCH will fly aboard China’s upcoming Chang’e 7 orbiter. It will study solar storms and cosmic rays respectively with two instruments. CNSA aims to launch the Chang’e 7 lander-orbiter stack in late 2026. MATCH was developed by over a dozen Thai researchers in collaboration with seven professors across Chinese scientific institutions. Thailand was the first country to sign and participate in both the Sino-led ILRS Moonbase project and the US-led Artemis Accords [announcements one and two]. Senegal is the only other country to sign both. I hope many more join.
Related: The case for India to study and exchange Chang’e lunar samples
ispace Europe announced that is has passed the milestone of “Mission Design Review” (MDR) for the MAGPIE rover mission its leading to study lunar polar water ice and other such volatiles. The launch target is 2028. The mission team involving European universities won a ~€2.7 million ESA contract earlier this year to collaborate with the agency for achieving the scientific goals. ispace Europe says the MDR went free of any critical blockers, allowing the project to proceed to the next phase of funding and development which will involve maturing payload designs and building prototypes. Similar to the upcoming joint ISRO-JAXA LUPEX rover mission, MAGPIE will also feature a drill, a ground penetrating radar, and a neutron spectrometer to map and analyze lunar polar soil.

More Moon

Riccardo Pozzobon, an instructor on ESA’s Pangaea analog lunar campaign to train future astronauts, unfortunately passed away in an accident during a recent excursion. 😔
Blue Origin announced that it has passed Critical Design Review (CDR) for its Blue Alchemist project, which involves making solar cells using silicon and metals extracted from lunar soil simulants. This milestone is part of a broader goal set in 2023, when the company received $34.7 million from NASA as part of public-private Tipping Point contracts to build advanced lunar technologies. That broader goal is to demonstrate the autonomous operation of Blue Alchemist solar cells in a “simulated lunar environment” by 2026. The latest CDR milestone clears the way towards achieving that goal. While Blue Alchemist is an undeniably intriguing project, the sheer complexity and scale of producing infrastructure on the Moon to power habitats means that at least for a decade from now, NASA’s plans for getting power—solar and nuclear—for surface activities continues to be through the annoying tradition of pulling material out of Earth’s gruesome gravitational well. It should be noted though that Blue Alchemist also includes systems for extracting oxygen from lunar soil while getting metal byproducts so that’s valuable in itself.

Materials such as iron, silicon, glasses, and ceramics extracted from simulated lunar soil by the electrolysis reactor part of the Blue Alchemist project. Image: Blue Origin

Chandrayaan 4 will bring unique Moon materials—and maybe a giant scientific leap for India 🌓🪨

- Jatan 🌙

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We’re building future technologies for the Moon without closing missed milestones

Jatan Mehta — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 19:29:41 +0530

Image: ESA

This century has seen countries worldwide explore our Moon with new and varied technological capabilities. In recent years, Japan’s SLIM spacecraft achieved the world’s most precise robotic lunar landing while China demonstrated the first remote docking and undocking of spacecraft in lunar orbit with the Chang’e 5 sample return mission. This year Firefly’s Blue Ghost Moon lander, part of NASA’s CLPS program, received the first terrestrial navigation signal fixes all the way at the Moon. More such capabilities that have been demonstrated, and those which aren’t yet, need to come together for humans to build and sustain permanent outposts on our Moon for the exploration of itself and worlds beyond.

Below is a review of advanced capabilities that Moon missions aim to demonstrate through the remainder of this decade, achieving which can—collectively—power the foundational elements of Moonbases.

Upcoming lunar milestones

Rover autonomy: Safely operating most robotic rovers in the harsh environment of our Moon currently involves accepting the necessary lag of two-way Earth-Moon communications and human-in-loop decision making. But a bevy of upcoming rovers from organizations worldwide aim to demonstrate a variety of autonomous surface operations spanning navigation, exploration, and mapping to enable the next generation of expansive missions. These rovers will come from the UAE, US-based Astrobotic, NASA’s CADRE group, Australia, and Canada respectively.
Polar solar and nuclear power: To maximize endurance, operations time, and its effectiveness during frigid lunar nights and in harsh permanently shadowed regions at the Moon’s poles, NASA is investing in multiple companies to have large & tall vertical solar panels suited for the poles as well as nuclear power in the 100-kilowatt range.
Oxygen extraction: Both ESA and NASA are aiming to demonstrate the ability to extract oxygen from lunar soil with the upcoming missions called PROPSECT and LIFT-1 respectively. Future astronauts will benefit from such oxygen for breathable air, and eventually even use it as rocket fuel too. With this ability, we will no longer need to carry and drag ample oxygen out of Earth’s gruesome gravity well.
Resource utilization: China’s upcoming Chang’e 8 mission aims to go one step further. It would not only melt lunar soil but also transform it via 3D printing into bricks and assemble basic structures out of them. Chang’e 8 aims to test techniques for construction of future lunar infrastructure like habitats and landing pads in the build up to the Sino-led Moonbase called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS).

An artist’s concept showing the concept of the Sino-led ILRS Moonbase. Image: CNSA / Roscosmos

Navigation and communications: With recent demonstrations of automated navigation, accurate distance measurements, and low-energy orbital transfers, China is gearing up to create the Queqiao network of lunar satellites that enable Mooncraft to navigate autonomously and provide them with high-bandwidth communications independently of Earth.
Advanced mobility: Upcoming large rovers in the class of the Artemis Lunar Terrain Vehicle will be able to explore our Moon longer, farther, and across more terrains than any rover before. It will also host astronauts during their lunar visits.
In-space refueling: Both SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon spacecraft aim to refuel in Earth orbit to enable their respective plans & contracts of landing Artemis astronauts on the Moon for NASA by the end of the decade. In-space refueling would unlock large payload capacities and better spacecraft maneuverability across the Solar System. Combined with several capabilities above, it also lays the pathway for using the Moon as a future launch base to other places in our Solar System.

Gaining these capabilities would represent a huge feasibility leap in having permanent human or robotic outposts across the Solar System. However, these technological milestones, while necessary, are insufficient in themselves to achieve the goal. They need to work in tandem with several other technologies which have all gone unachieved in past Moon missions as listed below.

Missing the mark

Water ice: Virtually all recent lunar surface and orbital missions funded by NASA have failed to explore lunar water as the foundational goal of the US’ Artemis program. China’s Chang’e 7 lander and rover, targeting launch next year, will be the first attempt by the Chinese to advance on the same.
Safer landings: NASA flew an advanced LiDAR-based sensor on Intuitive Machines’ first CLPS Moon lander in 2024. The mission was supposed to validate the sensor’s use in enabling autonomously safe and precise landings. But issues with retrieving sensor data during the lander’s descent coupled with the hard landing did not allow said technology’s validation.
Lunar sample ownership transfer: In 2020, NASA contracted three companies to each collect lunar soil after their respective landings and then virtually transfer its ownership to NASA. It aimed to set precedence for legal frameworks that would enable extracting and utilizing resources on the Moon and in space in the future. But the flown missions, one by Lunar Outpost and two by ispace, failed to operate on the Moon. The only other award was to Masten Space, who filed for bankruptcy in 2022 and its CLPS mission contract became void.
Smart lunar night survival: NASA’s VIPER rover, whose fate is now uncertain, was supposed to test a technique on the Moon’s south pole of intermittently parking at pre-identified high-altitude spots where nights are shorter due to the local topography, thereby enabling the mission to last six months or more. This would allow future autonomous rovers to efficiently explore the lunar poles and its water ice. Now the upcoming joint Indo-Japanese LUPEX rover hopes to demonstrate and utilize this technique during its mission to study water ice.

A reference traverse path for NASA’s VIPER rover on the Moon’s south pole. Image: NASA

A pattern for lunar landing failures

Those key technological milestones that we wished for have been missed because reliably landing and operating on the Moon remains hard. About half the world’s lunar landing attempts still fail. And most missions get delayed. As the following recent Moon landing attempts illustrate, a truly comprehensive testing regime for landers during their development is non-optional for success.

ISRO attributes Chandrayaan 3’s triumphant touchdown on the Moon principally to the emphasis on demonstrating the lander system’s performance down to its specifics post Chandrayaan 2’s failure.
Both of Intuitive Machines’ CLPS landers hard-landed on the Moon due to inadequate testing and checkouts of their laser rangefinders. ispace Japan’s second Moon landing attempt shared a similar fate this year due to performance issues with its laser rangefinder.
Astrobotic’s first CLPS lander Peregrine failed because of skipping comprehensive launch environmental testing of its propulsion system.
In contrast, Firefly proactively kept ample safety margins through terrestrial testing as well as for spaceflight deviances and anomalies to achieve the first true soft landing for NASA CLPS earlier this year.

The Athena CLPS lander lying on its side after a hard landing, as captured from one of its navigation cameras. Image: Intuitive Machines

As indispensable as comprehensive testing is, another hard fact is that private companies and emerging space nations don’t have the kind of large budgets or time afforded by advanced government space agencies. This necessarily implies lesser overall redundancy in their lander designs as well as a testing regime that’s always battling cost and schedule—all leading to greater risks. Even fuel margins on privately built landers tend to be on the lower side because every kilogram of added fuel reserve would take away at least several hundred thousand dollars worth of commercial payload capacity. But alas, the closer a lander is to the surface during lunar descent, the lesser its ability to self-correct amid depleting fuel reserves. Based on these observations, the Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor) notes a fundamental issue with this approach:

Rather than one agency attempting seven landings, a growing number of new actors are launching their first or second attempts. Instead of hard won lessons flowing freely into the next mission, knowledge is often siloed, treated as proprietary by agencies and companies, and so potentially avoidable mistakes can resurface. [...] Collaboration becomes critical to ensure that tens of millions of dollars of investment and years of work aren’t lost in the final seconds of flight. The more we can share data from these attempts, the more return humanity as a whole makes on these investments. The Moon is hard, but there is no reason to make it harder.

Information sharing is known to enable cutting-edge space missions. Unfortunately though, there are currently no institutionalized mechanisms that do so while also scaling with the increasing pace of Moon missions worldwide. Different states share different information at different times, in different formats, and through different channels at varying levels. Amid competition, companies remain tightfisted about sharing information even on mission aspects that aren’t sensitive to intellectual property. Information sharing and coordination is thus dispersed and limited, and not efficient for safety, sustainability, or abundant progress. If we improve it to accommodate more actors, we can compound perks for all. It’s to this end that Open Lunar has embarked upon the Lunar Ledger project for companies and organizations to reliably share technical data for the safety and success of all.

Our Earth on the Moon’s horizon as imaged by South Korea’s KPLO lunar orbiter. Image: KARI

In parallel, the non-profit Lunar Policy Platform (LPP), with funding from Open Lunar and in synergy with multilateral initiatives within UN COPUOS, started the “Lunar Information Sharing 101” initiative. It has consulted over 70 representatives from 35 governments, space agencies, companies, and experts to understand converging and diverging views on when, where, and how to share lunar mission information. Open Lunar has also submitted a formal Conference Room paper to COPUOS, which outlines how the Lunar Ledger complements the UN’s efforts by enabling rapid, transparent data sharing among multiple types of lunar actors.

Core challenges still remain in harmonizing humanity’s technological abilities through effective collaboration. Only then do we gain more than the sum of our parts. Christine Tiballi, the Lunar Ledger Lead and a researcher with Open Lunar, highlights one such challenge in the Lunar Compass:

Over the next decade and beyond, the Moon will bear witness to increasing levels of activity: the most significant and perhaps consequential loci are the Artemis Base (US-led coalition) and the China and Russia led International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). Both align signatories along mission milestones with increasing cadence and complexity, married to technological and scientific advancement, In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), and strategies of incremental autonomy. But despite the parallel focus on standards, cooperation, and interoperability, neither explicitly states its objectives in relation to non-appropriation (permanence), nor its willingness to cooperate (beyond due regard) with the other, setting the stage for terrestrial geopolitical conflict to remain tethered to us.

- Jatan 🌙

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Chandrayaan 4 will bring unique Moon materials—and maybe a giant scientific leap for India

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 18:57:30 +0530

Graphic: Jatan Mehta | Individual images of the LVM3 rocket, the two Chandrayaan 4 spacecraft stacks, and the Moon’s south pole: ISRO / NASA / GSFC / Timothy McClanahan / LOLA

It’s been a year since the approval of ISRO’s Chandrayaan 4 mission, and ISRO has not yet provided an update on if the preliminary design review (PDR) to finalize the mission design has been completed—especially when considering that the original announcement stated 2027 as the target launch year. The word on the street from multiple sources is that Chandrayaan 4’s PDR is done or near complete but multiple media queries and follow-ups sent to ISRO continue to not be answered.

That it’s the tax season in India is reminding space industry observers and participants here that ISRO doesn’t consistently share about key milestones associated with the publicly funded civil space exploration missions. The limited official information on Chandrayaan 4 remains scattered online and offline, and is even inconsistent with each other at times. As a result, it’s frequently taken and presented out of context by the media and the space industry at large, causing more misunderstandings of the mission’s goals and potential.

Based on confirmed but scattered public sources, I want my readers and people worldwide to know about India’s fascinating Chandrayaan 4 mission in one convenient place. This article is thus my attempt to collate, clarify, and adequately contextualize everything we know about ISRO’s actual plans for Chandrayaan 4. I also explain the mission’s immense scientific potential in the global context, and propose the idea of India doing a sample exchange with China and the US for the benefit of both nations and their researchers. ISRO responding to media queries would’ve helped put together a better article but here goes all that I could assemble anyway.

The mission

The elongated Chandrayaan 4 spacecraft stack of five modules (left) versus the two modules which comprised Chandrayaan 3 (right). Images: Jatan Mehta / ISRO

Chandrayaan 4 will fetch samples from the Moon’s south pole for researchers worldwide. Now launching by 2028, the mission was approved with a budget of ₹2104 crores ($252 million) last September by the Indian Government Union Cabinet following Chandrayaan 3’s triumphant touchdown on the Moon in August 2023. Chandrayaan 4 currently aims to bring two kilograms of scooped plus drilled samples for scientific studies to enrich our understanding of the Moon. Using combined imagery and topographic data from the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the mission’s landing site being evaluated is between 84-85° on the lunar south pole, which has the potential for hosting buried water ice deposits.

The Chandrayaan 4 mission comprises five spacecraft modules:

the lander (descender module)
the propulsion module
the ascender module
the sample transfer module
and the Earth reentry capsule module.

ISRO will launch these modules in two stacks, each currently weighing about 4600 kilograms. However, each stack’s mass still lies beyond the reach of India’s current most powerful rocket, the Launch Vehicle Mark III (LVM3), which launched Chandrayaan 3. That’s why ISRO’s launch vehicle of choice for Chandrayaan 4 is an upgraded version of LVM3 whose core stage will be powered by the upcoming SE2000 semi-cryogenic kerolox engine. The LVM3’s lift capacity to GTO orbit would then be increased from about 4200 kilograms to roughly 5000, allowing an LVM3 each to launch a Chandrayaan 4 stack while also allowing some margin for mass changes during development. ISRO has said this maxed out LVM3 rocket will be ready to fly in 2027.

Liftoff of 36 OneWeb satellites on India’s LVM3 rocket in 2023. Image: ISRO

During the Chandrayaan 4 mission, each spacecraft stack will be deployed in an elliptical Earth orbit. The two launches will be within a month of each other. The stacks then rendezvous and dock with each other in Earth orbit to form a full, integrated stack. The large propulsion module then raises the stack’s Earth orbit, approaching closer to the Moon and jettisoning itself post that. The remainder stack then enters lunar orbit, where the lander plus ascender module separate out for descent and land on the Moon’s south pole. A robotic arm will collect and transfer scooped plus drilled samples into a sealed container. Only the ascender module carrying these samples then lift off to lunar orbit. After docking with the stack that stayed back in lunar orbit, the samples will be transferred to the reentry capsule module to get them to Earth with a tactful reentry and oceanic splash. Having a successful mission would also mean ISRO can then leverage this docking based mission architecture for its eventual goal of sending humans to the Moon.

Pre-Chandrayaan 4 preparations

With Chandrayaan 3, one of the extended goals ISRO achieved was pulling the mission’s propulsion module from lunar orbit back to Earth orbit, thereby demonstrating a small but key capability that will be required to pull off a robotic sample return with Chandrayaan 4. One of the most complex parts of Chandrayaan 4 would be to remotely dock large robotic modules in Earth and lunar orbit. The latter is a feat only China has achieved so far with their Chang’e 5 and Chang’e 6 sample return missions respectively.

Pre-launch photo and renders of the SPADEX satellites. ISRO designed the satellites such that either could act as the chaser and the other the target for docking. Images: ISRO

Because Chandrayaan 4 is a huge technological leap for India, ISRO is taking the approach of demonstrating and practicing docking satellites in Earth orbit first to reduce risks. Earlier this year, the first such milestone was accomplished when India’s $14 million SPADEX satellites successfully docked and then later undocked in circular Earth orbit. ISRO continues testing dual-satellite operations and precision approaches with the satellites.

M. Sankaran, the Director of ISRO’s key URSC center in Bangalore—which was involved in Chandrayaan 3’s design, assembly, and testing—has told asianetnews that the upcoming SPADEX 2 mission will demonstrate docking in elliptical orbit, the same kind that the two Chandrayaan 4 spacecraft stacks will also need to execute. To further mimic a Chandrayaan 4 like mission scenario, the SPADEX 2 satellites and their docking ring sizes will be bigger than the first pair. SPADEX 2 has gotten mission approval from the Indian government, and is now awaiting a financial sanction.

The scientific value of Chandrayaan 4 samples

Aggregated solar illumination map of the Moon’s south pole made from stacked observations by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, shown in perspective view. The brightest spots are topographic highs that are maximally sunlit whereas the pitch black areas are permanently shadowed—within which water ice deposits are thought to exist. Image: NASA

NASA’s Apollo missions helped scientists confirm that our celestial companion had a fiery origin tied to Earth. On the other hand, the Soviet Luna missions were the world’s first robotic sample return missions, establishing the modern approach that fetching planetary material to Earth generates scientific results for decades. Samples fetched by China’s robotic Chang’e 5 mission confirmed that the Moon was volcanically active and thermally complex geologically recently. And Chang’e 6 transformed our understanding of how our Moon evolved thanks to the first ever samples from the mysterious lunar farside.

As I wrote in my article ‘Why explore our Moon’, for us to continue piecing together the complex and nuanced origin and evolution of the Earth-Moon system, we need to continue fetching distinct geological material so that our world’s lunar samples represent more of the Moon—a trend started by Chang’e missions. We currently don’t have any samples from the lunar poles, including potential water ice or water-mixed regolith from there. It’s important to understand this water’s sources, its abundance, and how it is related or unrelated to Earth’s water. Said knowledge is equally crucial in helping us plan sustained lunar exploration and build future Moonbases. As such, when Chandrayaan 4 brings unique lunar polar samples to Earth, it will help humanity make its first tactile advances into these fundamental open questions about our Moon, Earth, Solar System, and future in space.

Related tangent: I’m pleased that ISRO’s webpage on Chandrayaan 4 cites my blog as a reference for the mission’s scientific context! 🚀

Screenshot of ISRO’s webpage on the Chandrayaan 4 and Venus Orbiter missions.

Many thanks to Open Lunar Foundation, Takshashila Institution, PierSight and Gurbir Singh for sponsoring this week’s special combined edition of Moon Monday and Indian Space Progress!

If you too appreciate my efforts of putting together this curated & unique resource on Chandrayaan 4 for free, and without ads, kindly support my independent writing:

Prepping for Chandrayaan 4 science

For a nation that began planetary exploration only this century starting with Chandrayaan 1, a sample return mission will be a giant leap in scientific output. To ensure tapping into its potential though, ISRO has recognized that early preparations would be needed across the board. Some representative developments to that end are listed below.

In April, ISRO gathered about 50 scientists from across India to deliberate on and help determine next steps for storage and scientific studies of lunar samples Chandrayaan 4 will fetch.
The ISRO-affiliated PRL institute conducted an in-person inaugural workshop for students last November to teach them via lab visits and hands-on sessions how to handle and analyze space and planetary samples. More such workshops are planned not just for students but for professional scientists across the country since realizing Chandrayaan 4 necessitates building national capacity to thoroughly prepare, store, curate, characterize, and analyze the first set of space samples fetched by India. The second such workshop is yet to take place.
An official response this past August to a query put forth in the Rajya Sabha—loosely, the Indian equivalent to the US Senate—provides us some details on how ISRO is planning the handling and storage of Chandrayaan 4 samples:

Chandrayaan-4 mission will ensure the safe handling and storage of lunar sample to prevent contamination by transferring the leak proof sample canisters to sample curation facility with contamination control features. Establishment of Curation Facility (Class 100 & 1000 clean room environment as per ISO standard) is planned with advanced instrument[s] to preserve the integrity of the sample for scientific analysis. As per COSPAR (Committee on Space Research) Planetary Protection policy, lunar missions fall under the category where it does not demand stringent requirement for biological contamination.

The case for India to study and exchange Chang’e lunar samples

In April, China announced the first set of international researchers whose proposals were selected to study unique lunar samples brought to Earth by Chang’e 5 in 2020. The researchers now analyzing said samples are from universities or institutes in the UK, Japan, France, Germany, Pakistan, and even the US (through efforts outside of NASA). Unfortunately, ISRO or its affiliated institutions did not participate in these sample research proposals. In fact, no non-ISRO or non-government funded Indian institute proposed Chang’e 5 sample studies either in this round.

Sure, India and China aren’t on friendly terms but so aren’t US and China, and yet recognizing the scientific value of Chang’e 5 samples, NASA did secure a remarkable exception to the Wolf Amendment from the US Congress for the country’s researchers to be able to apply for federally funded Chang’e sample research proposals. While the latter outcome remains blocked from the US’ own side, getting the Congressional exception was the first big step in the right direction. India doesn’t have a Wolf Amendment of its own, and so no major legal blockers exist for national research institutes or otherwise to study Chang’e samples. Besides, India and China do have relations & interactions for trade, economic growth, infrastructure contracts, and several technologies out of necessity for both nations. So why should science be the one excluded of all things?

Several Indian scientists, like those at the ISRO-affiliated PRL institute, have already studied Apollo and Luna samples. They have analyzed asteroid samples too. As such, Indian researchers stand to benefit from studying the geologically young and unique Chang’e 5 samples as well by publishing varied and more current work. Notably, doing so would also naturally open windows for the national scientific community to access Chang’e 6 samples in the future, which are even more diverse and valuable.

A close look at scooped lunar farside samples brought to Earth by China’s Chang’e 6 mission. They contain a diversity of stony, volcanic, impact-induced, and glassy materials. Images: Chunlai Li, et al.

Even more crucially perhaps, going through the logistical process of proposing Chang’e sample studies and then getting & storing them would provide India with a good programmatic sense of the kinds of things that it would also need to do to share Chandrayaan 4 samples when our time comes. This experience would span an obviously indirect yet nuanced sense of China’s storage facilities, initial characterization and cataloging of samples, their transport systems, and so on. Sure, India could also pick up things from how NASA manages Apollo samples but that system is utterly expensive, having been made in a different era of budgetary freedom during the Cold War. In contrast, the scale and scope of China’s lunar sample facilities are more in reach for India to replicate. And they are modern too. There’s no harm in seeking inspiration from the only other facility on Earth that concerns the same celestial body and is also closest in scope to what India desires for Chandrayaan 4. I hope Indian research proposals make their way into the second round of international Chang’e 5 sample studies.

While geopolitical hesitation may keep this prospect a dream, it’s worth noting that in the meanwhile China did formally welcome India to cooperate on Moon missions and the Sino-led ILRS Moonbase project this past May. The invitation came from none other than Wu Weiren, the Chief Designer of China’s extremely successful lunar program.

In fact, Indian scientists applying for Chang’e sample studies can be an enabler of even more valuable scientific exchanges with the Chinese. One of these could be a literal sample exchange, a mechanism known to work very well in the past and present worldwide—such as the recent asteroid sample swap between the US and Japan. With Chandrayaan 4 lunar samples in hand, ISRO should initiate a sample exchange program with China and the US, swapping Chang’e and Artemis samples respectively for the also uniquely valuable Chandrayaan 4 Moon materials. With this program, all three nations will benefit in terms of their scientific outputs while India also gets better geopolitical leverage and China further improves its international relations. A win-win for all, and for humanity.

Indian and Chinese space researchers have an opportunity to interact, exchange ideas, and consider future collaborations at the International Lunar Sample Research Symposium being hosted by the University of Hong Kong this November. I sincerely hope that ISRO is sending, or is at least considering sending, some of its researchers to this science-focused symposium for mutual benefit.

In turn, realizing such proposed collaborations and building trust in the process could be the start of many more synergies between India and China at the Moon.

A contrasting view of the total lunar eclipse of September 7, 2025 as seen from Bangalore, India. Image: Jatan Mehta

On our Moon
from where the Sun never shines,
a new era will dawn.
– Jatan

- Jatan 🌙

Thanks for using RSS the best.

No, Starship’s latest success doesn’t favor the US over China in landing humans on Luna | Moon Monday #240

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 17:38:13 +0530

A note before we start: A warm welcome to the new wave of subscribers coming from Fraser Cain’s recommendation of my blog & newsletter on his YouTube channel. It made my day—especially because I’ve been reading and inspired by Universe Today since I was in college. I hope you find my writings on space exploration and our Moon useful. You may want to start here. 💫

The surface-oxidized Starship IFT-10 upper stage shortly before splashdown. Image: SpaceX

Following three back-to-back failures this year and an explosion of a test pad, SpaceX finally had a largely successful integrated test flight (IFT) of Starship on August 26. Called IFT-10, the flight achieved all of its primary goals across deployment of simulated Starlink satellites, heat shield tests, and precise core & upper stage splashdowns.

In 2021, NASA selected Starship’s lunar variant for landing Artemis astronauts on the Moon in 2024. Over and above previous delays, this year’s failures of Starship have significantly slowed down progress along the long road ahead for NASA to put humans on the Moon on Artemis III. But now the success of IFT-10 has somehow led many in the US space industry to hope that said Moon moment will take place before China lands crew as its own goal by 2030. In fact, Stephen Clark reports NASA’s Acting Administrator Sean Duffy confidently noting SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell as saying that Starship won’t be the holdup for Artemis III.

However, the fact is no other system involved in either Artemis or China’s architecture is nearly as complex as Starship. While the Artemis Moonsuits from Axiom Space have been facing its own delays, the technological advances needed there over existing spacesuits aren’t as wide as Starship’s would be compared to traditional rockets. It’s only now that SpaceX has managed to get the upper stage heat shield to perform well enough. It’s no doubt a challenging task but nevertheless only one of the many key milestones needed to achieve the goal of landing humans on the Moon. Next up, SpaceX also needs to be able to:

have lofted Starships return to launchpads by default
refurbish Starships fast enough
consistently deploy payloads in Earth orbit
perform cryogenic fuel transfers between upper stages in Earth orbit
and, later during Moon missions, avoid having that cryogenic fuel boil off in lunar orbit and on the Moon’s surface while waiting for and hosting astronauts.

That’s why Lunar Starship needs a high launch cadence for adequate in-orbit refueling. But it will take several more Starship test launches before we can even get a baseline demonstration of in-orbit fuel transfer, a milestone already delayed by a year since its previously intended target. In July 2024, Jeff Foust had reported that an internal confirmation review conducted by NASA on Lunar Starship’s readiness gave Artemis III a 70% chance of launch by February 2028. It’s been over a year since, and with the earlier failures of Starship this year, the launch target has already moved to the right even if NASA may stick to calling 2027 as the official year. In fact, we don’t even have a firm launch target for the uncrewed Starship lunar landing demonstration, which needs to be successful before SpaceX is allowed to carry Artemis astronauts. Simply put, NASA’s road to the Moon has been inching through Starship.

In the meanwhile, China has bagged a quicker succession of milestones in 2025 than expected across its Moon rocket, the crew capsule, the lander, and supporting navigation and communications infrastructure. China’s track record this century of nearly no failures despite undertaking increasingly complex lunar missions has been exceptional. Barring a major failure or technical holdup in any of China’s crewed lunar landing components, there’s little reason to doubt a Sino success.

Given the numerous milestones left for Starship to land humans on the Moon compared to the relatively fewer gaps for China to fill, the US will likely not meet its self-imposed goal of “beating China” to the Moon. Either way, it’ll be great to have a second nation from Earth land humans on Luna. We should be happy that we now have two distinct efforts to sustain crewed and robotic exploration of our Moon. It gives humanity a better chance to do so since a dichotomic political system can apparently only do better under a competitive mindset and internal fear-mongering.

Related articles:

More Artemis updates

The newly setup Orion Mission Evaluation Room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Team members are seen here working during a simulated Artemis II mission on August 19, 2025. Image: NASA / Rad Sinyak

NASA continues preparations to launch the crewed Artemis II circumlunar mission in early 2026, with the latest update being the completion of the new “Mission Evaluation Room” to complement flight control. Said team will consist of about 48 engineers from across NASA, ESA, Lockheed Martin, and Airbus with deep knowledge of subsystems comprising the crew’s Orion spacecraft. They will analyze technical data from the 10-day mission as it unfolds, assisting flight control with optimizations as well as during any anomalies. In the lead up to the Artemis II launch, NASA will conduct a series of 10 integrated tests over the remainder year.
NASA has built a new system to test hardware components in a simulated environment which replicates the frigid vacuum conditions of the harsh lunar night and many permanently shadowed regions. Uniquely combining cryocoolers and vacuum setups, the system called the Lunar Environment Structural Test Rig (LESTR) allows testing components—like small rover wheels—at temperatures as low as -233° C amid a dry vacuum similar to what hardware will experience on the Moon. NASA says LESTR’s architecture is scalable, meaning it lays the groundwork for advancing testing of technologies for future, increasingly complex Artemis missions.
Related articles:
- How engineers test Moon landers on Earth
- Europe’s LUNA test facility brings Moon vibes on Earth

Many thanks to The Orbital Index and Matt Ryall 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:

Our Moon 🌗 by Rebecca Boyle

More Moon

Illustration of the Chandrayaan 5 lander and LUPEX rover. Image: JAXA / ISRO

On August 29, teams led by the Prime Ministers of India and Japan respectively signed the implementing arrangement for the joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX Moon mission intended to launch by the end of the decade. This phase follows the mission’s financial approval by India in March [Japan approved years ago] and the third in-person technical interface meeting between mission members from the two agencies in May. The Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX mission will drill and analyze water ice on the Moon’s south pole and be a giant leap in lunar capabilities for both ISRO and JAXA. It can also provide NASA with data critical for Artemis planning currently missing from US missions.
The NASA-supporting-and-enabled Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) is looking for volunteers for multiple positions in its Executive Committee and related roles.

Even more Moon!

Last week I published a linked list of unique ways in which our Moon is valuable even beyond itself. In there, I also asked if any aspect is missing, and that was indeed the case. I’ve updated the post with two more points:

The lunar regolith has a layered record of our dynamic Sun over the last 2+ billion years, and the interstellar mediums and environments our Solar System passed through in that time
Studying moonquakes and the lunar interior helps us understand the origin and evolution of solid surface planets & moons across our Solar System and beyond

Many thanks to planetary scientists Ian Crawford and Clive Neal for these suggestions. 🌙

- Jatan 🌙

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Our Moon is valuable even beyond itself | Moon Monday #239

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 16:55:29 +0530

Our Earth and Moon as captured from beyond the lunar farside by China’s Chang’e 5 T1 test spacecraft in 2014. Image: CAST

Very few people know that our serene, silvery cosmic companion’s value lies even beyond the exploration of itself. That’s why I’ve been sharing and writing about various such aspects too and their relevance on my blog and beyond. However, I realized I never brought it all together in one place. Today I’m fixing that. Take a look at these fantastic propositions our Moon offers. Who knows it might be useful during some policy debrief when people want to choose between the Moon and Mars based on logical fallacies tied to mutual exclusions? Our Moon is valuable even beyond itself:

As a unique platform for radio cosmology to study the Cosmological Dark Ages from the Moon’s farside
To repurpose Moon missions for enabling deep space exploration
For leveraging Luna’s unique vantage point to monitor our Sun and its wind
As a geological time capsule and an age reference for Earth and events across the Solar System
By studying moonquakes and the lunar interior to understand the origin and evolution of solid surface planets & moons across our Solar System and beyond
As a well known, nearby reference body to calibrate imagers and radar systems for Earth observation as well as planetary exploration
For performing some of the most stringent tests of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity using deployed retroreflectors
As a good proxy of unprotected solar and radiation in deep space environments to enable future human exploration of our Solar System
Its regolith being a layered record of our dynamic Sun over the last 2+ billion years, and the interstellar mediums and environments our Solar System passed through in that time
Enabling an exclusive set of gravitational wave studies of highly energetic cosmic body collisions not possible to conduct from Earth or elsewhere in our Solar System
As a unique astronomy platform to study magnetospheres associated with exoplanets that are galactically-nearby and potentially habitable
Perhaps, as a future launch base to other places in our Solar System

Related book recommendation:

There might be a few more aspects that I’m missing and would love to know about it from you! Edit: Many thanks to planetary scientists Ian Crawford and Clive Neal for two suggestions which I’ve incorporated. 🌙

Taken together, the above aspects in themselves constitute a clear rationale not just for exploring our Moon but also standing up for its preservation against pure commercialization and national or private claims of ownership—especially so when it’s the same kinds of exploratory technologies that both enable many of these observations and can eventually destroy them.

Science does not exist in a (lunar) vacuum

An artist's concept of the Moon shortly after its formation, with a magma ocean and a newly forming rocky crust. Image: NASA Goddard

NASA’s Apollo missions helped us confirm that our celestial companion had a fiery origin tied to Earth. Soviet Luna missions were the world’s first robotic sample return missions, establishing the modern approach that fetching planetary material to Earth generates scientific results for decades. India’s Chandrayaan 1 orbiter discovered water on the Moon, revealing a dynamic lunar environment and catalyzing global interest in lunar exploration. Japan’s SELENE orbiter extensively mapped the Moon and found openings to long underground lava tubes. Samples fetched by China’s Chang’e 5 mission confirmed that the Moon was volcanically active and thermally complex geologically recently. And Chang’e 6 transformed our understanding of how our Moon evolved thanks to the first ever farside lunar samples.

These are profound discoveries that tie back to the history of Earth and potentially its water. The scientific exploration of our Moon has been a microcosm of what humans globally are cumulatively capable of. And it promises more still as a unique platform for radio cosmology, solar sciences, unraveling the complex history of our Solar System, and more.

But with increasing Moon missions, harsh lunar dust that can go orbital, congestion and lack of regulation in lunar orbit, the lunar south pole becoming a region of convergence and potential contest for technology, mining, infrastructure, and habitat development, and the changing geopolitical environment on Earth, our Moon’s scientific value as an extraordinarily unique time capsule could become increasingly inaccessible and gated.

That’s why the non-profit Lunar Policy Platform (LPP), with support from the Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor), consulted key scientific organizations like COSPAR and the International Astronomical Union (IAU) as well as universities and research centers worldwide to understand nuances of the situation. In the ensuing guide, LPP finds that because science doesn’t exist in a vacuum, the intersection of national, commercial, technological, and strategic objectives means there’s no single way forward to accommodate the scientific pursuits of all. In the project’s key takeaways shared before the guide’s impending public availability, LPP noted a concluding remark pertinent to preserving lunar science for all:

As lunar development accelerates, it’s tempting to fall back on familiar scripts: that science is neutral, that preservation requires exclusion, and that responsible actors will defer to experts. But the Moon is not just a research site. It’s a commons. [...] We can design governance tools that protect fragile sites without prioritising any one specific activity. Shared-use protocols, adaptive zoning, and rotational access are all terrestrially tested mechanisms that could allow multiple actors to coexist. [...] The challenge is to find that shared margin, ensure that protection does not entrench inequality, and that managed access does not become a proxy for power plays.

This section was originally published by me on the blog & newsletter of Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor) as their Science Communications Lead.

Key mission updates

Left: Launch of the Chang’e 6 lunar sample return mission by a Long March 5 rocket from Wenchang, Hainan island on May 3, 2024; Center: Drop zone of the rocket’s payload fairing near the Philippine Sea before and after (red and green boxes) CNSA made mission profile modifications; Right: The Chang’e 6 lunar lander’s descent & ascent trajectories for prograde and retrograde orbits (red and yellow arcs) so as to reach the targeted landing site on the Moon’s farside for its immense scientific value. Image: CNSA / Xinhua / GUO Zhilei et al.

Ling Xin reports that due to the Philippines government voicing issues against China’s rocket stages entering their sovereign territories at sea, CNSA had to redesign the launch and flight trajectories of the Chang’e 6 mission which successfully fetched samples from the Moon’s farside last year. The report is based on the technical paper published in the Journal of Astronautics by the mission designers themselves, which provides interesting graphs as well. In particular, the mission profile modifications stretched Chang’e 6’s Moonward journey from 23 days to 53 days while narrowing the window for touching down within the primary landing region on the Moon’s farside. The landing region was not to be changed owing to its immense scientific value. At the end, everything has gladly worked out.
Astrobotic announced that its “LunaGrid-Lite” lunar surface power transfer demonstration mission targeting a 2026 launch has passed the Critical Design Review phase ahead of flight model build and assembly. As part of public-private Tipping Point contracts in 2023, NASA awarded Astrobotic $34.6 million for this mission. After landing, the company’s tethered CubeRover—itself supported by a $5.8 million Tipping Point contract—will unreel about 500 meters of high-voltage, 1 kilowatt power line across the surface. The demonstration will be a test for LunaGrid, wherein Astrobotic aims to commercially deliver power to enable hardware and rovers on the Moon’s poles to survive the poorly lit terrain and frigid nights. Concerning another piece that would be part of LunaGrid, Astrobotic said in May that it has completed the standard but critical set of space environmental tests for its wireless charging system for hardware operating on the Moon. Also related is the company’s development of the also NASA-funded 20-meter tall, retractable polar solar arrays and its newly picked up larger cousin. These are aimed to be deployed on maximally sunlit sites at the Moon’s south pole.

Many thanks to Catalyx Space, Alexandra Witze and Gurbir Singh 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:

China’s march to the Moon 🌗

- Jatan 🌙

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Moon Monday #238: The long march to Luna continues

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 17:25:38 +0530

Left inset: A test first stage structure of the upcoming Long March 10A rocket. See the technician humans standing beside for scale; Right inset: Static fire test of its seven YF-100K engines roaring in tandem. Images: CMSA / CCTV / CALT

On August 15, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) and the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT) conducted a 30-second static fire test for the upcoming Long March 10 series of crew-capable rockets using a high fidelity first stage structure. China has thus now successfully simultaneously fired the seven YF-100K high-thrust kerolox engines to validate the design system, components, and materials which will power Long March 10A rockets to launch its next-generation human spacecraft named Mengzhou to Earth orbit. China will combine three such first stages to form the core stage of the Long March 10, which will launch humans to the Moon. Notably, the test was conducted at the same launch complex in Wenchang which China will use for said crewed Moon missions.

Unlike the US Artemis efforts, the Chinese have been consistently hitting milestones in the lead up to its first crewed Moon landing aimed to be accomplished by 2030. The article linked below provides a review of all such recent milestones.

On our Moon
from where the Sun doesn’t shine,
a new era will dawn.
– Jatan

NASA un-nukes its decision to steer away from using nuclear power on the Moon

Right after the US Presidential NASA budget request for FY2026 noted that the agency will focus on “advanced non-nuclear power in support of lunar and Mars missions”, NASA through its new Acting Administrator Sean Duffy has now announced a Request for Information asking the industry to design a 100-kilowatt-plus nuclear fission power system with a mass less than 15,000 kilograms that can be ready to launch by 2030 to use on the Moon’s surface for a decade. NASA’s previous $15 million award in 2022 distributed equally to three companies was for such systems with ~40 kilowatts of electrical power. The agency’s driving rationale is that nuclear systems enable missions to operate continually through the long and frigid lunar nights, and in permanently shadowed regions on the poles where the water ice is.

Concept image showing Zeno’s nuclear electrical power system being used on a lunar rover. Image: Zeno Power

Missing from NASA’s latest announcement is any mention of Zeno Power, which raised $50 million earlier this year, a major chunk of which is going towards developing and demonstrating the company’s nuclear electric power system on the Moon for NASA by 2027. NASA’s now-former Chief Technologist A. C. Charania recently joined Zeno as Senior Vice President of Space Business Development. As part of public-private Tipping Point contracts in 2023, NASA awarded $15 million to Project Harmonia, a team led by Zeno Power which includes two lunar surface delivery vendors from the agency’s CLPS program: Blue Origin and Intuitive Machines. Project Harmonia aims to demonstrate a radioisotope generator using a Stirling engine instead of traditional thermocouples to convert radioactive heat into electrical power. The system will use the Americium-241 isotope, which is more readily available than the conventionally used Plutonium-238. As such, Zeno would very likely participate in this old-not-new initiative from NASA.

Many thanks to The Orbital Index and Vinayak Vadlamani 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:

More Artemis & CLPS updates →

Artemis updates

NASA continues preparations to launch the Artemis II Moon mission in 2026. The latest test involved its crew putting on their spacesuits and heading to the launchpad to simulate a possible nighttime launch. They also practiced an emergency escape scenario should something go wrong in the launch complex. In the meanwhile, technicians at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida completed fueling the crew’s Orion spacecraft. Next up, Orion will be integrated with its emergency escape system. In the lead up to the Artemis II launch, NASA will conduct a series of 10 integrated tests over the remainder year.

The 10 integrated tests NASA will conduct in the lead up to the crewed Artemis II Moon mission launch on an SLS rocket. Image: NASA

As Firefly continues building its second, third, and fourth CLPS Moon landing missions as well as an orbital imaging service, the company is hiring a Deputy Chief Engineer.
Leonard David reports that as part of NASA’s Lunar Surface Technology Research (LuSTR) program, the Colorado School of Mines has built a large simulated lunar surface facility to enable testing of rovers and other lunar hardware designs. The testbed contains over 100,000 kilograms of lunar soil simulant.

- Jatan 🌙

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Notable nuances about NISAR and how it flows into planetary science for NASA and ISRO | Indian Space Progress #30

Jatan Mehta — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 19:48:54 +0530

Left inset image: The July 30 launch of NISAR on an ISRO GSLV Mk II rocket; Right inset image: NISAR’s two radar systems from NASA and ISRO respectively being tested at ISRO’s compact antenna test facility in Bengaluru, India; Background image: Illustration of NISAR in Earth orbit with its large 12-meter antenna deployed. Images: ISRO / JPL / NASA

The July 30 launch of the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) spacecraft has put the first dual frequency radar system on a free-flying Earth observation satellite, with the longer wavelength L-band SAR coming from NASA and the complementary shorter S-band system from ISRO. Much has been covered about how over the next three years, these all-weather radar systems will repeatedly observe physical changes on Earth from a polar orbit at the finest scales while also touting the broadest, most time-consistent, and fully free global coverage so far. And so I won’t get into those same details in this article and instead let you look at some notable nuances about NISAR, and how it makes its way into planetary exploration as well.

At the heart of NISAR

Let’s start with the origin story of NISAR. Over a decade ago, NASA was formulating the L-band based DESDynI mission based on the US scientific community’s 2007 Decadal recommendation. ISRO’s S-band radar contribution to NISAR, which was formalized in 2014, came in to meet the specific goals of India. From the NISAR press kit:

In addition to using L-band data to meet the mission’s global science objectives, ISRO will leverage it to address a series of India’s Earth science priorities, including coastal wind velocity, seafloor topography near Indian coasts, the shape and position of the country’s coastlines, biomass measurements, geological features in the Himalayas and on the Deccan Plateau, and sea ice features in the Arctic and Antarctic.

Thus NISAR was born. These goals turned out to be complementary to ones NASA had while enhancing coverage and visibility for regions with extensive forest cover. If you probe deeper and look at the mission’s specific Level 1 (L1) requirements, you see two notable bits about how the mission objectives have been formalized:

The Level 1 Science Requirements define the specific science measurements that NISAR must perform to satisfy NASA's and most of ISRO's science goals. In addition to these joint requirements, ISRO has identified a number of additional Level 1 science requirements that are to be satisfied by the L-band radar instrument. These requirements then flow down to lower-level science and mission requirements that define the scope of the mission development and operations.

Two of these formal L1 requirements of ISRO are to specifically understand the nature of India’s landmass and its shorelines so to better plan agricultural and civilian development:

The NISAR mission will measure coastal wind velocity on a 1 km grid with an average sampling capability of 6 days, with an accuracy goal of 2 m/s over at least 80% of oceans within 200 km of India's coast.

The NISAR mission will image geological features over selected regions of India at 10 m resolution at an average sampling interval of 90 days with at least two viewing geometries. The regions include paleochannels in Rajasthan, linear features, and structural studies in the Himalayas and on the Deccan plateau.

To meet the whole set of L1 requirements and mission objectives, the finer requirements of L2, L3, and so on continue top down with increasing specificity of the engineering of the satellite and its subsystems. As such, NISAR’s ambitious scientific goals are ingrained into the very design of the satellite, and not something added up top as convenient. With its integral involvement in NISAR, ISRO is demonstrating a commendable commitment to understanding India’s natural ecosystems and their implications for responsible and more efficient national development. It harkens back to Vikram Sarabhai’s summary from 1969 of his efforts that decade to convince the Indian government to start a national space program in earnest:

There are some who question the relevance of space activities in a developing nation. To us, there is no ambiguity of purpose. We do not have the fantasy of competing with the economically advanced nations in the exploration of the moon or the planets or manned space-flight. But we are convinced that if we are to play a meaningful role nationally, and in the community of nations, we must be second to none in the application of advanced technologies to the real problems of man and society.

NISAR thus embodies the very spirit of using cutting-edge space technologies to solve humanity’s fundamental problems. The NISAR press kit highlights another such goal:

NISAR will study the planet’s ice-covered surfaces as they melt, move, and deform. The melting of the massive ice sheets covering Antarctica and Greenland has contributed about a third of global sea level rise, while the disintegration of mountain glaciers has added about the same share, in addition to affecting water supplies for billions of people. Meanwhile, the melting of polar sea ice can affect ocean circulation on a global scale.

NASA and ISRO have also baked in joint L1 requirements for NISAR, such as for the emergency observations the satellite will conduct post natural—or even human—disasters in any part of the world:

In support of responses to major natural or anthropogenic disasters, the mission system shall be capable of providing revised scheduling for new acquisitions within 36 hours of an event or an event forecast notification and delivering data within 9 hours of being collected, and shall exercise this capability on a best efforts basis.

NISAR’s numerous ground stations. The thousands of terabytes of data NISAR’s observations will generate will be distributed for free worldwide. Image: NASA / JPL

Direct collaboration on NISAR extends beyond the two agencies, in fact. The specific SweepSAR radar mapping technique NISAR will use, which allows it to capture wide swaths of hundreds of kilometers without compromising on resolution, was developed and refined by NASA in collaboration with the German Aerospace Center (DLR). SAR company PierSight Space (a sponsor of Indian Space Progress) has noted in a blog post that Anthony Freeman, who led the NISAR program during its formulation phase, spearheaded the decision of NISAR to use SweepSAR. That’s because to meet NISAR’s objectives, having centimeter level of detail is as essential as gaining vast, global coverage.

NASA JPL and ISRO engineers & technicians posing for a picture after combining the spacecraft bus and radar systems of NISAR at ISRO’s URSC center. Image: ISRO / URSC

NASA and ISRO have explicitly designed NISAR’s instrumentation such that both the L-band and S-band can work simultaneously as well where apt and necessary for achieving mission goals by combining the strengths of each:

The feed apertures at L- and S- band are built by JPL and ISRO, respectively, as well phase-matched to their respective electronics and cabling. In this sense, each radar is a self-contained instrument up to the radiated energy from the feed aperture. Thereafter, both will share the same reflector, with a nearly identical optical prescription (F/D=0.75). Because a distributed feed on a reflector-feed antenna has a single focus, much of the radiated and received energy is not at the focus. Since S-band wavelength is 2.5 times shorter than L-band, yet the feed is the same length to achieve identical swath coverage, the S-band system has greater deviations from the focus. Thus, the design has been iterated to derive the best offset, tilt and phasing of each radar to balance the performance across the two systems. This analysis has been done independently by the JPL and ISRO teams, then cross-compared to validate.

Like in a democracy, such a heavily integrated collaboration between different entities and their cultures is not easy to pull off and can certainly be time consuming. And yet the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) found in its 2018 assessment during NISAR’s development that the satellite was progressing despite risks stemming from procedural differences between the two agencies. In fact, the assessment noted effective collaboration thanks to NASA and ISRO having iteratively updated their cooperative project plan. Some GAO reports can be quite scathing, and so for NISAR to have had a favorable assessment is worth noting.

Many thanks to the Takshashila Institution, PierSight, GalaxEye and Gurbir Singh for sponsoring this month’s edition of Indian Space Progress. If you too appreciate my efforts to capture nuanced trajectories of India in space, support my independent writing.

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Flowing into planetary science and back

The NASA-ISRO collaboration has since expanded to the Moon as well. Over the last few years, ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter has been aiding NASA in selecting and filtering candidate landing sites for the crewed Artemis III Moon mission, which aims to put US astronauts back on the Moon later this decade.

This collaboration between researchers on both sides specifically involves the use of radar data from the ISRO orbiter’s Dual-Frequency SAR (DFSAR) instrument to uniquely characterize the Artemis III candidate landing zones. DFSAR has enabled NASA to sense valuable information on the physical state and structure of those regions, including mapping landing hazards for future landers to avoid. DFSAR has also been used to help reduce false positives where certain terrain on the Moon’s poles with rough textures seem like desirable water ice pockets but may not be.

This image of the Moon’s south pole shows the nine candidate landing regions/zones for NASA’s Artemis III crewed mission. Image: NASA / GSFC / ASU / LRO

And so, it’s interesting that while NISAR is the first free-flying Earth observation satellite to use dual-frequency SAR, we already did that at the Moon first through the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter DFSAR. For ISRO, its radar technology has first flown on Earth observation satellites, evolving later for use on Chandrayaan 2, and has now been fed back into NISAR. JPL’s various radar systems have recently flown on NASA’s planetary missions across the Solar System, honing a plethora of techniques over time. With NISAR, the two approaches have converged.

In an interview with The Hindu, NASA’s Director of its Earth Sciences division Karen Germain affirmed the cross-pollination of the agency’s radar systems across planetary and Earth observation missions, and went on to note how NISAR itself will also help scientists better understand other planets.

One of the things that NISAR is going to tell us about is what’s going on underneath the crust of the surface because we’ll be able to see these very small motions that you and I don’t experience daily, right? We can’t sense these. But NISAR will, and it will allow us to advance our models about how the interior of planets work.

Venus comes to mind in particular. ISRO’s upcoming Shukrayaan Venus orbiter will fly the highest resolution radar to the searing planet thus far, taking cues from both the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter and NISAR. It will pierce through the planet’s thick clouds and sense the crust to help planetary scientists unlock long-standing Venusian mysteries, including the critical question of how Earth has remained so habitable while its sister planet turned into a hellscape. Moreover, NASA, ESA, and ISRO hope to coordinate and complement observations from their respective Venus missions and share data with each other to enhance the scientific output from them all. NISAR sets precedence for such multi-organizational scientific use as well.

Left: Venus as it would approximately look to the human eye, imaged by NASA’s Mariner 10 spacecraft; Right: Radar image of Venus’ surface captured by NASA’s Magellan orbiter. Also shown in the graphic is ISRO’s newly approved Venus orbiter design. Images: Mattias Malmer / NASA / JPL / ISRO; Graphic: Jatan Mehta

When seen in this holistic context, NISAR is demonstrating peak peaceful uses of cutting-edge space technologies to not only solve humanity’s fundamental problems but also laying the path for helping us answer fundamental questions about our Solar System.

Read previous editions on Indian space

Indian Space Progress #29: Was Shubhanshu Shukla’s Axiom-4 flight to the International Space Station worth it for ISRO?
Indian Space Progress #28: A pressing PSLV rocket failure and orbital congestion to brood over
Indian Space Progress #27: Three months of mission updates, and fixing ISRO’s monthly summaries

- Jatan 🌙

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Moon Monday #237: China completes large lander test in latest milestone to put humans on the Moon

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 17:46:40 +0530

On August 6, China successfully conducted a terrestrially simulated lunar landing and takeoff test using a full-scale mockup of its upcoming ~26,000-kilogram crewed Moon lander named Lanyue—which roughly means ‘embracing the Moon’ in Chinese. For the control systems test, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) used the same exogravity simulation system in Huailai County outside Beijing as for previous tests part of past robotic Moon and Mars landing missions. The system involves giant tethered towers to simulate lunar gravity and an artificially cratered, rugged terrain on the ground to mimc the Moon’s surface. The test seemed to show apt coordination between the lander’s main engines and fine-control thrusters as orchestrated by Lanyue’s guidance, navigation, and control system by engaging all sensors and imagers.

As Ling Xin has noted, there are two more interesting aspects to the test:

Footage aired by state broadcaster CCTV showed a lunar rover mounted on the lander’s side, along with a ladder attached to one leg for astronauts to climb down to the surface. [...] Lanyue consists of the lander itself and a propulsion module, which carries most of the fuel and engines for the initial slowdown. A few kilometers above the surface, the propulsion module will separate from the lander and lighten the load for final landing. The propulsion module was not tested on Wednesday.

CMSA says the development “represents a breakthrough in research and development in terms of China’s manned lunar exploration program.” That’s true, especially since the Chinese have been consistently hitting milestones in the lead up to its first crewed Moon landing aimed to be accomplished by 2030. Below is a review of all such recent milestones.

Recent Sino milestones towards crewed Moon missions

Two months ago, CMSA successfully tested the launchpad escape system of China’s next-generation Mengzhou spacecraft. A variant called ‘Mengzhou Y’ will carry astronauts for Moon missions to lunar orbit.

Shots from the launchpad escape test of Mengzhou, China’s next-generation crewed spacecraft vehicle design. Images: CMSA / CMSEO | Graphic: Jatan Mehta

With Chang’e 5, China demonstrated the world’s first remote docking and undocking of spacecraft in lunar orbit in 2020. It repeated the feat with Chang’e 6 last year, bringing lunar samples from the Moon’s farside and demonstrating flexibility in the core architecture. China will utilize the technology for crewed Moon landings, wherein a Mengzhou Y spacecraft will dock with the Lanyue lunar lander in lunar orbit. Two of three/four astronauts then transfer into the lander. After the two spacecraft separate, the Lanyue lander will touchdown on the Moon for the surface mission. It will then return to lunar orbit to re-dock with Mengzhou Y, which will subsequently bring the crew back home.
Late last year, China created a test stand in the northwestern Shaanxi province, which can simulate the kind of high-altitude and vacuum conditions that the Lanyue lander will experience during its lunar descent and touchdown. The stand allows the lander’s main engine to be tested for its full burn duration of up to 20 minutes. Apparently the test system took only eight months to complete, according to Li Guanghui of CAST who was involved in the project.
Edit: In August and September 2025, China conducted booster engine tests of its upcoming heavy-lift, crew-capable rocket called the Long March 10A. Three such boosters will make up the Long March 10 rocket’s core stage. Two Long March 10s will launch Mengzhou Y and Lanyue towards the Moon respectively for every Chinese crewed Moon mission.
Andrew Jones reported in November 2024 that CALT successfully conducted a 5-meter-fairing separation test of Long March 10A. The Long March 10 will sport a larger fairing for crewed Moon missions, whose separation system should be tested soon too as per CASC.
Jack Congram has reported that for launches of Long March 10 from the southern Hainan island, China is constructing a third launchpad at Wenchang called Launch Complex 301. The core launch support tower build has been completed. The development of associated infrastructure is now in full swing, including the vehicle assembly building, servicing platforms, and transport systems. Xinhua has reported CMSA saying that the development and construction of ground systems—including the launch site, the measurement and control communication system, and the landing site—are “advancing in order”.

Payload fairing halves of the Long March 10 rocket flanking a large test structure after a fairing separation test. See the humans on the edges for scale. Image: CALT

CGI concept of China’s first crewed Moon landing mission. Image: PhilLeafSpace

With the debut launch of the semi-cryogenic Long March 12 rocket last November, China successfully flew the YF-100K engine, the same kind that will power the first stage(s) of the Long March 10. And, as Ling Xin reported in July 2024, China successfully test fired the YF-75E high energy hydrolox engine as well, three of which will power the third stage of Long March 10.
The upcoming Chang’e 7 and Chang’e 8 missions, targeted for launch next year and 2028 respectively, will demonstrate precision landings as well as the ability to explore the Moon’s south pole for water ice and other resources. Both of these capabilities will be valuable for China’s plan to create the crew-plus-robotic ILRS Moonbase, which will follow the string of initial crewed lunar missions of the 2030s.
Over the last couple of years, China has demonstrated world-leading lunar navigation and communications technologies in complex Earth-Moon orbital spaces. These abilities will substantially improve both the lunar surface coverage time and area as well as ground station availability for China’s future crewed Moon missions, and give it an edge over the US in sustaining the program.

A suited person demoing China’s lunar spacesuit prototype. Image: CMSA / CCTV / CMS

Chinese taikonauts (astronauts) have begun initial training for lunar missions since late last year across lunar transit and surface operations. Development has also progressed on the space suit and rover to be used by astronauts, with various prototypes built and tested. Edit: Jack Congram reported that China trained 28 taikonauts in cave exercises in Wulong, Chongqing in December 2025 to prepare them mentally for Moon missions.
In 2023, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) solicited science payload proposals for the mission’s lander. Similar to the instruments NASA will deploy on Artemis III, CMSA wants these payloads to focus on lunar geology, physics, life sciences, and solar and astronomical observations. Unlike Artemis III though, CMSA is open to in-situ resource utilization demos being proposed too! The final selection of the instruments to fly is expected to be announced soon.
In February, the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) announced a call for Chinese organizations to bid for developing a lunar mapping satellite in support of crewed Moon missions. The satellite’s mandate is to obtain high-precision mineral, topographic, and geomorphic data of the Moon’s low-latitude regions to aid planning of surface missions. Xinhua reported CMSA stating in April that the project has completed its approval and competitive selection process.

So that was a review of all recent advances from China as it prepares to send humans to the Moon. China sure is giving it all the might it can muster, and it will be great to watch a second nation from Earth land humans on Luna.

China’s Long March 2F rocket flying with astronauts, with a lunar backdrop. Image: Xinhua

Many thanks to Open Lunar Foundation 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:

Artemis updates

The Artemis II flight crew (in suits) and the mission closeout crew (in clean room apparel) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida prior to test operations. Image: NASA / Rad Sinyak

On July 31, the crew of Artemis II entered the fuel-loaded, original Orion capsule—which is targeted to take them around the Moon and back next year—to practice activities and operations they’d have to perform before launch and during the transit to Luna. This excercise had high fidelity since the crew not only used the original capsule but also put on their spacesuits and tested Orion’s interfaces while the capsule operated on full power with its communications and life control systems turned on. This latest update follows last month’s milestone of NASA completing a series of eight tests of ground systems and associated launch infrastructure ahead of the eventual second SLS rocket launch for Artemis II. Marcia Smith has recently reported that NASA is trying to launch Artemis II in February 2026.
After nearly six months of trying to establish communications with the Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft post its February launch, NASA has declared an end to the rescue efforts and the mission. The agency-funded Trailblazer was supposed to provide scientists with unprecedented, high-resolution global orbital maps of the amount, distribution, and state of water across our Moon. However, control over the spacecraft was lost shorty after launch, with subsequent revival efforts unsuccessful. Unfortunately, Trailblazer is the latest example of the US failing to explore lunar water as the principal goal of Artemis. NASA says the same infrared spectrometer design from Trailblazer will fly on an unspecified mission end of decade to provide regional contextual observations for the instruments to be aboard the upcoming versatile Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV), which will be used across Artemis missions for years starting end of decade at best. This means the expected scientific output from Trailblazer will now have to wait at least five more years.

More Moon

Orbital image processing enthusiast Chandra Tungathurthi has shared new imagery of the unsuccessful touchdown of Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 CLPS lander Athena this past March. The images clearly show engine plume and surface interactions during the lander’s final descent phase as well as the first surface contact of Athena’s landing legs. To appreciate the difference in detail between NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter, and with ISRO itself not sharing enough imagery to make their orbiter’s potential clear, I had to compare the images of Athena from the two and adjust the scale and rotation to roughly match:

Images: NASA / GSFC / ASU / LROC / ISRO / C. Tungathurthi | Graphic: Jatan Mehta

The University of Hong Kong is hiring for two doctoral positions to analyze Chang’e 5 & 6 lunar samples and characterize human & robotic lunar landing sites respectively.
Apollo 8 & 13 astronaut Jim Lovell passed away at 97.

- Jatan 🌙

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Moon Monday #236: A third orbiter-lander-rover trio to fire-and-fly

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 18:01:58 +0530

I’m thrilled to welcome Astrolab as a continuing yearly sponsor of my Moon Monday blog+newsletter!

California-based Venturi Astrolab Inc. (Astrolab) is developing the large multi-purpose rovers of FLEX and FLIP for advanced exploration of our Moon this decade and next. Through FLEX, Astrolab leads one of the three teams NASA selected last year to mature their designs for a versatile Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV), which the agency hopes to use with and without crew across Artemis missions starting end of decade. 🌗

Note: All sponsorships abide by my public Editorial Independence Policy with zero exceptions.

A fourth Firefly

An illustration of Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander on the Moon’s south pole carrying out its fourth mission for NASA CLPS. Note how lander elements are adapted for the near-horizon polar Sun and Earth visibility. Image: Firefly

US-based Firefly Aerospace won its fourth Moon landing mission contract as part of NASA’s CLPS program. For $176.7 million, the company’s lander is to deliver three NASA-funded instruments to the Moon’s south pole in 2029 as well as two rovers: a versatile CubeRover from Astrobotic called Moonranger and Canada’s first lunar rover through CSA. The Canadian rover has an interesting profile:

The CSA Rover is designed to access and explore remote South Pole areas of interest, including permanently shadowed regions, and to survive at least one lunar night. The CSA rover has stereo cameras, a neutron spectrometer, two imagers (visible to near-infrared), a radiation micro-dosimeter, and a NASA-contributed thermal imaging radiometer developed by the Applied Physics Laboratory. These instruments will advance our understanding of the physical and chemical properties of the lunar surface, the geological history of the Moon, and potential resources such as water ice. It will also improve our understanding of the environmental challenges that await future astronauts and their life support systems.

The rover was originally intended to be launched on a CLPS lander in 2026 as part of a NASA-CSA deal, and it’s only now that we’ve learnt about its launch target being pushed to 2029. Coming back to the CLPS mission itself, Firefly says the mission’s orbiter element, Elytra Dark, will provide communications relay services for the lander. After the short surface mission is over, Elytra Dark will join its other two twin craft (assumed to be operational by then from prior missions) to offer commercial lunar imaging and mapping services.

Illustration showing the Blue Ghost lander separating from the Elytra Dark orbital module that brought it to lunar orbit. Image: Firefly

Building on the success of its first Moon landing, Firefly is gearing up for its second, third, and now fourth Moon landing attempt this decade. While the company’s first lander did not carry a rover, all the next three are. The second Firefly lander will carry UAE’s Rashid 2 rover to the Moon’s farside whereas the third lander will deploy Honeybee Robotics’ first planetary rover on one of the two Gruithuisen Domes, a unique volcanic site on the Moon’s nearside.

More CLPS updates →

More mission updates

After Intuitive Machines faced a second unsuccessful CLPS landing with IM-2 this year, the lunar lander builder is diversifying its offerings with orbital lunar communications and cislunar deployment services, the latter being based on orbital vehicles derived from flown lander systems.
CSA awarded initial study contracts totaling $10.6 million to three companies—Canadensys, MDA Space, and Mission Control—towards developing a “Lunar Utility Vehicle” (LUV). This follows Canada’s intent from 2023 to invest $1.2 billion over 13 years to develop an assistance rover for future Artemis astronauts. Canada hopes that just like how contributing their Canadarm3 robotics servicing system to the upcoming NASA-led Gateway lunar orbital habitat bagged seats for their astronauts on circumlunar Artemis missions, contributing a large, durable LUV rover for Artemis surface missions will enable a Canadian to walk on the Moon. There are three other rovers in this largest size category being planned to explore the Moon: the Artemis Lunar Terrain Vehicle, JAXA’s advanced pressurized rover, and China’s crewed rover.
The Italian Space Agency (ASI) has awarded a preliminary design contract to a group led by Thales Alenia Space for a Multi-Purpose Habitat (MPH) astronaut module central to NASA’s planned Artemis Basecamp on the Moon. This follows last year’s milestone when a NASA review board approved the module’s development to commence. To be launched and placed on the Moon sometime in the 2030s, the MPH module can host two astronauts for up to 30 days nominally while a larger crew can stay for short periods during emergencies. The 15,000-kilogram module will have wheels so it can reposition itself as needed on the dynamically lit lunar polar surface. The flight model can be constructed only later once the development phase is complete.

Illustration of Italy’s mobile Multi-Purpose Habitat module for Artemis. Image: Thales Alenia Space

More Moon

A new document collated by US DARPA provides more details on the lunar infrastructure concepts by multiple companies which the former organization selected in 2023 for advanced studies. These are part of a 10-year Lunar Architecture (LunA-10) on how to build key commercial infrastructure pieces for sustaining human presence on the Moon.
Eric Jones, the lead creator of the meticulous Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, passed away last month.

Many thanks to Astrolab 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:

- Jatan 🌙

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Everything you need to know about NASA CLPS Moon landing missions

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 17:10:00 +0530

NASA is returning humans to the Moon later in the decade, but a fleet of agency-supported robotic spacecraft will touch down on lunar soil starting this year. With its $2.6 billion Commercial Lunar Payloads Services (CLPS) initiative, NASA has been competitively funding commercial companies to build spacecraft that will autonomously land on the Moon, carrying with them the agency’s science and technology payloads to geologically diverse places.

A render of Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander descending on the Moon. Image: Firefly

Upcoming CLPS Moon landings

To date, NASA has funded several commercial companies for these CLPS Moon landing missions with the following contract values at the time of their selections:

Mission 1, January 8, 2024: $79.5 million contract to Astrobotic
Mission 2, February 12, 2024: $77 million contract to Intuitive Machines
Mission 3, Late 2024: $47 million contract to Intuitive Machines
Mission 4, 2024: $93.3 million contract to Firefly
(Cancelled) Mission 5, November 2023: $75.9 million contract to Masten Space
(Cancelled) Mission 6, November 2024: $226.5 million contract to Astrobotic (increased to $320.4 million for extra tests)
Mission 7, 2025: $77.5 million contract to Intuitive Machines
Mission 8, 2026: $73 million contract to Draper
Mission 9, 2026: $112 million contract to Firefly
Mission 10, 2025-26: $6.1 million to Blue Origin
Mission 11, 2027: $116.9 million contract to Intuitive Machines
Mission 12, 2028: $179 million contract to Firefly
Mission 13, 2029: $176.7 million contract to Firefly

Unlike traditional missions, these CLPS missions are built, operated and managed by their companies, with lower oversight from NASA. The agency primarily dictates preferences for the landing sites, and the instruments it wants onboard.

These missions will also have non-NASA payloads from across the globe, something the agency encourages to spur a commercial lunar ecosystem. All landers on these missions will nominally last a maximum of one lunar day—that is, 14 Earth days—since frigid night time temperatures, well below -100 degrees Celsius, will render the solar- and battery-powered landers non-functional.

Astrobotic’s first CLPS mission

Astrobotic’s first Moon lander, Peregrine. Image: John Thornton

On January 8, 2024, Astrobotic’s lander launched with the aim of touching down in a lunar lava plain called Sinus Viscositatis just outside the Gruithuisen volcanic domes on February 23. The lander carried 15 payloads from 6 countries, including two micro-rovers. As part of NASA’s CLPS program, it was also supposed to carry 11 agency-funded instruments but flew only five of them. However, Astrobotic’s lunar lander failed before it could reach Luna, precluding a lunar descent attempt.

Intuitive Machines’ first CLPS mission

For its first CLPS mission named IM-1 which launched in February 2024, Intuitive Machines carried six NASA payloads to the Moon, attempting a soft landing in the polar Malapert A crater at 80°S. There was also a commercial telescope called ILO-X from Hawaii-based ILOA aboard. The company hit a hard-landing on the Moon instead but after which NASA and Intuitive Machines skewed the success criteria of the mission to claim is as successful.

A dramatic view of the Odysseus lunar lander still firing its main engine after making contact with the Moon. Image: Intuitive Machines

Intuitive Machines’ second CLPS mission

March 2025 update: The spacecraft landed sideways and the mission failed

On its second Moon mission in Q1 2025, Intuitive Machines will deliver NASA’s PRIME-1 drill and a mass spectrometer at an optimum location on the Moon’s south pole where underground water ice is expected based on orbital data. The lander will drill up to 1 meter below the surface and analyze the soil for water ice, a first such study. The lander will also deploy Lunar Outpost’s MAPP rover on the surface to collect—but not bring back—lunar soil for NASA and also test Nokia’s 4G/LTE network on the Moon. Further, there’s the company’s own NASA-supported hopper onboard called Micro-Nova, which aims to hop five times to capture high-resolution imagery and other measurements of the surface under its flight path.

Illustration of Intuitive Machines’ lander on the Moon with NASA’s PRIME-1 drill attached. Image: Intuitive Machines

First CLPS mission by Masten

Masten Space’s lander aimed to touchdown on the Moon’s south pole in November 2023. It was to have at least eight instruments onboard, chiefly to detect water ice and other volatiles such as methane and carbon dioxide to help us understand the Moon’s resource potential. The lander was also supposed to deploy Astrobotic’s shoebox-sized autonomous rover called MoonRanger. NASA even planned to put a neutron spectrometer onboard the rover to detect signs of water ice below the surface.

But following a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing by Masten on September 13, 2022, the mission seems to have been rendered impossible. Astrobotic acquired Masten Space, including much of its space technology portfolio for $4.5 million. Debra Needham, Program Scientist at NASA’s Exploration Science Strategy and Integration Office, said at the 2023 annual LEAG meeting in September that the agency plans to “strategically manifest payloads” from Masten’s mission onto other landers as feasible.

VIPER rover delivery by Astrobotic

Astrobotic planned to launch NASA’s VIPER rover to the Moon’s south pole in November 2024 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. VIPER was to explore areas in and around permanently shadowed regions for over 100 days, and use its drill and three instruments to unravel the nature of the Moon’s water ice deposits, assess their resource potential, and determine how accessible they are. This would’ve helped us plan future human missions to the Moon’s poles and eventually build sustainable habitats. On the same mission, ESA will fly a landing-precision-aiding camera, the first ever commercial delivery to the Moon contracted by the agency.

Given the mission’s criticality, NASA took a more conservative approach with VIPER compared to other CLPS contracts. The agency requested Astrobotic to delay VIPER’s delivery by a year, and contracted them $67.8 million to perform additional testing of the mission’s large, 5900-kilogram Griffin lander in order to reduce risk. At $320.4 million, VIPER was the most expensive CLPS delivery yet. Note that NASA separated its own costs to build and operate VIPER (currently at $433.5 million) from the payment to Astrobotic.

But in July 2024, NASA questionably cancelled the mission and has opted for a VIPER-less Artemis. The agency then tried finding a private company that will fly and operate the rover at its own cost, an approach many argued decidedly fails at VIPER’s original goal. After evaluating the proposals submitted by private companies, NASA has come to the same conclusion. The agency will restructure the solicitation to elicit stronger proposals that hopefully stay closer to VIPER’s original science goals. Edit: NASA has now tentatively chosen Blue Origin’s second Mark I lander to fly VIPER in 2027.

In the meanwhile, Astrobotic has completed testing their lunar navigation and guidance systems to be onboard Griffin. The large lander’s primary payload will be the FLIP rover by Astrolab (a Moon Monday sponsor), which got manifested recently after NASA decided not to fly VIPER aboard. Astrobotic also announced that its first CubeRover has successfully passed the standard suite of space environmental tests ahead of its flight on this Griffin lander.

Illustration of the VIPER rover exploring the Moon’s south pole. Image: NASA

Firefly’s first CLPS mission

Blue Ghost Mission 1. Images: Firefly Aerospace

March 2025 update: Firefly successfully landed and performed scientific experiments 🚀

On January 15, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched and deployed Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander in Earth orbit. It aims to descend in the lava plains of Mare Crisium at 18.56°N, 61.81°E in March 2025, carrying several NASA instruments to study the lunar environment.

One of the lander’s legs feature PlanetVac, a low-cost soil sampling technology partially funded by The Planetary Society to enable future sample return missions from the Moon, Mars and other planetary bodies. This mission will also be NASA’s first attempt to get a GPS lock from the Moon. The mission also has two commercial payloads.

Related: On the same launch as Blue Ghost, the Falcon 9 upper stage also deployed ispace Japan’s Hakuto-R lander to space. The mission followed up on the company’s first failed landing attempt but also failed to touchdown due to performance issues of the laser rangefinder. The outcome underscored the need for resilience in private lunar landing missions through expansive and collaborative testing. One must note that ispace has continued its remarkable transparency from the first failed landing mission, sharing detailed findings of what went wrong in mere weeks.

ispace Japan’s second Moon lander, named RESILIENCE, at JAXA’s Tsukuba Space Center. Also seen integrated into the lander is ispace’s first rover TENACIOUS. Image: ispace

Intuitive Machines’ third CLPS mission

Intuitive Machines’ third Moon landing will be in the swirl of Reiner Gamma in 2026. Reiner Gamma has a weak local magnetic field, possibly a remnant from the time the Moon had a global magnetic field. The mission’s primary payload suite Lunar Vertex is a collection of spectrometers and magnetometers on the lander and a rover to study the swirl’s composition, and map the strength and direction of magnetic fields on the surface. This will help us better understand the effects of solar wind and bombarding micrometeorites on planetary bodies across our Solar System, and also shape our understanding of the Moon’s magnetic evolution.

Relatedly, NASA has been testing variants of the three shoebox-sized CADRE rovers to be deployed at Reiner Gamma by the aforementioned lander. The rovers will autonomously navigate the landed region to demonstrate collectively better mapping it than a single rover would. The rovers will have multistatic ground penetrating radars to create 3D images of the subsurface structure up to 10 meters deep.

Draper’s farside CLPS mission

For its first CLPS mission in 2026, Draper will land a spacecraft made by ispace on the Moon’s farside, a feat only achieved by China’s Chang’e 4 mission so far. The landing region chosen by NASA for the mission is no less impressive—the 312 kilometers wide Schrödinger crater, the most pristine impact feature of its kind. The lander will carry 95 kilograms of NASA’s scientific instruments, which includes two highly sensitive seismometers, a drill, a probe, and a magnetic sounder, all to help us better understand the Moon’s internal structure and composition, and how our cosmic neighbor evolved. The lander will also carry LuSEE-Lite, which shielded from Earth’s radio noises on the farside makes it apt to study the solar wind’s interactions with the Moon’s surface.

Also see: How ispace, CLPS, funding, and science are interlocked

Firefly’s second CLPS mission

The Lunar Pathfinder will relay communications between Earth and robotic mission hardware at the Moon as a commercial service. Image: SSTL

Firefly will deliver an orbiter and several surface payloads to the Moon in 2026. The company will use a similar lander design as its first CLPS mission but add a transfer stage to deliver the 280-kilogram Lunar Pathfinder orbiter for ESA in lunar orbit. Pathfinder is a stepping stone towards Moonlight, ESA’s upcoming commercial navigation and communications constellation. The Firefly lander itself will attempt a touchdown on the Moon’s farside carrying LuSEE-Night, a first of its kind instrument to measure faint but unique radio signals from our Universe’s ‘Dark Age’—a slice of time right before the first stars were born.

Firefly later won an extended $18 million contract from NASA to provide services for LuSEE-Night. The lander will host the “User Terminal” payload to enable LuSEE-Night to communicate to and fro Earth via the Elytra stage in lunar orbit. Elytra will also provide radio frequency calibrations for LuSEE-Night. In all, the two LuSEE payloads will help us characterize the Moon’s radio emissions for future farside radio telescopes.

The Firefly lander will also carry a commercial seismometer from Australia-based Fleet Space Technologies, which once deployed will operate by tapping into lander-provided power and communications services—much the same as how the seismometer deployed by ISRO’s Chandrayaan 3 lander operated. SPIDER will offer scientists insights into the physical structure and nature of the local crust and subsurface, including hints of resources such as water ice. The lander will also deploy UAE’s Rashid 2 rover on the Moon.

Expanding scope

With the mission selection to Reiner Gamma and Schrödinger, NASA began an enhanced science phase of its CLPS program. The next missions in this phase will visit the volcanic domes of Gruithuisen with a rover from Honeybee Robotics, two to the south pole with Intuitive and Firefly respectively, and to Ina. NASA says future CLPS missions could also deliver more advanced rovers, technology demonstrations, standalone scientific payloads, and even infrastructure required by Artemis human landing missions.

A new commercial model for planetary missions

Landing on the Moon is hard. Only five countries have accomplished this feat so far—the Soviet Union, the US, China, India, and Japan. The fact that NASA is entrusting commercial companies with the agency’s crucial lunar scientific and technological objectives, many of which will directly affect their Artemis plans, shows their growing confidence in building a commercial ecosystem around lunar exploration. CLPS also inverts the tradition of having only custom-built planetary missions to meet specific scientific goals.

However, the CLPS program has been challenging, particularly with an immature supply chain and keeping costs in check. Ultimately, if enough of the CLPS missions stick the landing, it could open up frequent and periodic access to the Moon’s surface for diverse scientific investigations in ways never possible before for any planetary body.

Resources

A story about open knowledge sharing in space

Jatan Mehta — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 19:26:10 +0530

It was eight years ago that I wrote a guide on how to correctly and reliably install NASA’s popular HEASoft software on Linux, a software which is extensively used in high energy Astrophysics research.

I wrote it because the official guides on NASA HEASoft’s website were failing to let us correctly install the software, particularly in setting all parameters correctly. But I found some way to reliably get it done through trial and error in installing the software from source in different ways.

I never ended up pursuing a career in Astrophysics research, and pivoted to space writing instead, but to this day I get emails from students and researchers alike that they find it useful. That has given me more satisfaction than any of my Astrophysics research might have probably. Open knowledge dissemination is at the heart of the Web.

Years later I had removed the post, thinking it won’t be reliable for latest Linux releases—and which I hadn’t tested against. Then I started getting emails saying the guide still works, and that they need to refer it for every new install..

And so I restored the guide and continued my passive contribution to Astrophysics research. 😄

- Jatan 🌙

Thanks for using RSS the best.

Moon Monday #235: Artemis and other mission updates

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 17:51:18 +0530

Artemis updates

The eight high-level tests of the SLS rocket’s ground systems and associated launch infrastructure which NASA completed ahead of the upcoming crewed Artemis II mission. Image: NASA

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 Artemis updates →

More mission updates

PlanetVac in action near a leg of the Firefly Blue Ghost Moon lander. Seen in the image are rocks flinging as PlanetVac operates. Image: Firefly

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.

NASA astronaut Jessica Wittner with Norwegian geologist Käre Kullerud discussing anorthosite samples picked up from the Norwegian Lofoten fjords. Image: ESA / V. Crobu

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:

Gallery: Our Moon’s captivating craters

A Moon-catalyzed Jupiter update

An artist’s impression of ESA’s JUICE spacecraft at Jupiter. Image: ESA / NASA / DLR

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.

- Jatan 🌙

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Explore our Moon’s wild places and wonderful samples | Moon Monday #234

Jatan Mehta — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 15:15:11 +0530

Look up at our Moon. You see deep craters and massive mountains. If you approach closer, there are lovely lava channels and weird features. Land and fetch some samples, and it will keep revealing threads of our Moon’s fiery origin, its two-faced evolution, and the history of our Solar System.

We can’t all launch ourselves to Luna to admire its beauty and depth up close. But we can do it virtually. And so below is a set of curated galleries for you to visually explore our cosmic companion’s wild places and wonderful samples, with explainer links and resources. There’s even a video to see lunar places in 3D! Celebrate the International Moon Day from anywhere in the world—because we all see the same Moon.

Let us not just look up at our Moon but look up to it.

Note: You can click the images to explore each gallery or visual collection.
(Since this is visual browsing page, image credits are provided in the links.)

Wild geological places on our Moon

How Moon mountains form instantly

Gallery: Our Moon's marvelous mountains

Gallery: Our Moon's lovely lava channels

Gallery: Just some weird yet wonderful features on our Moon

Watch and browse the Moon in 3D!

Watch on YouTube | Learn how 3D lunar images are made

Explore our Moon like Google maps with LROC QuickMap | Browse the fantastic LROC Blog full of high-resolution images

Explore Moon rocks!

Explore Apollo Moon rocks in a virtual microscope

View Moon rocks in 3D and dissect them with the Astromaterials Lunar Sample Collection | Browse the Lunar Sample Compendium

Browse Soviet Luna core samples

Browse China’s Chang’e 5 and 6 lunar samples

Visualize a new Moon based on scientific discoveries by Chang’e 6

Many thanks to Astrolab and Ajay Kothari for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to inform and educate people worldwide on lunar exploration, for free and without ads, kindly support my independent writing:

- Jatan 🌙

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Was Shukla’s Axiom-4 flight to the International Space Station worth it for ISRO? | Indian Space Progress #29

Jatan Mehta — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 21:16:43 +0530

Axiom-4 (Ax-4) Mission Pilot Shubhanshu Shukla in the Cupola at the International Space Station. Image: Ax-4 crew / ISRO

Sponsored job listings: PierSight Space is hiring for 15 roles—notably an embedded software developer and engineers for RF design and spacecraft electrical assembly & integration—to join their teams in Ahmedabad and Bangalore who are building a constellation of SAR-AIS satellites for persistent, all-weather ocean monitoring.

Before we dive into evaluating the Axiom-4 mission’s specifics as relevant to ISRO, here’s a mission brief:

On June 25, India’s test pilot & Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla launched in a Crew Dragon capsule atop SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station (ISS) as part of the Axiom Space Ax-4 mission crew. Said Axiom-4 crew comprises Mission Commander (and space veteran) Peggy Whitson, Mission Pilot Shubhanshu Shukla, and Mission Specialists Sławosz Uznański from Poland & Tibor Kapu from Hungary. The capsule, named “Grace” by the crew, docked with the ISS the next day. ISRO provided a timeline of activities until June 30. After a total of 19 days of stay and experiments at the ISS, the crew re-entered Grace and splashed down safely on Earth today, July 15.

Note: Shukla has become the first Indian national to have visited the ISS but is not the first Indian to do so, as numerous media reports have claimed, since Sunita Williams is of Indian origin too. Williams isn’t an Indian citizen but you don’t need to be one to be of Indian origin.

Shukla’s Ax-4 ISS flight is critiqued in India

The “Grace” Crew Dragon spacecraft from Axiom-4 approaching the ISS to dock. A thruster plume is visible on its right as the spacecraft orients itself towards the docking port. Image: NASA / Axiom Space

Shukla’s flight to the ISS has spurred controversial opinions in Indian space communities. Between the influx of public posts online, conversations I tuned into in semi-private messenger groups, and many people I spoke to offline, this mission has been the most polarizing in recent times. Some say that as a commercial mission, it’s just a “joyride”. Others say the mission should be proudly celebrated as a national achievement. Others still consider the mission to be a waste of ~$70 million for Indian taxpayers. What is true?

The reason I’ve had to do this piece is because ISRO, or rather India’s Department of Space (DOS) as its overarching entity, did not provide a formal rationale for paying for an astronaut ride on the Ax-4 ISS mission. It’s only after the mission’s launch and repeated media inquiries that ISRO provided a few details on what’s in it for us as a country.

I reached out to ISRO, NASA, Axiom, and SpaceX to get more information other than assimilating what’s on the Web. I did not hear back from ISRO and SpaceX. Follow-ups were not responded to either. It remains frustrating that despite me being an Indian citizen, ISRO doesn’t formally respond to journalistic queries for contacts listed on its website. NASA and Axiom responded repeatedly. As an Indian citizen, how is it that I have easier formal access to NASA but not ISRO?

Anyway, between responses from NASA and Axiom, and some added context to consider, it’s possible to make a nuanced case in favor of the mission as explained and discussed below—albeit with some caveats.

Putting the cost in context

Illustration of human spaceflight technologies ISRO is gradually building to enable an indigenous space station in Earth orbit. Image: ISRO / Hanumantray Baluragi

How much did Shukla’s Ax-4 ISS flight cost to ISRO? Chethan Kumar has reported at least $68 million sent in payments to Axiom and NASA. That’s almost the same amount as Chandrayaan 3’s Moon landing. And that’s why many consider Shukla’s ISS flight to be a rather expensive joyride. But what most have missed is the backdrop of the ~$2.4 billion budget of the Gaganyaan program of which Ax-4 is part of. In other words, Shukla’s ISS flight has cost India only 3% of its sanctioned human spaceflight budget. It’s also about 4.5% of ISRO’s annual budget of $1.5 billion in recent years.

Assuming the flight’s stated—and unstated—benefits hold true to scrutiny and prove valuable over time as expected, the amount spent is not high. As an agency new to the niche pursuit of human spaceflight, ISRO leveraging of Ax-4 to gain insights into the complexities of real world astronaut missions and its international coordination mechanisms can be a worthwhile cause. Especially so before India mounts its own far-more-expensive astronaut expeditions. And that’s why the exact amount spent on Shukla’s flight within that order of magnitude does not really matter.

People have argued that ~$70 million could’ve been better spent on India’s more pressing space technology needs, including civil and defense ambitions. However, budget appropriations don’t work that way. Money assigned for use on Gaganyaan and its missions will not get automagically reassigned to India’s other space missions should Gaganyaan or aspects of it disappear. That money will instead simply be added to the country’s central funds.

And yet despite all of this, it can be perplexing to understand the ISRO Chief V. Narayanan’s statements to Times of India that the Ax-4 mission’s spending is justified in another way too:

The ₹548 crore spent on the mission is a fraction of what India would’ve otherwise needed to spend on replicating the same training, exposure and systems-level experience. [...] We’ve gained access to infrastructure and experience that would otherwise require thousands of crores.

Now, it’s possible that the context in which this was said is different and missing. Because otherwise Gaganyaan’s explicit goal is to indeed build the same kind of infrastructure and capabilities in India. For a country wanting its own human space station and to send Indians to space by ourselves, we would certainly need to spend those thousands and thousands of crores to possess the numerous functioning parts of an independent human spaceflight program. And so the assumption is that Shukla’s ISS flight will lend us practical and nuanced insights that help us accelerate progress on Gaganyaan. That brings us to the next contended question.

What all did Shukla and his backup Nair train for?

Assigned and backup Ax-4 crew members, including Shubhanshu Shukla and Prasanth Nair, review training materials during Emergency Fire training. Image: Axiom Space

Critics argue that the commercial Ax-4 flight to the ISS is a fully automated one thanks to the sophistication of the SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle. They add that that coupled with US safeguards like ITAR, the flight is nothing but an expensive joyride with nearly no technical returns for Gaganyaan. So let’s review several specific aspects of the mission and its preparations to see if there’s something unique for India to have learnt.

ISRO itself has mentioned the following in high-level specifics post-launch:

The [astronaut] training modules covered are advanced spacecraft systems, emergency protocols, scientific payload operations, microgravity adaptation, space medicine, and survival training. They also participated in NASA’s National Outdoor Leadership Program (NOLPS) in the wilderness of Mexico, where the focus was on team cohesion and resilience under stress.
[...]
The Ax-04 mission will provide valuable inputs for ISRO’s upcoming Gaganyaan mission. It offers hands-on experience in the nuances of international crew integration, medical and psychological preparation, real-time health telemetry, experiment execution, and crew-ground coordination. These insights will directly influence mission planning, safety validation, and astronaut readiness for India’s first indigenous human spaceflight mission.

This is a good start but does lack details so let’s get into some.

The “Grace” Crew Dragon spacecraft from Axiom-4 approaching the ISS to dock. Image: NASA / Axiom Space

First and foremost, even for a commercial flight, it’s important to make the distinction between someone flying as a Mission Pilot versus other roles. Shukla is the former, as is his backup Prashanth Nair who was equally trained for the mission. Granted that Crew Dragon’s flight is practically fully automated, the Mission Pilot in particular is nevertheless taught to engage manual controls if and when necessary for contingency and emergency scenarios. When asked about distinguishing between mission training provided to Shukla & Nair versus that provided to the whole crew, Axiom Space responded with the following:

As the pilot, Shux [Shukla’s callsign] was trained to monitor Dragon’s systems during all critical phases—launch, docking with the ISS, and re-entry.
During launch, training focused on tracking system health, coordinating with mission control, and staying ready to troubleshoot anomalies.
For docking, he learned how to oversee the approach, ensuring correct alignment with the ISS docking port, and maintaining constant communication with both the station crew and ground mission controllers.
For re-entry, he was trained to monitor descent trajectory and key safety parameters—including parachute deployment and vehicle altitude—and he was trained to intervene manually if necessary.

That last bit in particular can be life saving, and so I wouldn’t characterize the mission as a purely paid passive ride to space and back. Note also that Shukla and Nair are test pilots on Earth. The intuition for air flight is of course completely different than for spaceflight but being pilots of the highest order lend the duo increased adaptability and responsiveness.

For emergency training that was applicable to the entire crew, Axiom Space stated the following. [Note that as a space veteran, Mission Commander Peggy Whitson didn’t need to go through all of these.]

The Ax-4 crew practiced responding to depressurization events, where they must quickly don emergency masks and seal off affected areas to manage a loss of cabin pressure.
They trained for medical emergencies, learning how to provide first aid and use onboard medical equipment to stabilize injured or ill crew members.
Fire response procedures were another focus, involving the location and extinguishing of fires, as well as managing smoke and toxic fumes.
These comprehensive drills equip the Ax-4 crew with the necessary skills and confidence to effectively manage emergencies in the challenging environment of space.
Their training took place across NASA, Axiom Space, and SpaceX facilities, and included integration with international partners to ensure readiness for ISS operations. Nair received similar training to ensure full mission capability as a backup.

The portion of the crew’s training via NASA at the agency’s Johnson Space Center also involved dealing with emergency situations at the ISS. Jimi Russell, the Public Affairs Officer for NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, said:

All private astronauts are trained to what is known as a minimum required level to ensure the safety of themselves and expedition astronauts aboard the ISS, as well as to ensure the safety of the station. At least two of the private astronauts also are trained to what is known as minimum escort level, which reduces the impact to ongoing station operations and improves overall mission safety and private astronaut crew autonomy.

When asked which two Ax-4 astronauts were trained at the “minimum escort level”, and if that involved Shukla, NASA did not respond back.

Many thanks to the Takshashila Institution, PierSight, Catalyx Space, Gurbir Singh and Arun Raghavan for sponsoring this month’s edition of Indian Space Progress. If you too appreciate my efforts to capture true trajectories of India in space, support my independent writing. 🇮🇳 🚀

Experience with microgravity experiments and its ISS modules

Shubhanshu Shukla and Peggy Whitson in microgravity aboard the ISS. Image NASA / Axiom Space

When aboard the ISS, ISRO through Shukla conducted seven out of sixty experiments. As part of a broader ISRO-ESA agreement, Indian institutes had two microgravity experiments jointly with ESA aboard as well. The Indian government’s public broadcast service Doordarshan created a video on the experiments (in Hindi). ISRO and the institutes involved will analyze the data and outcomes from the experiments soon and share the results later.

Note that it’s not the kinds of experiments Ax-4 crew performed that are as notable because, while good, they aren’t unique as the ISS hosts such research activities all the time. But the training for those experiments did give Shukla, Nair, and ISRO exposure to the European and Japanese modules on the ISS, which specialize in microgravity research. Here’s what Axiom has shared:

ESA and JAXA, along with the Japan Manned Space Systems Corporation (JAMSS), have provided astronaut training programs to ensure the assigned Ax-4 crew is adept at functioning within the space station's multinational environment.
[...]
At ESA’s European Astronaut Centre (EAC) in Cologne, Germany, the assigned Ax-4 crew completed comprehensive training covering communications systems, emergency response procedures, and conducting research activities inside the Columbus module. [...] Following ESA training, the crew underwent rigorous training sessions at JAXA's Tsukuba Space Center in Japan, concentrating on understanding the operation of the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM), known as Kibō. The training included gaining an in-depth understanding of the JEM module's capabilities.

Furthermore, ISRO has shared that it was the company Redwire that enabled the Indian experiments to logistically work at the ISS during Ax-4:

Redwire Space, USA, is coordinating the payload integration activities. Redwire facilitated key steps, including technical validation and compliance with ISS payload requirements. Each experiment is packaged into flight-ready payload containers. Redwire is also supporting the development of hardware handling protocols, ensuring that the Indian experiments could be safely deployed and operated onboard the ISS, thereby enabling meaningful scientific outcomes for India’s research community.

Considering that ISRO intends to have scientific experiments as part of its free-flying Gaganyaan capsule as well as space station missions, the ISS research training exposure and experience with ESA, JAXA, and Redwire will certainly come in handy for India as a new player to forge microgravity science modules that are flight feasible.

Could ISRO have achieved these goals another way?

Critics have also stated that ISRO could’ve achieved the goals discussed above via terrestrial means for far lower costs. Note that by this point in the piece, we’ve gone through the ISRO astronauts being involved in mission training and observations across NASA, SpaceX, Axiom, ESA, and JAXA facilities. Now if ISRO were to mount five such bilateral contracts for astronaut training, even if time consuming, it may or may not have provided the same insights with coherence. It certainly wouldn’t include the experience of being tuned into a human spaceflight itself, which I discuss in the next section.

A paid ticket to the ISS, even if commercial, was a single-window entry for ISRO to accelerate its own human spaceflight program. The inefficiency of arriving at a solution is a distinct problem from the outcomes being beneficial regardless. The desired outcome being fulfilled is more important than the pure efficiency of the solution—so long as the cost’s order of magnitude doesn’t rise from tens of millions to hundreds as discussed in this piece above.

Tuning into mission operations

The Ax-4 Mission crew and a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. Images: Axiom Space

Between the wide-ranging training provided to Shukla & Nair and the former’s flight experience now with its actual series of events in space, and the corresponding events at the mission control center, a valuable lesson for ISRO lies in something that seems simple but is nuanced: the ‘sequence of operations’ used throughout the mission for every system. Shukla knowing, practicing, and experiencing the specificities of this sequence will be valuable for ISRO to correctly or more quickly design human spaceflight systems and consoles. This is especially true for contingency scenarios and emergency situations, where the order of events matters most.

Furthermore, Chethan Kumar has reported that ISRO’s delegation of engineers and doctors supposedly had better access than what is possible through Axiom’s commercial flight alone, with India going through a NASA-ISRO agreement to that end. Kumar reports a “senior ISRO official” who is “closely involved with the mission” sharing the following—albeit all anonymously:

This is the first time we’re seeing these operations up close—till now, it was all just documentation. [...] We were on the audio loop, listening to mission control discussions. We saw what control operations did, how many docking attempts were made, what kind of error parameters were being monitored. These are not things you’ll find in any public webcast or document.

The official also said that the ISRO doctors were involved in the mission during Shukla’s Crew Dragon flight as well as the ISS stay via private medical conference links. They will also be involved in Shukla’s post-flight recovery and rehabilitation for a week or so. This experience with real data of its astronaut will help India plan its indigenous setup for Gaganyaan missions.

The ISRO Chief thus summed up the Ax-4 ISS flight’s advantage to India as follows:

From data handling to high-level system safety discussions, our understanding of the end-to-end process has grown. This cannot be acquired by simulation or literature review alone.

Note though that ESA and JAXA are long-time partners on the ISS. They don’t need Axiom flights for their astronauts to learn anything new. Their true ISS partnerships have provided Europe and Japan vastly superior experiences in human spaceflight than India. Even so, neither ESA nor JAXA have seriously aimed to have an independent human spaceflight program as an outcome [for various reasons including costs] but India is.

A thermal shot of the Ax-4 “Grace” Crew Dragon capsule approaching splashdown near California with its parachutes deployed. Image: SpaceX / Axiom Space

By this point in the piece, it appears that ISRO thought through the benefits of this mission as a key stepping stone in its ambition to indigenously send humans to space. But then you also have ISRO stating on its website that the mission took place “only because” of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

ISRO’s participation in Axiom-04 Mission happened only because of the visionary leadership of the Honorable Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi ji. It was under his guidance that the foundation was laid for this joint collaboration between ISRO and the United States. The mission was envisaged during the Prime Minister’s historic visit to the U.S. in 2023 and his meeting with the then-President of the United States to send an Indian astronaut to the International Space Station as part of a broader partnership.

One would typically imagine that since ISRO as India’s premier space technology and research institution understands the nuances of what it stands to gain from the Axiom-4 ISS flight, it would therefore be the one originally proposing said mission. But since it’s the Indian Prime Minister that has both proposed the mission and orchestrated the deal with the US, one therefore asks if ISRO had alternate or even no plans to gain the same insights and experiences that they now have from Ax-4?

Advanced training for ISRO astronauts?

I asked NASA to share some specifics on the non-Ax-4 related training provided by NASA to Shukla & Nair as part of said ISRO-NASA agreement on human spaceflight cooperation. For context, Shukla & Nair, along with the other two ISRO astronaut candidates, completed their basic astronaut training in Russia at various Roscosmos centers. Shukla & Nair were to undergo “advanced training” at NASA. It turns out that it’s not done yet. Jimi Russell, the Public Affairs Officer for NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, said:

The two agencies also are discussing advanced ISRO astronaut training and will share more details as they are available.

Note that the US White House factsheet about the subject at the time of the agreement in 2023 stated the following:

NASA will provide advanced training to ISRO astronauts with the goal of launching a joint effort to the International Space Station in 2024.

Next steps

The TV-D1 Gaganyaan crew module test article near an Indian navy ship, waiting to be lifted after a successful in-flight rocket abort test. Image: ISRO

Looking ahead, the next major milestone in India’s human spaceflight journey is Gaganyaan G1. It’s the first of three uncrewed test flights which need to be successful before ISRO can deem all systems to be safe enough to launch its own astronauts from Indian soil. ISRO is targeting G1’s launch later this year although timelines have been uncertain until now. There will also be more abort tests of the Gaganyaan Crew Module to follow up on the previous in-flight abort test.

ISRO’s human spaceflight program has been facing recurring delays despite progress on parts. It’s a complex undertaking, and astronaut safety is paramount. It’s also important to get the essential pieces right when a country has ambitions to create a space station of its own. Shukla’s Ax-4 ISS flight and the Shukla-Nair duo’s training experience will definitely be fed into ISRO’s central planning of Gaganyaan at India’s Human Space Flight Center to accelerate the program—even if there may be caveats about the efficacy and extent of benefits of Shukla’s flight. As with most things, time will tell.

Read previous editions on Indian space

Indian Space Progress #28: A pressing PSLV rocket failure and orbital congestion to brood over
Indian Space Progress #27: Three months of mission updates, and fixing ISRO’s monthly summaries
India’s achievements in Moon exploration this half year

- Jatan 🌙

Thanks for using RSS the best.

Moon Monday #233: Visualizing a new Moon based on scientific discoveries by China’s Chang’e 6 mission

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 20:50:16 +0530

I’m over the Moon to share that Open Lunar Foundation is continuing to be a sponsor of my Moon Monday blog+newsletter for the fifth year in a row! 🌕

Open Lunar is a non-profit organization that actively promotes cooperative, peaceful, and sustainable exploration of our Moon. The organization enables experts globally to collaborate and develop equitable technical and policy building blocks to such ends. It’s a mission I love so much—alongside the people—that I’ve been happily aiding it as their Science Communications Lead since this year. 🚀

Note: All Moon Monday sponsorships, including that of Open Lunar, abide by my public Editorial Independence Policy with zero exceptions.

Top left: Chang’e 6 reentry capsule after safe descent and landing on Earth; Top right: Chang’e 6 lunar sample container after being lifted out of the reentry capsule; Bottom: Part of the Chang’e 6 mission team from CNSA and CAST. Images: Xinhua / CCTV+

CNSA held a press conference on July 9 to share novel findings about our Moon as revealed by Chinese researchers studying lunar farside samples brought to Earth by the Chang’e 6 mission last year. This is a good time to highlight all major findings with an accompanying visual that lets you picture the scientific value the Chinese have added to humanity’s exploration of our Moon.

Note: Unlike as reported in many media outlets, the findings include but are not actually limited to the four papers that appear in the July 10 edition of Nature. Some reports are also calling these papers new whereas all but one of them were published earlier. The four papers are simply bundled in this journal edition for context. And there are more elsewhere.

First, take a good look at the sampling site of Chang’e 6 on the Moon, lying at 153.99° W, 41.64° S within the farside Apollo impact crater.

A panorama from China’s Chang’e 6 lander on the Moon’s farside, showing one of its legs and the scoop sampling arm near its surface digs. Chang’e 6 collected 1.93 kilograms of soil and rocks across scoops and drills. Image: CNSA / CLEP

Below is a good look at some scooped samples. Most of the Chang’e 6 samples are stored at NAOC of CAS.

Alongside the 2-billion-year-old samples from Chang’e 5, the Chang’e 6 samples at 2.8 billion years old are among the youngest volcanic material fetched from Luna. Earlier Apollo and Luna volcanic samples are not only older, they belong to a different era in the evolution of our Moon.

Top left: The Chang’e 6 farside landing site (red dot) lying within the 500-kilometer wide Apollo impact crater. Bottom left: Two basaltic (volcanic) rock fragments from Chang’e 6 whose age was determined in labs; Right: The ages of Chang’e 5 and 6 basalts (CE-5 and CE-6) compared to Apollo samples and several lunar meteorites. Images: Zexian Cui, Qing Yang, et al.

One Chang’e 6 study did find evidence of a distinct volcanic episode about 4.2 billion years ago amid samples otherwise dominated by the 2.8-billion-year aged basalts. Scientists concluded that the former was due to the presence of heat-producing and radioactive elements whereas the volcanic outbursts 1.4 billion years later took place despite the lunar interior beneath the landing site being deprived of such catalysts. Chang’e 6 findings have thus added to the complexities of the Moon’s volcanic history.

The X-axis shows the ages of volcanic samples brought by Chang’e and Apollo missions. Several lunar meteorites found on Earth are included as well. These are charted against the amount of heat-producing and radioactive elements in the samples to determine their origin and the varying makeup of our Moon’s mantle. The two kinds of Chang’e 6 (CE-6) volcanic samples are clearly visible to be distinct from each other here. Image: Qian Zhang et al.

Another interesting result from the same paper was that the accurate, lab-determined age of 2.8 billion years for the dominant Chang’e 6 basalts falls right in line with their approximate age as previously estimated using the remote crater counting method. This means that the crater-counting based age model established for the Moon’s nearside is gladly closely applicable to features on the farside too. This is what lunar dating for lunar scientists looks like.

The lunar crater-counting chronology passes through the grounded age reference point of the Chang’e 6 local basalts. See full legend | Image: Qian Zhang et al.

In contrast, dating Chang’e 5 samples led to noticeably shifted ages of lunar features as well as refining of the nature of impacts over the last 2 billion years in the inner Solar System. For example, it’s because of Chang’e 5 that scientists realized that some lunar features may be up to 240 million years older than previously thought.

Another study of the dominant Chang’e 6 basalts with embedded micrometer-sized iron grains revealed a surprising increase in magnetic field strength, providing the first ground truth constraints for farside lunar magnetism. From the paper:

These results record a rebound of the field strength after its previous sharp decline of around 3.1 Ga [billion years ago], which attests to an active lunar dynamo at about 2.8 Ga in the mid-early stage and argues against the suggestion that the lunar dynamo may have remained in a low-energy state after 3 Ga until its demise.

A Chang’e 6 volcanic basalt sample imaged with a polarizing microscope under various rotation angles. To scientists, the varying colors and their shades reveal the diverse mineral makeup of the sample. Images: Shuhui Cai et al.

Let’s switch gears to the few hundred million years after our Moon’s fiery formation. This earliest era of Luna’s evolution is where findings from Chang’e 6 have been deeply insightful.

Until recently, all direct evidence of our Moon being covered in a global magma ocean shortly after its formation has come from Apollo and Luna samples sourced from nearside equatorial and near-equatorial regions. Surface measurements made by Chandrayaan 3’s Pragyan rover in 2023 extended this hypothesis’ validity to high-latitude regions on the nearside. But we lacked any such tactile measurements from the Moon’s farside. Recently though Chinese researchers studying two grams of Chang’e 6 samples confirmed the presence of key chemical elements that are compatible with a fully molten young Moon. Chang’e 6 has thus lent unequivocal credence to said hypothesis.

Illustration of a young Moon with a global magma ocean and newly forming crust. Image: CCTV+

In another critical study, researchers analyzed 1600 fragments from five grams of Chang’e 6 samples and found 20 relevant pieces to determine the truest age yet of the massive South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin—within which the spacecraft landed—as being 4.25 billion years. Spanning 2500 kilometers, the SPA basin is the Moon’s largest, deepest, and oldest impact crater. Its age and nature of formation has huge implications for understanding how our Moon evolved.

Illustration showing ancient impact melt rock fragment collected among Change’e 6 samples at the mission’s landing site, which lies within the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin. Image: CAS

Formation of the SPA basin’s impact melt sheet and layered structure as identified based on Chang’e 6 sample studies. Image: SU Bin, et al.

The CNSA release about the study notes:

This finding provides the first direct, sample-based evidence that the Moon's largest impact basin formed approximately 320 million years after the beginning of Solar System. The definitive age of 4.25 billion years for the SPA basin can serve as a crucial anchor point for refining the lunar cratering chronology and establishing a more complete temporal sequence of the Moon's early evolution.

The impact that created the SPA was so colossal that scientists think it changed the physical and chemical makeup of the Moon’s mantle down to hundreds of kilometers. And that’s exactly what more Chang’e 6 studies are finding. The dominant Chang’e 6 basalts are from lava erupted ~1.4 billion years after the SPA event’s morphing of the mantle. These thus exhibit a unique makeup compared to other volcanic lunar samples. A study of 16 fragments scooped up by Chang’e 6 found them severely lacking elements such as titanium and thorium.

Another study analyzing 578 particles weighing a total of 5 grams revealed for the first time that the Moon’s farside mantle contains less water than within the nearside. The finding added to the debate on the topic by lending a solid and unique credence to the hypothesis that our Moon indeed lost most of its water during its fiery formation. CASC’s news release on the study noted how Francis McCubbin, NASA’s Astromaterials Curator and a peer reviewer of the paper, called the work “a landmark study on the water abundance of the lunar farside.”

With this long march of notable scientific discoveries, China’s Chang’e 6 sample return mission has lived up to its bold promises of helping scientists advance on a host of Moon mysteries. Chang’e 6 anchoring past lunar events and providing literally deep insights on the Moon’s farside-nearside enigma is helping us not just understand our celestial companion’s evolution but that of our Solar System.

Many thanks to Open Lunar Foundation and Ajay Kothari for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource for free, and without ads, kindly support my independent writing. 🌙

More Moon

For the versatile Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) to be used across Artemis missions starting end of decade at best, NASA has announced that the rover will carry three agency-funded instruments: an infrared spectrometer, a microwave spectrometer, and a ground penetrating radar. Together, these would map minerals, volatiles like water ice, and subsurface structures on the Moon’s south pole. NASA will also have an infrared spectrometer in orbit—but whose flight opportunity is not yet determined—to provide regional context for the LTV rover’s measurements and observations. The agency will announce later this year which of the three competing teams has been selected to make and operate the LTV.

Suited engineers testing a terrestrial LTV rover prototype at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Image: NASA / Bill Stafford

US-based Advanced Space (who leads the NASA-funded CAPSTONE lunar orbiter mission) has partnered with Firefly Aerospace (who is building orbiters too and recently demonstrated a soft Moon landing) so as to study design reference missions for NASA for future lunar communications and navigation services, an area of lunar infrastructure which China currently leads.
The Swedish Institute of Space Physics (IRF) is offering a PhD position for calibration and analysis of data obtained by the organization-built instrument on the Moon’s farside. The instrument is the Negative Ions at the Lunar Surface (NILS) payload, which flew on China’s Chang’e 6 lander last year. NILS detected negatively charged particles, a world first. These ions are produced due to highly energetic solar wind particles slamming the Moon’s surface and kicking up secondary particles. NILS is the first of two European and ESA-involved instruments to operate on the Moon’s surface, and was Europe’s first such collaboration with China.

- Jatan 🌙

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Moon Monday #232: Still free mission updates

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 15:56:10 +0530

In response to the Trump’s administration’s FY2026 presidential budget request for NASA slashing the Artemis projects of the SLS rocket, the Orion spacecraft, and the NASA-led international Gateway orbital habitat after the upcoming crewed Artemis III Moon landing mission, the US Congress passed a supplementary $6.7 billion fund for NASA on July 3 as part of a megabill to continue those projects instead regardless of what the agency’s FY2026 budget proceedings output.
In what is perhaps emblematic of the inefficiency and mismatched priorities of US politics vis-à-vis its space ambitions, the Congressional megabill also provisions $85 million just to move the ancient Space Shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum to Texas but does not include any funds to reinstate NASA’s VIPER rover mission to study water ice on the Moon’s south pole even though the US has been failing at this goal central to Artemis.
Last month on June 6, ispace Japan’s second Moon lander RESILIENCE crashed on the Moon due to performance issues with its laser rangefinder. I’ve argued how the outcome underscores the need for resilience in private lunar landing missions through expansive and collaborative testing—something former NASA astronaut and current ispace US Chair Ron Garan has also vouched for. One must note that ispace continued its remarkable transparency from the first failed landing mission, sharing detailed findings of what went wrong in mere weeks.
The Hawaii-based International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA) will fly its ILO-1 telescope on the crew-capable FLEX rover by Astrolab (a Moon Monday sponsor). Astrolab leads one of the three competing teams NASA selected last year to mature their designs for a versatile Lunar Terrain Vehicle for use across Artemis missions starting end of decade.

What science will Artemis II do? Zilch?

Artemis II flight map. Image: NASA

NASA wrote the following in a recent release on its website about the topic:

Artemis II astronauts will observe the Moon during their 10-day mission around the Moon and back, taking photographs and verbally recording what they see. Their observations will support science objectives and provide data for potential landing sites for future Moon missions.

Now, Artemis II is not even an orbiter mission. The four-person crew inside Artemis II’s Orion capsule will be flying more than 7000 kilometers from the Moon at their closest approach. What science can they even do from such large distances? And so in less than 10 days? Certainly no landing sites will be selected.

While all Artemis II activities will certainly be useful operationally to feed forward into Artemis III and beyond but doing science as an objective in itself is a different ballgame altogether. Now, every space agency does PR pieces. But NASA used to stand out for clearly articulating the scientific motivations and implementations part of its missions. This webpage release is not one of them.

The SLIM lander’s images of the Moon (blue boxes) taken from about 50-meter altitudes, superimposed on the background image by ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter for navigation. Image: ISRO / JAXA / SLIM

The day was January 19, 2024. JAXA’s SLIM spacecraft just achieved the most precise Moon landing ever for a robotic vehicle, touching down only 55 meters from its targeted point. A unique enabler of that feat was ISRO, who shared its Chandrayaan 2 orbiter datasets with JAXA for landing site selection as well as for SLIM’s onboard navigation maps. Without the world’s sharpest lunar imager, it wouldn’t be possible for SLIM to spot and navigate to a safe touchdown point without compromising the landing accuracy—the primary mission goal. The two agencies are now collaborating on the joint LUPEX rover mission to study water ice on the Moon’s south pole.

It’s a fine example of state actors bridging their unique strengths to gain more than the sum of their parts. There’s also the recent case of international researchers getting access to lunar samples from China’s Chang’e 5 mission for detailed scientific studies. One such lab is from the UK’s Open University. The UK does not have an independent lunar landing program but it does have state-of-the-art laboratories and world-class planetary scientists. With the samples, UK researchers are uniquely advancing humanity’s understanding of our Moon’s origin and evolution, which in itself is tied to that of Earth and the history of our Solar System. For China, it also helps maximize the output of its missions.

Such data sharing and access are useful not just for enabling cutting-edge lunar exploration but to have it continue safely as well. The US, India, and South Korea constantly coordinate their polar orbiters to avoid uncomfortably close passes with each other. A collision otherwise would render low lunar orbit dangerous for all orbiters while also obstructing surface landers traversing through the region.

All of these examples represent commendable efforts from each actor. But unfortunately, they’re also ad hoc or opportunistic in ways that don’t scale with the increasing pace of Moon missions worldwide. Different states share different information at different times, in different formats, and through different channels at varying levels. Information sharing and coordination is thus dispersed, and not efficient for safety, sustainability, or abundant progress. Improving it for more actors can compound perks for all.

To that end, in 2025 the non-profit Lunar Policy Platform (LPP) has embarked on the “Lunar Information Sharing 101” initiative. With funding from the Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor) and in synergy with UN COPUOS initiatives, LPP spent five months consulting over 70 representatives from 35 governments, space agencies, companies, and experts to understand converging and diverging views on when, where, and how to share lunar mission information. The resulting document will be released publicly later this year after feedback. You can read more about the initiative and contact LPP with your feedback and ideas.

This section was originally published by me on the newsletter of Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor) as their Science Communications Lead.

There are many ways to contribute to humanity. Mine is to tell people it’s a Monday. 🌝

Many thanks to The Orbital Index and Tim Glotch for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource for free and without ads, support my independent writing. 🌙

More Moon

An illustration of NASA’s newly launched Arcstone satellite gathering measurements of lunar reflectance from Earth orbit. Image: Blue Canyon Technologies

Earth observation satellites periodically image the Moon to detect, calibrate, and correct deviations in the performance of their imagers. The latter happens naturally due to aging hardware, degradation of imager material or the coating, radiation exposure, and other such factors. It’s our Moon’s stable and known light intensity that allows it to act as an accurate celestial reference for Earthbound remote sensing satellites. And that’s why NASA launched the Arcstone satellite on June 23 to provide state-of-the-art radiometric calibration for Earth Observation satellites. NASA completed commissioning the spacecraft bus on July 3. NASA says Arcstone is “the first mission exclusively dedicated to measuring lunar reflectance from space as a way to calibrate and improve science data collected by Earth-viewing, in-orbit instruments.”
Another the way our Moon is useful beyond lunar exploration: Repurposing Moon missions to enable deep space exploration
The Italian Space Agency (ASI) has contracted a OHB-led consortium to develop the flight payload for the ORACLE project aimed at extracting oxygen from lunar soil. ASI has not selected or announced yet which Moon lander ORACLE will fly on but was previously targeting launch by 2028.
After three collaborative years of research & development and community consultations, the Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor) has launched the Lunar Ledger (Registry) project in Beta. The ledger of lunar objects and activities hopes to improve operator transparency and public understanding of Moon missions globally. Open Lunar also announced a multi-country Advisory Board for the Ledger.

- Jatan 🌙

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On SpaceNews going paywalled, and the broader disregard for archiving in journalism

Jatan Mehta — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 23:17:26 +0530

This article is a break from my usual because space communities worldwide are affected by this important topic, and I have some thoughts to offer to add to the discussions.

SpaceNews, a well known media publication in the global space industry, went paywalled for its website on July 1 with a short announcement. This led many longtime readers such as myself to run into the following view on its articles.

The new SpaceNews digital access paywall

Considering that SpaceNews typically publishes well over a hundred stories every month, getting access to only three free monthly articles is more like a preview. For all practical purposes, the SpaceNews website is now fully paywalled.

A paywall is not necessarily bad by itself for readers across global space communities. After all, a sustained revenue source can empower good journalism. But that’s precisely why it’s disappointing to see how the wall has been erected on multiple fronts, including for my own piece on SpaceNews..

Should you paywall past pieces in retrospect?

My article on India’s Venus orbiter mission published on SpaceNews in 2020 is now behind their paywall too for some reason. I did get paid for writing the piece at the time but I also contributed it with the expectation that it will be publicly readable—just as all or most pieces on SpaceNews’ website were back then and until recently. With SpaceNews going paid now, I was not asked or even informed if I’d like to have my piece behind a paywall in such a retrospective way. I do not.

I’ve been in contact with SpaceNews about it, where I expressed the above concerns. I was told they “appreciate my perspective” but did not offer to unpaywall my article. That is frustrating.

Even recent op-eds published on SpaceNews by external experts before the paywall came into effect are made paid-only. Were the authors notified of this impending change? Shouldn’t they have been made aware of it since it could affect their right of decision to publish on SpaceNews? In many cases, op-ed contributions on media outlets are made pro bono for the mutual benefit of the author and publisher. Authors get a wider reach, and publishers get more and higher quality articles. But retrospectively paywalling pieces originally published for everyone to read for free breaks this inherent trust and deal. As such, sadly it no longer makes sense for me to recommend space experts I know to pitch op-eds to SpaceNews.

I’d argue that the principle extends even to originally free articles published by the SpaceNews staff. After all, pieces published months and years ago must’ve been already accounted for financially, be it through ads, sponsorships, donations, magazine-subsidies, or something else. Those past pieces are technically already paid for. I can completely understand paywalling new articles going forward but why gate nearly all the past pieces? [Some posts from about a year or two ago seem to be accessible; it’s not clear what’s the exact criteria for paywall exceptions.]

I’m a huge fan of Jeff Foust’s work. So much that every time anyone subscribes to my newsletter, they’re recommended his website The Space Review as part of a curated set. [Jeff is probably reading this post since I know he does read my blog. Hi Jeff!] It’s quite sad that the vast majority of Foust’s incredible work in space journalism—which is extensively cited web-wide such as on Wikipedia—is now behind a paywall. As readers of my Moon Monday blog+newsletter know, I frequently cite and link to Foust’s articles too. But now hundreds and hundreds of space-related pages on the internet at large citing such work that’s hosted on SpaceNews lead to a paywall.

Why can’t there be exceptions for communities and people to access articles that are, say, older than a year or more for archival purposes? Why can’t media publications at least make such articles accessible using a custom link similar to how Medium offers ‘friend links’.

This brings us to the next issue with the SpaceNews paywall, which is its blocking of the Internet Archive.

Blocking of public-benefit web archives

In retrospect, I should’ve seen the paywall coming because it was in February that I realized that SpaceNews articles (then free) couldn’t be accessed on the Internet Archive at web.archive.org. It’s one of the tools which—ironically—journalists use to access originally published material which may have since become modified or unavailable. It’s also useful when a website goes offline for whatever reason.

A look at SpaceNews’ robots.txt file tells you that the non-profit Common Crawl bot (CCBot) used by the Internet Archive to store webpages is explicitly blocked by the website. To be clear, it’s their right to be able to do so. But it’s also rather unsettling that it’s journalistic works, which are so valuable as archival materials, that are being fundamentally access-blocked for archival. Again, I can completely understand wanting to do so for new or recent pieces so as to prevent people from bypassing paywalls but why not allow archiving of much older articles for public benefit? How will older news articles garner more subscriptions anyway? Besides, as the website owner, SpaceNews always has the ability to take down specific pages from the Internet Archive they don’t want archived. Is that not fair game?

Several other media outlets have also blocked archival access. And, earlier this year, NASA also failed to keep many of its community webpages and documents online for months. In fact, more related documents were taken out in May. ISRO’s new website launched a few years ago still hasn’t retained many webpages and documents at their original URLs, which all point to dead pages now. The only saving grace in NASA and ISRO’s case is that web archives worked as alternative access means for the most part, illustrating their importance.

But the poignant point is that when credible journalistic outlets and even institutions as revered as NASA can’t protect public access to public works for public good, how do we trust the web’s origin as a public place? If journalism as an industry meant for public good cannot regard accessible archives as one of its foundational principles, what is even the point of our work?

On a professional yet personal note, this issue is close to me. All of my work on this blog & website is completely free to access by everyone, with no ads. My work is supported by organization and reader sponsorships. I also regularly self-archive my articles and blog posts over on the Internet Archive so that if my blog goes offline or becomes completely inaccessible in the distant future for whatever reason (such as my death), people can still browse and read fully archived copies on the Wayback Machine. Archiving also forces me to take responsibility for my mistakes and make public corrections.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand..

Pricing woes

Last but not the least let’s talk about pricing. The SpaceNews subscription’s annual base price of $230 just for digital access is steep. It’s certainly far more expensive than most popular science & technology outlets out there. Given below are equivalent subscription or membership amounts as I see them from India for various media outlets with large global readerships:

Scientific American: $40/year
The Hindu: $33/year
Ars Technica: $25/year
The Planetary Society: $50/year
Nature: $220/year (with print access!)
Science News: $36/year
Sky & Telescope: $39/year
New Scientist: $49/year
WIRED: $30/year
The Verge: $50/year

In other words, the absolute amount SpaceNews wishes to charge is about six times greater than what I pay for my media subscriptions of Scientific American and The Hindu respectively. And that’s without including any discounts the latter offer.

I’m disappointed that a media publication as globally read industry-wide as SpaceNews hasn’t offered variable pricing based on purchasing power parity for people in low and middle-income countries. At the very least, it could’ve been offered for digital access, where physical distribution costs are not involved. Being based in India, spending $230 just for digital access to SpaceNews feels like spending at least $600 due to purchasing power parity. The base subscription price is high enough that the one-time launch offers, or even other academic or unspecified group discounts, simply do not bring the wall down enough.

Despite all my concerns, I don’t consider the paywall in itself to be bad for readers of SpaceNews. If it empowers great journalism, I’m all for paywalls. I want nothing but for SpaceNews to thrive, and in turn further empower space communities worldwide. But as I explained in this article, there are at least three core issues in my eyes as things stand right now:

Previously freely accessible articles by external authors should not be paywalled in retrospect without their permission.
There should be at least some way to access old pieces, particularly for archival purposes instead of blocking a foundational journalistic element en masse.
Make the subscription cost actually affordable.

As such, despite being a long-time reader of SpaceNews, I just can’t justify spending that much money. I can easily imagine many others feel the same way—even if we are all entrenched into the space industry globally. What if the outlet I thought was indispensable turns out to be not so? This is a good opportunity for other space media outlets to step up their game, especially ones that remain essentially free such as Spaceflight Now and NASASpaceflight—which, by the way, remains inaccessible in India for mundane reasons..

- Jatan 🌙

Thanks for using RSS the best.

Moon Monday #231: Achievements and shortfalls in Moon exploration this half year

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 19:57:13 +0530

2025 is halfway through, and we’ve already seen a raft of lunar exploration achievements—as well as several sad shortfalls—from organizations worldwide. Here’s a curated list of it all, each linked for understanding the context of its development. Just like my list of 2024 in lunar exploration, I’ve made a conscious effort to highlight events and trends that actually happened instead of amplifying speculative coverage of what might or might not transpire—the latter of which seems to consume many media outlets too much. If someone asks you what’s happening at the Moon, say all of this is. 🌗

China

A panorama from China’s Chang’e 6 lander on the Moon’s farside, showing one of its legs and the scoop sampling arm near its surface digs. Image: CNSA / CLEP

Chinese researchers published a range of papers on their recent lunar exploration outcomes as well as ongoing scoping of future ambitions. This includes unique results from lunar farside samples brought to Earth last year by CNSA’s Chang’e 6 mission, such as confirming that our young Moon was fully molten, determining the age of the Moon’s largest impact basin, and that the farside mantle contains less water than within the nearside. All of these are helping scientists understand our Moon’s evolution and why its farside is so different from the nearside we know and see—and what it all tells us about the evolution of our Solar System.
China also announced the first set of international organizations whose proposals were selected to study unique lunar samples fetched to Earth by CNSA’s Chang’e 5 mission in 2020. And, this month China displayed Chang’e samples at the UN for the first time.
Throughout the past several months, China cemented and further advanced its lead in building a lunar communications and navigation network. The DRO-A and DRO-B twin satellite pair demonstrated automated navigation at the Moon—despite a failure of their launch vehicle’s upper stage leaving them stranded in Earth orbit and causing structural damage. China also achieved daytime Earth-Moon laser distance measurements with a retroreflector on the Tiandu 1 spacecraft—the first for a lunar orbiter. These and other developments have cumulatively provided China an edge over the US in sustaining future crewed Moon missions.
Building on international cooperation in the upcoming Chang’e 7 mission, CNSA announced more international payloads that will be onboard Chang’e 8 to explore the Moon’s south pole for water ice and other resources.
In February, the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) announced a call for Chinese organizations to bid for making a lunar mapping satellite in support of China’s crewed landing missions—which start later this decade. The satellite’s mandate is to obtain high-precision mineral, topographic, and geomorphic data of the Moon’s low-latitude regions. This month, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) successfully tested the launchpad escape system of China’s next-generation Mengzhou spacecraft, a variant of which will carry astronauts for Moon missions.

The US

CLPS

Shadows of Firefly’s Blue Ghost Moon lander performing final descent and having touched down on the lunar surface. Images: Blue Ghost landing video

With rigor and abundant caution, Firefly’s Blue Ghost spacecraft part of NASA’s CLPS program brought the first true soft landing for the US in the 21st century, involving operations of its science & technology payloads, a precision landing demonstration, the first GPS/GNSS lock on the Moon, and a stunning solar eclipse capture.
In March, Intuitive Machines’ second CLPS craft hard-landed on the Moon’s south pole and came to rest on its side, which led to the mission being unsuccessful across all of NASA’s primary goals related to learning about local water ice.
NASA’s VIPER rover cannot catch a break. Originally meant to reveal the first set of hard facts about the Moon’s polar water ice deposits, NASA instead cancelled VIPER’s CLPS flight last year citing cost challenges. The agency then tried finding a private company that will fly and operate the rover at its own cost, an approach many argued decidedly fails at VIPER’s original goal. After evaluating the proposals submitted by private companies, NASA has come to the same conclusion. The agency will restructure the solicitation to elicit stronger proposals that hopefully stay closer to VIPER’s original science goals.
Astrobotic completed testing their lunar navigation and guidance systems to be onboard the company’s upcoming Griffin CLPS lander. The large lander’s primary payload will be the FLIP rover by Astrolab (a Moon Monday sponsor), which got manifested recently after NASA decided not to fly VIPER aboard. Astrobotic also announced that its first CubeRover has successfully passed the standard suite of space environmental tests ahead of its flight on this Griffin lander.
Firefly and the UAE space agency MBRSC announced that the former’s second CLPS lander will carry the second UAE rover to the Moon’s farside next year.
Firefly also announced the Ocula lunar imaging service, which can fill some—but not all—critical gaps for NASA.

More NASA CLPS updates →

Artemis

The Artemis II SLS rocket core stage being transported towards NASA’s Pegasus ferry barge near the agency’s Michoud Assembly Facility. Image: NASA / Eric Bordelon / Michael DeMocker

Preparations continue to fly the four Artemis II astronauts around the Moon and back next year. Technicians working at NASA completed integrating the SLS rocket sans the Orion spacecraft in May while Lockheed Martin delivered said capsule to NASA for further processing and assembly. And, teams and the crew are practicing sea recovery procedures for when the capsule would splash on Earth at the end of the mission.
With three back-to-back failures of SpaceX Starship and an explosion during testing this month, NASA’s long road to putting humans on the Moon with Artemis III has significantly slowed down. While the Moonsuits from Axiom Space have been facing its own delays, Starship now seems to be the pacing item for NASA to land humans on the Moon this century. Given the numerous milestones left before a Starship can carry astronauts, it might not meet the US’ self-imposed goal of “beating China” to the Moon.
In the meanwhile, Blue Origin’s successful launch of its New Glenn rocket in January finally opened up a second line of pursuit for NASA to send lunar astronauts vis-à-vis Blue Moon. Blue Origin aims to launch its first two robotic Moon landers by next year as practice ahead of crewed flights—but with nearly no NASA payloads onboard.
The Trump administration’s budget request for NASA for FY 2026 proposes a historic ~25% cut but continues support for the crewed Artemis II and III missions. Notably, the budget proposes cancelling SLS and Orion from Artemis IV onward as well as the NASA-led international Gateway orbital habitat. It proposes changes to CLPS and several lunar science programs too. The US Congress will review these proposals in the coming months for appropriation or changes. Notably, the proposed budget does nothing to address the fact that the US is failing to explore lunar water as the principal goal of Artemis.
In February, Blue Origin simulated two minutes of lunar gravity inside the New Shepard crew capsule. NASA funded this project, and tested 17 lunar-relevant payloads onboard. As such, NASA continues leveraging New Shepard’s suborbital flights to help verify and refine new lunar technologies at relatively low costs before they can be sent to the Moon.
Zeno Power raised $50 million, a major chunk of which will go towards developing and demonstrating the company’s nuclear electric power system on the Moon for NASA by 2027.

More Chandrayaan updates →

Many thanks to Open Lunar Foundation for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource for free and without ads, support my independent writing. 🌙

India

Illustration of the Chandrayaan 5 lander and rover, and a mission graphic. Images: JAXA / ISRO

Results from the thermal probe experiment on India’s Chandrayaan 3 lander have expanded the possible locations for finding water ice beyond the Moon’s poles, thereby benefiting future scouting missions.
India approved the joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX mission to drill and analyze water ice on the Moon’s south pole. The mission will be a giant leap in lunar capabilities for both ISRO and JAXA. And it can provide NASA with data critical for Artemis planning currently missing from US missions.
India’s Chandrayaan 3 rover may or may not have stumbled upon the Moon’s mantle material when studying the composition of the local lunar soil using its X-ray spectrometer.
ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter has helped international researchers produce a galore of science results recently: from lunar geological studies to characterizing the lunar environment as well as aiding NASA in assessing landing sites for crewed Artemis missions.

More Asia-Pacific

Earlier this month, ispace Japan’s second Moon lander RESILIENCE crashed on the Moon due to performance issues of the laser rangefinder. The outcome underscores the need for resilience in private lunar landing missions through expansive and collaborative testing, something former NASA astronaut and current ispace US Chair Ron Garan has also vouched for. One must note that ispace has continued its remarkable transparency from the first failed landing mission, sharing detailed findings of what went wrong in mere weeks.
South Korea approved plans made by the country’s newly forged space agency KASA to build a Moon lander by 2032 as part of a broader $500+ million annual investment in indigenous space technologies. South Korea is also transforming the former mining site of Taebaek into a testing ground for advanced mobile lunar exploration technologies, owing to the mine’s environmental resemblance to the darkness, coldness, and ruggedness of the Moon’s south pole.
The Australian Space Agency (ASA) continues funding local companies to build lunar technologies. In February, ASA particularly supported EntX to build a radioisotope heater unit to enable future landers and rovers to survive frigid lunar nights.

Europe

An astronaut and a robot in the Moon-simulating LUNA testbed in Germany. Image: DLR / ESA

ESA has started testing instruments, mission concepts, and modern astronaut tools at its new, versatile Moon-simulating LUNA facility in Germany. A simulated habitat module now adjoins LUNA to better test complex mission scenarios where humans and robots interact in varied ways for long periods.
ispace’s European subsidiary led team won a ~€2.7 million ESA contract to collaborate with the agency on the MAGPIE rover mission to study lunar polar water ice and other such volatiles.
In January, ESA announced a $882 million contract to a European consortium led by Thales Alenia Space for developing the Lunar Descent Element of the agency’s upcoming large Moon lander Argonaut. Launching no earlier than 2031, Argonaut will be capable of deploying about 2,000 kilograms of payload on the Moon. ESA hopes for Argonaut to support Artemis with navigation and communications equipment, cargo supplies for astronauts, large rover deliveries, and habitat-related infrastructure such as lunar oxygen extractors and solar arrays. It will also leverage ESA’s upcoming Moonlight navcom constellation for precision landings.
The 2025 European Lunar Symposium was held from June 22–27 with a focus on science & engineering presentations. The abstracts and documents from the conference are open access, and recorded talks will be available later on the SSERVI YouTube channel.

On cooperation and collaboration

The US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration has onboarded 55 countries with the latest addition of Norway.
China formally welcomed India to cooperate on Moon missions and the Sino-led ILRS Moonbase project.
Why Moon missions need their own Wikipedia and beyond
As lunar missions converge globally, we need to preserve future exploration and science
Moon missions can be both cheaper and safer if more countries share navigation infrastructure
How information sharing would enable peace and prosperity in Moon missions
Western media narratives misrepresent Chinese space, which reduces trust and deters cooperation and collaboration.

Originally published by me on the blog of Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor) as their Science Communications Lead. The article is republished here on my blog with a few additions and tweaks to capture developments that took place after the first publish.

- Jatan 🌙

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Moon Monday #230: China leaps again in its steady march to Luna while NASA’s progress on Artemis remains a mixed bag

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 19:38:23 +0530

Shots from the launchpad escape test of Mengzhou, China’s next-generation crewed spacecraft vehicle design. Images: CMSA / CMSEO | Graphic: Jatan Mehta

On June 18, China successfully conducted a launchpad escape test of its next-generation Mengzhou spacecraft, variants of which will carry astronauts on future Earth orbit and Moon missions. A video from CCTV+ shows how everything seems to have functioned as planned across the eventful two minutes: from the escape to the ascent to the drogue & main parachute deployments and—last but not the least—the airbag-cushioned capsule landing.

Notably, Chinese engineers have designed the emergency escape to be handled by the spacecraft itself instead of the rocket. This makes it somewhat launch vehicle agnostic, giving China flexibility to scale its crewed Moon mission plans in the run up to the China-led ILRS Moonbase ambitions. The China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) has thus noted that the successful test has “laid an important technical foundation for the subsequent manned lunar exploration missions.”

Jack Congram notes the following in his detailed coverage of the test (which is relevant because China will launch its crewed lunar missions from Wenchang):

A few days ahead of this test, China Central Television released a report regarding launch escape systems for crewed spacecraft, which briefly touched on Mengzhou’s launch system. That report notes that due to the density of launch infrastructure at Wenchang, Mengzhou’s escape systems boasts a higher thrust-to-weight ratio, compared to Shenzhou, to pull the spacecraft out toward the ocean quickly. Additionally, the report stated that should a launch abort be triggered late into flight, Mengzhou’s propulsion systems on the service module can propel the spacecraft a safe distance away or into orbit.

The escape test is the latest in a series of design validations for Mengzhou, most notably including the high velocity capsule reentry test in 2020. Once a few final tests planned later this year are complete, China is targeting flying crew on Mengzhou for Earth orbit missions next year. This will also help characterize the vehicle’s performance in space as well as refine its operations before a variant carries Chinese taikonauts to lunar orbit before 2030.

More Sino milestones for crewed Moon missions

With Chang’e 5, China demonstrated the world’s first remote docking and undocking of spacecraft in lunar orbit in 2020. It repeated the feat with Chang’e 6 last year, bringing lunar samples from the Moon’s farside and demonstrating flexibility in the core architecture. China will utilize the technology for crewed Moon landings, wherein a “Mengzhou Y” spacecraft will dock with a “Lanyue” lunar lander in lunar orbit. Two of three/four astronauts then transfer into the lander. After the two spacecraft separate, the Lanyue lander will touchdown on the Moon for the surface mission. It will then return to lunar orbit for re-docking with Mengzhou, which will subsequently bring the crew back home.
Late last year, China created a test stand which can simulate the kind of high-altitude and vacuum conditions that the Lanyue lander will go through during its lunar descent and touchdown. The stand allows the lander’s main engine to be tested for its full burn duration of up to 20 minutes. Apparently the test system took only eight months to complete, according to Li Guanghui from CAST.
Andrew Jones reported in November 2024 that CALT successfully conducted a 5-meter-fairing separation test of China’s upcoming heavy-lift, crew-capable Long March 10 rocket. The Long March 10 will also have a three-booster variant with a larger fairing for crewed Moon missions, whose separation system will be tested soon too as per CASC. Two Long March 10 mega rockets will launch Mengzhou Y and Lanyue towards the Moon respectively.

Payload fairing halves of the Long March 10 rocket flanking a large test structure after a fairing separation test. See the humans on the edges for scale. Image: CALT

With the debut launch of the semi-cryogenic Long March 12 rocket last November, China successfully flew the YF-100K engine, the same kind that will power the first stage(s) of the Long March 10.
Ling Xin reported in July 2024 that China successfully test fired the high-energy hydrolox YF-75E engine as well. Three of these engines will power the third stage of Long March 10.
The upcoming Chang’e 7 and Chang’e 8 missions, targeted for launch next year and 2028 respectively, will demonstrate precision landing as well as the ability to explore the Moon’s south pole for water ice and other resources. Both of these will be valuable for China’s ILRS Moonbase plans with crew and robots.
China has demonstrated world-leading lunar navigation and communications systems in complex Earth-Moon orbital spaces. It’s bound to substantially improve both the surface coverage time and area as well as ground station availability for China’s future crewed lunar missions.
Development has also progressed for the space suit and rover to be used by astronauts.

The last time China conducted a launchpad escape test was in 1998. Five years later, it flew its first astronaut to Earth orbit. With 2025 marking the completion of the critical escape tests for China’s next-generation crewed vehicle, the country has yet again set a target of five years within which to send humans to the Moon. It might just do it.

Many thanks to Gurbir Singh and Sanket Suman Dash for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource for free and without ads, support my independent writing. 🌙

Another blow(up) for Artemis

Fireball from the Starship upper stage explosion on June 19. The building immediately to the right of the tall crane is roughly the size of the exploded Starship. Image: Jerry Pike / NASASpaceflight

An upper stage of SpaceX’s Starship Super Heavy rocket exploded on June 19 during preparations for a static fire test that’s conducted pre-launch. The explosion may have been caused by the failure of a high-pressure nitrogen tank in the vehicle’s payload bay. SpaceX said shortly after that no people were lost in the incident, which happened on the test stand called Massey’s. It lies several kilometers away from the Starship launch site. As Stephen Clark points out, the test stand was the only place for SpaceX to static fire Starships and validate their functioning before taking them to the launchpad. As such, SpaceX is left without a facility at the moment to support preflight testing of Starships.

The incident marks the fourth failure in a row for the Starship program this year. The upper stage on the ninth Starship Super Heavy launch on May 29 failed due to a fuel leak and loss of attitude control. The booster was lost too due to anomalous engine re-lighting after reentry. The mission couldn’t achieve any of its key objectives: from opening the payload bay door and ejecting simulated satellites to testing heat shield tile reentry experiments to safely bringing back a previously flown booster. The two flights prior to it failed as well.

Due to SpaceX’s failures this year, NASA’s long road to putting humans on the Moon with Artemis III via an inching Starship has slowed down even more. While the Moonsuits being made by Axiom Space has been facing its own delays, Starship now seems to be the pacing item for NASA to land humans on the Moon this century. Given the numerous milestones left before a Starship can carry astronauts to Luna, it may not be ready in time to meet the US’ self-imposed goal of “beating China” to the Moon.

Related:

The silver Ocula to fill some gaps for NASA

Illustration of the Ocula lunar imaging service. Image: Firefly

US-based Firefly announced a commercial lunar imaging service called Ocula to succeed parts of the role that NASA’s gracefully aging Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has played for US and international Moon missions by providing high-resolution lunar surface imagery and topographic information. Firefly says the imaging with mineral detection capabilities will commence with its first Elytra Dark spacecraft next year from low lunar orbit. The orbiter will do so after completing its services for Firefly’s upcoming second Moon lander mission part of NASA’s CLPS program.

Firefly says Ocula’s best case optical imagery will tout a resolution of 20 cm/pixel, more than twice as good as the 50 cm/pixel LRO provides at its sharpest. If achieved, it would also be bit sharper than the current best of 25 cm/pixel that ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter pulls off. In fact, NASA has been collaborating with ISRO to have the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter aid Artemis landing site selections with lunar polar water prospecting and hazard classifications. But NASA’s leveraging and ISRO’s promoting of the orbiter’s optical and radar capabilities have been limited in scope. In the meanwhile, the 2009-launched LRO is due for its final mission extension evaluation with limited capabilities left, and can no longer maintain an orbit that can study the lunar poles heads down in any case.

Recognizing these constraints, a specialized team of US scientists released a report in 2022 urging NASA to plan replacing the LRO with a multi-orbiter approach so as to support the increasingly complex and diverse upcoming robotic and crewed Moon missions. Three years since, NASA has not approved any LRO successor despite the LExSO mission being proposed by members from the LRO team itself. NASA’s budget request for FY2026 too does not ask for any funding for the same. As such, Firefly’s Ocula service could fill some of that gap for US missions, closing some critical cases. But other shortfalls will remain since Ocula is not a full-fledged reconnaissance orbiter. For those, NASA and ISRO could tighten their use of the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter for Artemis, using it as a de facto LRO replacement and enhancement especially for helping locate water ice on lunar poles—something the US has been failing at despite it being central to Artemis.

More Artemis updates

An Astrobotic CubeRover prototype traversing on a simulated lunar terrain testbed developed by NASA. Image: NASA / Kim Shiflett

Astrobotic announced that its first CubeRover has successfully passed the standard suite of space environmental tests ahead of its upcoming flight on the company’s Griffin lander heading to the Moon’s south pole as part of NASA CLPS. The large lander’s primary payload will be the FLIP rover by Astrolab (a Moon Monday sponsor), which got manifested recently after NASA decided not to fly the VIPER rover aboard Griffin. Astrobotic also announced that it has successfully completed a high fidelity hardware-in-loop simulation of Griffin’s navigation and landing systems all the way up to an emulated touchdown.
This month NASA, the US Department of Defense, and Artemis flight control teams are practicing emergency procedures at sea that they would use to rescue the Artemis II crew from their Orion capsule after a launch emergency—either one on the launchpad or after liftoff. The recoveries use a mock Orion spacecraft with similar exterior to emulate the capsule and mannequins to simulate crew.
In similar vein to ESA’s LUNA Moon-simulating facility, NASA opened up a new facility to simulate the high contrast, high shadows lighting environment at the Moon’s south pole that the Artemis astronauts will face.
Interlune, one of the several lunar water startups developing resource extraction and excavation technologies for the Moon, is hiring a planetary scientist to lead work on lunar regolith and soil simulants. The company is also hiring an operations manager and a mechanical engineer.

- Jatan 🌙

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Moon Monday #229: China extends lead in lunar orbital infrastructure, gets an edge in future crewed missions over the US

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 20:38:53 +0530

Before we begin this week’s Moon Monday, consider taking a moment of silence for everyone affected by the deadly Air India flight crash in Ahmedabad on June 12. 😔

Ling Xin reports that on May 22, China moved the Tiandu 1 lunar orbiter from its Distant Retrograde Orbit (DRO) to a 3:1 resonance orbit. This move comes after the small 61-kilogram (at launch) spacecraft helped China achieve the first ever daytime Earth-Moon laser distance measurements using an orbiter earlier this year. In its new orbit, Tiandu-1 loops around Earth thrice for every revolution of the Moon around our planet. It’s a stable orbit, requiring minimal maintenance. It reminds me of how in 2023, ISRO pulled Chandrayaan 3’s propulsion module from lunar orbit to Earth orbit, demonstrating a small but key capability that will be required to pull off a robotic sample return mission in the future with Chandrayaan 4.

Coming back to China, as per graphics shown by CAS and subsequently reported by others, China also made the DRO-B lunar satellite depart its DRO orbit in April and enter a 3:2 resonance orbit—a world first. When in DRO, the 277-kilogram (at launch) DRO-B and its twin craft DRO-A demonstrated automated navigation at the Moon in tandem with the Earthbound DRO-L satellite. The three satellites tracked each other without relying on Earthly ground stations.

Graphic showing the new geometry of the DRO-A, DRO-B, and DRO-L satellites tracking each other. In its 3:2 resonance orbit, DRO-B travels through the Earth-Moon Lagrangian L3, L4, and L5 regions—where the gravitational forces of the two bodies roughly balance. Credit: CAS

The damaged solar panels of DRO-B post its anomalous launch will reduce the extent of automated navigation the craft can perform in its new orbit but demonstrations and spacecraft operations continue nevertheless. Enthusiastic spacecraft observer Scott Tilley, who has been tracking the aforementioned Mooncraft and independently confirmed their orbits, has pointed out that Chinese researchers recently published a paper on exactly these kinds of orbital maneuvers. And now, China has demonstrated several low-energy orbital transfers as well as autonomous navigation in complex multi-body gravitational environments.

China is doing more still in the Earth-Moon space. CNSA launched the 1200-kilogram Queqiao 2 satellite to DRO last year to support Earth-Moon communications for the Chang’e 6 spacecraft modules to fetch farside lunar samples. With that immediate mission accomplished, the orbiter then began making observations to pursue its other scientific goals. CASC has provided an update on the same with notable statements:

The satellite has been stably operating in orbit for 14 months. [...] The satellite’s extreme ultraviolet camera captured the first global 83.4-nanometer ionosphere image, providing crucial data for studying the impact of solar activity on the plasmasphere. The satellite’s VLBI experiment system, in coordination with the Shanghai 65m Radio Telescope, extended the observation baseline to 380,000 kilometers and successfully observed deep-space targets like radio source A00235 and the Chang’e-6 orbiter.

Chinese researchers are expected to publish results based on these observations later this year. Recall that Chinese researchers have suggested that when coupled with Earth-based ground stations, China’s in-progress network of lunar navigation and communications (navcom) satellites can help CNSA track its deep space missions with sub-kilometer accuracy all the way to Jupiter and even beyond. As noted by Chi Wang, et al. in a December 2023 paper, Queqiao 2 will try testing an element of this during the upcoming Chang’e 7 Moon mission:

The LOVEX [payload] on the relay satellite is used to construct a 400000-km baseline Moon–Earth VLBI measurement and observation experiment system to improve the accuracy of orbit determination in deep space and to carry out astrometry and astrophysics observation and study.

Earth and our Moon as seen from beyond the lunar farside by China’s Chang’e 5 T1 test spacecraft on October 28, 2014. Image: CAST

How China has an edge in sustaining future crewed Moon missions over the US

Between the developments above, the Queqiao 1 orbiter having enabled humanity’s first lunar farside mission with Chang’e 4, and Queqiao 2 expected to aid the upcoming Chang’e 7 and Chang’e 8 missions to the Moon’s south pole, China has extended its lead in lunar navigation, communications, and complex orbital operations by what seems like a light year.

In the meanwhile, the US has demonstrated a GPS lock on the Moon through private company Firefly’s first Moon lander part of NASA’s CLPS program. But that’s pretty much it. The NASA-funded and Advanced Space-led CAPSTONE lunar orbiter has been making progress towards automated navigation demonstrations with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) since over two years now. The goal is similar to China’s DRO-A/B/L trio but has a relatively limited scope even when successful. ESA is yet to launch its first lunar communications spacecraft called Lunar Pathfinder as part of its upcoming Moonlight navcom constellation. And so is NASA.

In contrast, China’s visibly great progress in building its full-fledged lunar navcom constellation named Queqiao is bound to substantially improve both the surface coverage time and area for China’s upcoming ambitious crewed lunar missions, which along with robotic explorers systematically lead up to the full-fledged ILRS Moonbase. ILRS is a long-term undertaking, and the Queqiao constellation’s capabilities will afford China redundancy even if—or when—there are ground station availability issues from its Moonbase partners across the globe.

Even if the US somehow lands humans on the Moon first with Artemis III later this decade, the long term game of sustaining human and robotic lunar presence still favors China because it has achieved more complex capabilities in orbital infrastructure as well as modern surface missions, gaining valuable operational experiences therein.

A three-stage concept for a cislunar navigation and communications constellation proposed by Chinese researchers. Image: SCMP

Many thanks to Open Lunar Foundation and Sanket Suman Dash for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource for free and without ads, support my independent writing. 🌙

A problem with Western media narratives of Chinese space

While China has been building up orbital infrastructure for increasingly complex lunar missions, the Western media and industry observers at large have underestimated or ignored the depth of what the Chinese have accomplished at the Moon. Such blindspots usually happen when there’s a fixation on narratives, the kind that lead to fabricating stories such as China choosing “the same” landing sites as the US for its upcoming Chang’e 7 Moon mission. In fact, Gizmodo titled that as “China oversteps NASA in choosing coveted Shackleton crater for its Moon lander”. Such framing is quite questionable:

Firstly, it was always likely, and known, that the robotic Chang’e 7 would land on the Moon’s south pole before the crewed Artemis III does. So can we even call the former to be choosing “the same” landing site as the latter?
Artemis III had 13 candidate landing zones in 2022. We’re almost halfway through 2025, and the candidate regions are still a set of nine. It’s not quite a “selection” yet.
More importantly, Shackleton is a large 21-kilometer wide crater, and the number of mission-favorable areas on the rim and nearby ridges are relatively plenty. Even if both missions ultimately chose Shackleton as the main landing region, they would be reasonably far away from each other not just in time but in space too.
Similar arguments can apply for Chang’e 8.

Some of the Chang’e 7 candidate landing sites on the Moon’s south pole. Image: DSEL

This image of the Moon’s south pole shows the nine candidate landing regions for NASA’s Artemis III crewed mission. Image: NASA / GSFC / ASU / LRO

While, yes, the water-hosting lunar south pole not being a massive place could eventually mean potential contest between countries—and companies—for some common sites, much before that though comes the fact that there are purely engineering and scientific factors that make landing site selections converge to certain locations. For example, the Sun perpetually circling the lunar polar horizon coupled with rocky terrain automatically render higher altitude areas desirable power-wise for touchdown—which is what most lunar polar missions end up converging to. I highlighted this point in an invited Media Roundtable discussion hosted by the Duke University in 2024:

It’s important to keep in mind that not all decisions are taken with a geopolitical adversary in mind. Some of them are purely engineering. But this you would only understand if you have scientists and engineers talking to policy makers. Fear-mongering narratives can cause issues to scale up, and then convert into a lot of unfriendliness that could impact everyone badly… as journalists, our job is to simplify and clarify the layers of what scientists and engineers do—as well as the geopolitical and policy elements.

Such technical factors should be considered first before jumping the gun with political changes and associated policy recommendations and that maybe based on shallow narratives. It could adversely affect international cooperation and collaboration, both of which are hard won, while making discussing real challenges more difficult. We shouldn’t have to waste our time and efforts discussing laughable claims like China apparently landing Chang’e 6 in the farside Apollo crater just to signal the US of a race.

It can be helpful to get some non-US perspective here. Jack Congram, who writes the blog & newsletter “China in Space” with the aim of providing more grounded coverage of Sino space activities, offers a view on this Moon “race”:

While the US has tried to lean on the idea of competition to secure political and financial support, China treats its space and lunar programs as part of long-term plans for national development. [...] With few political shifts and more stable funding, China doesn’t need to frame its lunar program in a race with the US plans.
[...]
Once a policy and its direction are decided, it tends to receive consistent support over many years, with progress evaluated against clear developmental and technological milestones. This structure means the space program is not vulnerable to the kind of budgetary uncertainty or political turnover common in Western liberal democracies.

Budgetary uncertainty and political turnover indeed.

- Jatan 🌙

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Moon Monday #228: The need for resilience in private lunar landing missions through expansive and collaborative testing

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 21:04:45 +0530

ispace Japan’s second Moon lander RESILIENCE launched in January with the aim of a Moon landing. But just like its predecessor Hakuto-R’s fate about two years ago, RESILIENCE crashed into the Moon during its landing attempt on June 6. It was a moment of heartbreak for several lunar communities and space enthusiasts around the world. It’s also a moment to reconsider resilience in lunar exploration through expansive and collaborative lunar lander testing for private missions.

While ispace’s first lunar lander ultimately failed due to its navigation software rejecting correct altitude readings from the Moon provided by the laser rangefinder onboard, RESILIENCE failed differently. The latter’s rangefinder readings were correct only later in the descent around a kilometer above the surface. The lander thus hadn’t slowed down enough by the time it approached the Moon’s surface, crashing into it rather than gently landing. ispace Japan’s CTO Ryo Ujiie noted during the post-landing-attempt media briefing that RESILIENCE used a different rangefinder than on the first mission (M1) because the vendor had discontinued the earlier model.

RESILIENCE mission milestones and success criteria as stated by ispace Japan. The company achieved eight of ten milestones. Image: ispace

Testing the limits of resilience

As always, we will know the root cause(s) of the M2 mission’s failure and its extent only after engineers conduct a detailed failure investigation. That’s always been the case for all major spacecraft failures. And yet it didn’t deter media reports and social media posts from continuing to confidently “explain” the events of RESILIENCE based on lander telemetry from the livestream alone—despite us learning about the unreliable rangefinder readings from ispace itself mere hours after the landing attempt. And so, instead let’s discuss an underlying point about the testing regime of Moon landers through what is admittedly speculation on RESILIENCE.

Note that RESILIENCE began its descent to the lunar surface from its circular orbit of ~100-kilometer altitude. It’s a much higher starting point than those of contemporary landers; India’s Chandrayaan 3, the US-based Firefly’s Blue Ghost, and JAXA’s SLIM lander began their descent from 30, 20, and 15 kilometers above the lunar surface respectively. Depending on the operational extent of the specific laser rangefinder ispace used, choosing a lower orbital profile to start RESILIENCE’s descent from could’ve allowed ispace to test the rangefinder before diving in. This would’ve provided mission operators a warning that the rangefinder wouldn’t be relaying accurate readings, at least at that high altitude, and may have allowed them to design some workarounds. Now, to be fair, such an orbital profile might have been unfeasible in RESILIENCE’s case, or simply too risky given uneven lunar gravity. Or it may not have given RESILIENCE sufficient time to adapt while in orbit after all since the rotating Moon would increasingly steer its carefully chosen lava plain landing site away from reach.

Regardless, the point is that conducting operational checkouts of the laser rangefinder before attempting to land was probably missing from RESILIENCE’s in-space testing regime. For example, ISRO’s Chandrayaan 3 lander performed such checkouts with its propulsion module after the two separated from each other in lunar orbit. And so the lander’s altitude above the lunar surface didn’t matter as much.

Prior to RESILIENCE’s launch, ispace had told me in an email response that to improve the chances of a successful touchdown, the company has conducted extensive field testing of landing sensors in lunar-like environments at multiple locations around the world. This is over and above the improvements across subsystems which ispace identified after flying its first Moon mission to feed into RESILIENCE. Despite that, the rangefinder has clearly missed the mark. It again goes to show that you can only know your particular spacecraft’s behavior once it is in space. And that’s also why for its SLIM lander, JAXA tested its crucial crater recognition system while in lunar orbit before SLIM attempted and achieved its goal of landing on the Moon with precision.

Areas of enhancement which ispace identified after flying its first Moon mission (M1) to feed into RESILIENCE (M2). Image: ispace

Complex balance

Moon landings remain hard; and a truly comprehensive testing regime non-optional for success. Note the following about four recent Moon landing attempts.

ISRO attributes emphasis on demonstrating the lander system’s performance down to its specifics as the principal reason for Chandrayaan 3’s triumphant touchdown on the Moon after Chandrayaan 2’s failure.
Both of Intuitive Machines’ landers part of NASA’s CLPS program hard-landed on the Moon due to inadequate testing and checkouts of their laser rangefinders.
Astrobotic’s first CLPS lander Peregrine failed because of skipping comprehensive launch environmental testing of its propulsion system.
In contrast, Firefly proactively kept ample margins in terrestrial testing as well as for spaceflight deviances and anomalies to achieve Blue Ghost’s soft landing for NASA CLPS earlier this year.

As indispensable as comprehensive testing is, another hard fact is that private companies don’t have the kind of high budgets or time afforded by government space agencies. This necessarily implies lesser overall redundancy in their robotic lander designs as well as a testing regime that’s always battling cost and schedule—all leading to greater risks. Even fuel margins on privately built landers tend to be on the lower side because every kilogram of added fuel reserve would take away at least several hundred thousand dollars worth of commercial payload capacity. But alas, the closer a lander is to the surface during lunar descent, the lesser its ability to self-correct with depleting fuel reserves.

Such complex balance of testing and resources is why I agree with remarks made by the Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor) after the RESILIENCE mission’s outcome:

Rather than one agency attempting seven landings, a growing number of new actors are launching their first or second attempts. Instead of hard won lessons flowing freely into the next mission, knowledge is often siloed, treated as proprietary by agencies and companies, and so potentially avoidable mistakes can resurface. [...] Collaboration becomes critical to ensure that tens of millions of dollars of investment and years of work aren’t lost in the final seconds of flight. The more we can share data from these attempts, the more return humanity as a whole makes on these investments. The Moon is hard, but there is no reason to make it harder.

We must encourage companies and organizations to share technical data for safety and success of all.

Tenaciously transparent

ispace’s first Moon lander inside the Falcon 9 rocket’s fairing pre-launch. Image: SpaceX

RESILIENCE’s crash landing means its multiple payloads have been lost too, most notably the 5-kilogram micro-rover built by ispace’s European subsidiary under an ESA contract with funding aid from the Luxembourg Space Agency. Called TENACIOUS, the rover was supposed to explore and image the Moon’s surface in HD, and use a back-mounted shovel to collect lunar soil and transfer its ownership to NASA as part of the latter’s move to set precedence for future resource use under the US-led Artemis Accords. Alas, these opportunities have succumbed to harsh lunar dust.

Jeff Foust has previously reported that ispace got a $22 million payout for its first crashed Moon mission through insurance brought from Mitsui Sumitomo. We’ll get to know later this year what ispace receives for its second failed attempt. Looking ahead, ispace Japan’s CFO Jumpei Nozaki told CNN that the company has the funding necessary to attempt a third lunar landing. That would be the company’s US subsidiary’s first CLPS mission through US-based Draper Laboratory. It’s targeting landing on the Moon’s farside in 2027, carrying NASA payloads onboard as well as another rover from ispace Europe. ispace US will also provide ground communications and relay services for the mission.

Between the capital intensive nature of building Moon missions and the ispace-provided CLPS lander having to be wholly redesigned, and even go through a late engine swap, ispace Japan has had to raise a huge amount of funds. To its credit, the publicly traded company has always announced these upfront. Such financing has taken the form of $35 million and $70 million in loans this year, and $62 million and $45 million last year. Jeff Foust reported in March 2024 that ispace then raised $53.5 million through a stock sale, $47 million of which was to be used for the Draper-led CLPS mission. ispace’s share of Draper’s $77 million CLPS contract is supposedly $55 million. Note though that all of these amounts, along with a $80 million Japanese government grant, do include funds for ispace Japan to launch a fourth lunar lander by 2027, and so aren’t just for the CLPS flight.

Contrast ispace’s impeccable transparency with CLPS vendor Intuitive Machines. Despite both of them being publicly traded companies, ispace has transparently published mission objectives before launch as well as accepted outcomes of both its lunar missions on the same day as the landing attempts with unusual candidness. Whereas Intuitive—and NASA as its CLPS flight enabler and partner—retrospectively skewed the success criteria for the company’s first Moon mission and even straight up falsely proclaimed it to be a “soft and safe landing” and an “unqualified success”. Intuitive continued to use intentionally fuzzy language to claim success for its second hard Moon landing despite the mission hosting more than $100 million worth of US taxpayer money through NASA whose goals weren’t met. The value of ispace Japan too gets affected as a publicly traded company, and yet they face it with more honest, upfront communications. That is true resilience.

Many thanks to The Orbital Index and Sanket Suman Dash for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource for free and without ads, support my independent writing. 🌙

Two new European Moon missions

Aggregated solar illumination map of the Moon’s south pole made from stacked observations by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, shown in perspective view. The brightest spots are maximally sunlit topographic highs whereas the pitch black areas are permanently shadowed—within which water ice deposits are thought to exist. Image: NASA

ispace utilized five of ESA’s Estrack network ground stations to command and hear back from RESILIENCE throughout its mission. This partnership is now growing as ispace’s European subsidiary along with five of its also-European institutional partners have won an extended ~€2.7 million ESA contract to collaborate with the European Space Agency on the MAGPIE mission. It’s a rover to study water ice and other volatiles deposited on the Moon’s south pole. MAGPIE stands for Mission for Advanced Geophysics and Polar Ice Exploration.

The mission is being assessed for flight as part of ESA’s 2023 call to the European industry, asking it to propose small and medium Moon mission concepts that can fly starting by 2028. As long as each mission stays under €50 million, and focuses on ESA’s lunar exploration and science goals, any physical form goes: an orbiter, a (presumably small) lander, a flyby craft, a rover, what have you.

As one way to stay within budget, ESA encouraged mission proposals to leverage a rideshare launch on Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket, specifically using several lunar-ward trajectories to that end including possible aids with a kick-stage. ESA also suggested spacecraft use its upcoming Moonlight navigation and communications service to reduce the mass of the onboard communications system and save mission costs.

Relatedly, ESA approved the LUnar Meteoroid Impacts Observer (LUMIO) CubeSat mission last year. As its name suggests, LUMIO will monitor flashes of meteorite impacts on the Moon’s farside to determine its poorly constrained rate and potential impact (pun intended) on long-term robotic and crewed exploration. ESA aims to launch LUMIO in 2027 to the second Earth-Moon Lagrangian point (EM-L2) from where it can continuously observe the Moon’s farside. The CubeSat also aims to demonstrate autonomously determining its position in space and navigating accordingly, independent of communications with Earth, something China pioneered with its DRO lunar craft recently.

More Moon

🧊 Every detail on Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX 🌗

In response to the Trump’s administration’s FY2026 presidential budget request for NASA slashing the SLS rocket, Orion spacecraft, and the NASA-led international Gateway orbital habitat programs right after the upcoming crewed Artemis III Moon landing, the US Senate is trying to propose and pass a supplementary $10 billion fund for NASA to continue those projects instead.
Amid these larger proposed cuts for NASA, people seem to have missed some finer cuts affecting four forward-looking Moon projects: the oxygen extractor mission, Decadal science efforts, an advanced instruments program, and the THEMIS-ARTEMIS spacecraft.
In the meanwhile, NASA is pulling its support for the long-running, community-oriented Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, one of the largest gatherings of planetary scientists in the world.
Notable Chandrayaan updates from last month

- Jatan 🌙

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A pressing PSLV rocket failure and orbital congestion to brood over | Indian Space Progress #28

Jatan Mehta — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 20:41:12 +0530

I’m delighted to share that PierSight Space is continuing its sponsorship of my Indian Space Progress blog+newsletter for another year! 🚀

Ahmedabad-based PierSight is building a private constellation of SAR satellites equipped with AIS sensors for persistent, all-weather ocean monitoring. With $8 million raised in funds, and building on the recent spaceflight of its Varuna technology demonstrator, PierSight is targeting a mid-2026 launch for its first commercial satellite. The company is hiring across subsystems at Ahmedabad as well as Bangalore. 🛰️

PSLV’s failure could trigger multiple mission delays for India

Launch of ISRO’s PSLV rocket on April 22, 2023 carrying Singapore’s TeLEOS-2 satellite. Image: ISRO

On May 18, India’s PSLV rocket failed for the second time in this century. ISRO’s Chief V. Narayanan said during the post-launch media briefing that “a fall in the chamber pressure of the motor case” of PSLV’s solid-fueled third stage prevented the dual-use 1700-kilogram EOS-09 radar imaging satellite onboard the rocket from attaining orbit. PSLV’s failure comes as a shock to many in the space industry because this is the rocket that has notably launched a lunar orbiter, a Mars orbiter, a space telescope, a solar observatory to the Earth-Sun L1 point, a record 104 satellites in one flight, and also important missions for other space agencies such as last year’s launch of the Proba-3 Sun-studying craft for ESA.

A failure analysis committee is examining PSLV’s failure. Between solid rocket motors being a staple element across ISRO’s entire rocket family and the PSLV notably sharing the liquid fueled Vikas engine with the more powerful GSLV Mk II and LVM3 rockets, one of the first things ISRO will try to get clarity on is if any aspect of PSLV’s failure would affect its other launch vehicles or not. While the PSLV’s Vikas engine performed fine on May 18, a Mk II is soon slated for a high-profile launch of the joint Indo-US NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) Earth observation satellite. Every process tied to it will be scrutinized, and NISAR’s launch might get delayed again purely out of abundant caution.

The PSLV rocket being transported in India’s launch complex at Sriharikota. Image: ISRO

More directly though, the May 18 PSLV failure means the launch of the PSLV N1 will now be delayed further. N1 is the first industry-led PSLV to be launched as part of a $104 million contract awarded by ISRO to the bid-winning HAL-L&T consortium. It’s a national effort to improve the rocket’s production rate by privatizing it. The N1’s launch was originally targeted last year.

ISRO’s new and nimble SSLV rocket is also affected. The next SSLV launch might take a while because the PSLV’s third stage motor is virtually identical to the SSLV’s second stage one. Note that the SSLV’s direct competitors in the global small lift commercial market already moved ahead last year given the SSLV’s slow operationalization pace.

What makes the PSLV’s loss more aggravating is that this is the second failure for India’s national space program this year, following that of the NVS-02 navigation satellite in January. The Mk II that deployed NVS-02 into orbit worked well but the satellite’s own propulsion system failed, leaving India’s strategic NavIC navigation constellation of a handful of satellites operating below expected performance levels. ISRO has not found the root cause of NVS-02’s failure so far, and the next navigation satellite might face delays to address issues found.

ISRO will certainly return the PSLV to flight and make it more robust, just as it methodically achieved Chandrayaan 3’s success after Chandrayaan 2’s landing failure, and how it re-flew the GSLV Mk II and maintained consecutively successful launches after its failure in 2021. What makes this particular wait feel longer is the more fundamental place of the PSLV in India’s space progress.

Dodging orbital debris, congestion, and collisions

The figure shows the no-liftoff zones within the PSLV SPADEX mission’s launch window to avoid uncomfortably close passes with other space objects. Image: ISRO

India currently chairs the UN’s working group on long-term space sustainability. And, ISRO, based on its experience of launching and operating varied space missions, has helped manage the growing orbital congestion and risk of high-velocity collisions in Earth orbit by contributing updated guidelines for debris mitigation as part of the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC)—whose participating members include the major spacefaring national agencies of NASA, CNSA, Roscosmos, and more. Now, ISRO has released its internal Space Situational Assessment Report for the year 2024. It’s public executive summary published this May has several interesting things of note:

The PSLV rocket which launched the twin SPADEX satellites on December 30, 2024 was intentionally delayed by 2 minutes and 15 seconds based on collision avoidance analysis for known orbital objects.

The upper stage of PSLV-C3 underwent an accidental break-up in 2001 and generated 371 debris. While most of these fragments have re-entered the atmosphere, 41 PSLV-C3 debris were still in orbit by the end of 2024. [...] Among the intact Indian upper stages, 34 rocket bodies re-entered the Earth's atmosphere till 2024 end, and 5 of such re-entries took place in 2024. All LVM3 rocket bodies have decayed, only the one from LVM3 M2 OneWeb mission remain in orbit. Among GSLV rocket bodies, only GSLV-F12 and GSLV-F14 rocket bodies are in orbit.

The number of CAMs [Collision Avoidance Maneuvers] was less in 2024 compared to the previous year. This is because improved close approach analysis methodology with larger conjunction screening volume and usage of more accurate ephemerides helped to meet collision avoidance requirements by adjusting orbit maintenance maneuvers on several occasions and avoiding exclusive CAMs.

Based on the projected deployment of multiple large constellations, active satellites are likely to outnumber space debris population within the current decade, making Space Traffic Management (STM) an indispensable part of spaceflight safety. As of now, there is no accepted framework for STM, hence on-orbit close approach between two active space assets needs to be resolved on case-by-case basis through inter-operator coordination, with non-trivial operational overheads. Consequently, spaceflight safety in future scenario is expected to involve more intensive coordination and cooperation between various spacefaring entities, it is desirable that a suitable collaborative framework evolves for meeting STM requirements.

Beyond Earth orbit, at the Moon, ISRO, NASA, and South Korea’s KARI continue coordinating lunar traffic for their respective orbiters. From the aforementioned report summary:

14 OMs [Orbital Maneuvers] were carried out for the Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter, the plans were adjusted on 8 occasions. On one occasion, a scheduled orbit maintenance manoeuvre was advanced to avoid a close conjunction with Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter of NASA. [...] An orbit maintenance manoeuvre was originally scheduled on 26 Nov 2024 but advanced to 11 Nov to mitigate conjunctions with LRO which were predicted to occur on 15-16 Nov.

Left: Illustrations of the ISRO Chandrayaan 2 and NASA LRO orbiters around the Moon; Right: Increase in separation between their orbits after Chandrayaan 2 performed a diversion maneuver in 2021. Images: ISRO / NASA / GSFC / Chris Meaney

Many thanks to the Takshashila Institution, PierSight, GalaxEye Space, Gurbir Singh and Arun Raghavan for sponsoring this month’s Indian Space Progress edition. If you too appreciate my efforts to capture true trajectories of India in space, support my independent writing. 🇮🇳 🚀

Chandrayaan updates

Scientists analyzing the elemental composition of our Moon’s southern high-latitude surface as measured by ISRO’s Chandrayaan 3 rover have surmised that the excess sulfur detected in the landing site’s soil and rocks compared to other regions may have originated in the Moon’s ancient mantle.

Top left: Locations of samples collected by previous nearside Moon missions. The geologically distinct landing site of Chandrayaan 3 is marked down south; Bottom left: The co-added X-ray spectrum from all 23 lunar surface soil and rock measurements by the Chandrayaan 3 rover; Right: An artist’s concept of our Moon shortly after its formation, with a magma ocean and a newly forming rocky crust. Images: Rishitosh Sinha, et al. / Santosh Vadawale, et al. / NASA Goddard

The IAF organized the latest international Global Space Exploration Conference (GLEX) in New Delhi, India last month, which ISRO hosted. I covered notable updates from GLEX in Moon Monday #225, of which two things are most relevant to India:

China formally welcomed India to cooperate on Moon missions. Wu Weiren, the Chief Designer of China’s extremely successful Chang’e lunar exploration program as well as the Director General of China’s Deep Space Exploration Laboratory (DSEL), said during a panel of various national space agency heads that China “especially welcomes India to participate in cooperating and collaborating on the ILRS” Moonbase project. Considering the not-so-great relations between China and India, and their mutual space activities being nearly nil, China’s invitation can be interpreted to be likely a formality. Nevertheless, it’s good to have the invitation explicitly said than not.
ISRO and ESA are enhancing their collaboration in space exploration across scientific collaboration, human spaceflight, and lunar exploration. For the Moon in particular, the agencies are discussing “alignment on payloads and robotic scientific missions”. Nigar Shaji, Associate Director of ISRO’s key satellite integration and testing center URSC, told during her GLEX panel that ISRO is open to flying ESA payloads on India’s upcoming lunar missions.

Despite the many cuts in NASA’s FY2026 budget proposed by the US Trump administration, the agency is thankfully continuing its funding and commitment to provide and operate a neutron spectrometer for the upcoming joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5/ LUPEX mission to study water ice on the Moon’s south pole.

More Indian space

The Ax-4 Mission crew flying soon to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. Images: Axiom Space

India’s Shubhanshu Shukla’s flight to the International Space Station (ISS) through the Ax-4 Axiom Space mission aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule as Mission Pilot is now delayed and rescheduled for June 10. Shukla underwent astronaut training for the 14-day mission arranged under a NASA-ISRO partnership. ISRO and Shukla will conduct seven out of sixty experiments aboard Ax-4. As part of a broader ISRO-ESA agreement, Indian institutes will conduct two joint microgravity experiments with ESA.

Chethan Kumar has reported the ISS mission’s cost to ISRO being at least $68 million. ISRO seeks to leverage this experience into India’s ambition to indigenously send humans to Earth orbit. The next major milestone to enable that end is Gaganyaan G1, the first of three uncrewed test flights required to be successful before ISRO deems all systems being safe enough to launch astronauts. ISRO is targeting G1’s launch later this year although timelines have been uncertain until now.

Read last four editions

Indian Space Progress #27: Three months of mission updates, and fixing ISRO’s monthly summaries
Indian Space Progress #25-26: Newly approved Chandrayaan 5 LUPEX mission will drill for water on the Moon and aid Artemis
Indian Space Progress #24: High on docking, low on navigation. Cool new projects, same old budget

- Jatan 🌙

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Moon Monday #227: Proposed cuts, cancellations, continuations, and changes to NASA’s lunar missions

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 21:05:17 +0530

The Artemis II SLS rocket core stage being transported towards NASA’s Pegasus ferry barge near the agency’s Michoud Assembly Facility. Image: NASA / Eric Bordelon / Michael DeMocker

The US Trump administration has released details of the FY2026 presidential budget request for NASA, which proposes a historic ~25% cut overall but continues support for the crewed Artemis II and Artemis III missions and most of its associated science elements—though purely because the US wants to land on the Moon before China attempts the same by 2030. I’ve compiled and contextualized a detailed rundown of the specific proposed cuts, cancellations, continuations, and changes to NASA’s Moon missions through this budget request from across its documents while also highlighting notable additional details from them. Support my writing if you appreciate my efforts and find it useful.

Proposed cuts and cancellations

Cancel the “grossly expensive” SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft from Artemis IV onward in favor of commercial alternatives—whose exact form is as-yet unknown. The “Budget Request Summary” document notes that the “>$3 billion a year in savings from the transition to commercial systems will be reinvested in Moon to Mars activities.” To enable said commercial transportation systems, formally called the Commercial Moon to Mars (M2M) Infrastructure and Transportation Program, NASA wants to ingest $864 million this year and next—and then quickly ramp up their funding by end of decade. These funds would essentially come from redirecting existing NASA budgets for crew and experiments at the International Space Station.
NASA aims to cancel the agency-led international Gateway lunar orbital habitat. The budget request’s “Mission Facts Sheets” state that NASA will “close out the current contracts while alternative uses of the Gateway hardware are evaluated by commercial and international partners.” Considering that many hardware elements are already built or are in production, this would essentially leave NASA’s partners to figure out by themselves what to do with the parts. The “Budget Request Summary” notes that NASA is requesting $304 million from the US Congress to conduct an orderly closeout of the Gateway program in 2026, without specifying what that entails.
As per the “Mission Facts Sheet”, NASA is not requesting funds for its LIFT-1 mission to extract oxygen from lunar soil. It was intended to demonstrate a technology critical for enabling long-term lunar exploration and living. Prior to this budget request drop, NASA had said it would fund $200-250 million in total for this mission. NASA now says it will “prioritize ground-based high-fidelity systems testing” instead.. 🤷🏻‍♂️
Continuing the decision from the prior Biden administration, NASA is upholding the cancellation of its already-built VIPER rover by requesting no budget for the mission. VIPER was originally meant to reveal the first set of hard facts about water ice deposits on the Moon’s south pole, which has been missing from the US Artemis program.

A NASA chart from 2023 showing maturation of lunar surface infrastructure capabilities, and its precursor missions, as strategized by NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. But with the VIPER and LIFT missions now proposed to be gone, and two past CLPS missions failing, the chart falls apart. Image: NASA

The budget request proposes reducing funding for the DALI program from $15 million to $10 million. DALI’s job has been to mature the flight-readiness levels of advanced lunar instruments for future missions.
Likewise, support for future, community-identified, high impact Decadal lunar science missions is proposed to be drastically reduced. Scoping of such missions usually takes place under NASA’s “Lunar Future” program or division. For 2026, NASA is proposing its funding to go from $10 million to $0. Although the “Budget Technical Supplement” document notes that it’s so because of “higher priorities in the Science portfolio.” And that “as funding becomes available in future years, NASA will perform studies to address these potential strategic missions as defined in the Decadal alongside other strategic goals for science near and on the Moon.”
NASA wishes to stop operating the THEMIS-ARTEMIS set of five small spacecraft. Since 2011, two of these have been studying how the Sun’s wind of radiation and charged particles interact with the Moon, something crucial to understanding parts of the radiation environment on and around Luna to safely send and return future astronauts. Data from the ARTEMIS pair have been consistently producing published scientific results even in this decade but the approximate $1 million per craft is an operations cost NASA no longer wishes to bear. Between this and Gateway’s proposed cancellation also depriving the agency and its international partners of information on what long-term deep space radiation would do to astronauts, it would be ironic to see a greater push for human spaceflight while defunding some of the science that enables it.

Newly proposed changes

The first ‘Blue Ghost’ lunar lander pre-launch. Image: Firefly

NASA wants to move the CLPS program from its Science Mission Directorate to the Exploration mission directorate. The “Budget Request Summary” notes that NASA is continuing to request the planned $250 million for CLPS for 2026, and that the agency will continue operating the program the same way as before. However, when you consider that even when the Science directorate managed CLPS, we saw abrupt changes like landing site swaps on missions due to other directorates taking priority. As such, CLPS being managed under the Exploration directorate would likely reduce the program’s scientific value in favor of purely technological and human spaceflight driven goals.
As planned during the previous Biden administration, NASA is indeed intent on introducing the PRISM-SALSA program with a $10 million annual budget to fly scientific and technological instruments whose goals are not strictly tied to any particular landing location on the Moon. The “Budget Technical Supplement” notes that NASA expects to have four such instruments on the Moon circa 2028 through CLPS landers—or even on other missions by NASA or its international partners as per available flight opportunities.

Proposed continuations

Keep funding the crewed Human Landing Systems by SpaceX and Blue Origin at a total of $1.7 billion, and continue the combined $642 million towards developing the surface elements of the Artemis spacesuit, the versatile Artemis Lunar Terrain Vehicle, and collaborator JAXA’s advanced pressurized rover.

Illustrations of SpaceX’s Lunar Starship and Blue Origin’s Blue Moon landers respectively, with which NASA hopes to land Artemis astronauts on the Moon this decade and beyond. Images: SpaceX / Blue Origin

NASA’s Lunar Discovery and Exploration Program (LDEP)—which has been formulating an integrated lunar science strategy and funding development of instruments for CLPS and Artemis missions—will continue to be funded at $137 million. It might seem like a drastic dip from the prior budgets thrice that amount but between VIPER’s cancellation and funds for CLPS now accounted for within its new home at the Exploration directorate, the proposed funding for the rest of the program elements is roughly on the same scale as before. And it’s projected to increase in the coming years too. Lunar science is not seeing the deep cuts of the rest of NASA’s science portfolio purely because the US wants to land on the Moon before China attempts the same by 2030, and that its robotic missions lag far behind the Chinese.
NASA is requesting $56 million for its Space Technology Mission Directorate to develop foundational surface infrastructure capabilities for the Moon and Mars. Particularly, the “Budget Request Summary” notes that the directorate “will perform [sic] advanced non-nuclear power in support of lunar and Mars missions.”
The budget request continues funding the operations of NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to support scientific investigations and landing site characterizations for Artemis and CLPS landing missions. But the 2009-launched LRO has gracefully aged now, is due for its final mission extension evaluation with limited capabilities left, and can no longer maintain an orbit that can study the Moon’s poles heads down in any case. Recognizing these constraints, a specialized team of US scientists released a report in 2022 urging NASA to plan an LRO replacement. Three years since, NASA has not approved any LRO successor despite the LExSO mission being proposed by members from the LRO team itself. The FY2026 budget request too does not ask for any funding for the same.
NASA is thankfully continuing its funding to send and operate instruments on two missions by international partners. NASA will provide a neutron spectrometer for the upcoming joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5/ LUPEX mission to study water ice on the Moon’s south pole. The agency will also support ongoing operations of its ultra-sensitive ShadowCam imager onboard South Korea’s 2022-launched KPLO lunar orbiter. ShadowCam is trying to locate water ice deposits in the Moon’s polar permanently shadowed regions.

Repercussions

Over and above the proposed cuts and changes, NASA not allocating or requesting any funds for missions to directly find and study lunar water ice deposits, despite the US failing at this central goal of Artemis, will make dealing with the already bad situation for Artemis worse. Next up, the US Congress will review all the budget proposals in the coming months for appropriations or changes. Although Marcia Smith explains how this process will not get done before October at best, until which a continuing resolution is in place for funds made available last year.

In the meanwhile, shortly after Elon Musk formally left DOGE last week, the Trump administration withdrew the nomination of Musk-allied Jared Isaacman as NASA Administrator, citing his lack of “complete alignment with President Trump’s America First agenda” as well as unspecified prior associations. While the Trump administration will propose a replacement for the US Senate to consider confirming again, this move essentially gives the White House even more freedom to overhaul NASA in the time being.

That’s because even though Isaacman was actually publicly aligned with Trump, the current Acting Administrator Janet Petro has fully embraced the challenge in resisting virtually nothing ever since the new US administration came in and selected her for the role. Under Petro, and through Presidential executive orders and other means, NASA has closed the offices of the Chief Scientist and Technology, Policy, and Strategy, removed critical scientific documents from agency-backed community websites, and also deleted inclusive language from the leading webpage of its Artemis program, among other changes.

Many thanks to Catalyx Space and Arun Raghavan for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday!

Today’s Moon Monday involved a lot of work to capture adequate context for each of NASA’s proposed changes to its Moon missions. If you find my article and its dozens of links to be useful, and you appreciate my efforts to publish Moon Mondays as a curated community resource for free and without ads, kindly support my independent writing. 🌙

More mission updates

Mission milestones and success criteria as stated by ispace Japan for its second Moon landing mission. ispace’s RESILIENCE lander has achieved eight of the ten milestones to date. Image: ispace

ispace Japan’s second Moon lander RESILIENCE successfully circularized its lunar orbit on May 28 with a roughly 10-minute main engine burn. The lander launched in January on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, and then followed a multi-month low energy trajectory to the Moon. It entered lunar orbit on May 7 with a roughly nine-minute main engine burn. ispace is targeting June 5, 19:24 UTC as the Moon landing date and time for RESILIENCE. ispace says the lander will begin its descent to the lunar surface from its current circular orbit only, which makes its ~100-kilometer altitude a much higher starting point than those of contemporary landers such as India’s Chandrayaan 3 and the US-based Firefly’s Blue Ghost—which began their descent from 30 and 20 kilometers above the lunar surface respectively.

Resources to follow RESILIENCE:

Watch the livestream on June 5 an hour prior to the aforementioned landing time
Check ispace’s News blog and subscribe to it in an RSS reader
Browse and search my recent past coverage on Japanese Moon missions for context
Subscribe for free to my globally read Moon Monday blog+newsletter to receive mission updates with context 🌝

The ninth launch of SpaceX’s Starship Super Heavy rocket on May 29 failed as well—due to a fuel leak and loss of attitude control on the upper stage, and the anomalous engine re-lighting of the booster stage leading to its explosion. The test flight did avoid the engine problems which had caused the upper stage to fail during its ascent itself on the previous two flights but the mission couldn’t achieve any of its key objectives: from opening the payload bay door and ejecting simulated satellites to testing heat shield tile reentry experiments to safely bringing back a previously flown booster. As such, NASA’s long road to putting humans on the Moon with Artemis III, which has been inching through Starship, has slowed down further with this failed flight.
NASA, ISRO, and KARI continue coordinating lunar traffic for their respective orbiters. ISRO released its internal Space Situational Assessment Report for the year 2024 this April, and whose public executive summary notes the following:

14 OMs [Orbital Maneuvers] were carried out for the Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter, the plans were adjusted on 8 occasions. On one occasion, a scheduled orbit maintenance manoeuvre was advanced to avoid a close conjunction with Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter of NASA. [...] An orbit maintenance manoeuvre was originally scheduled on 26 Nov 2024 but advanced to 11 Nov to mitigate conjunctions with LRO which were predicted to occur on 15-16 Nov.

I could glean one mission update from NASA’s FY2026 presidential request’s “Budget Technical Supplement” document discussed above. Blue Origin’s upcoming robotic lander called Blue Moon Mark I will carry at least one more NASA payload: a retroreflector for lunar satellite ranging and navigation studies.

More Moon

On May 29, China launched its Tianwen-2 mission to fetch samples from a ~100-meter near-Earth asteroid named Kamoʻoalewa. Earth-based spectroscopic observations and orbital simulations suggest that Kamoʻoalewa is likely to be a piece of the Moon, ejected during a crater formation. Chinese researchers have identified that comparing samples of this asteroid to the plethora of lunar samples will lend unique insights into our Moon’s origin and evolution.
In order to enable planning for ESA’s future exploration of the Moon’s surface using Argonaut landers and other means, the agency is asking its scientific community to propose and make the case for exploring specific lunar locations or regions which can be considered for mission planning.

- Jatan 🌙

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Moon Monday #226: Blue Origin aims to launch its first two Moon missions by next year—with nearly no NASA payloads

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 26 May 2025 17:29:24 +0530

Illustration of the Blue Moon Mark 1 lander. Image: Blue Origin

Jeff Foust reports that Blue Origin indeed aims to launch its robotic Blue Moon Mark I lander later this year on a New Glenn rocket. The trip to the Moon will take seven days, and the landing site will be somewhere on the Moon’s south pole. The region is known to have water ice deposits based on orbital remote sensing measurements but it’s unclear what payloads the Mark I will carry on this flight, and if any are related to lunar water.

Blue Origin will launch another Mark I lander next year, incorporating lessons based on how the first “Pathfinder” flight performs. It also gives the company another shot at landing on the Moon in the near future should the first Mark I fail.

One payload the Pathfinder Mark I will certainly carry is NASA’s third version of the multi-camera SCALPSS payload. The second SCALPPS, which flew on Firefly’s first Moon lander called Blue Ghost earlier this year, snapped close-up images of the Moon’s surface as the lander’s thruster plumes vigorously kicked up lunar dust, soil, and rocks—collectively called regolith. Collectively, these measurements will help lunar scientists and engineers better understand how rocket plumes blast out lunar regolith and affect the local lunar environment, and thus how to best protect future astronauts, critical hardware, and long-term habitats on the Moon.

Thruster-engine-plume and regolith interactions as seen from two of the six NASA SCALPSS cameras onboard Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander when 12 and 8 meters above the Moon respectively. Note how dust kick up dramatically increased within a small altitude change. Images: NASA / Olivia Tyrrell

NASA is re-flying SCALPPS on a Mark I because unlike smaller landers like Blue Ghost, Mark I will generate high enough trust to allow NASA to gauge engine plume effects at the scale of large crewed (Artemis) landers. That is what allowed NASA to award the payload flight to Blue Origin last year under a $6.1 million CLPS contract without holding a competition. Although NASA did not publicly announce the contract itself at the time.

The only other payload onboard seems to be a small retroreflector for lunar satellite ranging and navigation studies. Note that the Mark I lander has a large payload capacity of 3,000 kilograms. That’s more than the entire fueled mass of smaller landers like Firefly’s Blue Ghost and India’s Chandrayaan 3! And yet NASA hasn’t stated any plans to fly any other scientific instruments on either of the two Mark I flights. Considering that the US has been failing to explore lunar water as the principal goal of Artemis, and that the Mark I’s landing site is the lunar south pole, it would be remiss for NASA to skip flying any lunar water related payloads on the Mark Is as a bare minimum. Whether that be through Artemis, CLPS, or other funding sources does not ultimately matter.

For Blue Origin though, the Mark I is a key technology demonstrator for crewed missions in more ways than flying related NASA instruments. With the two self-funded robotic Mark 1 flights, Blue Origin wants to test and refine critical landing and associated systems before graduating them to the Mark 2 lander, which aims to land astronauts on the Moon for NASA with Artemis V by end of decade. Competitor SpaceX is targeting landing lunar astronauts for NASA with earlier Artemis III and Artemis IV missions through a Lunar Starship. Note that NASA requires crewed landers from both Blue Origin and SpaceX to touchdown within 100 meters of their targeted spots on the Moon’s rocky south pole. This is something the robotic Mark 1 will attempt as a precursor to the crewed Blue Moon. The ability is also precisely what JAXA’s robotic SLIM lander achieved last year.

Relatedly for Artemis V, Blue Origin has revealed that the mission’s “Transporter” vehicle will launch on a single New Glenn rocket. It will be fueled with leftover propellant from multiple New Glenn second stages though. Once fully fueled, it can carry the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to lunar orbit to enable the crewed Blue Moon to touchdown on Luna and return to lunar orbit.

A labeled illustration of the crewed Blue Moon lander. Image: Blue Origin / Labels: Jatan Mehta

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Firefly to carry second UAE lunar rover and more

Lander and orbital elements of the Blue Ghost lunar spacecraft stack. Image: Firefly

Last week I wrote that UAE would not specify which Moon lander would carry the country’s second Rashid rover next year. Later in the week, Firefly and the UAE space agency MBRSC announced that the former’s second Blue Ghost lander part of NASA’s CLPS program will do so. UAE’s near-identical Rashid rover 1 launched in 2023 but it couldn’t operate on the Moon since ispace Japan’s first Moon lander carrying the rover crashed. The Rashid 2 rover will have largely the same science & technology goals. For Firefly and NASA, Blue Ghost 2 carrying the Rashid rover to the Moon would be a milestone in flying actual commercial payloads instead of those funded by the US government or its longtime allies.

Illustration of the Blue Ghost 2 lander and Rashid rover on the Moon’s farside. Image: Firefly

With Blue Ghost 2, Firefly aims to deliver an orbiter and surface payloads to the Moon in 2026. The company will leverage a similar lander design as its successful first CLPS Moon mission but will add an orbital transfer stage called Elytra Dark. The latter will help deliver the 280-kilogram Lunar Pathfinder spacecraft for ESA in lunar orbit. Pathfinder is a stepping stone towards Moonlight, ESA’s upcoming navigation and communications constellation in support of lunar surface missions.

The Blue Ghost lander itself will attempt a touchdown on the Moon’s farside. Once on the surface, it will deploy the NASA-funded LuSEE-Night instrument. It’s a first of its kind, aiming to measure faint but unique radio signals from our Universe’s ‘Dark Age’—a slice of time right before the first stars were born. LuSEE-Night will help us characterize the Moon’s radio emissions for future farside radio telescopes. Firefly has also won an extended $18 million contract from NASA for Elytra Dark to provide communications and radio frequency calibration services for LuSEE-Night.

Blue Ghost 2 will also carry a commercial seismometer from Australia-based Fleet Space Technologies. Once deployed, it will operate by tapping into lander-provided power and communications services—much the same as how the seismometer deployed by India’s Chandrayaan 3 lander operated. Part of the larger global effort to study Moonquakes, SPIDER will offer scientists insights into the physical structure and nature of the local crust and subsurface. It might also provide hints of resources such as water ice, depending on the chosen landing site which is as yet unannounced.

More mission updates

The SLS rocket is seen here heading to the launchpad from its assembly building in March 2022. Image: NASA / Kim Shiflett

The SLS rocket for NASA’s upcoming crewed Artemis II circumlunar mission will also deploy four CubeSats from other countries in high Earth orbit: one each from Germany, South Korea, Argentina, and Saudi Arabia. These will largely perform radiation measurements and some technology demonstrations.
After announcing earlier this month that ispace Japan has taken $35 million more in loan financing, the company has announced an additional $70 million loan from Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank to continue developing its next set of Moon missions. This includes ispace’s US subsidiary’s first CLPS mission for NASA through Draper, which is targeting landing on the Moon’s farside in 2027. The loans also include funding for the next mission, to be conducted by ispace Japan. The development continues to highlight the intersection of CLPS, funding, and science.
Interestingly, ispace also announced indirectly that said first CLPS mission by ispace US through Draper will also carry a rover from ispace Europe.

More Moon

Astrobotic says it has completed the standard but critical set of space environmental tests for their upcoming commercial wireless charging system for hardware operating on the Moon. The offering aims to enable lunar night survival for polar rovers and other such mobile exploratory hardware, ideally by end of decade.
The Planetary Society has launched an online petition to oppose the proposed 47% budget cut for NASA space science and exploration in the coming year. The society will deliver the signed petition to members of the US Congress next month just as they start assessing the proposed cuts to appropriate, revoke or reinstate specific funds for NASA and its programs. Note that NASA’s FY2026 presidential budget request does not allocate any funds or missions to directly find and study water ice deposits on the Moon even though the US has been failing at this central goal of Artemis. Ensuring continued space science funding for NASA would prevent the already bad situation for Artemis science from getting worse. The petition can be signed by non-US citizens too, and so I’ve done the same. Maybe you can too.

- Jatan 🌙

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Why Moon missions need their own Wikipedia and beyond

Jatan Mehta — Fri, 23 May 2025 17:19:06 +0530

Our Moon may be one of the largest satellites in the Solar System but its exploration has been concentrated on select areas. One of these is low lunar orbit, where mapping spacecraft from three countries have been concurrently flying from pole to pole between 50 to 150 kilometers above the Moon’s surface for three years. These are the US’ Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), India’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter, and South Korea’s KPLO spacecraft. The Moon’s gravity being uneven means they operate in select orbital planes to maintain their mapping orbits and avoid crashing into the Moon. But that also means their orbits often overlap, increasing the chances of these orbiters running into each other at high velocities.

The situation has compelled their three space agencies—NASA, ISRO, and KARI—to coordinate and share precise trajectory information of the lunar satellites with each other, and even conduct diversion maneuvers to avoid uncomfortably close passes. Last July at the Secure World Foundation’s Summit for Space Sustainability, a KARI researcher presented how the three agencies are using NASA’s MADCAP software to predict and alert operators of potential close approaches between the orbiters, after which a decision can be taken for either craft to divert.

In October 2021, ISRO commanded the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter to slightly change its orbit to avoid a three-kilometer close approach to NASA’s LRO. Similarly, LRO postponed a maneuver in 2023 to avoid more such close conjunctions. An August 2023 blog post by ISRO specifically on the importance of managing growing lunar traffic mentioned the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter maneuvering to avoid close approaches to KPLO. In turn, KPLO too has performed multiple such maneuvers. These will only grow in number in the coming years as more reconnaissance orbiters become operational amid increasing Moon missions worldwide.

Slide from KARI’s presentation at SWF’s Summit for Space Sustainability in July 2024. Credit: Moon-Jin Jeon of KARI, who leads KPLO mission operations

Enter the Registry

Unfortunately, these largely manual coordination efforts from NASA, ISRO, and KARI can’t scale adequately for future exploration—given that there’s no global lunar traffic management system agreed upon or in place. Even spacecraft briefly passing by lunar orbit on their way to the Moon’s surface can trigger alarms. Last year, KPLO avoided a close approach to Japan’s SLIM spacecraft before the latter’s Moon landing. The decision had to be taken within a day. The risks of cascading accidental collisions within the tight orbital mapping spaces our Moon’s gravity allows is increasing.

“If you announce a launch date, you should publish trajectory information”, says Mehak Sarang, Director of Industry Integration at the Open Lunar Foundation. Sarang has experience working on Moon missions, having last worked at ispace-US, a subsidiary of ispace Japan building a lunar lander with US-based Draper to carry scientific payloads for NASA’s CLPS program.

If all organizations operating at the Moon could securely access trajectory information of others in sufficient detail at a trusted node, it would not only reduce collision risks for everyone but also save on complex operational and analysis costs. It’s to this end that the Open Lunar Foundation is building the Lunar Registry, an accessible platform and database of public as well as appropriately private information on Moon missions worldwide. “Commercial actors could better benefit from sharing trajectory information”, says Sam Jardine, who leads stakeholder engagement for the Lunar Registry.

During the initial scoping of what such a lunar registry needs to account for, Open Lunar learnt that creating the Registry would be more a political challenge than a technical one. To that end, Jardine engaged over 150 government, industry, civil society, and scientific stakeholders last year through one-on-ones and workshops to gather valuable feedback and gauge their interests. This included hosting events on the sidelines of the International Astronautical Congress 2024, and participating in the 2024 UN Conference on Space Law and Policy. A common takeaway was that information sharing is widely considered to be critical for effective governance at the Moon. Stakeholders are keen on a UN-aligned global registry created by an apolitical NGO—since that would invite the least objection globally. That’s why the Open Lunar Registry aims to operate as a non-profit which transparently collects an objective set of mission information.

A page from history

“The reality of space is that it’s very polarized”, says Rachel Williams, Acting Executive Director of Open Lunar. Information flow and exchange about missions navigates complex political and national security blockers like with US export controls. The competitive landscape further discourages information sharing even for mission aspects that aren’t sensitive. To that end, the Registry will encourage and incentivize collecting information that can indeed be shared for the benefit of all.

“Having a third party, neutral, independent organization transparently handling mission information will benefit all actors across safety, cost, and trust,” notes Williams. There’s also precedent in the space industry for this. Shortly after the advent of the Space Age, the UN Registration Convention required countries to provide basic information about objects being launched to space. It helped reduce tensions during the Cold War—especially to avoid misassumptions about rocket launches and their not-always-present military intentions. Said registry continues in operation today, although the UN recognizes challenges with getting sufficient levels of information in the registry as global space activity compounds.

Likewise, the Antarctic Treaty System—though considered imperfect by all involved—has resolved many challenges for decades. The bottomline is that trust enabled by transparency decreases political escalation and conflict. Other than lunar orbit, such transparency will also be needed on the Moon’s south pole, a region of convergence and potential contest for future missions to access water ice and other resources. If the unintended impact on the Moon’s farside in 2022—by what was likely a defunct Chinese spacecraft—had been near the south pole instead during active missions or astronauts in the future, it would’ve triggered major alarms.

A rocket body impacted the Moon’s farside on March 4, 2022, creating a 28-meter long double crater. Image: NASA / LROC / GSFC / ASU

The crescent of trust

Despite the prohibitive Wolf Amendment, NASA recently successfully sought a US Congressional exception to allow US scientists to apply to study valuable Moon samples brought by China’s Chang’e missions to Earth. While we wait for its fruits to bear, two US universities have already gotten selected to study Chang’e 5 samples in their labs with self funding. Such scientifically beneficial, low-risk environments present opportunities to build elements of collaborative trust. It also sets better norms to constrain the depths and divisions of political competition while yielding better trust in future activities—something especially important when building something as complex as a Moonbase. It’s that element of trust building in opportunistic environments that Open Lunar hopes to facilitate with the Lunar Registry.

A panorama from the Chang’e 6 lander on the Moon’s farside, showing one of its legs and the scoop sampling arm near its surface digs. Image: CNSA / CLEP

A successful registry will include private and national missions, the former group especially benefiting from the safety and visibility perks of participating in the Registry. Open Lunar has already tested Registry Prototypes with over 100 users across various organizations, and is gearing up for a public release later this year.

“Our goal is to build trust with the first group of users by making them see the value, which can then lead to a snowball effect,” says Williams. “Due to competition in CLPS and lack of incentive, the market also lacks credible information about potential customers and competitors”, says Sarang. But with a trusted registry, “it could be lucrative to punch yourself in, even if just to find potential customers”.

“It could be a way to incentivize more commercial companies to share their landing site areas if not coordinates,” added Jardine. The core challenge here would be to “nail down the minimum number of core mandated fields,” so that every public mission page in the Registry comes with assured benefits for all while simultaneously allowing the next layer of information to be private as appropriate.

A basic visualization of the Open Lunar Registry’s process flow

Wikipedia for the Moon

Involving space enthusiasts around the world is also the Lunar Registry’s key goal. Community-oriented works the likes of CelesTrak and Jonathan’s Space Reports are well known for providing uniquely useful and reliable information about space missions for public benefit. With the Registry, there’s an opportunity to pool such credible utilities in one place for all things lunar exploration globally. The Registry can thereby enable community verification while also adequately delineating information and its sources as coming from either mission operators or community volunteers.

Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer as well as creator of the aforementioned Jonathan’s Space Reports, is an advisor for the Lunar Registry. McDowell has stressed the importance of multi-stakeholder-reported data verification: “With all registries, traceability is trust. Retaining original information is crucial in building a registry, but allowing a complementary verifiable mechanism is key.” Christine Tiballi, the Lunar Registry Lead says, “We'll need to develop data standards so that we end up with harmonized inputs & outputs in ways that don’t stifle interest from different stakeholders.”

The Registry’s operations will be paired with a multi-stakeholder advisory group, a process known to increase engagement and cooperation through inclusiveness. In fact, the internet’s own open registry stands as an excellent example. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), an international non-profit managing the global domain name system (DNS), has successfully implemented a multi-stakeholder model by having governments, businesses, technical communities, and civil society participate in the decision-making processes.

A Registry that allows space enthusiasts and organizations worldwide to contribute information and review its credibility can help everyone better explore and track past, active, and future Moon missions from across the globe. Wikipedia is perhaps the best demonstration of the power of such collective public knowledge banks. “Having a Wikipedia style community of enthusiastic contributors, curators, and editors would be fantastic”, remarks Jardine.

Looking ahead, the Registry would advance Open Lunar’s own mission to promote cooperative and peaceful exploration of our Moon based on equitable technical and policy building blocks. “It allows us to see and think deeply about interoperability from multiple mission and program perspectives”, notes Sarang.

- Jatan 🌙

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Moon Monday #225: Lots of global lunar mission updates 🌙

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 19 May 2025 20:37:13 +0530

Illustration showing satellite elements of China’s Queqiao lunar navigation and communications constellation. Image: CNSA / CASC

Key news of the month: China has achieved daytime Earth-Moon distance measurement wherein a 1.2-meter telescope reflected an infrared laser off of a small retroreflector on the 61-kilogram Tiandu 1 lunar orbiter. This was the first ever daytime laser distance measurement using an orbiter, accomplished despite massive interference from our Sun. Tiandu 1 was launched alongside Queqiao 2 last year in March. Between this development, other Chinese satellites recently demonstrating automated navigation at the Moon, and the Queqiao 1 & 2 orbiters having enabled humanity’s first two lunar farside missions with Chang’e 4 and Chang’e 6 respectively, China has cemented and further advanced its lead in building a lunar communications and navigation network. The CASC release about the daytime laser-based distance measurements states that the demonstration will “support the argumentation and implementation of major deep-space exploration projects in the future, such as the International Lunar Research Station” (ILRS). The latter is the China-led effort to build and operate a long-term Moonbase.

Notable exploration updates from GLEX 2025

The IAF organized the latest international Global Space Exploration Conference (GLEX) in New Delhi, India this month, which ISRO hosted. I attended as well as spoke at the conference. Below are notable updates of wider interest from GLEX—which saw active participation from over a dozen national space agencies, including their heads & program leads, astronauts, technical mission leads, space scientists, etc.

China formally welcomed India to cooperate on Moon missions. Wu Weiren, the Chief Designer of China’s extremely successful Chang’e lunar exploration program as well as the Director General of China’s Deep Space Exploration Laboratory (DSEL), said during a panel of various national space agency heads that China “especially welcomes India to participate in cooperating and collaborating on the ILRS” Moonbase project. Considering the not-so-great relations between China and India, and their mutual space activities being nearly nil, China’s invitation can be interpreted to be likely a formality. Nevertheless, it’s good to have the invitation explicitly said than not. During the same panel, Weiren also stated:

The Moon belongs to all human beings. Therefore we welcome all scientists in the world to participate into the ILRS. [...] We welcome international cooperation on our deep space exploration missions. Every country can apply.

Zhongmin Wang, Director of International Cooperation at DSEL, reiterated and expanded on those intentions during his presentation on China’s lunar and deep space exploration missions. As China has publicly stated before, such cooperation and collaboration can be on multiple levels: from flying payloads to conducting joint scientific studies to contributing spacecraft systems and subsystems and so on.

A graphic showing UAE’s Rashid rover 2 and its instruments. Image: MBRSC

Salem Al Marri, Director General of UAE’s space agency MBRSC, said during another panel of space agency leads that the country’s second Rashid lunar rover will launch next year. However, there continues to be no word from the UAE on which lander will carry the rover to the Moon. Some unvetted sources indicate it might be China’s Chang’e 7 lander that does so. UAE’s near-identical Rashid rover 1 launched in 2023 couldn’t operate on the Moon since ispace Japan’s first Moon lander carrying the rover crashed. On the same GLEX panel as Al Marri was on, Arif Karabeyoğlu of the Turkish space agency said that the country’s first lunar mission, an orbiter, is being targeted for launch in late 2026 or early 2027. It will use an indigenous propulsion system, which itself will gain space heritage later this year on an Earth orbiter. He added:

“The Moon is so close it’s hard to ignore.”

ISRO and ESA are enhancing their cooperation in space exploration. For the Moon in particular, the agencies are discussing “alignment on payloads and robotic scientific missions”. Nigar Shaji, Associate Director of ISRO’s key satellite integration and testing center URSC, told during her GLEX panel that ISRO is open to flying ESA payloads on India’s upcoming lunar missions.
- Related: ESA and JAXA move ahead on lunar collaborations
Notably, NASA was the only major space agency missing at GLEX due to the Trump administration’s policies limiting use of federal budgets for travel, which have curbed the space agency’s representation at multiple national and international forums. Anjali Marar reports that anonymous sources from GLEX’s organizing committee said that at least a dozen NASA officials were expected to attend GLEX but the same did not materialize.

On a personal note, I had fun moderating a rather stellar panel at GLEX on current themes and challenges in global Moon exploration. Watch the video. 🌙

Yours truly speaking at GLEX 2025.

Many thanks to Catalyx Space and Gurbir Singh for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource for free and without ads, support my independent writing. 🌙

Artemis and CLPS updates

NASA’s VIPER lunar rover after passing thermal vacuum testing. Image: Anthony Colaprete / NASA

Marcia Smith reports that NASA is trying to launch the crewed Artemis II Moon mission in February 2026. In the meanwhile, NASA announced that the Artemis II launch will also carry a CubeSat from Saudi Arabia in addition to the previously announced ones from Germany and South Korea.
NASA’s VIPER rover cannot catch a break. Originally meant to reveal the first set of hard facts about water ice deposits on the Moon’s south pole, NASA instead questionably cancelled VIPER’s flight as part of the agency’s CLPS program last year citing cost challenges. The agency then scrambled to find a private company that will fly and operate the rover at its own cost, an approach many argued decidedly fails at VIPER’s original goal because asking a commercial entity to fulfill the mission’s scientific objectives at its own cost is a non-starter. NASA seems to have come to the same conclusion, now saying that after evaluating the proposals submitted by private companies, the agency deems none to be acceptable. NASA added that it needs to re-structure the solicitation such that it elicits stronger proposals that hopefully stay closer to VIPER’s original science goals. In that context, ditching VIPER’s purely private flight is a good decision but at the same time it’s costing the agency even more delays in knowing the ground truth about lunar water—which is critical in planning sustainable exploration of our Moon but is also what the US has been failing at for years now.
In March, Intuitive Machines’ second CLPS lander for NASA called Athena hard landed on the Moon’s south pole and came to rest on its side, which led to the mission being unsuccessful across all of NASA’s primary goals related to learning about local water ice. Following a failure analysis, Intuitive says that other than the non-working laser altimeter leaving the lander half-blind about its distance from the lunar surface, Athena hard-landed because its image-based crater-and-feature recognition system was not adequately trained. It relied on images taken from orbit by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which doesn’t accurately represent how those craters look up close at increasingly lower altitudes. However, one should also note here that the holistic nature of the lunar environment in and around the targeted landing site is usually accounted for in the planning of a Moon mission and its contingency scenarios. In any case, Intuitive says it will fix these and other issues identified during the mission failure analysis while preparing its third CLPS mission for NASA targeting launch next year.
Zeno Power has raised $50 million in Series B funding, a major chunk of which will go towards developing and demonstrating the company’s nuclear electric power system on the Moon by 2027. In 2023, NASA funded eight advanced exploration technologies which could contribute towards sustained robotic and crewed exploration of our Moon. As part of it, NASA awarded $15 million to a Zeno-led team for demonstrating nuclear electrical power on the Moon. Specifically, the team aims to demonstrate a radioisotope generator which uses a Stirling engine instead of traditional thermocouples to convert radioactive heat into electrical power. The system will be based on the Americium-241 isotope, which is more readily available than the conventionally used Plutonium-238.
On May 15, Norway became the 55th country and 22nd European nation to sign the US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration.

Mission updates from ispace

Illustration of the APEX 1.0 lunar lander design by ispace US. Image: ispace

ispace Japan’s second Moon lander RESILIENCE successfully entered lunar orbit on May 7 with a roughly nine-minute main engine burn. The lander launched in January on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, and then followed a multi-month low energy trajectory to the Moon. ispace is targeting June 5 as the landing date for RESILIENCE.
ispace Japan’s US subsidiary announced that its first CLPS mission for NASA through Draper targeting landing on the Moon’s farside will now launch in 2027 instead of 2026 due to an engine swap on the mission’s APEX lander and changes associated with it.
Relatedly, ispace Japan has taken $35 million more in loan financing to continue developing said ispace US’ CLPS lander as well as the next mission from ispace Japan. Earlier this year, ispace secured a $10 million loan from Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank to the same ends. This development continues to highlight the intersection of CLPS, funding, and science.

More Moon

Alexandra Witze reports that even more NASA-related lunar and planetary science community documents online have been taken down, specifically from websites organized by the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) and its NASA-backed parent organization called the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) who cite an executive order from US President Donald Trump as the reason for doing so. This follows critical scientific documents going missing from another NASA-backed community website since over three months now. NASA has also removed inclusive language from the leading webpage of its Artemis program.
I wrote the following article for the Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor) about the Lunar Registry they’re building: Moon missions need their own Wikipedia and beyond

- Jatan 🌙

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Moon Monday #224: A curious find from Chandrayaan 3, Artemis updates, and more

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 05 May 2025 15:21:58 +0530

Two announcements before we begin:

I’m honored to be moderating a fantastic panel on modern themes in global lunar exploration at the international Global Space Exploration Conference (GLEX) on Friday, May 9. If you’re attending GLEX in New Delhi, join us for the session. And, if you’re in India’s space hub Bangalore on Monday, May 12, I’m speaking at the Nehru Planetarium about recent scientific results from India’s Chandrayaan 2 and 3 missions as part of Galaxy Forum India. 🚀
Moon Monday will be off the coming Monday since I’m attending as well as speaking at these two back-to-back conferences in two cities. Naturally, May 19’s Moon Monday will cover all major global lunar exploration updates between now and then so you won’t miss anything. I will also share any notable updates from said conferences that maybe of wider interest. 🌗

India’s Chandrayaan 3 rover may or may not have stumbled upon the Moon’s mantle material

Top left: Locations of samples collected by previous nearside Moon missions. The Chandrayaan 3 landing site marked down south lies far from these sites, which are either within or close enough to the Procellarum KREEP Terrane region (red dashed outline)—thus containing more heat-producing and radioactive elements and therefore representing a distinct lunar interior source than for the rest of the Moon; Bottom left: The co-added X-ray spectrum from all 23 lunar surface soil and rock measurements by the Chandrayaan 3 rover; Right: An artist’s concept of our Moon shortly after its formation, with a magma ocean and a newly forming rocky crust. Images: Rishitosh Sinha, et al. / Santosh Vadawale, et al. / NASA Goddard

Scientists analyzing the elemental composition of our Moon’s southern high-latitude surface as measured by ISRO’s Chandrayaan 3 rover have concluded that the excess sulfur detected in the landing site’s soil and rocks compared to other regions likely originated in the Moon’s mantle. After rejecting or accommodating other mechanisms known to enhance sulfur in the lunar soil, the authors of the paper published in Nature surmise that the majority of these sulfur-enhanced materials would’ve likely gotten deposited in the Chandrayaan 3 landing region by the massive South-Pole Aitken (SPA) basin impact roughly 200 million years after our Moon’s formation. The SPA’s impactor is thought to have excavated material from more than 100 kilometers below the Moon’s surface, altering the evolution of our Moon’s farside and south pole.

Note that unlike media reports calling the Chandrayaan 3 rover’s curious finds as definitively being material from the Moon’s mantle, it’s not a certainty. Even if the materials may have originated from the lunar interior, they might be from the lower crust instead of the mantle, for example. We need direct sample collection and analysis to confirm or constrain their origin. Either way, it’s important to remember that ISRO optimized the Chandrayaan 3 rover’s traverse path heavily for engineering safety rather than scientific return, more so than your typical tradeoff in a planetary science mission due it being India’s first extraterrestrial rover. Furthermore, having faced more roving difficulties than expected due to the high-latitude lunar environment and uneven local topography, the rover moved only about 100 meters from the lander, which is shorter than the originally expected drive of 300–400 meters. There’s no doubt that more elemental measurements from distinct areas in the landing region would’ve increased Chandrayaan 3’s scientific oomph. With India’s lunar landing and roving technological foundations set though, measurements from the upcoming complex and capable Chandrayaan 4 and Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX missions should be very exciting from a scientific standpoint.

In any case, finding the sulfur-enhanced materials certainly add the Chandrayaan 3 landing region to the list of potential mantle sampling locations on the Moon, expanding said scope. The findings are also important in another way as explained in the paper:

Prior to ISRO’s Chandrayaan-3 mission, there were no in-situ volatile abundance measurements from the lunar southern high-latitude highlands. Consequently, our understanding of the variations in the concentrations of volatiles across the lunar surface is constrained by the limited scope of measurements obtained primarily from lunar samples collected from equatorial regions. This points to a substantial gap in our understanding of the mechanisms governing enrichment-depletion of volatiles such as sodium (Na), potassium (K) and sulfur (S) on the Moon.

Relatedly, the first geological map of Chandrayaan 3’s landing region was published recently. It revealed the region to be 3.7 billion years old, and that it has been significantly altered since its formation by subsequent crater impacts and their material ejections. Another paper posited specifically that Chandrayaan 3’s landing site lies atop an ancient crater spanning about 160 kilometers across and being up to 4.4 kilometers deep. This inference is primarily based on ejecta trails around the landing site as imaged by the mission’s Pragyan rover coupled with high-resolution views of the larger region from the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter.

A related study of Chang’e 6 Moon samples published in Nature recently added to the long march of notable scientific results from the Chinese mission and continued anchoring events in our Moon’s evolution. This study involved analyzing 578 particles weighing a total of 5 grams. It revealed for the first time that the Moon’s farside mantle contains less water than within the nearside, adding to the debate on the topic by lending firm and unique credence to the hypothesis that our Moon indeed lost most of its water during its fiery formation. CASC’s news release on the study noted how Francis McCubbin, NASA’s Astromaterials Curator and a peer reviewer of the paper, called the work “a landmark study on the water abundance of the lunar farside.”

Locations of samples collected by nearside Moon missions are both farther away and geologically distinct from the Chang’e 6 landing site inside the SPA basin on the Moon’s farside. The sizes of outer circles around location dots reflect the estimated maximum water abundance in the mantle sources beneath the sampled sites. The inset image shows how measurements of farside Chang’e 6 samples indicate lower mantle water abundance than the nearside Apollo, Luna, and Chang’e 5 ones. Images: Yangtin Lin, et al.

Many thanks to Open Lunar Foundation and Astrolab for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource for free and without ads, support my independent writing. 🌙

Artemis updates

The Orion capsule for the crewed Artemis II Moon mission being transported. Image: NASA / Kim Shiflett

On May 2, the Trump administration released its Presidential budget request for NASA for FY 2026, proposing a historic ~25% cut to NASA’s budget but which continues support for crewed Artemis II and Artemis III missions as planned so as to try landing on the Moon before China attempts the same by 2030. Notably, the budget request proposes cancelling the “grossly expensive” SLS rocket and Orion crew capsule from Artemis IV onward in favor of as-yet-unspecified commercial alternatives. It also proposes canceling the NASA-led international Gateway lunar orbital habitat, suggesting that its already-developed elements by the US and its international partners be repurposed for other [unspecified] missions. The budget request essentially wants to redirect existing funds from the International Space Station and elements of Artemis that are being proposed for cancellation towards commercial Moon and Mars missions instead. The US Congress will review these proposals in the coming months and will need to approve them to become reality.

These updates fall in line with the recent insistence by Jared Isaacman, Trump’s nominee for the NASA Administrator position, that the US should pursue the Moon and Mars in parallel. Notably, NASA’s FY2026 presidential budget request does not allocate any funds or missions to directly find and study lunar water even though the US has been failing at this central goal of Artemis.

In the meanwhile, preparations continue to fly the four Artemis II astronauts around the Moon and back next year. Technicians working at NASA completed integrating the SLS rocket’s upper stage atop the core stage on May 1. On March 23, technicians had joined the twin solid rocket boosters to either side of the SLS’s core stage. Also on May 1, Lockheed Martin delivered the mission’s Orion crew capsule to NASA for further processing and assembly.

As a mildly interesting aside, Stephen Clark reports that NASA swapped one of the four core stage engines on the Artemis II SLS rocket after discovering a hydraulic leak in the engine’s oxidizer valve actuator. Another aside: Artemis II will also fly a CubeSat each from Germany and South Korea.

More mission updates

A rendering of the Griffin lander on the Moon. Image: Astrobotic

By flying lunar sensors and associated computing units on a helicopter as well as the Xodiac vertical-takeoff vertical-landing rocket system over a simulated lunar terrain, Astrobotic completed testing their lunar navigation and guidance systems that will fly to the Moon on the company’s upcoming Griffin lander as part of NASA’s CLPS program. The large lander’s primary payload will be the FLIP rover by Astrolab (a Moon Monday sponsor), which got manifested recently after NASA decided not to fly the VIPER rover aboard Griffin.
TASS reports that as part of a meeting of the space agency heads of BRICS countries, the Roscosmos Chief Dmitry Bakanov stated that Russia’s lunar exploration plans involve launching the polar reconnaissance orbiters of Luna 26 and Luna 29 respectively as well as the Moon landers of Luna 27, 28 and 30. Bakanov added that Russia plans on contributing an electric power station to the China-led ILRS Moonbase project. Luna 26’s primary goal after launching circa 2027 is to map our Moon’s surface in multiple wavelengths at high resolutions from altitudes as low as 50 to 80 kilometers. This will particularly help scientists better grasp the distribution of water ice on the Moon’s poles, which is useful data to help plan the China-led ILRS Moonbase project with Russia as a member. Another major goal of Luna 26 is to measure and characterize the radiation and plasma environment around the Moon. The list of Luna 26’s instruments is given below.

Slide presented at the 2024 Galaxy Forum, China. Slide credit: Andrei Sadovski / IKI / RAS

ispace has been selected as part of Japan’s 1-trillion yen “Space Strategy Fund” initiative to deploy a lunar orbiter which will use a terahertz wave sensor system to locate and map water ice deposits on the Moon’s poles. Data from this orbiter will be analyzed in tandem with direct surface and subsurface measurements made by the upcoming Indo-Japanese LUPEX rover mission.

- Jatan 🌙

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Indian Space Progress #27: Three months of mission updates, and fixing ISRO’s monthly summaries

Jatan Mehta — Thu, 01 May 2025 17:51:38 +0530

ISRO has been publishing monthly summaries of the varied activities and programs of India’s Department of Space (DOS) for years. Lately though, there have been consistent delays in publishing them by a month or two, and sometimes even more. The summaries have been trimmed too, now conveying less than half the information they once did whereas India is doing more in space than ever before across an increasing number of domains. As it is ISRO doesn’t invest as much in comprehensive public communications via its website and social channels like ESA, NASA or JAXA do. With the last published summary being for February, the final leg of finer, official, public information about India’s space missions is becoming inaccessible for the taxpayers as well as global space enthusiasts.

It’s partly due to such issues that I started writing monthly Indian Space Progress reports over two years ago, compiling and contextualizing our space activities while reflecting on trajectories of key developments. To that end, with this 27th edition, I aim to fill another gap and provide a contextualized overview of the last three months in Indian space. It’s organized by section, and touts links to everything to learn more. If you appreciate my efforts, kindly support as an individual or organization to keep these reports going. 🚀

Mission updates

Pre-launch photo and renders of the SPADEX satellites. ISRO designed the satellites such that either could act as the chaser and the other as target for docking. Images: ISRO

On April 20, ISRO successfully docked the twin SPADEX (space docking experiment) satellites for the second time, this time with better precision and control while also demonstrating power transfer between the satellites unlike the last time. ISRO is using the $14 million mission—sans the launch cost—and its two upcoming namesake successors as practice before the agency can launch and execute the complex Chandrayaan 4 spacecraft stack meant to bring samples from the Moon. Chandrayaan 4 will feature multiple large robotic modules that dock remotely in Earth as well as lunar orbit, the latter being a feat only China has achieved so far with its Chang’e 5 and Chang’e 6 sample return missions. SPADEX is also reducing risk for the upcoming set of Gaganyaan human spaceflights—especially so for two end-of-decade planned cargo flights, one to the International Space Station and one to India’s first space station module. The first SPADEX mission will continue docking and undocking attempts under varied conditions to maximize learning value and help master this technology key to many ambitions in space.
After ISRO’s latest navigation satellite NVS-02 failed earlier this year, leaving India’s NavIC navigation constellation of a handful of satellites operating below expected performance levels, ISRO’s Chief V. Narayanan told the media that “we will be raising the [NVS-02 satellite’s] orbit using the thrusters with the available propellant. The satellite’s condition is healthy.” In a later interview with Chethan Kumar of the Times of India, the ISRO Chief went back on that plan. As such, the $35 million NVS-02 satellite–without the launch cost—will unfortunately certainly not reach its final inclined geosynchronous orbit (IGSO), leaving its utility limited to testing a handful of new technologies onboard. It’s a setback for the NavIC program.

An Indian to the ISS

The Ax-4 Mission crew flying to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. Images: Axiom Space

Having completed planned astronaut training, India’s Shubhanshu Shukla will fly to the International Space Station (ISS) on May 29 through the Ax-4 Axiom Space mission aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule as Mission Pilot. As part of the 14-day mission arranged under a NASA-ISRO partnership, ISRO and Shukla will conduct seven out of sixty experiments aboard Ax-4. As part of a broader ISRO-ESA agreement, Indian institutes will conduct two joint microgravity experiments with ESA. Chethan Kumar reported the ISS mission’s cost to ISRO being at least $68 million. ISRO seeks to leverage this experience into India’s ambition to indigenously send humans to Earth orbit. The next major milestone to enable that end is Gaganyaan G1, the first of three uncrewed test flights required to be successful before ISRO deems all systems being safe enough to launch astronauts. ISRO is targeting G1’s launch later this year although timelines have been uncertain until now.
Chethan Kumar made a compelling case for the Indian government and ISRO to let astronaut elects engage with the public instead of barring them from the same.
In the meanwhile, ISRO continues testing Gaganyaan crew capsule parachutes on rail sleds, with the latest test simulating simultaneous firing of two drogue chutes in a way that mimics their deployment during the steepest atmospheric descent expected of the crew capsule.

Continuing Chandrayaan

Illustration of the Chandrayaan 3 lander and orbiter stack in lunar orbit. Image: ISRO

India approved the joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX mission to drill and analyze water ice on the Moon. I’ve collated, contextualized, and linked to every mission specific we know of. I also explain how Chandrayaan 5 LUPEX will be a giant leap for ISRO and JAXA, and how it can provide NASA with data critical for Artemis planning:

The Chandrayaan 2 orbiter has helped produce a galore of lunar science results recently.
Chandrayaan 3’s thermal probe experiment will benefit future missions eyeing lunar water
On April 16, ISRO gathered about 50 scientists from across India to deliberate on and help determine next steps for storage and scientific studies of lunar samples to be brought to Earth by India’s upcoming Chandrayaan 4 mission.

Many thanks to the Takshashila Institution, PierSight and Gurbir Singh for sponsoring this month’s Indian Space Progress edition. If you too appreciate my efforts to capture true trajectories of Indian space, support my independent writing. 🚀

Private and commercial space updates

Test fire of the third stage solid rocket motor of the Vikram-I launch vehicle. Image: Skyroot

Hyderabad-based Skyroot test fired the third and fourth stage engines of its upcoming Vikram-I rocket targeted for an orbital test launch sometime next year. The company also tested actuators of Vikram-I’s first stage engine nozzle. Other recent Vikram-I milestones include proof pressure testing all three stages of Vikram-I, flight qualifying the Raman-I engine which will provide roll attitude control, and test firing the rocket’s second stage motor. Unfortunately, despite these advances, Skyroot and its Indian competitor Agnikul face an uphill battle to survive and be profitable this decade, facing competition from ISRO’s own nimble SSLV rocket. A lot will ride on the first orbital demonstration going well for Skyroot.
The Indian government through IN-SPACe has launched a ~$57 million “Technology Adoption Fund” to encourage the private sector to develop and manufacture space components that can help India reduce its reliance on foreign imports while commercializing them. These funds will be on a co-investment basis. The move follows a separate pool of $120 million in venture capital funding that the Indian government announced last year, which industry experts are cautiously optimistic about.
After conducting their first orbital demonstration of edge-computing-based smart Earth imaging last year, Bengaluru- and Cupertino-based SkyServe recently tested NASA JPL’s AI models in space through their software platform on a partner satellite.
Bengaluru-based Bellatrix Aerospace is creating a US subsidiary to better position the sales of their green propulsion systems. So far, the company has tested several small demonstrators in space.
HEX20 launched the “Nila” demonstrator CubeSat on March 15.
Kolkata-based Sisir Radar raised $1.5 million in seed funding to develop and launch the world’s highest resolution L-band SAR satellite later this decade.

More rocket tech investments from ISRO

Hot test of India’s upcoming semi-cryogenic engine Power Head Test Article, comprising all systems except the thrust chamber. Image: ISRO

Producing rocket engines and stages involves complex pipelines. ISRO has continued investments in optimizing the performance and production of parts of its family of rockets, with this year seeing some notable advances.

Over a year later than expected, ISRO has finally made headway into testing its upcoming semi-cryogenic kerolox engine. Many more milestones remain before ISRO can integrate the engine into the Launch Vehicle Mark III (LVM3), India’s most powerful rocket. The engine will increase LVM3’s mass to GTO orbit lifting capacity from ~4,000 kilograms to ~5,000.
In the meanwhile, ISRO is increasing the delivery rate of its upper stage cryogenic engines and stages for operational missions of LVM3. This is part of the agency’s efforts to increase the production capacity of the rocket from the currently two a year to four and then six. Moreover, with successful ignition trials, ISRO is also progressing on having engine restart capability on LVM3’s upper stage, which will allow more complex satellite deployments.
Relatedly, the recently-approved heavy-lift NGLV rocket—which will succeed the LVM3 next decade—will also have engine restart capabilities. This will the case for its booster for returning to Earth for launch reuse, and so for its upper stages to perform complex orbital maneuvers and deployments.
Efforts continue to approach near-100% self-sufficiency in India’s building of its rockets, with the latest addition and modernization coming in the form of a 32-bit microprocessor.
Solid rocket motors are a staple element across ISRO’s entire rocket family. ISRO’s pace of producing them is also getting a boost thanks to the realization and operational availability of the world’s largest solid propellent mixer.
ISRO successfully fired its 300-millinewton Xenon-based electric plasma propulsion system for a long duration to qualify it for use on an upcoming test satellite. These engines will save mass on heavy geostationary satellites, allowing increase in performance of their other systems like communications. Electric propulsion also has applications for deep space planetary exploration as was utilized by NASA’s Dawn mission to explore the asteroid belt.
ISRO inaugurated a modern landing gear facility at its Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) campus to comprehensively test and qualify landing legs and associated systems for its upcoming reusable spaceplane.

ISRO’s spaceplane test vehicle called RLV-TD autonomously landing on a runway. Image: ISRO

More Indian space

Former ISRO Chief K. Kasturirangan passed away on April 25. His numerous contributions to India’s space program span astrophysics, Earth observation and communications satellites, operationalization of the PSLV rocket, the first GLSV flight test, and laying the foundations for India’s first planetary mission and space telescope with Chandrayaan 1 and AstroSat respectively.
India’s newest space-based telescopes Aditya-L1 and XPoSat continue observing solar explosions and cosmic bursts respectively. It was in January that ISRO released the first datasets from Aditya-L1’s observations at the agency’s ISSDC and PRADAN portals. XPoSat data is not available the same way yet but will come online later this year on its ISSDC page.
Related: ISRO’s plan to study Venus alongside NASA and ESA
Cool new space projects approved while budgets stay the same..

- Jatan 🌙

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Moon Monday #223: International researchers to study Chang’e lunar samples, including US ones but without NASA funding

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 18:08:23 +0530

I’m delighted to share that one of my favorite space outlets The Orbital Index is continuing to be a sponsor of my Moon Monday blog+newsletter for the fourth year in a row! 🚀

Not sponsored: Other than the crisp & curated technical space overviews that the Orbital Index dispatches every week, I particularly love how Andrew, Ben and Sarajane have recently published birds-eye-views of space activities in the under-covered regions of Africa, South America, and South East Asia. If you follow only the popular western space media outlets and “influencers”, your view of the global space industry is guaranteed to be wrong by light years. But with outlets like Moon Monday and the Orbital Index striving to cover truly global updates, it’s possible to elevate what you’re tuned into. 🛰️

China announced selecting proposals from seven international universities to study unique Moon samples brought to Earth by CNSA’s Chang’e 5 mission in 2020. So far Chinese researchers have had first, exclusive access to the samples—a standard followed by most organizations worldwide for their missions or telescopes. The researchers have already produced several notable science results. To briefly summarize a review paper to that end:

Chang’e 5 samples have helped scientists determine truer ages of lunar features, refine the nature of impacts over the last two billion years in the inner Solar System, and shed light on young lunar volcanism while also finding 120-million-year young volcanic beads—which collectively opened up more enigmas about the Moon’s interior and its evolution.

It was in late 2023 that China opened up sample research applications to foreign scientists. The process has taken longer than expected but the international researchers whose proposals have been finally selected are from universities in the UK, Japan, France, Germany, Pakistan, and the US. The UK’s Open University (OU) is thrilled with its selection and eager to do science:

The Chang’e 5 samples will be analyzed using the OU’s state-of-the-art laboratories located on its Milton Keynes campus, where Professor Mahesh Anand and his team will carry out their research. The loan agreement is for a year, and during that time, the OU team is planning to determine the amount and isotopic composition of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and noble gases in Chang’e 5 samples, results from which will be used to evaluate the giant-impact origin of the Moon and develop new insights into the history of volatiles such as carbon and nitrogen in the Earth-Moon system.

The proposal selections of two US universities—Brown and Stony Brook—are notable as well albeit for an underwhelming reason not tied to the universities themselves. Recall that in late 2023, NASA secured a US Congressional exception for researchers funded by the US government to be able to apply to study Chang’e samples despite the prohibitive Wolf Amendment. US scientists then applied for the same last April, including a proposal by lunar geochemist and Apollo sample curator Ryan Zeigler. But as Leonard David reports on his blog Inside Outer Space, the selections of Brown and Stony Brook are not a result of NASA’s efforts:

Timothy Glotch is a professor of geosciences at Stony Brook University in New York. He told Inside Outer Space that NASA and CNSA were unable to come to terms on the loan agreement for the Chang’e 5 samples. “As a result, due to the Wolf amendment, I am not able to use any NASA funds to carry out the work my team and I proposed to do on the Chang’e 5 samples,” Glotch said. “However, the Stony Brook University administration has provided me with internal funds for travel and to conduct our proposed analyses, which is exciting.” Glotch added that the Stony Brook contracts office still has to sign off on the loan agreement, and has been in touch with the CNSA representative about this.

The US and China had been taking long to finalize terms for US researchers to access Chang’e 5 samples after NASA got the aforementioned Congressional exception. And so it would seem that the desired deal hasn’t gone through—whatever it was. For US researchers, this is not an ideal outcome because it would likely also restrict or minimize access to the even more valuable Chang’e 6 samples, which CNSA brought from our Moon’s enigmatic farside last year. 🌗

In the meanwhile, another study of Chang’e 6 lunar samples was published in Nature recently, adding to the long march of notable scientific results from the mission which have been anchoring events in our Moon’s evolution. The latest study involved analyzing 578 particles weighing a total of 5 grams. It revealed for the first time that the Moon’s farside mantle contains less water than within the nearside, adding to the debate on the topic by lending firm and unique credence to the hypothesis that our Moon indeed lost most of its water during its fiery formation. CASC’s news release on the study noted how Francis McCubbin, NASA’s Astromaterials Curator and a peer reviewer of the paper, called the work “a landmark study on the water abundance of the lunar far side.”

Catalyzing the international long march to Luna

Launch of the Chang’e 6 sample return Moon mission by a Long March 5 rocket. The launch attracted hundreds of thousands of excited spectators at and around the coastal Wenchang Space Launch Center. Images: CNSA / Xinhua

CNSA announced even more international payloads that will be onboard their upcoming Chang’e 8 mission to explore the Moon’s south pole for water ice and other resources. Other than the previously known payloads, the new ones comprise:

a radio astronomy array from South Africa and Peru
a retroreflector from Italy
Russia’s lunar environmental radiation and charged dust monitors
a hyperspectral mineral mapping camera from Egypt and Bahrain, and
a “lunar potential monitor” from Iran

For many of these countries, it’s their first Moon mission, which is great. The currently targeted landing site for Chang’e 8 is in the Mons Mouton region at roughly 85°S.

CNSA also announced that 17 countries & international organizations as well as over 50 international institutions have joined the China-led International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) Moonbase project. Between April 24 to May 5, China is hosting an ILRS Developers’ Conference as well as the second lunar sample research symposium.

Overall, these developments of international researchers studying Chang’e samples, numerous foreign payloads flying on Chang’e 8, and sufficient global interest in ILRS are clear signs that China’s approach to scientific cooperation and collaboration at the Moon is working well.

Many thanks to The Orbital Index and Arun Raghavan for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource for free and without ads, support my independent writing. 🌙

More mission updates

ispace Japan’s second Moon lander, named RESILIENCE, at JAXA’s Tsukuba Space Center before launch. Also seen integrated into the lander is ispace’s first rover TENACIOUS. Image: ispace

With a successful engine burn on April 24, ispace Japan’s second Moon lander RESILIENCE continues to be on its multi-month low energy trajectory to the Moon. RESILIENCE will target entering lunar orbit on May 7. Originally launched on January 15, ispace is targeting June 6–8 as the landing date(s) for RESILIENCE.
On April 16, ISRO gathered about 50 scientists from across India to deliberate on and help determine next steps for storage and scientific studies of lunar samples to be brought by India’s upcoming Chandrayaan 4 mission.
Following US DARPA’s selection of 14 companies over a year ago to conduct lunar infrastructure studies with a focus on surface access technologies, the organization is now seeking proposals for a small orbiter that would hunt for substantial water ice hosting locations on the Moon’s south pole by mapping areas from as low as 10 kilometer altitudes. This is similar to Advanced Space’s SLALOM concept. Per DARPA’s solicitation milestones, such a spacecraft is not intended to fly until at least three years though, and its funding allocation is as yet unknown. If and when it does fly, it would finally allow the US to stop failing to meaningfully exploring lunar water as the central theme of Artemis.

More Moon

Building on measurements made during Firefly’s Moon landing, NASA continues upping its efforts to understand exactly how spacecraft rocket engine plumes blow off lunar soil and rocks to inform future mission safety planning. The agency’s latest investment comes from its Langley center:

We’re bringing back the capability to characterize the effects of rocket engines interacting with the lunar surface through ground testing in a large vacuum chamber—last done in this facility for the Apollo and Viking programs. The landers going to the Moon through Artemis are much larger and more powerful, so we need new data to understand the complex physics of landing and ascent. We’ll use the hybrid motor in the second phase of testing to capture data with conditions closely simulating those from a real rocket engine. Our research will reduce risk to the crew, lander, payloads, and surface assets.

The FLEXhab astronaut habitat module outside ESA’s Moon-simulating LUNA hall. Image: DLR / ESA

A simulated habitat module now adjoins ESA’s recently operationalized Moon-simulating LUNA facility to better test complex mission scenarios where humans and robots are interacting in varied ways across prolonged periods.
China continues to show a keen interest in engaging and inspiring the general public on lunar exploration. The Shanghai World Expo Exhibition and Convention Center is hosting a 10-day space exhibit for the public, including showcasing Chang’e 5 and 6 samples. The National Museum of China in Beijing is currently hosting a two-month exhibit on the extremely successful Chang’e lunar exploration program, with sample displays here as well. Last year, China showcased Chang’e 5 samples at the Beijing Planetarium. Moreover, China evaluated over 9,000 entries from the public to then announce in February the names of the spacesuit and rover to be used on crewed Moon landing missions as being Wangyu and Tansuo respectively. Wangyu means “gazing into the cosmos” and Tansuo means “to explore the unknown”.

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Moon Monday #222: How China navigated failure to nail down lunar navigation success

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 17:55:27 +0530

I’m thrilled to welcome Catalyx Space as the latest sponsor of my Moon Monday blog+newsletter. 🌗

Having raised $1.7 million in pre-seed funding, Catalyx is building fully integrated autonomous labs and re-entry capsules for microgravity and hypersonic sci-tech studies. The company is hiring for multiple positions. 🚀

Top left: Illustration of the attached DRO-A and DRO-B small lunar satellites; Bottom left: A schematic diagram of DRO-A, DRO-B, and Earthbound DRO-L spacecraft testing laser-based navigation between Earth and the Moon; Right: DRO-A and DRO-B as imaged by the other spacecraft after entering lunar orbit showing their bent solar panels. Images: CAS / CSU / Journal of Deep Space Exploration / SCMP

Qiu Chenhui of China Youth Daily reports based on an April 15 presentation by a Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) researcher Zhang Hao on how the latter’s team managed to put the twin DRO-A and DRO-B spacecraft into their intended lunar distant retrograde orbits (DRO) last year despite a failure of the upper stage of their launch vehicle Long March 2C.

The upper stage deployed the attached DRO-A-B craft with a high spin rate of once every 1.8 seconds, which bent and damaged their solar panels. While the satellite operators quickly stabilized the craft and figured out optimal dynamic solar panel orientations to stay power positive, the anomalous launch had also left the small satellites much more distant from the Moon than intended. Within days, the team took a key decision to not separate the twin spacecraft and to alternately use either craft’s engines to perform precisely timed orbital maneuvers which conserve and balance fuel availability. It worked. Combined with a fuel-efficient, low energy trajectory to the Moon generated as contingency, the still attached DRO-A-B craft entered lunar orbit in August 2024. The two craft separated from each other shortly after.

It was only days later that DRO-A and DRO-B fulfilled their primary mission objective: establish a laser-based navigation, timing, and communications link between the DRO craft at the Moon and the Earth-orbiting DRO-L satellite. Since then, the three craft have been able to track each other and navigate autonomously instead of relying heavily on or choking terrestrial ground stations.

This is a notable world first. And with it, not only did China avoid a mission failure but it cemented its lead in building a lunar communications and navigation network. The NASA-funded and Advanced Space-led CAPSTONE lunar orbiter has been making progress in cross-communicating with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) since over two years to perform similar Moon-to-Moon demonstrations but with a relatively limited scope than the Earth-Moon DRO trio.

As an unrelated but interesting tangent, Andrew Jones reports that DRO-A also carries an all-sky detector to monitor gamma-ray bursts from highly energetic cosmic objects. The instrument is thus enabling extended mission objectives, and continues the trend of China maximizing spacecraft capacity and time.

Earth and our Moon as seen from beyond the lunar farside by China’s Chang’e 5 T1 test spacecraft on October 28, 2014. Image: CAST

A lit lunar water source

A NASA-funded study used a particle accelerator to bombard Apollo 17 Moon samples for simulating long-term effects of the radiating solar wind on lunar soil. It found that the solar wind could indeed be a potent source for creating lunar water.

Relatedly, a February 2022 study analyzed water and other volatiles detected by NASA’s LCROSS spacecraft to determine the likelihood of their source being volcanoes, comets, micrometeorites, the solar wind, or even our Earth’s atmosphere. The volatile ratios in the study suggested comets to be the most abundant lunar water source, followed by micrometeorites. A related 2020 study supported this view since it found that even temporary atmospheres created by the peak volcanic Moon over 3 billion years ago were likely inefficient in transferring and depositing lots of water and other volatiles to permanently shadowed regions on the Moon’s poles. On the other hand, a study last year as well as a review paper from 2022 suggested based on various factors that the Moon’s past volcanism is the primary source of subsurface lunar water.

Scientists figuring out ratios of lunar water sources and other Moon mysteries tied to it will help us know not only how our Moon evolved but also what kinds of processes drive the evolution of airless planetary bodies across the Solar System.

Many thanks to Catalyx Space and Craig Hardgrove for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource for free and without ads, kindly support my independent writing. 🌙

A small step for South Korea

Lunar rover demonstrations in the abandoned Taebaek mine in South Korea. Image: KIGAM

Choi Won-seok and Minu Kim report that in a notable world first, South Korea is transforming the former mining site of Taebaek into a testing ground for advanced mobile lunar exploration technologies. This is partly due to the mine’s environmental resemblance to the darkness, coldness, and ruggedness of the Moon’s south pole. Korean institutions began testing rover prototypes there.

This move follows the development in February when South Korea’s National Space Council approved plans for a Moon lander made by the country’s newly forged space agency KASA as part of a broader investment in indigenous space technologies. In January, Kim Na-young reported that KASA is budgeting about $31 million this year towards building the lunar lander by 2032. In an approach similar to what ISRO takes for its planetary missions like Chandrayaan 3, South Korea is also indigenously developing the rocket to launch its Moon lander. The rocket’s budget line is also separately approved. KASA also plans to send a lunar environment monitoring payload through NASA’s CLPS program onboard Intuitive Machines’ third Moon lander for about $5 million. All of these investments are part of South Korea’s FY2025 space budget of $562.5 million, pushed with the aim of becoming a global space power in the coming decades.

Kim Na-young has also reported that other than the US, KASA seeks to strengthen partnerships with Japan and Europe too, including through multilateral participation in NASA’s Artemis program and as a signee of the US-led Artemis Accords which promotes cooperative lunar exploration.

More Moon

An illustration showing the Gateway lunar orbital station’s ESA-provided ‘I-hab’ astronaut hosting module (highlighted with a red outline). Seen are its two active docking regions. Image: ESA / K. Lochtenberg

Thales Alenia Space has contracted Redwire’s Belgian subsidiary to build and provide the docking & berthing mechanisms and ports for ESA’s Lunar I-Hab astronaut habitat module, which will be part of the upcoming NASA-led Gateway international orbital habitat. Last year, ESA and NASA astronauts provided feedback on the usability of initial interior mockups of I-Hab. This exercise allowed accommodating changes before the upcoming critical design review phase, after which assembly and integration of Lunar I-Hab can begin.
A NASA article on Dr. Juliane Gross, the Sample Curation Lead for Artemis missions, succinctly summarizes the complex scope of her work:

Her multifaceted role includes preparing the Johnson facility that will receive new lunar samples, developing curation strategies, and collaborating with mission teams to plan sampling operations, which encompass collection, handling, transport, and storage processes for all stages of Artemis missions. She trains program managers and engineers on the importance of sample return and teaches crew members how to identify lunar samples and collect them without contamination. She also works with the different programs and teams that oversee the vehicles used at different stages of lunar missions – collaborating with the human landing system team around tool storage and delivery to the lunar surface, the Orion Program to coordinate sample stowage for the return to Earth, and Exploration Ground Systems to plan sample recovery after splashdown.

Once samples are returned to Earth, Gross and the ARES curation team will conduct a preliminary examination of the materials and release a sample catalog from which members of the global scientific community may request loans to carry out their respective research.

Related: How NASA has been incrementally planning Artemis science

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Moon Monday #221: The US is failing to explore lunar water as the principal goal of Artemis

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 22:03:04 +0530

Illustration showing the distribution of permanently shadowed regions (in blue) on the Moon’s south pole, superimposed on a digital elevation map. Image: NASA / GSFC / Timothy McClanahan / LOLA

It’s now been more than seven years since NASA officially started its Artemis program to fulfill the US government’s Space Policy Directive of sustaining a human presence on or around the Moon. And it’s been nearly two decades since the NASA Authorization Act of 2005 legislated a mandate to such end:

The Administrator shall establish a program to develop a sustained human presence on the Moon, including a robust precursor program, to promote exploration, science, commerce, and United States preeminence in space, and as a stepping-stone to future exploration of Mars and other destinations. The Administrator is further authorized to develop and conduct appropriate international collaborations in pursuit of these goals.

The National Space Policy adopted by the US White House in 2020 added the following:

The United States shall extend human economic activity into deep space by establishing a permanent human presence on the Moon, and, in cooperation with private industry and international partners, develop infrastructure and services that will enable science-driven exploration, space resource utilization, and human missions to Mars.

Last decade’s joint Indo-US discovery of water ice on the Moon’s poles by India’s Chandrayaan 1 orbiter not only catalyzed the world’s heightened interest in our Moon but also provided a possible path to have future lunar astronauts stay for long periods by utilizing these water deposits. However, planning and executing a sustained human presence on our Moon hinges greatly on what we learn about the ground truth of these deposits in terms of their nature, abundance, exact locations, and ease of utilization. Especially as they are sequestered inside extremely harsh permanently shadowed regions on the poles.

The US has spent nearly $100 billion so far via Artemis and other related programs but has failed to meaningfully progress our understanding of lunar water, much less how to use it. A review of the current states and unfortunate outcomes of US Moon missions across orbit and the surface reveals the direness of the situation. Delays in similar missions by international allies of the US add to the problem.

Lunar orbit mission failures

Concept image showing how the Lunar Trailblazer orbiter’s remote sensing measurements would’ve distinguished between lunar water in the form of ice crystals and mineral-bound states. Image: Jasper Miura / Lockheed Martin

The NASA-funded Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft, which launched in February 2025, was supposed to provide scientists with unprecedented, high-resolution global maps of the amount, distribution, and state of water across our Moon from orbit. However, control over the spacecraft was lost shortly after launch, with subsequent efforts being unsuccessful. Trailblazer will no longer be able to enter its planned lunar orbit, and the original mission is dead.
Four independent NASA-funded small satellites—namely LunaH-Map, Lunar Flashlight, Lunar IceCube and LunIR—which launched to the Moon in 2022 also failed at their primary missions. You can follow the links to know what specifically went wrong with each but essentially they couldn’t achieve their desired orbits to study aspects of lunar water and its polar ice deposits as scientists had hoped for.
Data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has uniquely aided many NASA and international Moon landing missions in technical analysis of landing site selections. It has also helped scientists produce many results relevant to lunar water. But the 2009-launched LRO has gracefully aged now, is due for its final mission extension evaluation with limited capabilities left, and can no longer maintain an orbit that can study the lunar poles heads down in any case. Recognizing these constraints, a specialized team of US scientists released a report in 2022 urging NASA to plan an LRO replacement so as to support the increasingly complex upcoming robotic and crewed Moon missions. Three years since, NASA has not approved any LRO successor despite the LExSO mission being proposed by members from the LRO team itself.
The upcoming NASA-led international Gateway lunar orbital habitat will conduct scientific experiments to help us understand long-term effects of space radiation on prolonged human stays outside the protection of Earth’s magnetic field. The results would be relevant for sustained stays on the lunar surface too. But Gateway’s orbit brings it only up to 1500 kilometers above the Moon’s north pole for a brief period and then takes it almost 70,000 kilometers over the south pole. As such, the Gateway’s not-at-all low lunar orbit is unsuitable to perform meaningful mapping studies of polar water ice and other resources or be of aid in landing site selections. In any case, Gateway’s launch has been delayed by years and its inaugural elements aren’t taking off for the Moon until around 2028.

Lunar surface missions not taking off or landing

An illustration showing NASA’s VIPER rover onboard the Griffin Moon lander. Image: Astrobotic

The one NASA mission that was supposed to reveal the first set of hard facts about the Moon’s polar water ice deposits was the VIPER rover part of the agency’s CLPS program. But last year NASA undertook a questionable cancellation of VIPER, and is now scrambling to find a commercial company that will fly and operate the rover at its own cost. This approach decidedly fails at VIPER’s original goal because asking a commercial entity to fulfill the mission’s scientific objectives at its own cost is a non-starter.

Thomas Zurbuchen, a former NASA associate administrator for science and the co-creator of CLPS has said that NASA losing VIPER “pulls the scientific teeth from the Artemis program in an irreversible way.” Planetary scientist Brett Denevi, who leads an Artemis Geology Team for NASA, said in a US Congressional hearing that “we should not expect VIPER science to happen by hoping that someone will offer to fly and operate it on their own dime.” Denevi stressed that the Congress should at least fund existing VIPER science and operations teams, which are at risk of being disbanded even if NASA selects a commercial company to fly VIPER. Even if the US Congress does do that, VIPER’s launch is now delayed anyway.

Earlier this year, Intuitive Machines’ second CLPS lander called Athena hard landed on the Moon’s south pole and came to rest on its side, which led to the mission being unsuccessful. NASA’s primary goal with Athena was to drill the lunar polar surface to find and study water ice deposits. The agency had also funded a hopper onboard which was to detach and fly over a permanently shadowed region looking for signs of water ice. Athena’s anomalous landing meant none of those experiments could take place. And, results from these experiments were supposed to inform VIPER’s strategy, thus now resulting in having learnt nothing.
The only other NASA-funded CLPS flight heading for the Moon’s south pole is Intuitive’s IM-4 mission, which isn’t scheduled to fly earlier than 2027, and has limited ways to study water ice in any case. The ESA-provided PROSPECT payload suite onboard to study water ice and extract oxygen from lunar soil is certainly intriguing but is being sent in a demonstrative capacity.
To advance over PROSPECT, NASA has been planning to send an enhanced pilot plant that extracts oxygen from lunar soil too. Extracting sufficient oxygen from either watery or dry lunar regolith has advantages for sustaining long-term human stays on the Moon. During the extractor mission’s announcement in 2023, NASA said it aims to send the hardware in 2027 but there have been no major updates since then. Based on the announced manifest of NASA payloads on upcoming CLPS and Artemis missions so far, NASA’s oxygen extractor is almost certainly delayed beyond 2027.
The Artemis III crewed Moon landing mission targeting exploration of the south pole is also delayed. It looks like it will very likely not launch before 2028 at the earliest, given the gradual pace of SpaceX’s Starship progress as the mission’s landing system element as well as delays in Axiom Space developing the lunar surface spacesuit. Most importantly, all of the missions mentioned above that have failed were supposed to inform and enhance science investigations on Artemis III, which will now have to be conducted half-blind.
The versatile, crew-capable Lunar Terrain Vehicle rover is supposed to be available across Artemis missions and have a large capacity for NASA to host experiments. But it will not launch before 2030 at the earliest.

Missions by US allies facing delays

Illustration of the Indian Chandrayaan 5 lander and Japanese LUPEX rover, and a mission graphic. Images: JAXA / ISRO

NASA’s ultra-sensitive ShadowCam imager onboard South Korea’s 2022-launched KPLO lunar orbiter was designed to optically image and locate water ice deposits inside permanently shadowed regions with higher resolution. However, it has found no reflectance differences that can be uniquely attributed to surface water ice in most of the areas it has mapped so far. To be clear, this isn’t a failure of ShadowCam the instrument. But given that the KPLO orbiter will likely end this year, the dull outcome highlights the pressing need for higher-resolution studies from orbit and the surface neither of which are taking place substantially.
To be fair to ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter, its better optical and radar mapping capabilities than LRO have been producing a trickle of this next layer of lunar water results. In fact, NASA has been collaborating with ISRO to have the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter aid Artemis landing site selections with lunar polar water prospecting and hazard classifications. But the orbiter’s infrared spectrometer’s output has been lacking, and NASA’s leveraging of the orbiter’s optical and radar capabilities has been limited in scope.
Ultimately though, knowing the truth about the Moon’s water ice deposits from the surface is necessary to systematically plan sustained lunar missions. With NASA’s now-shaky VIPER rover likely not enabling this critical outcome as intended, the upcoming joint Indo-Japanese Chandrayaan 5 LUPEX mission stands to provide NASA a chance to obtain the desired information. Japan is a key Artemis partner of NASA, and has signed the US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration. India too has signed the Accords, and ISRO is already aiding NASA as outlined above. All of these mechanisms encourage scientific data sharing. However, LUPEX was originally intended to launch mid-decade, and is now targeting take off only by end of decade instead.
Chandrayaan 3 landed in a high-latitude but non-polar region and as such only one of its instruments had relevance to the search for polar water ice.
Australia’s first lunar rover called Roo-ver, which will launch on a NASA-funded CLPS lander to explore the Moon’s south pole for water ice, has also gotten delayed to 2028—two years later than originally intended. Similarly, Canada’s first lunar rover to explore south polar water ice has been delayed. It too was supposed to launch on a NASA-funded CLPS lander in 2026 but has not been assigned a lander yet—or whose manifest status has not yet been made public.

China to gain lead in lunar water too

Illustration of China’s Chang’e 7 lander and orbiter. Image: CMG

While the US and its allies have been failing to advance swiftly and meaningfully in exploring and understanding water ice on the Moon, China has been preparing two Moon landing missions to that end. CNSA is preparing to launch the Chang’e 7 mission next year to advance the understanding of the accessibility, movement, and storage of surface and near-surface polar water ice. The same theme will be advanced by Chang’e 8 in 2028, which will also start utilizing lunar soil by melting it to 3D-print bricks from.

China’s track record of virtually no failure despite undertaking increasingly complex lunar missions is exceptional. There’s little reason to doubt that Chang’e 7 and Chang’e 8 will not be successes, giving China a lead in that aspect of lunar exploration as well. China is poised to prepare well for an eventual sustained lunar presence with crew and robots under the Sino-led project called the International Lunar Research Station.

What can the US bloc do?

To alleviate its failure to substantially understand lunar polar water ice, the US could take a number of steps:

The US Congress could reinvigorate VIPER by mandating that its scientific goals be executed for as originally planned and appropriating relevant funds for the same.
NASA and ISRO could tighten their use of the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter for Artemis-related studies, using it as a de facto LRO replacement.
In parallel, NASA could get the US Congress to approve the LRO successor mission LExSO and launch it as soon as feasible.
Having done it before, NASA could direct a couple of upcoming CLPS flights to land on the Moon’s south pole instead on their current target landing sites. However, this would come at the expense of the different lunar science goals the missions are currently aiming for, and could make the landings riskier.
NASA could enhance its investment in the Indo-Japanese LUPEX rover for the mutual benefit of all involved.
NASA could continue investing in small lunar orbiters but with changes that ensure better resource availability to significantly improve chances of mission success while the satellites still cost a fraction of big programs by definition.

Now, these or other recourses could prove challenging in a tightening budgetary environment for NASA and the US at large, especially with planetary sciences facing deeper cuts under the current Trump administration.

Many thanks to Open Lunar Foundation and Gurbir Singh for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday!

Today’s special Moon Monday edition took me a lot of work to get the breadth, depth, and accuracy right across the global spectrum of missions related to lunar water. If you found my article and its dozens of links useful, and you appreciate my efforts to publish Moon Mondays as a curated community resource for free and without ads, kindly support my independent writing. 🌙

The Moon and Mars in parallel

Jared Isaacman during his US Senate confirmation hearing for the position of the NASA Administrator. Image: NASA / Bill Ingalls

During his US Congressional confirmation hearing, Trump’s nominee for the NASA Administrator position Jared Isaacman insisted on a parallel Moon & Mars approach with the existing NASA budget instead of choosing one over another. Marcia Smith though points out:

If confirmed to lead the agency, he may discover money is, in fact, part of the problem. The nation’s investment in NASA today, about $25 billion a year, is a fraction of what the country was spending in the 1960s. The Apollo program alone cost $25.8 billion over the years 1960-1973, which is $257 billion when adjusted to 2020 dollars according to The Planetary Society. That didn’t include NASA’s science or aeronautics programs.

During the hearing, Isaacman endorsed landing US astronauts on the Moon with Artemis III before China does by 2030. The latter is an event in itself that the entire US Congress is scared of. Isaacman said NASA’s existing plan with the SLS rocket is the fastest way to land Artemis III. Although he would not clarify why the Moon’s “scientific, economic, and strategic value” to the US is yet to be determined but that of Mars somehow is pre-known.

Notably, in the context of Isaacman’s deep ties with Elon Musk and SpaceX, Isaacman repeatedly avoided answering a simple yes/no question about whether Musk was in the room when US President Trump offered him the administrator position. Relatedly, last month Isaacman sent a letter to the Ethics Official at NASA about his plans to disentangle his actual and apparent conflicts of interest with SpaceX should the US Senate vote and confirm his NASA Administrator position by next month.

More Moon

On April 8, Bangladesh became the 54th nation to sign the US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration, joining its neighbor India who became an Accords signee in 2023.
Intuitive Machines announced that it will launch its fourth Moon mission on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with a liftoff target of 2027.
ispace Japan’s US subsidiary is partnering with Redwire Space to compete for CLPS contracts to send NASA’s scientific & technological payloads to the Moon. ispace US currently is part of one CLPS contract through Draper, wherein ispace US is building the lander to carry NASA payloads to the Moon’s farside.
Over at its new Moon-simulating LUNA facility, ESA is testing modern tools and equipments future astronauts could use to optimize which rocks to collect during future Moonwalks to yield better science.

- Jatan 🌙

Thanks for using RSS the best.

Moon Monday #220: Lunar science galore from the Chandrayaans

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 16:12:49 +0530

Mission updates

Multi-agency instruments planned to be on the LUPEX rover. Image: JAXA / M. Ohtake, et al.

India approved the joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX mission to drill and analyze water ice on the Moon. I’ve collated, contextualized, and linked to every mission specific we know of. I also explain how Chandrayaan 5 LUPEX will be a giant leap for ISRO and JAXA, and how it can provide NASA with data critical for Artemis planning:

🧊 Every detail on Chandrayaan 5 / LUPEX 🌗

As hardware elements of the crewed Artemis II Moon mission are coming along slowly for the targeted launch next year, teams and the crew are practicing crew capsule related sea recovery procedures for when the mission nears its end with a splash on Earth.
Progress continues slowly on the NASA-led Gateway lunar orbital habitat. After passing various space environmental tests, the core pressurized structure of Gateway’s HALO habitat module built by Thales Alenia Space was shipped from Europe to the US as of April 1. It will now undergo outfitting at lead HALO contractor Northrop Grumman’s facility, and then be mated to Gateway’s also-in-assembly Power and Propulsion Element ahead of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket launch no earlier than December 2027.

Lunar science galore from Chandrayaan 2

Illustration of the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter. Image: ISRO

With another joint analysis specifically identifying a possible landing area, ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter continues aiding NASA in landing site selection for the crewed Artemis III Moon mission targeting launch later this decade.
In February 2024, the UK Space Agency funded Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL) with £306,000 to develop software for the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter to help its multi-band radar better detect underground water ice on the Moon’s poles. Initial results are now out, showing some headway. The orbiter’s radar data is also aiding geological studies.
Analyzing how two-way radio signals between the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter and an Indian Deep Space Network antenna were affected, scientists have inferred the first electron density profile of the Moon’s ionosphere for when the Moon passes through Earth’s geomagnetic tail, finding the density to be substantially higher than expected.
Stereo images from the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter’s TMC-2 payload are being used to study volcanic domes.

High resolution surface elemental abundance maps of various regions on the Moon, based on X-ray detections by the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter’s CLASS spectrometer; Clockwise from the left: Abundances of Magnesium and Iron, Aluminum, and Iron respectively. Images: ISRO / S. Narendranath, Thejas Suresh, et al.

The CLASS spectrometer on the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter has provided the largest and highest-resolution X-ray mapping of the Moon’s surface elements using orbital data collected over the first three years of its operation. This previously led to the first ever global-scale sodium maps of the Moon, and identifying Chromium in volcanic lunar soil. Now, with more studies based on CLASS data, the instrument continues assisting in detailed geological and volcanic analysis of several lunar features, including Mare Imbrium, Mare Crisium, and the puzzling nature of Irregular Mare Patches. Studying these datasets is unraveling specifics of how our Moon evolved and helping scientists constrain the lunar crust’s composition.
Researchers have been using the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter’s high-resolution camera, which is the world’s sharpest lunar imager, to identify sub-resolution tracks of Chandrayaan 3’s rover based on illumination changes. Scientists are also using the imager to study interactions between the lander’s engine plumes and lunar regolith during when Chandrayaan 3’s lander hopped towards the end of its surface mission.

The case of IIRS

The IIRS infrared spectrometer on the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter is the successor to the M3 instrument on Chandrayaan 1 which discovered lunar water. IIRS was supposed to advance the next phase of lunar exploration by helping locate and quantify water ice deposits on the Moon’s poles. However, the expected results haven’t come due to issues with calibration of IIRS data. The team is still slowly progressing on making its data products useful, and there’s some usage demonstrated with mineral compositional studies. But the lack of firm, expected results from IIRS are made poignant by the fact that it’s been in lunar orbit for over five years since Chandrayaan 2’s launch in 2019. There may be a silver lining. Recently a team of US scientists calibrated IIRS datasets on their own to be able to leverage the spectrometer’s potency:

Observations from the Chandrayaan-2 Imaging Infrared Spectrometer (IIRS) present a unique opportunity to study lunar hydration, given the instrument’s spectral range of 0.9–5.3 μm, spectral resolution of 20 nm, and spatial resolution of ~80 m. This instrument is similar to the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) on Chandrayaan-1 but the longer spectral range allows for direct removal of the lunar thermal emission which affects the 3 µm band. After five years in orbit, IIRS has accumulated enough observations to include the same surface regions under different lighting conditions. [...] We use the IIRS data to analyze the spatial and temporal variability of the 3 µm absorption feature on the lunar surface to explore the effect of temperature/illumination conditions on the presence of hydration.

Related: How Chandrayaan 1, 2 and 3 leveraged their view from the Moon to image a solar eclipse, study the Sun’s flares, and observe Earth as an exoplanet

Thank you to Astrolab and GalaxEye Space for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource for free and without ads, support my independent writing. 🌙

More lunar science

Formation of the lunar South Pole-Aitken basin’s impact melt sheet and layered structure as identified based on Chang’e 6 sample studies. Image: SU Bin, et al.

Our Moon’s massive South Pole-Aitken basin got an age thanks to China’s Chang’e 6 mission but people and media in the West have barely talked about it. If this was a NASA mission, they’d be screaming on all channels and everyone spacey would share it like it’s the biggest thing right now—which in the lunar world it is! I covered it on Moon Monday to do my part.
The National Museum of China in Beijing is hosting a two-month exhibit on China’s extremely successful Chang’e lunar exploration program to educate and inspire the public at large. As part of it, CNSA is also displaying Moon samples brought to Earth by its Chang’e 5 and Chang’e 6 missions. A few months ago, China exhibited Chang’e 5 lunar samples at the Beijing Planetarium.

A visitor exploring the lunar exhibition at the National Museum of China in Beijing. Image: Li Hao / Global Times

The first geological map of Chandrayaan 3’s landing region reveals it to be 3.7 billion years old. The region has been significantly altered since its formation by subsequent crater impacts and their material ejections.
The composition of high-latitude lunar soil measured by Chandrayaan 3 is being used to create lunar soil simulants from Moon-like anorthositic rocks in the UAE.
ispace Japan’s US subsidiary has formed a scientific advisory board, featuring well known names in the lunar community, with the aim of strengthening its lunar exploration approach and competitiveness in NASA’s CLPS program.

More Moon

A rover navigating in ESA’s Moon-like LUNA facility in orchestration with other hardware sensors positioned across the simulated surface. Image: DLR

Jeff Foust reports that several CLPS lunar lander companies expressed asking for large delivery contracts, block buys of missions, investment in testing facilities and communications services, and non-NASA US government buyers in a US Congressional hearing.
ESA’s new Moon-simulating LUNA facility continues being used by researchers for honing future exploration development, with the latest tests seeing multiple hardware devices and rovers working in tandem to autonomously map and navigate unknown terrain.
A group of researchers at the Indian Institute of Science have been progressing on bacteria-based lunar regolith simulant bricks that are repairable.
Moon missions can be both cheaper and safer if more countries share navigation infrastructure. I wrote on how its implementation details matter for the Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor) and why they’ve taken up this research scope.

- Jatan 🌙

Thanks for using RSS the best.

Newly approved Chandrayaan 5 LUPEX mission will drill for water on the Moon and aid Artemis | Indian Space Progress #25-26

Jatan Mehta — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 19:40:20 +0530

India has formally approved the joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5 (LUPEX) mission to study water ice on the Moon’s south pole. The mission and its approval are notable in many ways as we’ll see below.

Illustration of the Chandrayaan 5 lander and rover, and a mission graphic. Images: JAXA / ISRO

First, on the confusion about the mission’s approval and development

The Japanese government had approved the LUnar Polar EXploration (LUPEX) mission on their end for years, and had been waiting on India to do the same. ISRO’s new Chief V. Narayanan said the Indian Government’s Union Cabinet approved the Chandrayaan 5/LUPEX mission on March 13. It finally ends the unnecessary confusion stemming from ISRO not clearly communicating official information about the mission’s approval status. The approval also resolves statements made by both ISRO and JAXA which wrongly conveyed LUPEX’s launch being in mid-decade for years.

Note that not everything is clear just yet since no budget seems to have been announced for the mission so far. However, one can gauge from ISRO’s Demand for Grants for 2025-26 document that work on Chandrayaan 5 will continue in the background while the Chandrayaan 4 sample return mission takes center stage. Also, confusion about LUPEX thickened recently as the ISRO Chief seems to have erroneously quoted that its rover’s mass will be 250 kilograms instead of 350. ISRO and JAXA have been consistently quoting the latter number for years, and that is very likely the correct mass range.

The water-hunting mission of LUPEX

The Chandrayaan 5 lander carrying the LUPEX rover on top of it will launch on Japan’s H3 rocket by end of decade, following India’s launch of Chandrayaan 4 which is targeted by 2028. The ~6,000-kilogram ISRO-developed Chandrayaan 5 lander will deploy the JAXA-provided ~350-kilogram LUPEX rover on the Moon’s south pole to directly study the nature, abundance, and accessibility of water ice. As part of its exploration spanning at least 3.5 months, the LUPEX rover will enter permanently shadowed regions seeking water ice and other such volatiles.

In terms of hardware development, JAXA and Mitsubishi have been validating the LUPEX rover design through a series of tests using qualification and engineering models. Engineering models for several rover instruments have also been built and tested. To safely and precisely land LUPEX amid the dangerously rocky terrain at the Moon’s south pole, ISRO is building the Chandrayaan 5 lander with input from both Chandrayaan 3’s success and that of JAXA’s SLIM lander. LUPEX builds on the previous Indo-Japanese collaboration of ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter helping JAXA nail SLIM’s goal of precision lunar landing.

Landing site selection studies for LUPEX have been ongoing, feeding into as well as building on ISRO’s ongoing aid to NASA for planning crewed Artemis missions. A 2024 IAC talk by Chandrayaan 3’s Project Director Palanivel Veeramuthuvel suggests that Chandrayaan 5’s landing site could be 89.45°S, 222.85°E, which lies on an elevated ridge connecting the large Shackleton and de Gerlache craters. A key criteria for selecting Chandrayaan 5’s landing site is that it should have several 100-meter-scale permanently shadowed regions nearby so that the LUPEX rover can directly study any potential water ice and other volatile deposits they might host.

LUPEX will power through one of the harshest planetary environments in the solar system. Between cryogenic temperatures during major investigations, a rocky terrain riddled with steep slopes, and a near-horizon Sun causing long, moving shadows that the rover needs to keep avoiding, we’re sending LUPEX to lunar hell. Despite facing much colder temperatures than NASA’s flagship Mars missions, LUPEX is not currently planned to have a radioisotope heater unit (RHU) for warmth. Instead, the solar-powered rover will rely on its battery and heat pipes to keep itself from freezing. LUPEX will periodically park at pre-identified high-altitude polar spots during the mission where local nights last only 3 to 5 Earth days instead of the longer 14 Earth days worth of equatorial lunar nights.

LUPEX instruments

Multi-agency instruments planned to be on the LUPEX rover. Image: JAXA / M. Ohtake, et al.

The LUPEX rover will feature instruments from both Japan and India as well as a contribution each from NASA and ESA. A defining capability of LUPEX will be the ISRO-provided ground penetrating radar, which will tell scientists about the Moon’s polar underground structure and its water ice locations up to 3 meters depth. To complement these observations, a NASA-led neutron spectrometer onboard will detect hydrogen—as an indirect sign of water—up to a meter below the surface. Together, the two instruments will help mission scientists identify the most favorable drill locations to access water-containing soil samples. JAXA’s drill on LUPEX will fetch samples from up to a depth of 1.5 meters, which will be analyzed by at least five complementary spectrometers from JAXA and ISRO onboard the rover.

Since volatiles evaporate even at moderately warm temperatures, some of them would escape the soil and drilled samples before LUPEX’s spectrometer suite can detect them. To that end, ESA is contributing a mass spectrometer onboard the rover to identify escaped volatiles that pass through it. It will also study the Moon’s exosphere. Lastly, an ISRO-provided thermal probe on the rover will help quantify water ice within soil samples.

Things on the lander side are still murky. ISRO is yet to finalize, or announce, the instruments that will be on the large lander. Given its mass budget, it also has the potential for substantial science. ISRO has been considering adding an RHU on the lander to demonstrate lunar night survival but it’s not confirmed yet.

International context and Indo-Japanese aid to Artemis

The Chandrayaan 5 mission’s goal is thus similar to China’s Chang’e 7 mission, which CNSA aims to launch next year to substantially advance our understanding of the accessibility, movement and storage of surface and near-surface polar water ice. In the meanwhile, NASA undertook a questionable cancellation of its VIPER rover, which had a similar goal, and so the US is now scrambling to find another opportunity to fly VIPER—an approach which decidedly fails at the mission’s original goal. Planetary scientist Brett Denevi, who leads the Artemis III Geology Team for NASA, said “We should not expect VIPER science to happen by hoping that someone will offer to fly and operate it on their own dime.” She added that the US Congress should at least fund existing VIPER science and operations teams, which are at risk of being disbanded even if NASA selects a company to fly VIPER.

Knowing the ground truth about the Moon’s water ice deposits is necessary to systematically plan sustained robotic and crewed lunar missions, and India and Japan are keen to be strategic knowledge providers of the same. As such, Chandrayaan 5 LUPEX stands to provide NASA a chance to obtain the desired information about lunar polar water without the US space agency pursuing another time-consuming mission. Japan is a key partner of NASA in the Artemis campaign, and has signed the US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration. India too has signed the Accords, and ISRO is already aiding NASA with lunar polar resource prospecting and hazard classification of landing sites for crewed Artemis missions. All of these mechanisms encourage scientific data sharing. It’s also how the US bloc of countries can catch up with China’s lead in lunar exploration.

There are also other areas where LUPEX will help leapfrog technological developments. For India, building the large Chandrayaan 5 lander will enable a foundational element for more complex robotic and crewed missions. On the Japanese side, building and operating the LUPEX rover will contribute directly to the development of Japan’s advanced pressurized rover for Artemis, which targets a launch and lunar delivery next decade.

Lunar science galore from Chandrayaan 2

Illustration of the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter. Image: ISRO

With another joint analysis specifically identifying a possible landing area, ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter continues aiding NASA in landing site selection for the crewed Artemis III Moon mission targeting launch later this decade.
In February 2024, the UK Space Agency funded Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL) with £306,000 to develop software for the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter to help its multi-band radar better detect underground water ice on the Moon’s poles. Initial results are now out, showing some headway. The orbiter’s radar data is also aiding geological studies.
Analyzing how two-way radio signals between the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter and an Indian Deep Space Network antenna were affected, scientists have inferred the first electron density profile of the Moon’s ionosphere for when the Moon passes through Earth’s geomagnetic tail, finding the density to be substantially higher than expected.
Stereo images from the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter’s TMC-2 payload are being used to study volcanic domes.

The CLASS spectrometer on the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter has provided the largest and highest-resolution X-ray mapping of the Moon’s surface elements using orbital data collected over the first three years of its operation. This previously led to the first ever global-scale sodium maps of the Moon, and identifying Chromium in volcanic lunar soil. Now, with more studies based on CLASS data, the instrument continues assisting in detailed geological and volcanic analysis of several lunar features, including Mare Imbrium, Mare Crisium, and the puzzling nature of Irregular Mare Patches. Studying these datasets is unraveling specifics of how our Moon evolved and helping scientists constrain the lunar crust’s composition.
Researchers have been using the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter’s high-resolution camera, which is the world’s sharpest lunar imager, to identify sub-resolution tracks of Chandrayaan 3’s rover based on illumination changes. Scientists are also using the imager to study interactions between the lander’s engine plumes and lunar regolith during when Chandrayaan 3’s lander hopped towards the end of its surface mission.
The IIRS infrared spectrometer on the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter is the successor to the M3 instrument on Chandrayaan 1 which discovered lunar water. IIRS was supposed to advance the next phase of lunar exploration by helping locate and quantify water ice deposits on the Moon’s poles. However, the expected results haven’t come due to issues with calibration of IIRS data. The team is still slowly progressing on making its data products useful, and there’s some usage demonstrated with mineral compositional studies. But the lack of firm, expected results from IIRS are made poignant by the fact that it’s been in lunar orbit for over five years since Chandrayaan 2’s launch in 2019. There may be a silver lining. Recently a team of US scientists calibrated IIRS datasets on their own to be able to leverage the spectrometer’s potency:

Observations from the Chandrayaan-2 Imaging Infrared Spectrometer (IIRS) present a unique opportunity to study lunar hydration, given the instrument’s spectral range of 0.9–5.3 μm, spectral resolution of 20 nm, and spatial resolution of ~80 m. This instrument is similar to the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) on Chandrayaan-1 but the longer spectral range allows for direct removal of the lunar thermal emission which affects the 3 µm band. After five years in orbit, IIRS has accumulated enough observations to include the same surface regions under different lighting conditions. [...] We use the IIRS data to analyze the spatial and temporal variability of the 3 µm absorption feature on the lunar surface to explore the effect of temperature/illumination conditions on the presence of hydration.

Related: How Chandrayaan 1, 2 and 3 leveraged their view from the Moon to image a solar eclipse, study the Sun’s flares, and observe Earth as an exoplanet

Many thanks to the Takshashila Institution, PierSight, Catalyx Space and Gurbir Singh for sponsoring this Chandrayaan-special edition of Indian Space Progress. If you too appreciate my efforts to capture true trajectories of Indian space, support my independent writing. 🚀

Results from India’s Chandrayaan 3 experiment to benefit future missions eyeing lunar water

The Chandrayaan 3 lander on the Moon with its ChaSTE thermal probe deployed. Image: ISRO

The Chandrayaan 3 lander touted a thermal probe called ChaSTE developed jointly by two ISRO-affiliated institutions SPL and PRL. The lander deployed and inserted ChaSTE almost 10 centimeters into the lunar soil to take pristine temperature measurements across the lunar day using ten spaced-out sensors. A new study published in Nature shows how the measurements are helping scientists learn exactly how the Sun’s heat propagates down from the Moon’s surface, which has notable implications for planning future polar missions scouting for water ice.

ChaSTE sensors noticed a rather large temperature difference of 50–80°C between the two ends of the probe, owing to the Moon’s soil being a poor conductor of heat. ChaSTE’s measurements from Chandrayaan 3’s near-polar landing site of 69°S are unique because heat flow experiments on earlier Apollo missions and most recently on Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander were in near-equatorial locations, thus tailoring to different objectives that aren’t related to understanding water ice deposits on the Moon’s poles. “ChaSTE is the first ever in-situ thermal profiling of the Moon’s near subsurface,” said PRL planetary scientist K. Durga Prasad who is one of the experiment leads.

Left: Temperature profiles measured by the ten ChaSTE sensors at different depths; Right: Structural diagram of the ChaSTE probe with mounting positions of the sensors and heater. Image: K. Durga Prasad, et al.

A heater just above the probe’s tip later warmed up the subsurface soil, which let scientists determine its thermal conductivity, and from it infer its density and physical properties. Future missions operating at or near the Moon’s poles need to account for these characteristics. Likewise, even though the ChaSTE experiment did not directly study water ice, its results have relevant implications for future missions looking for said icy deposits.

Combining multiple measurements and extensive modeling that accounted for Chandrayaan 3’s landed geometry, local topography, and actual observational conditions, the ChaSTE study derived high-resolution surface and subsurface temperatures at the landed region that were more accurate than those inferred coarsely from orbit using the Diviner radiometer on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. This led to a conclusion relevant to future water-ice hunting missions on or near the Moon’s poles:

ChaSTE observations have shown that at high-latitudes, sunward slopes are considerably warmer and poleward slopes just about a meter apart could be much cooler, providing an environment conducive for the presence of water-ice within the shallow sub-surface.
[...]
A relationship between the local slope and expected surface peak temperature has been derived. The interesting outcome is that the high latitude sites with local slope greater than 14° in poleward direction might offer similar environment as polar sites for accumulating water ice at shallow depths.

The ChaSTE experiment thus suggests that the local terrain and slopes play an outsized role in the ability of near-polar and polar areas to “pump” and accumulate water ice deposits in their subsurfaces. “Temperatures dictate the presence, stability, and mobility of water on the Moon,” said Durga. More on that in the paper:

Modeling studies showed that surface temperatures ranging from 110 K to 114 K [-163°C to -159°C] are suitable conditions for cold-trapping of water ice, particularly at polar regions. It is also suggested that water-ice can migrate to the subsurface due to strong thermal pumping, if the diurnal maximum temperature (Tmax) is above 120 K [-153°C] and the mean temperature (Tmin + (Tmax-Tmin/π)) is below 105 K. [-168°C] Also, the presence of a dry regolith layer can reduce sublimation rates, potentially burying water ice deposits (due to any transport mechanisms) under a few centimeters thick layer. Such buried water-ice can remain stay put as long as the temperatures are maintained below cold-trapping limits, especially during lunar nights.

Considering that local surface temperatures at the Chandrayaan 3 landing site hovered around -168°C by nighttime, it’s possible that several larger poleward sloping regions around Chandrayaan 3’s landing site are hosting subsurface water ice. More crucially, the findings lend mission planners a broader area for water ice prospecting instead of being limited to the treacherously rocky regions of 86-90°S. From the paper:

High-latitude regions with larger poleward slopes can also be potential sites for water-ice prospecting for future exploration and in-situ resource utilization. Such sites would be technically less challenging for exploration in comparison to extreme polar sites, but scientifically equally interesting for enhancing our understanding about the water ice quantification, distribution and migration.

While exploring high-latitude lunar regions between 70–85°S is more challenging—in terms of terrain, slopes, temperature ranges, and access to the Sun and Earth—compared to the relatively benign near-equatorial and mid-latitude regions, the high-latitudes are still not as extreme as 86–90°S. The Moon’s peak polar areas demand 100-meter precision landings as well as operations during local summers to survive and enable full-duration missions. As such, ChaSTE’s results suggest that future missions with relatively lower budgets and lower risk appetites could still explore water ice in either the less extreme near-polar areas or in peak polar areas despite shorter mission durations.

The rather scary slope map of the Moon’s south pole (85–90°S). Image: CLSE / LPI

“Future studies and even extraction operations of lunar soil will benefit from ChaSTE’s data,” said Durga. The data is publicly available on ISRO’s ISSDC portal. The datasets and model codes used in the study are available on PRL’s website.

More lunar advances from India

Geological map of the Chandrayaan 3 landing region showing geological units, secondary crater chains (blue), and boulders (bright yellow). Image: R.K. Sinha, et al.

The first geological map of Chandrayaan 3’s landing region reveals it to be 3.7 billion years old. The region has been significantly altered since its formation by subsequent crater impacts and their material ejections.
On March 13, India’s SPADEX satellites achieved successful undocking in Earth orbit, nearly two months after the docking in January. SPADEX is paving the way for ISRO to undertake the Chandrayaan 4 sample return mission, which will involve remote docking and undocking in Earth and lunar orbit.
The composition of high-latitude lunar soil measured by Chandrayaan 3 is being used to create lunar soil simulants from Moon-like anorthositic rocks in the UAE.
A group at the Indian Institute of Science has been progressing on bacteria-based lunar regolith simulant bricks that are repairable.

That was a long piece! If you liked my compilation, commentary, and analysis to provide you with a true sense of advances that India is making with its Chandrayaan missions, kindly support my independent writing. 🌙

- Jatan 🌙

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Moon Monday #219: Results from India’s Chandrayaan 3 experiment to benefit future missions eyeing lunar water

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 17:34:51 +0530

The Chandrayaan 3 lander on the Moon with its ChaSTE thermal probe deployed. Image: ISRO

ChaSTE observations have shown that at high-latitudes, sunward slopes are considerably warmer and poleward slopes just about a meter apart could be much cooler, providing an environment conducive for the presence of water-ice within the shallow sub-surface.
[...]
A relationship between the local slope and expected surface peak temperature has been derived. The interesting outcome is that the high latitude sites with local slope greater than 14° in poleward direction might offer similar environment as polar sites for accumulating water ice at shallow depths.

Modeling studies showed that surface temperatures ranging from 110 K to 114 K [-163°C to -159°C] are suitable conditions for cold-trapping of water ice, particularly at polar regions. It is also suggested that water-ice can migrate to the subsurface due to strong thermal pumping, if the diurnal maximum temperature (Tmax) is above 120 K [-153°C] and the mean temperature (Tmin + (Tmax-Tmin/π)) is below 105 K. [-168°C] Also, the presence of a dry regolith layer can reduce sublimation rates, potentially burying water ice deposits (due to any transport mechanisms) under a few centimeters thick layer. Such buried water-ice can remain stay put as long as the temperatures are maintained below cold-trapping limits, especially during lunar nights.

High-latitude regions with larger poleward slopes can also be potential sites for water-ice prospecting for future exploration and in-situ resource utilization. Such sites would be technically less challenging for exploration in comparison to extreme polar sites, but scientifically equally interesting for enhancing our understanding about the water ice quantification, distribution and migration.

The rather scary slope map of the Moon’s south pole (85–90°S). Image: CLSE / LPI

India’s next Moon mission Chandrayaan 4 aims to launch by 2028 and bring lunar samples from a landing site somewhere between 84-85°S. And the follow-on joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5/LUPEX rover mission is considering landing sites around 89°S to directly study the nature, accessibility, and abundance of lunar water ice.

Also see: Composition of high-latitude lunar soil by the Chandrayaan 3 rover and its importance

Many thanks to The Orbital Index, Astrolab and Open Lunar Foundation for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource for free and without ads, support my independent writing. 🌙

More mission updates

The SLS rocket core stage and twin boosters inside NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building. Image: NASA / Frank Michaux

On March 23, technicians at NASA joined the twin solid rocket boosters to either side of the SLS rocket’s core stage in preparation towards launching the crewed Artemis II Moon mission next year. On March 9, ULA delivered to NASA the upper stage of SLS, which technicians will fuel and later stack it atop the core stage via an adapter.
Jeff Foust reports that lunar lander builder Intuitive Machines aims to diversify its offerings with orbital lunar communications and deployment services. This comes after the company faced another unsuccessful mission with IM-2 as part of NASA CLPS.
To continue the development of its next two Moon missions, ispace Japan has secured a $10 million loan from Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank. This enables funding for the company’s US subsidiary’s first NASA CLPS mission through Draper—which interestingly highlights an intersection of CLPS, funding, and science.

More Moon

Top: The Apollo 15 and 17 thermal probes inserted into the lunar surface by astronauts; Bottom: The current archival status of data from their experiments. Images: NASA / James Irwin / Harrison Schmidt / S. Nagihara, et al.

A new study which recovered and restored previously unarchived data from the heat flow experiments on Apollo 15 and 17 found that the subsurface warming recorded during 1974–1977 was ultimately a result of prior astronaut surface activities slightly darkening the soil, which increased their absorption of the Sun’s heat.
As background work to realize advanced technologies in the 2030s or 2040s, China has been working on aspects of versatile mining robots and giant lunar farside telescopes while Japan is eyeing self-adapting multi-robot explorers.

- Jatan 🌙

Thanks for using RSS the best.

Fun with Moon exploration headlines

Jatan Mehta — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 17:40:00 +0530

I’ve been having so much fun with headlines on my Moon Monday blog+newsletter lately:

Why such non-traditional headlines, you ask? Because I write for you, not social media or SEO.

- Jatan 🌙

Thanks for using RSS the best.

Moon Monday #218: A molten Moon, a date for the SPA, sunset for Blue Ghost as well as inclusive Artemis language, and more

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 21:14:40 +0530

There’s a lot in this Moon Monday edition to unpack. Grab yourself a coffee or another mild drug of choice and let’s get started. 🤓

Chang’e 6 samples produce two more big results

An artist's concept of our Moon shortly after its formation, with a magma ocean and a newly forming rocky crust. Image: NASA Goddard

Until now, all the direct evidence of our Moon being covered in a global magma ocean shortly after its formation has come from lunar samples brought by Apollo and Luna missions from equatorial and near-equatorial regions on the nearside. Surface measurements made by Chandrayaan 3’s Pragyan rover in 2023 extended this hypothesis’ validity to nearside high-latitude regions. But we had no such tactile measurements from the Moon’s farside until recently. Last year, China’s Chang’e 6 mission brought the first lunar farside samples to Earth, allowing scientists to test if the hypothesis holds true for whole of Luna.

Now, scientists from various institutes in Beijing studying two grams of Chang’e 6 volcanic samples have confirmed the presence of key chemical elements that are compatible with a young fully molten Moon, lending unequivocal credence to the idea. The CNSA release about the study notes that finer deviations in the composition of farside and nearside basalts as revealed by the analysis will help scientists further constrain how our Moon evolved:

The lead isotope evolution paths in basalt from the far and near sides are different. This suggests that different regions of the Moon evolved differently after the magma ocean crystallized. Giant impact events, especially the one that created the SPA Basin, likely changed the physical and chemical properties of the Moon's mantle.

In another critical study published on March 20, scientists from Beijing analyzed five grams of Chang’e 6 samples to determine the truest age yet of the massive South-Pole Aitken (SPA) basin within which the spacecraft landed. Spanning 2500 kilometers, SPA is the Moon’s largest, deepest, and oldest impact crater, and its age and formation nature has huge implications for our Moon’s evolution. Chang’e 6 landed within SPA at 153.99° W, 41.64° S, near the southern rim of the 500-kilometer wide Apollo crater. While the vast majority of Chang’e 6 samples represent much younger volcanic material, the researchers meticulously examined 1600 fragments from those 5 grams to identify 20 pieces that relate to an SPA-like impact-created origin. Precise lead-lead dating of the fragments finds the SPA to have formed 4.25 billion years ago. 💥

Illustration showing ancient impact melt rock fragments collected among Change’e 6 samples at the mission’s landing site within the South-Pole Aitken (SPA) basin. Image: CAS

Formation of the SPA basin’s impact melt sheet and layered structure as identified based on Chang’e 6 sample studies. Image: SU Bin, et al.

The CNSA release about the study notes:

This finding provides the first direct, sample-based evidence that the Moon's largest impact basin formed approximately 320 million years after the beginning of Solar System. The definitive age of 4.25 billion years for the SPA basin can serve as a crucial anchor point for refining the lunar cratering chronology and establishing a more complete temporal sequence of the Moon's early evolution.

With these discoveries, Chang’e 6 is continuing to live up to its bold promises of the mission samples helping scientists solve a whole host of Moon mysteries such as understanding the distinct lunar farside volcanism, determining its age, and learning why the farside is so enigmatically different from the familiar nearside—which is necessary to understand not just Luna’s evolution but that of our Solar System.

I have more coverage of other notable recent results from Chinese lunar missions in the link below:

A long march of lunar papers from China 🌗

The Sun sets for Blue Ghost

A beautiful lunar sunset captured by the Blue Ghost lander, with our Earth and Venus seen near the horizon. Image: Firefly Aerospace

Capturing a lunar sunset and associated glow on March 16 was one of the final acts of the Blue Ghost Moon lander before US-based Firefly Aerospace sunset the mission part of NASA’s CLPS program—as intended. NASA scientists will study the sunset imagery from multiple cameras as well as surface dust photographed by another instrument SCALPSS during that time to try and determine if electrically charged and levitating dust really is the cause of the lunar horizon glow or not.

In the meanwhile, Firefly has chosen Honeybee Robotics to provide the rover for the company’s third CLPS mission. Honeybee successfully operated instruments on Blue Ghost’s Mission 1. Firefly’s third CLPS flight will carry six NASA-funded science & technology payload suites, including some on the rover, to one of the two Gruithuisen Domes, a unique volcanic site on the Moon’s nearside.

An informative correction: Last week on Moon Monday #217, I wrote that Blue Ghost was the first to capture a solar eclipse from the Moon. I was wrong. The first to do so was NASA’s Surveyor 3 lander on April 24, 1967. It not only photographed the eclipse crown ring but did so on its 114th day on the Moon! Thank you Mark Robinson of the LRO fame for pointing this out. Upon checking the associated paper, a cool fact is that Surveyor 3 used a mirror to bring the Earth in view from its local landed geometry to be able to image the solar eclipse. 🪞✨

Top panel: The total solar eclipse of April 24, 1967 as captured by NASA’s Surveyor 3 lander using red, green, and blue filters respectively; Bottom panel: Distribution of light in the refraction halo of Earth for two sets of superimposed eclipse pictures, shown here as an inner circle and an outer circle. Images: NASA / E. M. Shoemaker, et al.

Many thanks to Catalyx Space and Gordon Roesler for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource for free and without ads, support my independent writing. 🌙

Firefly deserves an unusual kudos

Blue Ghost Mission 1. Images: Firefly Aerospace

Following China’s lead in successful modern lunar surface missions, and joining Chandrayaan 3 as the only other such mission that went as planned, Firefly has executed a rare, supremely nominal Moon mission with Blue Ghost. Firefly brought the first true soft landing for the US in the 21st century, bounties of knowledge from its science & technology payloads, a precision landing demonstration, the first GPS/GNSS lock on the Moon, a stunning solar eclipse capture, and humble brags despite it all. Immense congratulations are in order to the entire Firefly team, NASA, and all the payload people for pulling this off. 🔥🌗

If you want to learn about how Blue Ghost fits into the larger picture of global lunar exploration, I’ve been covering its lunar activities in context that’s not limited to the US. Follow the four links below for the full rundown:

How Firefly approached and achieved a Moon landing in the first attempt with rigor and abundant caution (includes insights from Blue Ghost’s Chief Lander engineer)
Blue Ghost achieved third most precise robotic planetary landing
A busy lunar morning with lots of payload operations and GPS signals
Drilling on the Moon , images of flying regolith, and operating more payloads

NASA removes inclusive language from Artemis

NASA Artemis webpage screenshots before and after the language change.

NASA has deleted the following language previously prominently presented on the Artemis landing page on its website:

With the Artemis campaign, NASA will land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon, using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before.

A previous version of the page hosting said language can be found on the Internet Archive. Eric Berger reported NASA’s response to the change as conveyed via an agency spokesperson:

In keeping with the President’s Executive Order, we’re updating our language regarding plans to send crew to the lunar surface as part of NASA’s Artemis campaign. We look forward to learning more from about the Trump Administration’s plans for our agency and expanding exploration at the Moon and Mars for the benefit of all.

Many are inferring and reporting this as a change of mission crew plans but that’s not the case—not yet anyway. The reasonably diverse Artemis astronaut corps of 18 people hasn’t changed. It incudes women and people of color. Of course, the selection criteria and preference of choosing from within the corps could very well change going ahead given the US-wide inclusion purge.

Related reminder: Critical scientific documents go missing from NASA-backed lunar community website (they’re still missing two months later)

ESA and JAXA move ahead on lunar collaborations

Image: ESA

In November 2024, ESA and JAXA announced that the two agencies will keenly examine opportunities for cooperation and collaboration across a whole range of space projects, including lunar exploration. Now they’ve identified various areas across the lunar spectrum to evaluate in detail:

Coordinating ESA’s upcoming Moonlight constellation and JAXA’s LunaNET test mission for communications and navigation satellites (navcom)
Payload flight opportunities on missions by both organizations, including upcoming Gateway science by both agencies
ESA’s existing analog mission testing with LUNA and astronaut training with Pangaea
Joint studies on future surface missions, particularly how JAXA’s upcoming pressurized habitable rover for Artemis astronauts could work in tandem with ESA’s Argonaut cargo lander in the 2030s within the Artemis framework.
Developing technological synergies in power systems, robots, and working on interoperability at system and sub-system levels.

This sounds promising! 🚀

More Moon

ispace Japan is partnering with SpaceData Inc. to build a system which replicates physical elements of the lunar environment such as lunar gravity and communications delays. This will accelerate testing and qualification of Moonbound hardware ahead of real flights. The duo will also build a high-resolution topographical model of the Moon based on data acquired by ispace’s lunar missions.

The LUNA test facility for lunar exploration hardware and operations. Image: ESA

ESA started operating a similarly driven, expansive LUNA facility since late last year. And, South Korea has developed a full-scale dirty thermovac chamber that accurately simulates the dynamic electrostatic environment on the Moon’s surface. Such facilities also help scientists and engineers understand how to mitigate long-term damage to lunar hardware and astronaut suits from notoriously sticky moondust.

If you like my efforts to bring you Moon Monday every week as a curated community resource compiling and contextualizing all things lunar exploration worldwide for free and without ads, support my independent writing. 🌙

- Jatan 🌙

Thanks for using RSS the best.

Moon Monday #217: Red A-CLPS 🔥💍

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 21:58:54 +0530

The Blue Ghost lander captured the roughly five-hour long March 14 total solar eclipse from the Moon. You can see the glowing ring of light from the third, latter picture emerging in earlier images in the solar panel reflections. Images: Firefly Aerospace

US-based Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Moon lander part of NASA’s CLPS program continued its nominal streak of payload operations until just after the end of lunar day on March 16, achieving virtually all of the mission goals it set out on.

On March 14, Blue Ghost captured a total solar eclipse from the Moon, a mesmerizing world’s second recording of this celestial clockwork that humans have otherwise only observed from Earth as lunar eclipses. Many people are assuming the eclipse ring to be from the Earth’s surface edges but that’s wrong. Earth is much bigger than our Moon, and so the ring glow is from sunlight refracting through our Earth’s outer atmosphere. What’s remarkable is that Blue Ghost made these observations across five hours on battery power amid surrounding surface temperatures dropping far below 0°C and peaking to a frigid -170°C. In a way, this was a mini demonstration of Blue Ghost trying to work into a lunar night, something the spacecraft repeated at the end of the local day on March 16 for about 5 hours as planned.

Since March 3, Blue Ghost was also intermittently operating the LISTER drill, which is jointly developed by Honeybee Robotics & Texas Tech University and flight-funded by NASA. While LISTER’s intended drilling depth was up to three meters underground, according to Firefly’s latest release the drill went up to about a meter into the surface. Data from LISTER will help scientists characterize heat flow in the Moon’s interior as well as other thermal properties, and from it ascertain our knowledge of how our Moon evolved. ISRO’s Chandrayaan 3 Moon lander performed a similar but complementary experiment in 2023 using a thermal probe, and whose first set of results have been published in Nature earlier this month.

Thruster-engine-plume and regolith interactions as seen from two of the six NASA SCALPSS cameras onboard Blue Ghost at 12 and 8 meters above the Moon respectively. Note how dust kick up dramatically increased within a small altitude change. Images: NASA / Olivia Tyrrell

NASA has released initial pictures taken by the agency’s multi-camera SCALPSS payload onboard Blue Ghost during the lander’s last 28 meters of its lunar descent. Blue Ghost’s thruster plumes vigorously kicked up lunar dust, soil, and rocks—collectively called regolith. The full suite of up-close SCALPPS images will help lunar scientists and engineers better understand how rocket plumes blast out lunar soil and affect the local lunar environment, and thus how best to protect future astronauts, critical hardware, and long-term habitats on the Moon. NASA aims to make the payload’s data public within six months.

The first version of SCALPSS flew on Intuitive Machines’ first CLPS lander last year but couldn’t work because the spacecraft had an anomalously hard landing. NASA is sending the third version of SCALPPS on Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark I lander targeted for launch later this year. NASA says the new SCALPPS will be delivered to Blue Origin by end of March. The agency is interested in this flight because unlike smaller landers like Blue Ghost, the massive Mark I will generate high enough trust to allow NASA to gauge plume effects at the scale of large crewed (Artemis) landers.

Firefly says the rest of the NASA payloads onboard performed well too . The retroreflector atop Blue Ghost successfully reflected laser pulses from Earth-based ranging observatories. LEXI captured X-ray images to study how the solar wind interacts with Earth’s magnetic field. The RAC instrument noted how lunar regolith sticks differently to different materials on the Moon, which will better inform scientists and engineers on how to better protect future human and robotic explorers from notoriously sticky and jagged lunar dust.

Blue Ghost’s view from the Moon during sunset with lovely crescent Earth in the sky to reflect on. You did well little firefly. Image: Firefly

Many thanks to The Orbital Index, Kris Zacny and Ben Hockman for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource for free and without ads, support my independent writing. 🌙

Still a hard landing for IM-2?

The Athena CLPS lander lying sideways inside a crater on the Moon, captured from orbit by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Note the whitish trail from south of the image leading up to the lander. Image: NASA / LRO / GSFC / ASU

On March 6, Intuitive Machines’ second CLPS lander called Athena landed on the Moon’s south pole around 85°S but ended up resting on its side and inside a cold crater such that it couldn’t generate enough solar power for a single Earth day and died without accomplishing the vast majority of its IM-2 mission objectives. It turns out Athena’s landing might not have been much better than last year’s hard-landed IM-1 either based on multiple reports.

A blog post by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera team mentions that Athena “hit the surface faster than intended”. While Japanese company Dymon’s tiny YAOKI rover onboard Athena couldn’t be deployed due to the lander being sideways, it took images from its hosted position which suggest that a lander leg might have broken off this time too. While that inference is speculative, YAOKI showcases how independent payloads enable more transparency on a mission by offering all they know. Analysis by Scott Manley using YAOKI images and other pieces of data also suggests that Athena may have come in laterally faster than expected just before hitting the Moon and toppling over. Well, for a nominal landing scenario, a lander could in principle leave a fine trail while laterally diverting to a safe landing spot using its hazard avoidance system but with Athena’s altimeters not working, the lander wouldn’t have known with good certainty how far off ground it is.

Athena’s lander leg pictured by the YAOKI rover. Images: Dymon / Phil Stooke

Eric Berger reports that Athena toppled over upon hitting the surface, and skid and rotated along the ground, gathering some regolith over itself and its solar panels before coming to a stop in a shadowed crater as cold as -173° Celsius. Now, many people are attributing the coldness as the reason for the mission failure. While that’s not false, it’s also not primarily relevant because broad ranges of pre-cryogenic and sub-cryogenic temperatures at the Moon’s poles are a well known fact. The environment is accounted for in mission planning and its contingencies.

Sadly, all of the issues discussed above is something the intentionally fuzzy language used by Intuitive as a publicly traded company will never tell you clearly and upfront through their direct communications, even though the mission hosted more than $100 million worth of US taxpayer money through NASA. The lander technically made it to the Moon and conducted very limited operations, and that’s something to acknowledge—but the mission itself failed, something to also acknowledge and certainly not forget when writing or talking about it in the future.

More mission updates

Without providing any role-specific explanation, NASA has closed its offices of the ‘Chief Scientist’ and ‘Technology, Policy, and Strategy’, citing only broader workforce reduction orders under the new US administration. Both offices led and enabled cross-cutting work across NASA centers crucial to the agency’s and country’s scientific, technological, and geopolitical space goals, including those under Artemis. Marcia Smith has best covered the move’s impact.
On March 9, ULA delivered to NASA the upper stage of the SLS rocket for the crewed Artemis II Moon mission targeting launch next year. Technicians will next fuel the upper stage and later stack it atop the rocket’s core stage via an adapter. On February 19, NASA completed stacking the twin solid rocket boosters that will be attached to the rocket’s core stage.
The four lunar navigation satellites part of ESA’s upcoming Moonlight navcom constellation will be built by Thales Alenia Space as part of the Telespazio-led consortium, which won ESA’s competed selection last year for ~$134 million. Moonlight will majorly serve hardware on the lunar south pole region. The launch of UK’s SSTL-built, 280-kilogram Lunar Pathfinder communications orbiter in 2026 onboard Firefly’s second CLPS lander will constitute ESA’s first Moonlight element. ESA signed a $23.5 million contract with SSTL in September 2021 to get communications services from Lunar Pathfinder. As such, ESA will be Moonlight’s anchor customer but expects the consortium to seek lunar navcom customers globally. ESA is targeting end of decade for the full Moonlight constellation to be operational.

Illustration of ESA’s Moonlight navigation satellites operating in lunar orbit. Image: Thales Alenia Space / Briot

More Moon

ESA is requesting research proposals by April 21 to assess the economic viability of local resource utilization on the Moon. ESA will co-fund the research in partnership with academia or industry. The research output must include a reference financial model ESA can use for its own strategic lunar exploration planning.
I wrote this piece for the Open Lunar Foundation (a Moon Monday sponsor): As Moon missions mount globally, we need to preserve future exploration and science
If you’re in Bangalore this Sunday, March 23, come over for the inclusive open discussion on all things space organized by WoAA India (Women Of Aeronautics & Astronautics India).

- Jatan 🌙

Thanks for using RSS the best.

If nasaspaceflight.com and its forum are blocked for you too, here’s how to access them

Jatan Mehta — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 19:53:35 +0530

Sometime last year, nasaspaceflight.com (NSF) stopped loading for me. I could not access any page on its website, all of which said “Sorry, you have been blocked” no matter which browser I tried. Since then I’ve been accessing the NSF site in alternate ways because of their valuable space journalism and their active forum. Lately, the issue seems to have grown. Multiple people in India have been noting that they’re unable to access the NSF site or its forum. Some of them reached out to me asking for a solution. I shared multiple solutions with them, and they found it useful. As such, I’m sharing those here on my blog hoping to help all who may be affected the same way with this or another such useful website.

The error page nasaspaceflight.com shows to many readers in India

A VPN is the obvious thing people try when a website isn’t accessible. But the thing is it may or may not work reliably for nasaspaceflight.com because it’s actually the Cloudflare service they use as the site traffic intermediary that’s blocking access for certain visitors based on its blackbox-esque security implementation. It doesn’t provide anything in the way of a human fix, not even the hated CAPTCHA nor a contact email on the error page. The bottomline is even if the NSF site loads for you through a VPN today, it may not tomorrow. I doubt NASASpaceflight folks are even notified of these blocks by Cloudflare.

Moon Monday #216: Firefly Blue Ghost brings precision landing and lunar sci-tech bounties

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 21:20:14 +0530

Last week in lunar exploration was eventful and bittersweet to say the least, with multiple US spacecraft at the Moon. At over 2500 words, this Moon Monday edition unpacks a lot of context on Firefly’s successful CLPS mission as well as on IM-2’s failure for Intuitive Machines and NASA so as to strive to provide you with a true, PR-less sense of the state of US robotic Moon exploration as it stands right now. If you like my compilation, commentary, and analysis, kindly support my independent writing. 🌙

Blue Ghost achieved third most precise robotic planetary landing

Shadow of the Firefly Blue Ghost Moon lander performing final descent and having touched down on the lunar surface, the latter captured before the kicked up lunar dust settled. Images: Blue Ghost landing video

The lunar touchdown of the Blue Ghost spacecraft on March 2, which the US-based Firefly approached and achieved with rigor, not only brought the first soft robotic Moon landing for the US in this century but also elevated the country to the era of precision landings crucial for future space exploration and science. Blue Ghost, part of and funded by NASA’s CLPS program, landed about 118 meters away from its target landing site in Mare Crisium—a remarkably close distance against the vast expanse of our Moon.

Blue Ghost seen from orbit by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Image: NASA / LRO / ASU / GSFC | Minor annotations: Jatan Mehta

On March 3, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) imaged the lander from orbit, finding its resting location on the Moon to be 18.5623°N, 61.8103°E. Recall from Blue Ghost’s landing site selection process that its targeted landing spot was 18.560°N, 61.807°E, with a circular “landing ellipse” diameter of just 100 meters. Shortly after landing, Firefly said that Blue Ghost “touched down within its 100-meter landing target.” Assuming the actual targeted coordinates didn’t change by more than 18 meters, and which Firefly hasn’t specified, it does mean that technically Blue Ghost landed a little outside of its landing ellipse. This might be due to the last minute divert maneuver that Blue Ghost made, as can be inferred from its surreal landing video, wherein its hazard avoidance system prioritized a safe spot for touchdown.

Blue Ghost’s target and landed site within Mare Crisium on the Moon. Image: LROC Quickmap / Jatan Mehta

In any case, Blue Ghost’s achieved landing precision allows it to be classified squarely in a small but growing global league of lunar landers that are enabling future polar crewed exploration, precision science, and cargo supplies. Blue Ghost proudly follows the lead of JAXA’s SLIM and CNSA’s Chang’e 3 craft, which touched down about 55 meters and 90 meters away from their respective target spots on the Moon.

A busy lunar morning

In the half a lunar day since its local morning landing, Firefly has operated most of the ten NASA payloads onboard Blue Ghost.

The Electrodynamic Dust Shield (EDS) successfully lifted, repositioned, and removed lunar regolith from glass and thermal radiator surfaces using electrical forces, demonstrating its potential to enable safe, dust-free long-term lunar living for future astronauts.
Blue Ghost’s ‘Surface Access Arm’ deployed the PlanetVac payload along one of the lander’s legs. Developed by Honeybee Robotics, managed by NASA, and partially funded by The Planetary Society, PlanetVac is a low-cost and efficient soil collection technology which uses pressurized nitrogen gas to suck in samples like a vacuum cleaner instead of bothering with sample-grabbing arms. It did its job. PlanetVac can enable swift, low-cost future sample return missions from the Moon, Mars and other planetary bodies.

PlanetVac in action near a Blue Ghost leg. Seen in the image are rocks flinging as PlanetVac operates. Image: Firefly

Blue Ghost has also deployed—threw, really!—four tethered Lunar Magnetotelluric Sounder (LMS) electrodes whose data is expected to help scientists learn more about our Moon’s interior, and from it gain better insights on how Luna evolved.
On March 3, the joint US-Italian LuGRE receiver payload onboard Blue Ghost got navigation signal fixes on the Moon. LuGRE previously achieved GNSS fixes in lunar orbit. It has proved that Earth-based GNSS satellite constellations can help future spacecraft autonomously navigate at Luna without relying on Earth-based tracking. It’s again through the Italian Space Agency (ASI) that we get more details of LuGRE’s surface operations:

Prior to activating LuGRE, the lander underwent a series of system checks to ensure that its onboard systems and scientific instruments were fully operational. A vital step involved calibrating the gimbal, which precisely orients the antennas toward Earth. Only after confirming this alignment could LuGRE be activated to search for GNSS signals. The first GPS G25 signal on L1 and L5 frequencies was received at 7:48 AM, a moment of excitement for the control team, confirming that the receiver had come through landing unscathed and was functioning well. The orientation was confirmed as correct, and operations were as expected. The real breakthrough came shortly after: upon analyzing the initial received data, it was shown that LuGRE locked and traced onto four satellites—two from GPS (G18, G25) and two from the Galileo system (E2, E3). This achievement enabled the first calculation of Position, Velocity, and Time (PVT) fixes on the lunar surface.

LuGRE on Blue Ghost utilized the weaker side lobe signals from GNSS satellites on the other side of Earth. Image: NASA / Danny Baird

Resources to follow Blue Ghost

Firefly’s Live Updates blog for Blue Ghost
NASA-funded payloads onboard, amassing nearly 100 kilograms
NASA’s Artemis blog rather than the inactive official CLPS blog
Browse my dedicated CLPS coverage webpage and the Moon Monday archive
My guide on how to follow CLPS updates
Subscribe for free to Moon Monday to receive mission updates with context 🌝

Many thanks to Open Lunar Foundation, Arun Raghavan and Mia North for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource for free and without ads, support my independent writing. 🌙

Tipped Intuitive Mooncraft dies with none of the net $130-million worth of payloads deployed

The Athena CLPS lander in lunar orbit and on the Moon’s south pole from one of its navigation cameras. Our Earth can be seen in both frames. Images: Intuitive Machines

On March 6, Intuitive Machines’ second CLPS lander called Athena landed on the Moon’s south pole around 85°S but ended up resting on its side and inside a cold crater such that it couldn’t generate enough solar power for a single Earth day and died. The lander’s state, including limited communications, prevented any intended operations of the multiple payloads onboard. The mission, called IM-2, has cost NASA $62.4 million for the CLPS flight award, $41.6 million for the Intuitive-built and NASA-funded hopper, and $14.1 million for sending a test 4G/LTE network on the Moon. Non-NASA payloads onboard Athena beared their own development costs and losses, such as the unspecified multi-million dollar rover from US-based Lunar Outpost and Japan-based Dymon’s tiny rover. Following the mission’s end, Intuitive’s shares as a publicly traded company fell by nearly 40% at the end of the week.

NASA said in a release that the agency-funded, Honeybee-Robotics-developed PRIME-1 drill onboard Athena demonstrated “the hardware’s full range of motion”. Of course, it could not drill the surface as intended because of Athena being sideways. Athena’s MSOLO spectrometer, which was to detect water ice in the drilled samples, ended up only detecting elements likely from gases emitted from the lander’s propulsion system. Recall that the primary goal NASA stated for IM-2’s CLPS contract was to encounter and study water ice. It is thus not met. Other than the rovers by Lunar Outpost and Dymon, the NASA-funded hopper from Intuitive couldn’t be deployed either. The “operations” of all these payloads were limited to commanding them in static modes, primarily proving that their space avionics package worked on the Moon and the structures survived.

Components of the Honeybee Robotics provided TRIDENT drill. Image: NASA Langley

Context of IM-2’s failure

Note that IM-2’s landing can be presumed to have been relatively softer compared to the hard-landed IM-1 because it seems that all of Athena’s legs are intact. Crucially, all IM-2 payloads survived to be in a position to operate whereas on IM-1 the aforementioned SCALPPS cameras, for example, couldn’t image landing plume effects due to the anomalously hard landing. That the also sideways and also power-limited IM-1 lander happened to work on the surface for an Earth week while IM-2 lasted less than a day is merely a function of the orientation, attitude, and local topography combinations each lander happened to have, especially due to going in half blind with their laser rangefinders not working in either case.

The laser rangefinders were supposed to be one of the 65 odd improvements Intuitive made for IM-2 with lessons learnt from IM-1. The company even touted its thoroughness pre-landing. On IM-1, the laser rangefinders didn’t work because Intuitive’s engineers forgot to turn off their physical safety switch before launch. On IM-2, it was taken care of along with several tests of the instruments. Per Intuitive, they were “tripled checked” this time. Yet the landed outcome has been essentially the same, made worse for the mission and NASA only by the fact that this was supposed to be a second, informed landing attempt for Intuitive.

However, IM-2’s lander lacked something from IM-1, the NASA LiDAR payload which was developed specifically for precision navigation—as is needed at the Moon’s poles. On IM-1, Intuitive and NASA were prompt to praise the LiDAR for its last-minute role as a mission savior but which actually did not assist the landing in the last 15 kilometers of descent due to delays in processing its data. That was partly because it was a last-day hot patch. However, the NASA LiDAR flying on IM-2 with pre-preparations could’ve offered Athena dissimilar redundancy for its laser rangefinders, which have once again jeopardized the mission.

Given all of the above points, it’s hard to take the positive spin put on IM-2 by the Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus in the post-landing media briefing:

Anytime that you ship a spacecraft to Florida for flight, and end up a week later operating on the Moon, I declare that a success.

Before Athena’s landing attempt, I had hoped that if it does not touchdown nominally, Intuitive would remember what makes a Moon landing “successful” this time around. Unfortunately, I was wrong. It’s also baffling how media outlets like Ars Technica can continue calling IM-1 a soft landing even in their IM-2 coverage.

To NASA’s credit, the agency has been acknowledging IM-2’s outcome upfront, unlike IM-1’s case where NASA disappointingly skewed the success criteria and continued to at various space events and channels when talking of the mission. But for IM-2, Joel Kearns, a leading CLPS executive at NASA HQ, said (emphasis mine):

While we’re disappointed in the outcome of the IM-2 mission, we remain committed to supporting our commercial vendors as they navigate the very difficult task of landing and operating on the Moon.

For NASA, Firefly’s Blue Ghost represents the only objective and nominal success from the four CLPS missions flown thus far. Here’s hoping that the IM-2 review process results in recommendations and implementations that see successful landings and actual scientific operations on Intuitive’s upcoming third and fourth CLPS missions for NASA as well as for the company’s future.

Lunar Trailblazer issues add to the pile of small US spacecraft failing to explore the Moon

Render of the Lunar Trailblazer orbiter at the Moon. Image: Lockheed Martin

The NASA-funded Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft, which launched alongside Athena as a rocket rideshare, is also seeming like a failure. The first set of telemetry from Trailblazer on February 26 indicated that the small spacecraft was facing power issues. NASA lost communications with Trailblazer a day later. Based on ground-based radar data collected on March 2, engineers think that the spacecraft is spinning slowly in a low-power state. Efforts to restore receiving telemetry from the craft and thereafter establishing commanding have failed so far. In the process, Trailblazer has missed performing key trajectory maneuvers necessary to execute the original path plan. As such, Trailblazer will no longer be able to enter its planned lunar orbit, ending the original mission.

The $72 million Lunar Trailblazer was supposed to provide scientists with unprecedented, high-resolution global maps of the amount, distribution, and state of water across our Moon from orbit. It was to also help us better understand several other key scientific aspects of Luna. Trailblazer unfortunately adds to the growing list of NASA-led or NASA-aided small lunar-craft that have failed recently, namely LunaH-Map, Lunar Flashlight, Lunar IceCube and LunIR. :(

More Moon

In a déjà vu event, SpaceX’s eighth launch of its Starship Super Heavy rocket on March 6 went essentially the same as the seventh one did in January. The eighth flight saw another successful booster stage catch but the upper Starship stage exploded, with its debris showering outside the designated areas and over the Atlantic Ocean and the Bahamas islands. This caused the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to again divert and delay many flights, and will now lead to the organization conducting yet another Starship flight anomaly investigation. As such, NASA’s long road to putting humans on the Moon with Artemis III, which has been inching through Starship, has slowed down further with this failed flight.
ispace is targeting June 6–8, 2025 as the landing date(s) for its second Moon lander RESILIENCE, which is currently en-route to Luna via a multi-month, energy-efficient trajectory after launching on January 15 this year. ispace says every single one of its seven major subsystems have been working nominally so far—as are the payloads. The lander will attempt to enter lunar orbit on May 6.
On March 3, technicians with ESA and Airbus installed the four solar array wings on NASA’s Orion spacecraft in preparation for the crewed Artemis II Moon mission launching next year. Relatedly, NASA is seeking design ideas from creators globally for which plush toy should the agency fly on Orion to act as a zero gravity indicator. A plush Snoopy flew on Artemis I.

- Jatan 🌙

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Moon Monday #215: Firefly performs first actual soft lunar landing for the US in the 21st century, bags key firsts

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 21:05:56 +0530

On March 2 at 8:34 UTC, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost spacecraft part of NASA’s CLPS program successfully completed its 12-minute descent from a 20-kilometer altitude point in its orbit to autonomously guide itself to a soft, upright touchdown on the Moon amid the lava plains of Mare Crisium. Notably, the lander only used its thrusters and not the main engine for the final hundred seconds or so of its descent. Shortly after landing, Firefly began commanding the spacecraft, including deploying the high-bandwidth X-band communications antenna. Until March 16, the end of the local lunar day, Firefly will operate the 10 NASA payloads onboard Blue Ghost and send us high-definition pictures and videos. ✨

The $101 million CLPS contracted Blue Ghost makes Firefly the first private company in the world to soft land on the Moon for real since Intuitive Machines’ falsely regarded soft landing was a rather hard one that literally broke a leg, tipped the spacecraft over, and didn’t meet majority of the mission’s technical and scientific objectives. Firefly has been careful with their communications, calling itself “the first commercial company in history to achieve a fully successful Moon landing” so that it may humbly flaunt Blue Ghost’s success without stepping on Intuitive’s or NASA’s toes. Note however that even Firefly’s statement isn’t entirely accurate. None of the CLPS missions flown so far have been actually commercial since US-tax-funded NASA is their sole enabler by a long shot. Regardless, Blue Ghost is the first truly successful NASA CLPS mission with the only private soft lunar landing yet. It could be the start 0f the tide that turns CLPS around. For Firefly, Blue Ghost’s success is incredible news as the company has two more CLPS landing missions contracted by NASA:

One to the Moon’s farside, for scientists to conduct unique radio astronomy observations. On the same mission, targeting launch next year, Firefly will also deploy the Lunar Pathfinder spacecraft in lunar orbit for ESA to kickoff its navigation and communications constellation called Moonlight. The total contract value across these services is about $130 million.
$179 million to carry six NASA-funded science & technology payload suites to one of the Gruithuisen Domes, a unique volcanic site on the Moon’s nearside.

Test like you fly, test when you fly

Left: The yellow dot on the top left shows the Blue Ghost spacecraft’s target landing region within the lava plains of Mare Crisium on the Moon. Yellow polygons mark areas of low rock concentrations and fewer large craters based on data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and Earth’s Arecibo radar observatory. Right: The green circle shows Blue Ghost’s tight 100-meter landing ellipse. Red circles are fresh, more rocky craters to avoid. In similar vein, Firefly identified areas with gentle slopes of less than 5°. Images: Firefly’s landing site selection process document; minor annotations: Jatan Mehta

Firefly approached its first Moon mission with rigor. The company invested more into lander testing than its lunar competitors, carefully studied all recent Moon mission failures, did not underbid on its CLPS contract, and chose a cautious trajectory to the Moon regardless. Instead of skipping on propulsion system qualification, Firefly “qualified Blue Ghost’s propulsion system beyond the total firing duration expected on the mission”, said William Coogan, Firefly’s chief lunar lander engineer in a conversation last year explaining the company’s comprehensive approach. More insightful quotes from the conversation below:

Firefly conducted nearly 100 drop tests on lunar soil simulants to qualify the legs of the lander. We even tested drops on concrete because it’s harder than anything we’ll land on.

A lot of the LRO [Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter] imagery is from disparate times of the day. We worked with the NASA LRO team to get imagery for the same time of the day as the landing to help test our models.

We tested loads on the lander structure with a 60-foot [18-meter] test structure originally made for squishing and bending rockets. As a launch company, we leveraged our diverse portfolio which might otherwise be prohibitive for companies only building Moon landers.

Unsuccessful missions can be very expensive to a company. We recognized that and intentionally did not go for the lowest value proposal for our CLPS bids so we can do what’s necessary [in terms of testing, etc].

We also tested lander leg drops on sand, particularly to know what loads will be imparted on the payloads. We can’t land so hard that it potentially breaks our payloads because they’re the whole point of the mission.

Clearly, the efforts paid off. Despite such rigorous testing on Earth, you can only know your spacecraft’s behavior once it is in space, including things like the precise performance of your spacecraft’s attitude control and effects of propellant sloshing on the craft. That’s why Firefly chose a slower, more cautious trajectory design that provided its engineers and mission operators several weeks in space to thoroughly characterize Blue Ghost’s systems and adapt to unexpected changes—Chandrayaan 3 style. In fact, Firefly’s approach to testing Blue Ghost’s hardware and vision-based navigation has also mimicked Chandrayaan 3’s for good.

Like ISRO, Firefly built a one-acre moonscape on Earth to test via a heavy-lift drone the lander’s vision-based ability to avoid hazards and navigate with respect to the terrain it sees, which helped ensure a safe touchdown for Blue Ghost. Firefly says Blue Ghost “touched down within its 100-meter landing target.” Recall that Blue Ghost’s landing ellipse was supposed to be centered at 18.56°N, 61.81°E. We’re awaiting the final landing coordinates to know the achieved precision. If Firefly’s statement is confirmed, Blue Ghost would proudly follow JAXA SLIM lunar lander’s lead in sparking an era of precision landings crucial for future crewed exploration.

Blue Ghost’s view of our Moon from orbit. Image: Firefly

Many thanks to Astrolab and Gurbir Singh for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource for free and without ads, support my independent writing. 🌙

Resources to follow Blue Ghost

Firefly’s Live Updates blog for Blue Ghost
NASA-funded payloads onboard, amassing nearly 100 kilograms
NASA’s Artemis blog rather than the inactive official CLPS blog
Browse my dedicated CLPS coverage webpage and the Moon Monday archive
My guide on how to follow CLPS updates
Subscribe for free to Moon Monday to receive mission updates with context 🌝

In the meanwhile, the US wants to “dominate” on the Moon..

Blue Ghost provided the US with its first soft Moon landing in the 21st century as the country tries to counter’s China’s lead in lunar surface exploration. Since 2013, China has had four on four consecutive successful lunar surface missions, each one increasingly complex and cresting [for now] at the farside sample return by Chang’e 6 last year. For the US, three tries over the two years have resulted in one failure with Astrobotic Peregrine, one partial success with Intuitive Machines IM-1, and one success with Firefly Blue Ghost. Yet NASA’s Acting Administrator Janet Petro had this to say during Firefly’s livestream:

I think this [new US] administration really wants to keep America first, and I think the way that we keep America first is by dominating in all the domains of space. And the domain of space we’re going to capture, recently tonight, is going to be on the surface of the Moon, and around the Moon. So as long as we keep dominating that space, I think we're going to be putting America first.

Had the word dominate been uttered by a Chinese entity for a Chang’e mission, it would’ve likely triggered a series of sharp reactions from western media and industry folks at large about China’s intentions at the Moon. Of course, there would be reactionary social media posts too but let’s keep the argument civil. In this case, it’s the NASA Administrator using the word “dominate”—twice—instead of a softer option like “lead”. Virtually no media outlets questioned its intent while quoting it, including but not limited to Space.com and Scientific American. English is the first language of the United States.

Intuitive Machines launches second Moon lander

View of our Earth from the IM-2 Athena lander in space. Image: Intuitive Machines

On February 26, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched and deployed Intuitive Machines’ second CLPS lander called Athena towards the Moon. The mission, called IM-2, hosts many payloads, including a NASA-funded drill and spectrometer to hunt for water ice, a rover each by US-based Lunar Outpost and Japan-based Dymon, a NASA-funded hopper from Intuitive, and a retroreflector. Today, March 3, Athena performed a 492-second main engine burn to successfully put itself in lunar orbit. Athena will attempt to land on the Moon around 85°S on March 6. See press kits by Intuitive and NASA for more mission details.

Based on Intuitive’s experience with its first Moon mission IM-1, the company has refined several lander systems with the hope of bagging full success this time around instead of a hard landing and tip over—which NASA and Intuitive disappointingly skewed the success criteria of and continue to at various space events and channels when talking of the mission. As Athena approaches its nerve-racking lunar descent and landing, I’m optimistic that this time around Intuitive will achieve a soft touchdown. But I also sincerely hope that if it does not, Intuitive remembers what makes a Moon landing “successful” this time around.

Lunar Trailblazer launches for Luna too

Concept image showing how Lunar Trailblazer’s remote sensing data will be able to distinguish between lunar water in the form of ice crystals and that in mineral-bound states. Image: Jasper Miura / Lockheed Martin

Launching alongside Athena as a rocket rideshare was the also NASA-funded Lunar Trailblazer orbiter. Unlike Athena, Lunar Trailblazer will spend four to seven months in a low-energy, fuel-efficient transfer trajectory before entering lunar orbit—similar to ispace Japan’s recently launched Moon mission. Unfortunately, the first set of telemetry from Trailblazer on February 26 has indicated that the small spacecraft is facing power issues. NASA lost communications with Trailblazer on February 27. The agency is working to restore telemetry and then establish commanding of the craft to better understand and address the power issues.

Lunar Trailblazer was launched to provide scientists with unprecedented, high-resolution global maps of the amount, distribution, and state of water across our Moon from orbit. It will also help us better understand several other key scientific aspects of Luna. Here’s hoping that this key scientific spacecraft is back online and in control soon.

More Moon

Our Earth on the Moon’s horizon as imaged by South Korea’s KPLO lunar orbiter. Image: KARI

Andrew Jones reports that South Korea’s National Space Council approved plans made by the country’s newly forged space agency KASA to build a Moon lander as part of a broader investment in indigenous space technologies. In January, Kim Na-young reported that KASA is budgeting about $31 million this year towards the country’s goal of building a Moon lander by 2032. In an approach similar to what ISRO takes for its planetary missions like Chandrayaan 3, South Korea is also indigenously developing the rocket that will launch its Moon lander. The rocket’s budget line is separate. KASA also plans to send a lunar environment monitoring payload through NASA onboard Intuitive Machines’ third CLPS Moon lander for about $5 million. All of these investments are part of South Korea’s FY2025 space budget of $562.5 million.
ESA is requesting scientific proposals from its community as helpful for the agency’s involvement in science payloads onboard upcoming NASA CLPS Moon landing missions.
The Open University is hiring a postdoctorate to conduct mineralogical and isotopic studies of lunar samples.

- Jatan 🌙

Thanks for using RSS the best.

Joining Open Lunar’s orbit as their Science Communications Lead

Jatan Mehta — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 18:12:35 +0530

I’m thrilled to share that over and above my flagship Moon Monday blog+newsletter, I’ve joined the Open Lunar Foundation as their ‘Science Communications Lead’. In that role, I’ll help communicate Open Lunar’s research work on technical and policy building blocks towards cooperative and sustainable lunar exploration for all. Keep an eye out on Open Lunar’s newsletter and blog in the coming months. 🚀

Read my articles and posts for Open Lunar here:

Articles & Posts for Open Lunar

I’m very excited for this new phase in my partnership with Open Lunar, for it works towards a mission that has so much in common with Moon Monday, and so alongside people and a community I deeply admire. Thanks to Jessy, Chelsea, Rachel, and the team for doing what they have done. 🌙

Disclaimer for transparency: Open Lunar has been one of the sponsors of Moon Monday for almost four years now. As such, my public Editorial Independence Policy has applied to Open Lunar and my coverage of them throughout, and will continue to. This includes continuing to state about them being a sponsor of any kind in parentheses every single time I mention their work in my coverage or writing, just as I recently did with Astrolab’s coverage. 🌗

- Jatan 🌙

Thanks for using RSS the best.

Moon Monday #214: Blue Ghost preps for lunar landing, gets its fix in lunar orbit

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 21:59:19 +0530

Announcement: I’m thrilled to share that I’ll be communicating the Open Lunar Foundation’s research work on building blocks of cooperative and sustainable global lunar exploration as their ‘Science Communications Lead’. Keep an eye out on Open Lunar’s newsletter and blog in the coming months. 🚀

I’m very excited for this new phase in my partnership with Open Lunar, for it works towards a mission that has so much in common with Moon Monday, and so alongside people and a community I deeply admire. Thanks to Jessy, Chelsea, Rachel, and the team for doing what they have done. 🌙

Disclaimer: Open Lunar Foundation has been one of the sponsors of my Moon Monday blog+newsletter for almost four years now. As such, my public Editorial Independence Policy has applied to Open Lunar and my coverage of them throughout, and will continue to. This includes continuing to state about them being a sponsor of any kind in parentheses every single time I mention their work in my coverage or writing, just as I recently did with Astrolab’s coverage. 🌗

The next Moon lander arrives

Our Earth (in the background) before setting and after rising in lunar orbit as captured by Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander. Snapshots from timelapse by Firefly.

On February 18, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Moon lander part of NASA’s CLPS program successfully fired its engines for about three minutes to lower its lunar orbit. Scott Tilley’s enthusiastic tracking found this orbit to be about 150 by 100 kilometers, down from the roughly 150 by 5673 kilometers it was after lunar orbital insertion on February 13. Today, February 24, Firefly nearly circularized Blue Ghost’s orbit with a 16-second burn. Blue Ghost can now attempt descending on the Moon on March 2 to land amid the lava plains of Mare Crisium with the landing ellipse centered at 18.56°N, 61.81°E.

Firefly Blue Ghost’s landing region (white box) in the cratered lava plains of Mare Crisium. Image: NASA / LROC / GSFC / ASU

The landing site selection process for Blue Ghost involved down-selecting sites within Mare Crisium based on some of the following main criteria:

Analyze data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and Earth’s Arecibo radar observatory to find areas with the lowest density of large craters (> 2 meters), gentle slopes of less than 5°, and no boulders at the 1-2-meter scale for a safe landing
Take into account engineering requirements like having a direct line of sight from the lander to the Sun and Earth for power and communications
Balancing (as is usual) several conflicting requirements from various scientific instruments onboard

For the mission’s lander testing aspect, Firefly previously conducted nearly 100 drop tests on lunar soil simulants and sand to qualify the legs of the lander. William Coogan, Firefly’s chief lunar lander engineer told me last year that the team “even tested leg drops on concrete because it’s harder than anything we’ll land on.” Firefly also built a one-acre moonscape to test via a heavy-lift drone the lander’s hazard avoidance and terrain-relative navigation capabilities to ensure a safe landing for Blue Ghost during the final descent. As Firefly reaches for this nerve wracking moment, here’s a reminder of what makes a Moon landing “successful”.

The Blue Ghost Moon lander. Image: Firefly

While in lunar orbit, Blue Ghost achieved a notable first. On February 19, the joint US-Italian LuGRE receiver payload onboard got navigation signal fixes at distances past 400,000 kilometers, the farthest for any spacecraft, reinforcing the idea that Earth-based GNSS satellite constellations could help spacecraft navigate at the Moon. It’s through the Italian Space Agency (ASI) that we get more details:

The signal acquisition occurred in the L1/E1 and L5/E5 bands throughout the Blue Ghost 1 lander's journey to the Moon. The most distant GNSS satellite signal received was from the Galileo constellation, at a distance of 67.79 Earth radii, about 432,384 kilometers from the LuGRE receiver. [...]

Despite the significant distance and high speed, the position was calculated with very high accuracy, with an error margin of about 1.5 kilometers for position and about 2 meters per second for velocity. Signals were successfully acquired from four GPS satellites on the L1 and L5 frequencies and from one Galileo satellite on the E1-E5 frequency bands.

Resources to follow Blue Ghost

Firefly’s Live Updates blog for Blue Ghost
NASA-funded payloads onboard, amassing nearly 100 kilograms
NASA’s Artemis blog rather than the inactive official CLPS blog
Browse my dedicated CLPS coverage webpage and the Moon Monday archive
My guide on how to follow CLPS updates
Subscribe for free to Moon Monday to receive mission updates with context 🌝

Intuitive Machines set for second launch to Luna

Intuitive Machines’ second Moon lander Athena inside the protective fairing of a Falcon 9 rocket. Image: SpaceX

Intuitive Machines’ second CLPS Moon lander, called Athena, has been encapsulated inside the fairing of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in Florida, targeting launch during a three-day window starting February 26. The mission, called IM-2, will carry a NASA-funded drill and spectrometer, a rover by US-based Lunar Outpost and Japan-based Dymon, a hopper, and a retroreflector.

Launching alongside Athena as a rocket rideshare is the also NASA-funded Lunar Trailblazer orbiter. Trailblazer is expected to provide scientists with unprecedented, high-resolution global maps of the amount, distribution, and state of water across our Moon from orbit. It will also help us better understand several other key scientific aspects of Luna.

The Athena lander will head straight for the Moon post-launch. It will reach within a week, with Intuitive Machines targeting a landing no earlier than March 6. On the other hand, Lunar Trailblazer will spend four to seven months in a low-energy, fuel-efficient transfer trajectory before entering lunar orbit—similar to ispace Japan’s recently launched Moon mission.

Many thanks to Open Lunar Foundation, Nathan Price and Frank Genin for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource for free and without ads, support my independent writing. 🌙

Australia continues investing in lunar technology components

Image: ASA

The Australian Space Agency (ASA) continues aiding local companies to build lunar technologies with funds from the nation’s Moon to Mars Demonstrator Grants program. On February 2, ASA announced supporting three more projects:

$0.63 million to EntX towards building a radioisotope heater unit (RHU) with the goal of enabling future landers and rovers to survive frigid lunar nights from “several months to up to five years”
$0.63 million to Fleet Space to “develop a cutting-edge gravity measurement instrument that will improve exploration for critical minerals”
$0.16 million for Element Robotics to test and de-risk autonomous lunar systems in simulated lunar environments before sending them to space

Notably, entX’s selection follows earlier ASA support to conduct a feasibility study and build an early prototype. entX is building the RHU with aid from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization (ANSTO). The ultimate intent is to fly the RHU on a US lunar surface mission, wherein the key challenge will be to navigate the US’ Nuclear Flight Safety and Launch Approval process.

These grants represent the latest advance in Australia’s ongoing strategy to enter the US space industry supply chain with NASA as the key enabling partner. Here are some notable previously ASA-funded Moon to Mars projects.

$3.4 million to Advanced Navigation for providing US-based Intuitive Machines with a LiDAV navigation sensor to aid the company’s second or third CLPS mission with autonomous navigation. Since the sensor seems to be absent from Intuitive’s second Moon lander, it would appear the company’s third lander might carry it.
$3 million for a ground station to support NASA’s Orion capsule’s high bandwidth optical laser communications terminal in support of the crewed Artemis II circumlunar flight. Relatedly, the US and Australia announced in May 2023 that Australia will establish a new ground station to support crewed Artemis missions. Conversely, Intuitive Machines utilizes commercial ground station services from CSIRO’s high-bandwidth Parkes dish in Australia for its robotic lunar missions.
$2.4 million to Fleet Space for building a miniature seismic station called SPIDER, set to fly on Firefly’s second CLPS Moon lander next year.

In the context of major lunar faring nations, these efforts may not seem that sizable. But as Douglas Gorman aptly put it, the idea with these grants is to “use short term investment to build out space competencies, thereby growing the pool of Australian companies competing on future lunar bids.”

Also see: Australia’s first lunar rover called Roo-ver has been delayed. It will be built by the EPE & Lunar Outpost Oceania.

More Moon

The upper end of the fully stacked SLS rocket boosters. Image: NASA / Kim Shiflett

As of February 19, NASA has completed stacking the twin solid rocket boosters part of the SLS rocket that will send four astronauts to the Moon as part of Artemis II in 2026. The crane-lifted stacking of the multi-segmented boosters took three months.
NASA’s Associate Administrator Jim Free, an advocate of and chief contributor to the current crewed Artemis lunar exploration architecture, retired out of the blue on February 22. The agency hasn’t announced a replacement until now.
The NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) is conducting an agency- and community-wide assessment of the state of “cold electronics” and their potential for space missions. The primary intent is to identify and close technology gaps, and subsequently develop and continually use cold electronics on future Moon missions with minimal thermal management for up to 20 years—something that will be particularly pertinent for sustaining activities in and around frigid permanently shadowed regions on the Moon’s south pole that can host temperatures well below -200° Celsius.
APL is hiring an experienced scientist to join their 30-person ‘Moon and Rocky Planets Group’ for advancing planetary sample studies, which would include guiding future Moon missions to explore and sample the surface.

What a wonderful gift from a Moon Monday reader and supporter. Artist Ruchita Madhok’s work to track our Moon’s phases across the year! Thank you Susmita Mohanty. 🌙

- Jatan 🌙

Thanks for using RSS the best.

Moon Monday #213: Mission updates from the US, Japan, China, and this Indian

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 16:52:14 +0530

CLPS and Artemis updates

Our Moon as captured by the Blue Ghost lander after getting in lunar orbit. Image: Firefly Aerospace

On February 13, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Moon lander part of NASA’s CLPS program successfully fired its engines for 4 minutes and 15 seconds to enter an elliptical orbit around Luna. Over the rest of February, Blue Ghost will fire its engines multiple times for shorter durations to circularize its orbit before it can attempt a lunar landing on March 2. Scott Tilley’s enthusiastic tracking finds Blue Ghost’s orbit to be about 150 by 5673 kilometers.
On February 9, NASA delivered the trio of shoebox-sized, solar-powered CADRE rovers to Intuitive Machines for integration with the company’s third CLPS lander. Targeting launch next year, Intuitive’s lander will deploy the CADRE rovers on the Moon’s surface and relay their communications to and from Earth. CADRE’s aim is to collectively autonomously map the local surface more efficiently than an equivalent single rover would. Its engineers previously tested CADRE’s in-tandem driving abilities at JPL’s Mars Yard with full-scale engineering models.
Marcia Smith reports NASA’s Acting Administrator Janet Petro stating that any changes to the Artemis program, including potentially to Artemis II and III crewed orbital and landing missions respectively, will need to wait until a NASA administrator to serve under the new US administration is confirmed. Trump has formally nominated Jared Isaacman to be the new NASA administrator but that’s pending formal confirmation by the US Congress. Jeff Foust reports that Isaacman’s confirmation hearing is yet to be held because the complete paperwork for the same is not yet submitted by the relevant parties according to a Congressional Representative.

Also see: Artemis policy changes on the horizon

More NASA CLPS updates →

More Japan and Selene updates →

Japanese lunar updates

Our Moon as captured by the RESILIENCE lander on February 15 during its lunar flyby. Image: ispace

ispace Japan’s second Moon lander RESILIENCE, which launched alongside Blue Ghost last month, successfully flew past the Moon on February 15 to continue its energy-efficient trajectory that loops back to the Moon in May for an orbital insertion opportunity. When flying past Luna on February 15, the lander’s closest approach to its surface was about 8400 kilometers.
Dymon, another Tokyo-based Japanese company, announced that their tiny 500-gram YAOKI lunar rover has been integrated into Intuitive Machines’ second CLPS Moon lander launching later this month or early next.
Relatedly, micro-class lunar rovers work with limited power, mobility, and thermal resources, and so under the stringent radiation and environmental constraints on the Moon. To enable their exploration, the also-Tokyo-based company JAOPS has been building a lunar surface simulation suite (open source on GitHub), aided by simulated rover camera and sensor data for mission operations training. There’s even a video demonstration of a simulated Chandrayaan 3 rover navigating on the Moon!

Snapshot of JAOPS’ lunar surface simulator with spacecraft hardware. Image: JAOPS

Many thanks to Astrolab, Joseph Biernat and Sean Gulick for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to bring you this curated community resource for free, support my independent writing. 🌙

China and Luna

A suited person demoing China’s new lunar spacesuit prototype. Image: CMSA / CCTV / CMS

Following up on their recently announced intent, China and Pakistan confirmed on February 5 that the latter’s space agency SUPARCO will build its first lunar rover and that China’s upcoming Chang’e 8 lander targeting a 2028 launch will carry it to explore the Moon’s south pole. One of the several payloads to be on SUPARCO’s ~35-kilogram rover will be jointly developed by Chinese and European researchers.
Andrew Jones reports that on February 14, the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) announced a call for Chinese organizations to bid for making a lunar mapping satellite in support of China’s crewed Moon landing missions starting later this decade. The satellite’s mandate is to obtain high-precision mineral, topographic, and geomorphic data of the Moon’s low-latitude regions.
Relatedly, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) announced the names of China’s spacesuit and rover to be used on crewed Moon landing missions as being Wangyu and Tansuo respectively. Wangyu means “gazing into the cosmos” and Tansuo means “to explore the unknown”. The names were selected after evaluating over 9,000 entries by the Chinese public.

More Moon

Illustration of JAXA’s LUPEX rover egressing from the ramp of ISRO’s Chandrayaan 5 lander. Image: JAXA

Based on a parliamentary response from February 13 in the Rajya Sabha, the Indian equivalent to the US Senate, it would seem that the Indian Government Union Cabinet must have approved the joint ISRO-JAXA LUPEX mission (Chandrayaan 5), following it being green-lit by the country’s National Space Commission late last year. However, ISRO is yet to formally announce the same. And so, the “it’s complicated” status of LUPEX remains for now. :/
The seismometer at ESA’s new, versatile LUNA analog facility for testing future mission hardware and operations is now active. Its data will be publicly accessible.
NASA JPL’s Planetary Geosciences group is hiring a postdoctorate to study volatiles in lunar igneous rock samples.

Meta Moon Monday

My coverage of “Critical scientific documents missing from NASA-backed lunar community website” sadly landed among the top posts on r/NASA subreddit for last week. It would’ve been nice if my other, positive coverage was also read by more people but I suppose given the situation, this is the new normal and the need of the hour.
My article on “What makes a Moon landing mission successful?” has been republished on Jeff Foust’s revered publication The Space Review. 🚀
I’m quoted in this timely op-ed by Susmita Mohanty, wherein she argues for Europe to reduce its NASA dependency and avoid becoming collateral damage every time NASA or the US government change their priorities. As someone who supports Europe independently doing good things on the Moon, I concur.
Places I’ve published Moon Monday editions from 🌙

- Jatan 🌙

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Critical scientific documents go missing from NASA-backed lunar community website

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 23:25:23 +0530

Screenshot of the inaccessible document archive on LEAG’s website as of February 10, 2025.

A whole host of documents presenting work and recommendations of US scientists and engineers in service of NASA’s Moon exploration goals have gone missing from the website of the agency-backed Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG). The missing documents include but is not limited to the key 2023 CLOC-SAT report by US lunar experts, which urged NASA to plan a replacement for the 2009-launched Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to support the increasingly important, upcoming NASA-funded robotic and crewed Moon missions part of the US Artemis program. The link to the report now leads to a dead page with no fallback. Here’s an archived version of the report thanks to the Internet Archive. In fact, the whole master list of LEAG’s annual meeting reports and other such high-level documents dating back two decades is gone. Here’s an archived list of them.

Similarly, the document archive of work by researchers contributing to the Extraterrestrial Materials Analysis Group (ExMAG) in direct support of NASA’s Solar-System-wide sample return missions, which includes Artemis, is also a dead webpage now. Here’s an archived link of the same.

This global loss of accessible scientific information has happened because the new US administration with its many recent executive orders—in the name of ending Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and defending women—has imposed an indefinite pause on activities, meetings, and communications of all such working groups supporting NASA’s science and exploration activities. In fact, the entire website of LEAG has been reduced to a single page stating but a single line:

The LEAG website is being reviewed in response to guidance given by NASA leadership.

Screenshot of the LEAG website homepage as of February 10, 2025.

Recall that LEAG’s founding purpose was to help NASA forge and meet its Moon exploration objectives by providing analysis across scientific, technical, commercial, and operational aspects of space. One of these outcomes was LEAG’s Artemis recommendations. But you wouldn’t be able to know any of this now as all links currently point to a black hole for an indefinite period. Here’s the archived webpage of LEAG’s founding purpose and the archived copy of their Artemis recommendations.

Regardless of your personal or public views on DEI, how is loss of access to publicly-funded scientific and technical work produced by LEAG and ExMAG in direct support of NASA’s exploration an acceptable outcome? All of this currently censored work was done and put up online in the past whereas the executive orders from the Trump administration have come in the present. How is a blind blanket takedown of everything justified? Heck, even the white paper titled Continued Use of the Mean Earth (ME) Coordinate System for the Moon is not accessible (here’s the archived copy). If one claims that things like thinking about lunar coordinate systems and urging an LRO replacement for the US’ own benefit is somehow tied to DEI, one is objectively wrong.

More than 500 scientists from across the US are banding together to communicate this and other degradations of US science via an open letter to NASA leadership and the elected US Congressional representatives, asking them to take action and preserve the integrity and public access of the country’s scientific activities and its output. The open letter can be signed anonymously, including by people in other countries who would like to show their support.

It was shortly after the US electoral outcome in November that I had raised the importance of archiving key public documents and webpages to ensure they remain public. It’s sad to see the need to act on it has come about this early. Please archive key lunar and space exploration webpages using the free tools of the Internet Archive, archive.ph, ArchiveBox, Perma.cc, Conifer, and more.

Originally published as part of Moon Monday #212

- Jatan 🌙

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Moon Monday #212: UNO Skip, then UNO Flip, ft. VIPER and Artemis

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 20:49:02 +0530

The scramble to save VIPER continues while Astrobotic performs an UNO FLIP

NASA’s VIPER lunar rover after acing thermal vacuum testing. Image: Anthony Colaprete / NASA

Following the questionable cancellation of NASA’s VIPER rover to uniquely study the Moon’s water ice deposits, the agency asked US organizations on February 3 to formally propose a mission of their own that would fly and operate VIPER in partnership with but at virtually no cost to NASA:

As part of an agreement, NASA would contribute the existing VIPER rover as-is. Potential partners would need to arrange for the integration and successful landing of the rover on the Moon, conduct a science/exploration campaign, and disseminate VIPER-generated science data. The partner may not disassemble the rover and use its instruments or parts separately from the VIPER mission. NASA’s selection approach will favor proposals that enable data from the mission’s science instruments to be shared openly with anyone who wishes to use it.

As we discussed last year when NASA put out the initial industry request to this end, the approach decidedly fails at VIPER’s original goal of helping constrain the nature, accessibility, and potential quantities of surface and near-surface water ice deposits on the Moon’s south pole. A company spending hundreds of millions of dollars to fly VIPER has little incentive to make its scientific data as fully available and accessible as NASA would. A VIPER-less Artemis foregoes the agency and its associated national scientific community’s ability to systematically plan sustained robotic and crewed Moon missions in the near future. Last year NASA had also said it would separately explore flying VIPER through international partnerships but the agency hasn’t provided an update on that front.

In the meanwhile, Astrobotic announced on February 5 that its Griffin lander—which was to carry VIPER to the Moon as part of the CLPS program before NASA pulled out the rover—will now instead carry the 500-kilogram FLIP rover from Astrolab (a Moon Monday sponsor). FLIP is a scaled down test model of Astrolab’s crew-capable FLEX rover. By flying FLIP first, Astrolab hopes to raise the technology readiness levels of multiple aspects of FLEX, including testing a number of lunar dust protection technologies. Astrolab leads one of the three competing teams NASA selected last year to mature their designs for a versatile Lunar Terrain Vehicle for use across Artemis missions starting end of decade.

Critical exploration documents go missing from NASA-backed lunar community website

Screenshot of the inaccessible document archive on LEAG’s website as of February 10, 2025.

The LEAG website is being reviewed in response to guidance given by NASA leadership.

Screenshot of the LEAG website homepage as of February 10, 2025.

Many thanks to Off Planet Research, Gordon Roesler and Sonia Tikoo for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to publish this curated community resource for free, support my independent writing. 🌙

Mission updates

Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander has completed the Earth-orbiting phase of its Moon landing mission, clearing seven of its self-defined milestones. Image: Firefly

On February 8, Firefly fired engines on its Blue Ghost Moon lander part of NASA’s CLPS program to put it on a trajectory that intercepts with the Moon so it can attempt lunar orbital insertion on February 12. The six payloads Firefly and NASA had switched on earlier aboard Blue Ghost will continue to collect and send data to Earth as the spacecraft reaches the Moon.
On February 4, Blue Origin simulated two minutes of lunar gravity in the New Shepard crew capsule by rotating it at about 11 revolutions a minute during the post-capsule-deployment phase of the New Shepard rocket’s suborbital mission. This represents a tenfold increase in the time available for testing experiments under low gravity compared to the 20 seconds or so achieved on parabolic plane flights. The order of magnitude improvement is why NASA funded this project and tested 17 lunar-relevant payloads onboard the capsule. On previous New Shepard flights, NASA has tested autonomous lunar navigation and precision landing technologies, and an experiment to measure how Moon-like dust particles gain and accumulate electric charge in microgravity so as to effectively protect astronauts, lunar hardware, and future habitats from the damaging effects of clingy Moondust. As such, NASA is leveraging New Shepard flights to help verify and refine the functioning of new lunar technologies at relatively low costs before they can be sent to the Moon.
Jeff Foust reports that the UAE has selected Thales Alenia Space to build and help operate the airlock module for the NASA-led international Gateway lunar orbital habitat. Intended to fly to the Gateway on Artemis VI early next decade, the airlock will allow astronauts to perform spacewalks—while around the Moon!—and deploy and manage scientific payloads on the Gateway’s exterior. The airlock will also provide an additional docking port on the Gateway for visiting spacecraft. It was in January 2024 that NASA and the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) announced that the UAE will provide the Gateway’s airlock. Russia was originally supposed to be the provider but the country later pulled out. In return for this contribution, the UAE will get to send an astronaut to the Gateway aboard an Artemis flight. As for Thales Alenia Space, the company is now involved in producing five major elements of the Gateway including the airlock, the other four being the NASA HALO and ESA-JAXA Lunar I-Hab habitat modules, ESA’s Lunar Link communications module, and ESA’s Lunar View refueling and cargo module. The station might as well be called the Thales Lunar Gateway.

Artemis policy changes on the horizon

The SLS rocket at its launchpad on August 17, 2022. The Sun could set on the rocket any day now. Image: NASA / Joel Kowsky

Eric Berger reports that on February 7, Boeing notified 800 employees working on the SLS rocket that the company is preparing for up to 400 job cuts by April due to impending Artemis program changes any month now. While there’s little doubt among US space industry followers that the SLS will go away somehow, from some point on, the transition to other rockets including SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s New Glenn is not going to be straightforward—as Marcia Smith points out.

Note that no technical proposals for such a transition have been mentioned or discussed publicly so far by actors part of the new US administration although we should see some activity soon following the impending presidential budget proposal and the onboarding of a new NASA administrator. Jeff Foust notes in his coverage that the Vice Chair of the commerce, justice and science subcommittee part of the US Congress House Appropriations Committee is Dale Strong, whose district includes NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center—the lead center for SLS.

Illustration of Japan’s crewed, pressurized rover for NASA’s Artemis program. A large solar panel covers the other side. Astronaut added for (rough) scale. Image: JAXA / Toyota

In the meanwhile, a joint statement between the US and Japan, following a meet of their national leaders, reaffirmed US-Japanese cooperation to explore the Moon’s surface. JAXA and NASA had agreed last year that Japan will provide an advanced crewed pressurized rover for Artemis astronauts early next decade for use starting Artemis VII. In return for this critical contribution, NASA will land two Japanese astronauts on the Moon. The rover will be built by Toyota, JAXA, and Mitsubishi. Atsushi Nakajima, Project Manager of the Space Systems Division at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, previously said that building and operating the rover for the upcoming ISRO-JAXA LUPEX mission will contribute directly to the development of Japan’s pressurized rover for Artemis.

Note how the aforementioned joint statement makes no mention whatsoever of US-Japanese collaboration on the NASA-led Gateway lunar orbital habitat even though JAXA is making significant contributions to Artemis there as well. Japan has bagged an astronaut seat aboard the Gateway in return for JAXA providing critical life support systems and infrastructure components for the station’s Lunar I-Hab crew module. Japan is also developing the advanced HTV-X(G) spacecraft to supply cargo to the Gateway starting 2030, allowing the US to sustain crewed and uncrewed operations for longer periods. It’s quite possible the new joint statement’s omission of US-Japanese collaboration in lunar orbit wasn’t intentional, especially since the language was part of a broader announcement. But if it was intentional, expect to hear more on Gateway’s fate this year.

Editor’s note: As you may have guessed in this UNO-themed Moon Monday edition, some players have way more cards at their disposal than others.

- Jatan 🌙

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Sharing Moon Monday’s approach to avoiding (Artemis) hot takes and speculative coverage

Jatan Mehta — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 18:02:21 +0530

🌗 More China and Luna updates →

Some of you have been wondering and asking why I haven’t covered potential Artemis changes in the new US administration on my Moon Monday blog+newsletter. So here’s the thing.

In the nearly three months since the US electoral outcome, speculations on shifts in the Artemis program have come and gone, or even gotten superseded. As it is the space industry suffers from having more coverage of pre-launch and ongoing spaceflight than that of post spaceflight. As such, what many people and media outlets have been engaging in for the past two months is pre-pre-spaceflight and pre-policy!

I’ve generally kept an editorial rule that I don’t discuss or proliferate something on my blog that’s more speculation or more incomplete than not. I prefer to wait for a tangible aspect of something to move in the present, and then pull related threads and coverage to get a better sense of what’s happening and where things are really going. My goal with Moon Monday is to archive updates and efforts that actually transpired, including for Artemis. This way it can provide more long term value rather than be tied to just the news cycle.

There can be good reasons to do speculative coverage, and I’ve done some in the past when I thought it was warranted or if it was something only I could’ve said. But for Artemis, there are so many doing and spreading the speculations already that I don’t feel the need to proliferate it all further. I’m quite tired of the transient way in which most space news is covered, and I’d like to keep Moon Monday away from all of that.

To be clear, I’m not implying other media outlets should take the same approach as Moon Monday. Unlike what seems to be broadly assumed by people at large, the media is not a monolith. Not all media publications and journalists cover the same topics, and to the same depth or on comparable timescales. It holds true even within science and space journalism. In fact, if it wasn’t for many outlets providing space communities with daily coverage, my weekly Moon Monday editions wouldn’t have been able to build on it to provide a broader context. But there’s a difference between daily updates on actual developments versus transient speculations.

Just as importantly, majority of the US-based and Europe-based media publications covering space have a strong western bias, which is something I explicitly try and avoid here. Moon Monday covers global lunar exploration. There are many other lunar developments happening right now in countries worldwide—and that doesn’t mean including only China—which don’t get covered well or enough. These developments are just as important too.

With Moon Monday, my goal has been to provide a larger global picture that complements the daily coverage in parts of the world, and use that to identify gaps and fill them if possible. In turn, this contextual coverage feeds back to journalists and daily reporters worldwide who are subscribed to Moon Monday.

And so that is why you haven’t seen me spread Artemis speculations vis-à-vis the new US administration on Moon Monday. Having explained these things, now that the new US presidential term has officially begun and some space policy activity is unfolding, I look forward to covering all the tangible updates as well as share my perspectives along the way while retaining the approach above. To follow Artemis developments, subscribe to my blog for free and check out the dedicated Artemis page.

Thoughts?

- Jatan 🌙

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Indian Space Progress #24: High on docking, low on navigation. Cool new projects, same old budget

Jatan Mehta — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 22:28:59 +0530

This edition marks two years of publishing the monthly Indian Space Progress blog+newsletter. I started it with the goal of trying to compile, capture, and globally contextualize true trajectories of India’s evolving (civil) space capabilities. More than 7500 of you subscribers spread across the globe have found it interesting enough to have it on your radar. Thank you so much for reading and supporting! A special thanks also goes to the Takshashila Institution for being the enabling sponsor of Indian Space Progress. 🚀

Known geographical distribution of Indian Space Progress readers, spanning 100+ countries

India’s space program made great strides in 2023 and 2024 but there have also been several shortcomings and misses. This edition of Indian Space Progress discusses and contextually links to not just the highs but also the lows for India’s recent space missions and ambitions. The motivation is simple: there’s more work to do, and it all starts with accepting and discussing realities and constraints. It’s what made Chandrayaan 3 so successful after Chandrayaan 2’s failure. 🛰️

SPADEX paves the way for Chandrayaan 4 lunar sample return

Pre-launch photo and renders of the SPADEX satellites. ISRO designed the satellites such that either could act as the chaser and the other as target for docking. Images: ISRO

On January 16, India successfully docked and then controlled two twin satellites in circular low Earth orbit as part of mission SPADEX (space docking experiment). ISRO is using the $14 million mission, sans the launch cost, as practice before the agency can launch the complex Chandrayaan 4 spacecraft stack to bring samples from the Moon. Chandrayaan 4 will feature large robotic modules that dock remotely in Earth as well as in lunar orbit, the latter being a feat only China has achieved so far with its Chang’e 5 and Chang’e 6 sample return missions.

Chethan Kumar reported that ISRO will undock the SPADEX satellites and then conduct more docking trials with enhanced precision. The undocking was supposed to take place by late last month. In the absence of post-docking updates from ISRO, the New Indian Express reports that the undocking of satellites is taking longer than expected due to issues like power generation differences between the two spacecraft. Now, the undocking might not happen before March at the earliest.

Chandrayaan 3’s Project Director Palanivel Veeramuthuvel noted in his talk at the 2024 International Astronautical Congress (IAC) that this mission is the first of three SPADEX missions ISRO will conduct. At least one of the next two SPADEX missions will demonstrate docking in an elliptical orbit, something that better simulates mission scenarios for Chandrayaan 4.

The in-consideration elongated Chandrayaan 4 spacecraft stack of five modules (left) versus the two modules which comprised Chandrayaan 3 (right). Images: Jatan Mehta | ISRO

Chandrayaan 4’s landing site will be somewhere between 85–90° on the Moon’s south pole, putting it squarely in the water-hosting polar region as opposed to the 70°S for Chandrayaan 3. Chandrayaan 4 is not the only reason for ISRO to conduct SPADEX missions. These will also reduce risk for the upcoming Gaganyaan human spaceflight missions—especially so for the end-of-decade cargo flight to the International Space Station and one to India’s first space station module.

Tangent: ISRO provided ground tracking support for Intuitive Machines’ NASA CLPS Moon landing but will not spell it

Loading of ISRO’s NSV-02 satellite into a thermovac chamber for space environmental testing pre-launch. Image: ISRO

On January 29, a GSLV Mk II rocket successfully launched and deployed the second of five next-generation navigation satellites called NVS-02 into a geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO). The satellite though has been stuck there since. As is characteristic of the agency, ISRO tends to go silent when facing mission failures. ISRO made no press release, website blog post, or social media posts about the situation, and instead only quietly updated the mission’s webpage to append the following note on February 2:

Subsequent to the launch, the solar panels on board the satellite were successfully deployed and power generation is nominal. Communication with the ground station has been established. But the orbit raising operations towards positioning the satellite to the designated orbital slot could not be carried out as the valves for admitting the oxidizer to fire the thrusters for orbit raising did not open.

The satellite systems are healthy and the satellite is currently in elliptical orbit. Alternate mission strategies for utilising the satellite for navigation in an elliptical orbit is being worked out.

Chethan Kumar reported that ISRO’s multiple attempts to fix the non-functioning valve have not achieved the “desired outcome”. And, since the orbit of NVS-02 is about 165 by 37,582 kilometers, the low perigee will make the satellite reenter and burn up in Earth’s atmosphere due to air drag soon enough. Unless ISRO figures out some way to raise the satellite’s orbit, it will be lost. Either way, NVS-02 will not reach its final inclined geosynchronous orbit (IGSO) now, making it a setback for India’s GPS-GNSS–PNT constellation called Navigation with Indian Constellation (NavIC).

NVS-02 was supposed to replace the old IRNSS-1E PNT satellite. A parliamentary response from August 2024 as well as an October 2024 talk by former ISRO Chief S. Somanath tell us that NavIC has been operating on minimum strength of four satellites. Analysis of orbital operations of functional NavIC satellites by Adithya Kothandhapani reveals that because the satellites need to be spread out in a certain geometry, fixing NVS-02’s failure is more than a matter of a single satellite replacement by NVS-03. Kothandhapani notes:

IRNSS-1E is starting to have wider E-W migration (~10deg) in tracing an analemna at 111.75E (see the pink trace centered at 111.75E in the figure above). With no N-S station-keeping, the satellite will continue to go out of the orbital inclination specification, which is currently 34deg and rising.

[...]

The crucial takeaway here is that NVS-02’s failure has set the program back not just by one additional launch and a satellite, but also compounded the strain on operations of the existing satellites, majority of which are reaching the end of their stated lifespans.

And, reddit user u/Ohsin has pointed out that ISRO has stopped publishing NavIC performance reports since Q4 2021.

As such, other than a NavIC program review being in order, it will take ISRO a concerted effort over the next several years to bring NavIC to a place where it can function reliably and meet all of its desired objectives.

The POEM continues

On the same launch as SPADEX, ISRO once again uniquely repurposed the PSLV rocket’s fourth stage as a stabilized, solar-powered platform for onboard payloads. Called the PSLV Orbital Experimental Module (POEM), the platform affords organizations low-cost access to space for demonstrating their technologies ahead of use in future missions. This fourth launch of the POEM platform carried 24 payloads from private, commercial, academic, and government organizations across India.

Many of these payloads have already demonstrated their full primary mission objectives, including institutional ones growing cowpea seeds and spinach tissues in space, and firing and space-qualifying of green fuel thrusters by private companies Manastu Space and Bellatrix respectively. However, many other payloads have yet to provide public updates on the progress being made on their objectives—or lack of it.

The previous POEM launch last year hosted nine payloads from various organizations, including the LEAP satellite platform demonstration from the private company Dhruva Space, and ISRO’s own high density Lithium-ion batteries and a fuel cell with the hope of using their core technologies in future satellites and space stations.

Many thanks to the Takshashila Institution, PierSight, Gurbir Singh and Arun Raghavan for sponsoring this month’s Indian Space Progress edition. If you too appreciate my efforts to capture true trajectories of Indian space, support my independent writing. 🚀

Cool new projects; same old budget

An LVM3 rocket hosting the Chandrayaan 3 spacecraft on the second launchpad at India’s Sriharikota spaceport. Image: ISRO

On January 16, the Indian Government Union Cabinet approved the establishment of a third launch pad at India’s spaceport Sriharikota for $460 million. Targeting readiness before end of decade, the Third Launch Pad (TLP) will support horizontal integration, testing, and launches of the also-recently-approved heavy-lift NGLV rocket.

Since the NGLV is not planned to be launched before 2030 though, the TLP will initially aid in increasing the launch capacity of India’s Gaganyaan human spaceflight missions vis-à-vis LVM3 rocket launches. Notably, ISRO is undertaking this and other upgrades for its spaceport keeping in mind environmental constraints to prohibit flood damaging and erosion of the local ecosystem.

Despite the recent approval of multiple ambitious space projects, including the aforementioned new launchpad and NGLV rocket, Chandrayaan 4, a Venus orbiter, and multiple human spaceflight missions, the Indian government’s space budget for FY 2025-26 essentially remains flat at about $1.5 billion, continuing the trend and context from last year. It means that while India will develop these high-profile projects, the timelines for many will stretch out since the overall budget isn’t budging. Fixing NavIC will also need to come out of this same budget.

That being said, there is one notable change in the new fiscal year budget announcement to encourage private space companies to commercialize Indian space technologies, as noted by Chethan Kumar:

In a move that the industry had been batting for, the Centre has reduced customs duty on goods used in building of launch vehicles and launching of satellites to zero from the existing 5% and the same has been extended for ground installations for satellites, including space and consumables.
Goldie Dhama, partner, Deloitte India, said: “Reduction of custom duties to Nil for both should allow both global and domestic companies to make further investment for manufacturing in India and growth of the space sector.”

Pixxel Space launches first batch of hyperspectral satellite constellation

Pixxel Space’s Firefly satellite constellation specs. Image: Pixxel

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket’s Transporter 12 launch on January 14 carried five payloads from private Indian companies, including three hyperspectral satellites for Earth observation from Pixxel Space called Fireflies, Digantara’s SCOT satellite for space-based object tracking and situational awareness, and XDLINX Space Labs’ Elevation-1 satellite touting an advanced miniaturized communications payload.

Last year in April, Bengaluru-based Digantara opened up Asia’s first dedicated center for space traffic monitoring. The center also allows the company to assemble their upcoming satellite constellation dedicated to space-based tracking of orbital objects—a world first. SCOT is an experimental demonstrator and prototype to that end. The company raised $10 million in June 2023 to build the constellation, followed by an additional $2 million last year.

Pixxel Space, headquartered in the US but with a major Indian presence, aims to launch three additional Firefly satellites in the second quarter of 2025. The US company has notably won a NASA contract to provide Earth observation data. Pixxel raised an additional $24 million last year, bringing the total funds raised by the company to at least $95 million. Early last year, Pixxel opened up a 2800 square-meter manufacturing and testing facility in Bengaluru with the hope of eventually building and qualifying dozens of satellites a year.

Tigerfeathers has a great deep dive on Pixxel’s story, and YouTuber Gareeb Scientist gives us a nice satellite tour of Pixxel’s facility in Bengaluru. However, I will also note here that I’m not a fan of Pixxel’s communications. They have broadcasted things like “human eyes only see three wavelengths” in trying to sell the proposition of hyperspectral imagery. Such statements are disinformation spread from a science communications perspective, oversimplifying things to the point of becoming meaningless even for a lay audience.

More Indian space

As Indian astronaut training at NASA continues so as to fly Shubhanshu Shukla to the International Space Station (ISS) later this year through the Ax-4 Axiom Space private mission aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule as Mission Pilot, ISS partner nations have approved for the Ax-4 crew of four to fly for a 14-day mission. As part of the mission and a broader ISRO-ESA agreement, Indian institutes will conduct two joint microgravity experiments with ESA.
ISRO has released the first datasets from its Aditya-L1 solar telescope, which began studying the Sun’s surface, atmosphere, its activities, and the solar wind since January last year from a halo orbit around the first Sun-Earth Lagrangian point (L1). Aditya-L1 payload data is accessible from ISRO’s ISSDC and PRADAN portals. In the meanwhile, Chethan Kumar reports on how IIA researchers have developed a new method to predict impacts of solar storms on Earth.
Dr. V. Narayanan is India’s new Secretary of the Department of Space (DOS) as well as the chief of ISRO as a DOS entity. He continues helming India’s premier space organization from the previous DOS Secretary and ISRO Chief S. Somanath. Narayanan has contributed extensively to many high-profile Indian space missions and launch vehicle development programs, including cryogenic propulsion on India’s rockets, the Chandrayaan 3 lander, making the LVM3 rocket ready for Gaganyaan human spaceflights, developing propulsion systems for Gaganyaan, and much more.
Job listing: InspeCity, which is building technologies to better sustain satellites, is hiring a computer vision engineer, an AOCS engineer, an embedded systems engineer, and more. 🛰️

I’m pleased to share that ISRO’s webpage on details and scientific context of the Chandrayaan 4 lunar sample return mission plus their Venus orbiter cites my blog as well as my work for The Planetary Society as references! 🚀

Screenshot of ISRO’s webpage on the Chandrayaan 4 and Venus Orbiter missions.

- Jatan 🌙

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ISRO provided ground tracking support for Intuitive Machines’ NASA CLPS Moon landing

Jatan Mehta — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 22:31:19 +0530

Last week I wrote how the annual report of NSIL, an Indian government arm tasked with commercializing ISRO’s space technologies, notes that ISRO provided commercial ground tracking support for a lunar mission by another country in 2023. For some reason, the NSIL report doesn’t specify the mission name. NSIL has not yet responded to queries regarding the same. As such, we are left to guess.

Since the mentioned timeframe is 2023, my guess was the ground tracking support must have been for either Russia’s Luna 25 spacecraft or JAXA’s SLIM. Although SLIM landed in January 2024, it launched in September 2023. India’s geography with respect to Japan and Europe would’ve made it a suitable gap-filler for continued communications. I excluded ispace Japan’s first Moon mission as being the NSIL-ISRO customer on the assumed basis that ISRO doesn’t have publicly known cooperation arrangements with ispace like they do with JAXA and Roscosmos.

Now, multiple ISRO sources, and a public talk by a program lead at ISRO’s spacecraft communications arm ISTRAC, independently suggest that it was only Intuitive Machines who commercially used ISRO’s ground tracking support for IM-1, the company’s first NASA CLPS Moon mission. This use would be as part of Intuitive’s global network of commercially availed ground stations for its Moon missions, where ISRO’s presence was previously known.

Ground stations used by Intuitive Machines for its first CLPS Moon mission IM-1. Images: Intuitive Machines, MSU, Goonhilly, CSIRO

But there’s a catch. IM-1 happened in 2024, not 2023. NSIL’s annual report may be for FY 2023-24 but it also clearly states the following:

NSIL has provided one Deep Space Mission Support for a Lunar Mission of an International Customer during 2023.

The most likely thing here could be that the report made a writing mistake by not specifying the year as being fiscal. It makes one wonder how many other things across ISRO and ISRO-affiliated reports may have been inaccurate like this case?

Anyway, ISRO will provide commercial ground tracking support for Intuitive Machines’ second CLPS Moon landing mission as well. The IM-2 lander is set to launch late February on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. And I will cover its updates as usual on my Moon Monday blog+newsletter.

Tangent: Here’s a paper on how orbit determination went for the IM-1 mission. Ignoring that the paper’s very first line says “Intuitive Machines (IM) recently met its goal of softly landing a robotic spacecraft near the south pole of the Moon”, because it was not a soft landing by any measure, the paper notes many interesting challenges. Here’s an example:

A common issue throughout the mission was a lack of real-time information on which station was being used as the transmitter and at what frequency the station was transmitting. The issue with determining the transmitting station mainly came from the fact that all tracking data produced was labeled as 2-way. In general, one station would be in 2-way as the transmitter and one or more other stations would be listening in 3-way configuration. Early in the mission, it was noted that it appeared that several of the LTN stations were not transmitting at the assumed requested frequency. No direct telemetry was available in the ground system to determine what the true transmit frequency was. In some cases, the transmit frequency for a specific station could change from pass to pass. This required significant effort to identify what the transmitting station was and at what frequency it was transmitting.

- Jatan 🌙

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Moon Monday #211: A long march of lunar papers from China, and mission updates

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 19:24:37 +0530

A panorama from the Chang’e 6 lander on the Moon’s farside, showing one of its legs and the scoop sampling arm near its surface digs. Image: CNSA / CLEP

Chinese researchers have published a whole range of papers lately on their recent lunar exploration outcomes as well as ongoing scoping of future ambitions. Here’s a contextualized compilation.

Studying rocks from the first lunar farside samples brought to Earth by the Chang’e 6 mission has revealed that the Moon’s global magnetic field persisted longer than thought. Read:
1. Release by CAS
2. Paper in Nature
3. Coverage by Zhang Tong
The above finding comes shortly after Chinese scientists associated with the mission dated volcanic samples from Chang’e 6. Read:
1. CAS Release One and Two
2. Papers in Nature and Science
3. Moon Monday coverage
Chinese researchers at large can now apply for access to Chang’e 6 samples as of November last year, which came after curation and storage of samples was complete. The first batch of Chang’e 6 samples to be dispatched were approved late December alongside the eight batch of Chang’e 5 samples—a total of 8.55 grams across 16 research institutions. However, the Chang’e 5 sample dispatch doesn’t yet include approvals for international proposals as was expected, which might be due to the fact the US and China are taking long to finalize terms for US researchers to access Chang’e 5 samples after NASA sought and secured a US Congressional exception for the same in late 2023.

A three-stage concept of developing a cislunar navigation and communications constellation proposed by Chinese researchers. Image: SCMP

The Journal of Deep Space Exploration published a special edition of papers (in Chinese) which take a systematic look at mapping lunar lava tubes to asses their potential as long-term astronaut habitats in the future. Read:
1. The series of papers
2. Summary by Andrew Jones
3. International efforts to study and explore lava tubes
The Chinese Journal of Space Science published a review paper summarizing the scientific findings from Chang’e 4 and Chang’e 5.
1. To summarize the summary: Chang’e 4 greatly helped constrain the nature of cosmic ray radiation on our Moon’s farside, which will help plan safer future crewed missions leading to a Moonbase. Samples return to Earth by Chang’e 5 have helped scientists determine truer ages of lunar features, refine the nature of impacts over the last two billion years in the inner Solar System, and shed light on young lunar volcanism while also finding 120-million-year young volcanic beads—which have collectively opened up more enigmas about the Moon’s interior and its evolution.
Chinese researchers devised a method to produce water on the Moon by heating regolith containing the commonly found lunar mineral Ilmenite, a system that might provide a rather high output ratio of about 50 litres of water per ton (metric, obviously) of processed material for future astronauts at Moonbases. Read:

Institute Release
Paper in The Innovation
Coverage by Matt Williams

Last but most certainly not the least, China is conducting multiple independent studies to make a lunar navigation and communications constellation, building on last year’s launch and operationalization of Queqiao 2. Read:
1. Paper in the journal Chinese Space Science and Technology on a phased navcom constellation of 30+ satellites
2. Paper in Springer Nature on a constellation that optimizes for the Moon’s south pole
3. Paper in the Chinese Journal of Space Science proposing integrating China’s Queqiao lunar satellites with the existing Earthbound Tianlian ones
4. Related coverage by Ling Xin and Andrew Jones
5. Moon Monday coverage of how everything fits together

Mission updates

Illustration of Lunar Outpost’s rover on the Moon, with Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 lander that will deploy it in the image background. The rover is shown with deployed antennae for 4G/LTE network testing. Image: Nokia / Lunar Outpost

Intuitive Machines has delivered its Athena lander to SpaceX for the company’s second Moon landing mission part of NASA’s CLPS program. Athena will launch on a Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than February 26, carrying the agency’s payloads, a rover by Lunar Outpost, a hopper, and more. Launching alongside Athena as a rocket rideshare is the also NASA-funded Lunar Trailblazer orbiter. Trailblazer will provide scientists with unprecedented, high-resolution global maps of the amount, distribution, and state of water across our Moon. It will also help us better understand several other key scientific aspects of Luna. While Athena will head straight for the Moon post-launch and reach within a week, Lunar Trailblazer will spend four to seven months in a low-energy, fuel-efficient transfer trajectory before entering lunar orbit—similar to ispace Japan’s recently launched Moon mission.
On February 1, NASA requested the agency-backed Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) to pause all of its meetings and activities while NASA conducts a review to ensure their compliance with the many recent executive orders passed by the US President under the new administration. NASA asked LEAG to communicate this update to community members. Recall that LEAG’s founding purpose is to help NASA forge and meet its Moon exploration objectives by providing analysis across scientific, technical, commercial, and operational aspects.
ESA is awarding a $882 million contract to a European consortium led by Thales Alenia Space for developing the Lunar Descent Element technologically central to the continent’s upcoming large Moon lander called Argonaut. ESA says it will select the entity managing Argonaut missions by end of 2026. Launching no earlier than 2031 onboard an Ariane 64 rocket, Argonaut will be capable of deploying about 2,000 kilograms of payload on the Moon. With a planned launch cadence of two years, ESA hopes for Argonaut to support NASA’s Artemis crewed missions and its eventual Moonbase with navigation and communications equipment, cargo supplies for astronauts, large rover deliveries, and habitat-related infrastructure such as lunar oxygen extractors and solar arrays.

Illustration of ESA’s Argonaut Moon landers on the Moon’s south pole, aiding with astronaut supplies. Image: Thales Alenia Space / Briot

Many thanks to The Orbital Index, Henry Throop and Gurbir Singh for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to publish this curated community resource for free, support my independent writing. 🌙

The answer to which foreign Moon mission ISRO supported

Ground stations used by Intuitive Machines for its first CLPS Moon mission IM-1. Images: Intuitive Machines, MSU, Goonhilly, CSIRO

But there’s a catch. IM-1 happened in 2024, not 2023. NSIL’s annual report may be for FY 2023-24 but it also clearly states the following:

NSIL has provided one Deep Space Mission Support for a Lunar Mission of an International Customer during 2023.

Tangent: Here’s a paper on how orbit determination went for IM-1. Ignoring that the paper’s very first line says “Intuitive Machines (IM) recently met its goal of softly landing a robotic spacecraft near the south pole of the Moon”, because it was not a soft landing by any measure, the paper notes many interesting challenges. Here’s an example:

A common issue throughout the mission was a lack of real-time information on which station was being used as the transmitter and at what frequency the station was transmitting. The issue with determining the transmitting station mainly came from the fact that all tracking data produced was labeled as 2-way. In general, one station would be in 2-way as the transmitter and one or more other stations would be listening in 3-way configuration. Early in the mission, it was noted that it appeared that several of the LTN stations were not transmitting at the assumed requested frequency. No direct telemetry was available in the ground system to determine what the true transmit frequency was. In some cases, the transmit frequency for a specific station could change from pass to pass. This required significant effort to identify what the transmitting station was and at what frequency it was transmitting.

More Moon

Jeff Foust reports that NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) is requesting the agency to de-risk Artemis missions by simplifying them and essentially splitting them up such that each launch ties to fewer test objectives—Apollo style.
With the successful emplacement of 20,000 kilograms of Moon-like anorthositic material from Greenland, ESA nears completion of a lunar dust mimicking lab at its versatile new LUNA analog facility. Here Moonbound hardware can test the reliability of their operations under Moon-like dusty environment.
As human exploration and activities on the Moon continue to increase, a research project led by MIT is inviting people to participate in an anonymous survey by responding with what lunar sustainability means to them.

Our Moon, and Mars. At dusk, Puducherry, India.

Editor’s note of no consequence: I’m publishing this edition of my Moon Monday blog+newsletter from a beach in Puducherry, India. It’s quite nice right now after dusk. A dark windy seashore you can hear more than see. A crescent Moon, red Mars, bright Jupiter and Venus, and stellar Orion hang above. Moving wave crests are lightly lit by ambient light. What a lovely experience of breezy serenity. 🌊🌌

Perhaps the only purpose of this editor’s note is to make those who read until all the way here reflect and smile a little.

- Jatan 🌙

Thanks for using RSS the best.

Moon Monday #210: Mission updates from Japan, the US, China, South Korea, India, and Finland

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 21:16:15 +0530

A note before we start: Jonathan McDowell doesn’t need an introduction for his globally revered Space Reports. To move his foundational space library to a new home, he’s seeking funds through GoFundMe. I’ve donated, and urge my dear readers to consider supporting him too to help meet the goal. The best part from his announcement is that post-retirement from his day job, Jonathan intends to do Space Report related work full-time. Can’t wait. 🚀

Two Moon landers working in space

Our Earth as captured by the Blue Ghost lunar lander from Earth orbit on January 23, 2025. Image: Firefly Aerospace

On January 21, the joint US-Italian LuGRE payload onboard Firefly’s Blue Ghost Moon lander part of NASA’s CLPS program became the first experiment ever to get a GPS fix at approximately 331,000 kilometers away from Earth. That’s close to the average Earth-Moon distance of 384,000 kilometers, indicating that Earth-based GNSS satellite constellations could help spacecraft navigate at the Moon.
On January 22, ispace Japan turned on the radiation monitoring payload aboard its second Moon lander Hakuto-R, which launched alongside Firefly’s lander on a shared SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on January 15. The radiation payload on Hakuto-R is developed by the National Central University of Taiwan. It’s flying commercially, and represents the country’s first instrument flown to deep space. The payload’s data about the nature of radiation on and around the Moon will contribute to a larger effort to nail down on the same, which will inform us on how to adequately protect astronauts and critical hardware on future long term lunar missions.

More mission updates

Illustration of the Chang’e 8 lander on the Moon’s south pole. Image: CNSA

Andrew Jones reports that China’s upcoming Chang’e 8 Moon landing mission will carry two five-kilogram mobile robots developed by the private Chinese company ‘STAR.VISION’ in collaboration with universities from China and Turkey. This would make it the first payload from a Chinese company flying commercially on a Chang’e spacecraft. Targeting launch on a Long March 5 rocket in 2028, Chang’e 8 will explore the nature of local lunar polar resources like its soil and water ice and assess their utility with a comprehensive suite of payloads. It was recently revealed that the Chang’e 8 payloads will include a multi-purpose, 100-kilogram dextrous mobile robot from group of institutions in Hong Kong, and a 35-kilogram rover from Pakistan.
Kim Na-young reports that South Korea’s recently formed space agency called the Korea Aerospace Administration (KASA) is budgeting about $31 million this year towards the country’s goal of building a Moon lander. In an approach similar to what ISRO takes for its planetary missions like Chandrayaan 3, South Korea is also indigenously developing the rocket that will launch its Moon lander. The budget line for the rocket is separate. KASA will also send a lunar environment monitoring payload through NASA onboard Intuitive Machines’ third CLPS Moon lander for about $5 million. All of these investments are part of South Korea’s space budget of $562.5 million pushed with the aim of becoming a global space power in the coming decades. Kim Na-young has also reported that KASA seeks to strengthen partnerships with Japan and Europe other than the US, including through participation in NASA’s Artemis program.
The annual report of NSIL, an Indian government arm tasked with commercializing ISRO’s space technologies, notes that ISRO provided commercial ground tracking support for a lunar mission by another country in 2023. For some reason, NSIL doesn’t mention which mission this was. Since the timeframe is 2023, the ground tracking support must have been for either Russia’s Luna 25 spacecraft or JAXA’s SLIM. Although SLIM landed in January 2024, it launched in September 2023. India’s geography with respect to Japan and Europe would’ve made it a suitable gap-filler for continued communications. I’m excluding ispace Japan’s first Moon mission being the NSIL-ISRO customer on the assumed basis that ISRO doesn’t seem to have cooperation arrangements in place with ispace like they do with JAXA and Roscosmos. Thoughts?

Artemis updates

An artistic rendering of an imagined lunar architecture. Image: NASA

NASA is awarding $24 million across nine companies to investigate and propose high autonomy logistics and mobility solutions for eventual use on the Artemis Moonbase. These will serve astronauts living on the Moon and exploring it for longer durations. Relatedly, as part of the latest round of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, the agency is funding the LUNGS proposal that will explore melting of glass compounds in lunar soil to create large spherical shell structures as potential astronaut habitats.
Finland became the 53rd nation to sign the US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration. Relatedly, Intuitive Machines’ second CLPS Moon lander targeting a late February launch is slated to carry 4G/LTE communications systems from Nokia of America as a subsidiary of Nokia Finland. Jeff Foust noted in his coverage that while Finland has signed the Accords, the country continues to consider the United Nations as the primary forum for the development and compliance of international space law.

Also see: Artemis Accords strikes a chord

After NASA transferred operations of two of its key lunar orbital imagers to Intuitive Machines, the company is now hiring someone who would support their remote sensing observations, derive its data products, and conduct scientific analyses on the same. This role is part of the company’s ‘Super Moon Science Operations Center’ in Phoenix, Arizona.

Many thanks to Off Planet Research, Henry Throop and Frank Genin for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to publish this curated community resource for free, support my independent writing. 🌙

All about CLPS Moon landing missions 🌗

Some of you have been wondering and asking why I haven’t covered potential Artemis changes in the new US administration on this Moon Monday blog+newsletter. So here’s the thing:

In the two months since the US electoral outcome, speculations on shifts in the Artemis program have come and gone, or even gotten superseded. As it is the space industry suffers from having more coverage of pre-launch and ongoing spaceflight than that of post spaceflight. As such, what many people and media outlets have been engaging in for the past two months is pre-pre-spaceflight and pre-policy!

I’ve generally kept an editorial rule that I don’t discuss or proliferate something on my blog that’s more speculation or more incomplete than not. I prefer to wait for a tangible aspect of something to move in the present, and then pull related threads and coverage to get a better sense of what’s happening and where things are really going. My goal with Moon Monday is to archive updates and efforts that actually transpired. This way it can provide more long term value rather than be tied to just the news cycle.

Thoughts?

More Moon

A new book Optics of the Moon is out for students and early career researchers in lunar and planetary science.
Fun with Moon exploration headlines 🌝

- Jatan 🌙

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Moon Monday #209: Let’s be high on launch and low on provocation

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 20:47:11 +0530

Sponsored listing: Open Lunar Foundation is now accepting applications for a Co-Executive Director and Director of Operations to advance the non-profit’s ongoing projects on sustainable lunar governance and its goal to drive international collaboration. Learn more and apply. 🌙

Two Moon landers make it to space

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket which launched Moon landers from Firefly and ispace respectively on January 15. Images: SpaceX / NASA / Frank Michaux

On January 15, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched and deployed two Moon landers in space: The US-based Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander, flying 10 NASA payloads under the agency’s CLPS program in a company-first, and ispace Japan’s Hakuto-R lander, carrying multiple commercial payloads and following up on its first failed landing attempt.

Firefly and NASA switched on six payloads on Blue Ghost, which have collected and sent initial data to Earth. On January 17, ispace verified operating Hakuto-R’s propulsion system by firing the main engine for the first orbital maneuver. As did Blue Ghost on January 19. Firefly aims to land Blue Ghost on the Moon in the first week of March in the lava plains of Mare Crisium at 18.56°N, 61.81°E whereas ispace’s attempted touchdown after four months will be in the lava plains of Mare Frigoris targeting 60.5° N, 4.6° W.

Resources to follow these missions

My guide on how to follow CLPS updates
Firefly’s Live Updates blog for Blue Ghost
ispace Japan’s News section
Browse my dedicated CLPS coverage webpage, and search the Moon Monday archive
Subscribe for free to Moon Monday to receive mission updates with context 🌝

As Firefly and ispace reach for the Moon, here’s a reminder of what makes a Moon landing “successful”. I published it last week, and received so many emails from my readers agreeing with the critique as well as my disclaimer inside. And now I’m glad to share that the article has been featured on Medium by its Editorial. ✨

Meter by meter, to the Moon

The Raptor engines powering the booster stage of the seventh Starship Super Heavy rocket. Image: SpaceX

SpaceX’s seventh launch of its Starship Super Heavy rocket on January 16 saw a second successful booster stage catch while the Starship upper stage exploded. While the company asserted Starship debris to have fallen only “into the designated hazard area”, and Elon Musk suggested no delays for SpaceX to launch the next Starship, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said debris fell outside the designated areas, and that its danger led air traffic controllers to divert, reroute, or delay commercial flights over the Caribbean and the Atlantic Ocean. The media outlet Ars Technica noted the following as it listened to live audio from air traffic control in San Juan, Puerto Rico:

How long do you think this hold is going to be? We don't have a lot of gas to play with," one pilot asked air traffic control. "The sooner we can get on the ground, the better."

The FAA and SpaceX will thus need to conduct and close the flight anomaly investigation before the next Starship Super Heavy can take off. As such, NASA’s road to putting humans on the Moon that has been inching through Starship has slowed down with this failed flight.

On January 16, Blue Origin launched its huge, heavy-lift New Glenn rocket, achieving orbit in the very first try and demonstrating engine relight capability after getting in orbit. In 2023, NASA chose the Blue-Origin-led Blue Moon spacecraft to land astronauts on the Moon for Artemis V by end of decade. Blue Moon will be lofted to space and refueled for its mission with New Glenn launches. As such, the successful launch of New Glenn has finally opened up a second line of pursuit for NASA to send astronauts to the lunar surface other than via Starship. But before a Blue Moon carries crew, Blue Origin plans for New Glenn to launch a robotic Mark I Moon lander this year or next as a key technology demonstrator.

A labeled illustration of the Blue Moon lander. Image: Blue Origin / Labels: Jatan Mehta

Many thanks to Astrolab, Henry Throop and Abhinav Yadav for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to publish this curated community resource for free, support my independent writing. 🌙

SPADEX paves the way for Chandrayaan 4 lunar sample return

On January 16, India successfully docked and then controlled two twin satellites in circular low Earth orbit as part of mission SPADEX (space docking experiment). ISRO is using the $14 million mission, sans the launch cost, as practice before the agency launches the complex Chandrayaan 4 for bringing samples from the Moon. Chandrayaan 4 will feature remotely docking robotic modules in Earth as well as in lunar orbit, the latter being a feat only China has achieved so far.

Chethan Kumar reports that ISRO will soon undock the satellites and then conduct more docking trials with enhanced precision. This is only the first of three SPADEX missions by ISRO as Chandrayaan 3’s Project Director Palanivel Veeramuthuvel noted in his talk at the 2024 International Astronautical Congress (IAC). At least one of the next two SPADEX missions will demonstrate docking in an elliptical orbit, something that better simulates scenarios for Chandrayaan 4.

Illustration of two SPADEX satellites docked to each other. Image: ISRO

Chandrayaan 4’s landing site will be somewhere between 85–90° on the Moon’s south pole, putting it squarely in the water-hosting polar region as opposed to the 70°S for Chandrayaan 3. Chandrayaan 4 is not the only reason for ISRO to conduct SPADEX missions as these will also reduce risk for the upcoming Gaganyaan human spaceflight missions—especially so for the end-of-decade cargo flight to the International Space Station and one to India’s first space station module.

More mission updates

The IM-2 / Athena lander and attached hopper. Image: Intuitive Machines, via ESA

Intuitive Machines is preparing the Athena lander for the company’s second Moon landing mission part of NASA’s CLPS program ahead of a late February Falcon 9 launch. Relatedly, ESA announced that it will buy data from a Hungarian company whose neutron spectrometer will be aboard a hopper that Intuitive’s Athena lander will deploy on the Moon’s south pole. The instrument will detect subsurface hydrogen as indirect signs of water ice. This lunar exploration data buy agreement is a first for ESA, and the agency says it will standardize the data and make it public.
China’s Yutu-2 rover from the 2019-landed Chang’e 4 mission on the Moon’s farside hasn’t moved since March 2024, leading to speculation that it may have become immobile. Either way, Yutu-2 has clinched the title of the longest operational lunar rover.
US-based Draper’s first Moon landing mission part of NASA CLPS launching no earlier than 2026, whose lander is being developed by ispace US, will commercially carry a retroreflector from the Italian Space Agency thanks to a deal via ispace Europe. Explaining how a single payload got on a lander in the new space age can be complicated. 😄

Calling it a “race” to hide implanting fear

An article called Moonshot Solution in the Pioneer Works magazine is a recent example of a questionably provocative piece in the name of lunar resource exploitation. While I think the broader concern expressed in the piece is generally valid, the article does not connect many dots well and gets basic facts wrong which makes you question its rigor and intent. Mistakes in the piece include:

Japan’s SLIM lander didn’t touchdown 34 miles off target; it was 55 meters..
Apollo 17 landed over 50 years ago, not 40.
Water ice deposits on the Moon’s polar surface and just below it being accessible is not a fact. We need ground truth from multiple missions before we can truly know.
Rare earth elements on the Moon are not as accessible as implied. They are sparsely scattered, and aren’t mapped in high-enough resolution in areas where there may or may not be concentrated enough at lander and mission scales to economically make sense mining in the near future. It will likely not make sense to bring them to Earth in bulk in the near future because going to the Moon’s surface and coming back to Earth is very energy expensive.

As for the parts concerning LunA-10: While it’s an ambitious undertaking, LunA-10 is also at a nascent stage right now and does not concern only mining infrastructure but more mundane things as well such as solar power. Technologies associated with it are not going to be ready in the practically immediate timeframes asserted by the piece.

And so, my problem with such pieces is that by skewing and extrapolating from fractional aspects of lunar exploration developments, they place information in ways that allude to fear of exploitation and distrust rather than actually engaging in productive discourse. Such articles are not much better than pieces that have suggested that China chose to land the Chang’e 6 spacecraft for sample return in the farside Apollo crater just to signal the US of a race LOL.

- Jatan 🌙

Thanks for using RSS the best.

How to follow CLPS Moon mission updates

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 18:12:00 +0530

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched Moon landers from Firefly and ispace respectively on January 15. Images: SpaceX / NASA / Frank Michaux

With a fleet of NASA-supported robotic Moon landers part of the agency’s CLPS program launching throughout this decade, I’ve compiled an exhaustive rundown for you to be up to speed on these novel missions:

I update this page every month or two. Other than referencing everything high-level I can on there, whose more than one hundred links should help you get to places, there’s more you can do to keenly follow all things CLPS:

Check the new NASA CLPS sub-site. The agency updated a few pages lately, including adding Principal Investigators for VIPER payloads. At the same time, some already known high-level information from elsewhere on nasa.gov is missing there! Some of that can be found on nasa.gov’s CLPS page, which is different from the sub-site mentioned above, but hosts other information bits that are outdated.
Subscribe to blogs of all CLPS vendors in an RSS reader and also manually check their sites. This is especially useful to find and know about the non-NASA-funded payloads aboard CLPS landers. If NASA wants to highlight progress on the “commercial” part of CLPS, listing non-NASA payloads on the official CLPS pages would be great.
NASA hasn’t posted on the official CLPS blog for more than a year but has been putting out a few CLPS updates on the Artemis blog. And yet the CLPS blog is the one currently linked on official CLPS pages. It’s quite confusing.
Since information about CLPS wouldn’t necessarily be restricted to these direct sources, use a feature similar to Keyword Monitoring within your RSS reader to create a feed of posts that match CLPS-specific search terms across all your added sources.
Browse my dedicated CLPS coverage page and search the Moon Monday archive.

Subscribe for free to Moon Monday to receive mission updates with context 🙃. No, seriously, it’s one of the reasons I write this one-of-a-kind blog+newsletter!

- Jatan 🌙

Thanks for using RSS the best.

Moon Monday #208: What makes a lunar landing mission “successful”?

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 20:44:50 +0530

Before we begin, a note that my thoughts are with everyone affected by the fires in southern California as well as by last week’s 6.8-magnitude earthquake in Xizang, China.

The Moon lander duo from ispace Japan and US-based Firefly Aerospace are being targeted for launch by SpaceX on January 15 as a shared Falcon 9 ride to space. Firefly noted on their Live Updates blog that its Blue Ghost Moon lander has been fueled up and encapsulated in Falcon 9’s fairing as of January 10. Today NASA published a press kit for Firefly’s mission as part of the agency’s CLPS program.

One thing that is notable about both ispace’s and Firefly’s public communications is that they have clearly laid out the milestones and success criteria of their respective missions—(ispace, Firefly)—in terms of specific events.

Mission milestones and success criteria as stated by ispace Japan for its second Moon landing mission. Image: ispace

Mission milestones and success criteria set by ispace for the rover on its second Moon mission. Image: ispace

Mission milestones defined by Firefly for its Blue Ghost CLPS Moon landing mission. Image: Firefly

Note that ispace even went ahead and included a table which lists specific actions or criteria to be met for each of those milestones:

Specific actions or criteria ispace desires to achieve against all major milestones of its second Moon mission. Image: ispace

This exercise is something the publicly traded company also did during its first Moon mission. It respectfully stuck to its success criteria despite the outcome of a failed landing. But this wasn’t the case when the Odysseus spacecraft from US-based Intuitive Machines attempted its first Moon landing as part of NASA CLPS, wherein the publicly traded company as well as NASA retrospectively skewed the success criteria for the mission and straight up falsely proclaimed it as a “soft and safe landing” and an “unqualified success”.

Breaking a lander leg does not constitute a soft landing no matter which dictionary you use, an utterly simple fact that most media outlets supposed to keep tax dollars accountable seem to have forgotten. Most of Odysseus’ payloads collecting limited data and one collecting none due to the anomalous landing clearly means the majority of the scientific objectives weren’t met either.

A dramatic view of the Odysseus lunar lander still firing its main engine after making contact with the Moon. Image: Intuitive Machines

In fact, by all technical measures, the also-hard-landing of JAXA’s SLIM lunar lander was more successful than Odysseus across the board: from the touchdown and the achieved landing precision to payload operations and deployments. SLIM sparked an era of precision landings crucial for future crewed exploration, which includes implications for Artemis through a JAXA-NASA partnership. Despite that, JAXA honored the explicit success criteria for SLIM it had defined pre-launch. Moreover, despite the SLIM lander also having tipped over post its lunar touchdown like Odysseus did, and that it couldn’t even generate power until the Sun circled to the other side over a week later in the future, JAXA nevertheless provided a press update within two hours of the landing which sincerely accepted SLIM’s mixed bag of outcomes.

And yet the western media at large has perpetuated Intuitive Machines’ first Moon landing attempt as being more successful than it really was while not crediting SLIM’s achievements even half as much.

Japan’s SLIM spacecraft on the Moon as imaged by India’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter on March 16, 2024. JAXA set an ambitiously tight landing ellipse of 100 by 100 meters for SLIM, and the spacecraft managed to achieve it by touching down about 55 meters from the center of this ellipse despite an anomalous last phase of its descent. Image: ISRO / Chandra Tungathurthi

The hard-landing of Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus craft has also been incessantly touted as having created “commercial” success but that too is questionable. As a key example, Jeff Foust noted the following numbers in a November 2024 piece on the search for a commercial lunar economy:

In its 10-Q filing this month, Intuitive Machines noted that its IM-1 lander mission in February, along with its upcoming IM-2 and IM-3 missions—all part of CLPS—are considered “loss contracts” by the company as the cost of executing those missions exceeds the revenue expected from NASA and commercial customers, with $22.8 million in combined losses recorded on them this year alone. Even when working for the government, it can be hard to make money on the Moon.

I wish I could say the issues above are limited to Odysseus. In NASA’s plans to gain lunar navigation and communications (navcom) as a service for its crewed Artemis program, of which Intuitive Machines is a key element as a navcom provider, the agency has been opaque in publicly communicating its contract values and related specifics. This has also notably been the case for NASA transferring operations of two of its key lunar orbital imagers to Intuitive Machines.

These traits should be concerning for the US space communities, who often are the first ones to call out other countries for lack of transparency.

Don’t get me wrong. Even in my piece critiquing the Odysseus mission’s public communications, I’ve admired the technical feats Intuitive objectively achieved, including Odysseus being the first to lunar land using cryogenic methalox engines and remarkably making it to Luna alive using only optical navigation and an IMU. I’ve also been covering Intuitive’s upcoming second and third Moon landing missions contracted by NASA under CLPS, the latter’s science, their recently contracted fourth CLPS mission, and several other related developments for years. I even helped make a video on their upcoming missions!

But that does not mean I will celebrate Intuitive’s first Moon landing as being more successful than it really was—even if it has been normalized now. Just like how ISRO retrospectively calling the Chandrayaan 2 mission a “98% success” despite the crashed lander does not make it so, Intuitive and NASA redefining the mission doesn’t change the past. It’s my duty to share this with my readers.

Another reason to raise the issue is that I have grown up being immensely inspired by NASA. I hold great admiration for many pioneering aspects of the agency. I’m often found urging ISRO officials to follow NASA’s long-standing example in communicating the science and technology aspects of civil space missions. But I don’t believe this recent facet of NASA vis-à-vis Artemis is healthy in the long run, especially when the US aims to be the country leading sustainable exploration at the Moon.

If we truly want sustainable lunar exploration, we also need to be true to ourselves. Do we desire our Moonbase to be built on a house of cards or cemented concrete?

And so I hope that with ispace’s and Firefly+NASA’s upcoming Moon landing missions, the organizations will follow the honorable example of ispace’s own past communications in the event of a landing failure, or leave a trail of transparency like Astrobotic did when its ailing lander precluded a lunar descent attempt altogether. Likewise, in the case of success, I hope they choose the outlook of SLIM’s humble embrace. To me, this is what makes a Moon mission successful other than the obviously needed technical execution. We carry both these choices into the future.

On that note, I’d like to remind you—my dear readers—that as stated in my public Editorial Independence Policy, I do not own shares of any space company, primarily to keep my writings unbiased. It doesn’t matter if the company is publicly listed like Intuitive Machines or ispace Japan, or if it offers private stock like many others in the industry. I own none of it. As such, any enthusiasm, neutrality, or criticism expressed in my coverage of lunar and space developments is intended to be genuine. I wish all publishers, writers, and creators in the space industry revealed beforehand if they have any such vested interests. How else can we know whose piece of praise to trust?

I have exactly nothing to gain financially from private lunar companies whether they go public or commercial. My Moon Monday blog+newsletter is sustained purely through organization sponsorships and individual reader donations. And so if you like my work aimed at a better future on our Moon for people worldwide, support my writing.

Artemis updates

The eight high-level tests needed to prepare ground systems for the eventual launch of the SLS rocket for the crewed Artemis II Moon mission. Image: NASA

As the seventh test in a series of eight ahead of the eventual second launch of the SLS rocket in 2026, ground teams successfully tested that the rocket and its associated infrastructure will receive uninterrupted power supply around liftoff. The second SLS launch will push four astronauts in an Orion spacecraft towards the Moon on the Artemis II mission. For the final high-level test in preparing ground systems for the SLS launch, teams will practice flowing cryogenic liquid hydrogen from a new tank at the launch complex.
NASA continues testing aspects of the Artemis I Orion spacecraft, which returned to Earth after its mission, to better characterize and fine-tune the spacecraft’s configuration for future missions with crew.
To ensure tackling the challenging lighting conditions under which Artemis astronauts will operate on the Moon’s south pole, NASA is revisiting the requirements for achieving safe and functional vision for astronauts:

Tasks expected of astronauts were not incorporated into system design requirements to enable system development that ensures functional vision in the expected lighting environment. Consequently, the spacesuit, for example, has flexibility requirements for allowing the astronauts to walk but not for ensuring they can see well enough to walk from brilliant Sun into a dark shadow and back without the risk of tripping or falling. Importantly, gaps were identified in allocation of requirements across programs to ensure that the role of the various programs is for each to understand functional vision. NESC recommendations were offered that made enabling functional vision in the harsh lighting environment a specific and new requirement for the system designers. The recommendations also included that lighting, window, and visor designs be integrated.

More Chandrayaan updates →

Many thanks to Open Lunar Foundation, Henry Throop, Gurbir Singh and Abhinav Yadav for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday!

If you too appreciate my efforts to publish this curated community resource for free, support my independent writing. 🌙

More Moon

Intuitive Machines is preparing parts of the Athena lander for its second CLPS Moon landing mission with a target launch no earlier than late February on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Shooting micro-spectrometers into the lunar soil could be a cool way to measure composition across a geological area or region of interest instead of having to walk or rove to each location within, Andy Tomaswick reported.
Open Lunar Foundation is hiring for leadership and operations roles.

- Jatan 🌙

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Moon Monday #207: A whole bunch of global mission updates and lunar developments

Jatan Mehta — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 21:07:58 +0530

Welcome back to Moon Monday! 2024 was a happening year for global lunar exploration. We start this month with the impending launch of two Moon landers so 2025 seems thrilling already. Before diving into our weekly lunar fix, and there are many updates in this edition, I have three things to share with you all.

Over the holidays, I’ve been wondering how to enhance the utility of my Moon Monday blog+newsletter for space communities worldwide. For the past four years, my goal with Moon Monday has been to bring you streamlined, curated, contextualized, and linked updates about the world’s march to Luna. With opinions suffixed as food for thought. As 2025 progresses, you’ll see me add more factual lunar resources, highlight more varied lunar efforts that don’t get much visibility, and separately surface more op-ed commentary—because a Moonbase alone doesn’t lead us into a better future. Just like my whole website, this added work will also be free to access with no ads, and remain community-funded so if you appreciate Moon Mondays, kindly support my work as an organization or individually. Have thoughts? Email me. 🌗
I’m pleased to share that ISRO’s webpage on details and scientific context of the Chandrayaan 4 lunar sample return mission plus their Venus orbiter cites my blog as well as my work for The Planetary Society as references! 🚀

Screenshot of ISRO’s webpage on the Chandrayaan 4 and Venus Orbiter missions.

An unexpected Moon Monday story

Cue more private Moon landers

ispace Japan’s second Moon lander, named RESILIENCE, at JAXA’s Tsukuba Space Center. Also seen integrated into the lander is ispace’s first rover TENACIOUS. Image: ispace

Two Moon landers are nearly set to launch in mid-January sometime during a six-day window onboard a shared SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. There’s ispace Japan’s Hakuto-R lander, carrying multiple commercial payloads and following up on its first failed landing attempt, and Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander, flying NASA payloads under the agency’s CLPS program in a company-first. Last month, ispace received a license from the Japanese government to collect lunar soil and transfer its ownership to NASA—without bringing the samples to Earth—as part of the latter’s move to set precedence for future resource use under the US-led Artemis Accords. ispace’s target landing site lies in the lava plains of Mare Frigoris at 60.5° N, 4.6° W whereas Blue Ghost aims to descend in the lava plains of Mare Crisium at 18.56°N, 61.81°E.

The Gruithuisen Domes on the Moon. Images: NASA / LRO / GSFC / ASU; Graphic: Jatan Mehta | Explore the domes on a map

NASA has selected Firefly for a third CLPS Moon landing mission with a contract value of $179 million. The lander will carry six agency-funded scientific and technological payload suites to one of the two Gruithuisen Domes on the Moon’s nearside. Chiefly, a payload suite will measure the composition of the formerly volcanic dome and its thick, silica-rich lava flows, letting scientists compare them to the much more common thin basaltic flows on our Moon. This will greatly enhance our understanding of the Moon’s volcanic past. On Earth, such formations need significant water content and plate tectonics to form but with the Moon lacking both, lunar scientists have been wondering how these features formed and evolved. As an interesting aside, this latest CLPS award comes after NASA cancelled the VIPER rover mission, saying how it’s been affecting future CLPS missions the agency wanted to fly to the Moon.

More mission updates

At the Galaxy Forum in China last month, Andrei Sadovski from the Space Research Institute (IKI) of the Russian Academy of Sciences laid down the scientific instruments meant to fly on Roscosmos’ Luna 26 Moon orbiter. Likely launching in 2027, the primary goal of the polar reconnaissance orbiter is to map our Moon’s surface in multiple wavelengths at high resolutions from altitudes as low as 50 to 80 kilometers. This will particularly help scientists better grasp the distribution of water ice on the Moon’s poles, which is useful data for planning the China-led long-term ILRS Moonbase project of which Russia is a member of. Another major goal of Luna 26 is to measure and characterize the radiation and plasma environment around the Moon. The list of Luna 26’s instruments is given below from Sadovski’s slides.

Slide: Andrei Sadovski / IKI / RAS

A group of institutions from Hong Kong have banded together to lead the development of a multi-purpose dextrous mobile robot to be onboard China’s upcoming Chang’e 8 Moon landing mission. The robot will demonstrate the ability to assemble basic structures on the Moon using local soil. It will also fetch rock and soil samples for the lander’s spectrometers to determine their chemical compositions. This will likely include water ice. The robot might tout wireless charging capabilities too. Targeting launch on a Long March 5 rocket in 2028, Chang’e 8 will explore the nature of local lunar polar resources and assess their utility to inform China’s strategies for when it begins sending humans starting end of decade.

Artemis Accords strikes a chord

The 52 nation-signatories of the US-led Artemis Accords. Image: NASA

The US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration gained 50 signatories last month with the joining of Panama and Austria. Panama is the ninth Latin American country to sign the Accords; with the others being Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador, and Peru. Of these, four countries along with Panama are members of the recently formed Latin American and Caribbean Space Agency (ALCE). Inspired in part by ESA’s model, ALCE aims to pool resources of Latin American nations to enhance their space activities and its impact. Panama’s near-equatorial location along with the ability to transport large, sensitive hardware through its canal could be an interesting leverage point for orbital launches. Notably, Brazil has abstained from the ALCE initiative.
Thailand became the 51st country to sign the Accords. Notably, the nation is also party to the China-led long-term ILRS Moonbase project, and will fly instruments on China’s Chang’e 7 and 8 missions later this decade.
Europe’s Liechtenstein signed the Accords on December 20, becoming the 52nd nation to do so. Marcia Smith reports that Mike Gold—who was instrumental in creating the Accords—considers this a significant number:

Achieving 52 signatories is a critical milestone since Artemis Accords signatories now represent a majority of the UN COPUOS. This transforms the values of the Accords into a true global consensus on vital issues such as interoperability, due regard, transparency and, in particular, space resources.

Many thanks to The Orbital Index and Arun Raghavan for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday! If you too appreciate my efforts to publish this curated community resource for free, support my independent writing. 🌙

Lunar infrastructure developments

Illustration of the Lunar Pathfinder communications satellite relaying signals between Earth and robotic hardware at the Moon. Image: SSTL

NASA has awarded contracts to Intuitive Machines and KSAT for providing lunar communications as a service for at least 5 years in support of the agency’s Near Space Network. As Jeff Foust noted, NASA is not specifying the contract values. And so just like the agency’s plans to gain lunar navigation and communications (navcom) services, of which these latest contracts are an element of, and the case of transferring operations of two key NASA lunar imagers to Intuitive Machines, NASA continues to be opaque in communicating developments related to its lunar orbital infrastructure plans.
After ESA began using its new, versatile LUNA analog facility late last year to plan future Moon missions, the agency is continuing with more tests, with the latest one evaluating the usefulness of autonomous robotic interactions in service of astronauts during excursions.
The three competing teams NASA selected last year to mature their designs for a versatile Lunar Terrain Vehicle, to use across Artemis missions starting end of decade, recently tested static mockups of their rovers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center with lunar gravity offloading. These three competing teams are led by Astrolab (a Moon Monday sponsor), Intuitive Machines, and Lunar Outpost respectively.

Lunar outreach

Chang’e 5 lunar samples on display in glass containers at the Beijing Planetarium along with visual and explanatory backdrops. Image: CCTV

China has a rather well done exhibition of Chang’e 5 lunar samples at the Beijing Planetarium to further the public’s interest in and understanding of lunar exploration. Among its many discoveries, Chang’e 5 samples have helped scientists determine truer ages of lunar features, refine the nature of impacts over the last two billion years in the inner Solar System, and shed light on young lunar volcanism—which opened up more enigmas.
Speaking of lunar outreach, Bartosz Ciechanowski has created a wonderful interactive resource simply called “Moon” to visualize Luna’s positions in our skies and its path around our planet. 🌙
For my readers, most of whom are already lunar enthusiasts (:D), I now have a dedicated page to track Japanese lunar developments. This adds to the existing resource pages for:
- China and Luna
- The US Artemis and CLPS programs
- and India’s Chandrayaan
- Which other countries or regions should I add that you’d like to track dedicatedly? Europe?

- Jatan 🌙

Thanks for using RSS the best.

Indian Space Progress #23: How ISRO et al. laid the groundwork for a decade this year

Jatan Mehta — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 20:29:45 +0530

I’m delighted to welcome GalaxEye Space as the latest sponsor of my Indian Space Progress blog+newsletter! 🚀

Bangalore-based startup GalaxEye is developing hybrid Earth observation satellites with multi-spectral optical imaging plus synthetic aperture radar (SAR) capabilities, with the first launch targeted next year. 🛰️

While 2023 was an incredible year for ISRO in terms of execution of space missions and projects, 2024 was more about those successes giving the Indian government’s Department of Space (DOS) the confidence to plan an ambitious next decade. But ISRO, as usual, remains uninterested in contextualizing all of these advances on any of their channels. This issue of India’s space program lacking clear communications and outreach is partly why I write Indian Space Progress in the first place. And so below is a linked overview of the some of the key groundwork laid this year by DOS and ISRO across orbital launch vehicles, Moon missions, human spaceflight, commercial and private space capabilities, space sciences, and more.

Just like my 2024 global Moon exploration tour, I’ve made a conscious effort to highlight events and trends that actually happened instead of focusing on upcoming events that may or may not be as successful and/or as timely as they’re being touted and reported as. I’ve also included links to reports, analyses, and thoughtful opinions related to these developments by several experts.

Orbital launch flex

The PSLV rocket that launched ESA’s Sun-studying Proba-3 satellite pair. Notice the cool booster separation shot on the right. Images: ISRO

ISRO commercially launched ESA’s Sun-studying Proba-3 satellite pair on a PSLV rocket while SpaceX commercially launched ISRO’s high-throughput GSAT-N2 communications satellite on a Falcon 9, two opposite kinds of events that capture ISRO’s interesting approach to self sufficiency to the extent possible while gaining opportunistic commercial launches
ISRO operationalized the new, nimble SSLV rocket with a successful second launch but its direct global commercial competitors moved ahead in the meanwhile
The agency ramped up efforts to increase the production capacity of its most powerful rocket, LVM3, as well as up its mass to orbit
ISRO continued building a reusable spaceplane with two more landing tests
The Indian government approved ISRO’s proposal to develop a partially reusable heavy-lift rocket for $1 billion

Chandrayaan(s)

The Chandrayaan 3 lander Vikram imaged by the mission’s rover Pragyan on August 30, 2023. Image: ISRO

India approved Chandrayaan 4 as a lunar sample return mission
On (not) celebrating Chandrayaan 3’s Moon landing
How ISRO’s Chandrayaan and Gaganyaan programs will converge at Luna (associated video and podcast)
Discussion document on lunar governance and India
Chandrayaan 1’s Mission Director passed away; article on his internationally crucial work

A boost for space science

Left: Venus as it would approximately look to the human eye, imaged by NASA’s Mariner 10 spacecraft; Right: Radar image of Venus’ surface captured by NASA’s Magellan orbiter. Also illustrated in the graphic is ISRO’s Venus orbiter model. Images: Mattias Malmer / NASA JPL / ISRO; Graphic: Jatan Mehta

ISRO began the year by doubling down on space telescopes and Earth observation
India approved ISRO’s Venus Orbiter Mission (associated podcast)
The Chandrayaan 3 rover contributed to knowledge of our Moon’s origin
ISRO scientists aided the global search for lunar water, which though remains unresolved
Aside: How Chandrayaan 1, 2 and 3 have leveraged their view from the Moon to image a solar eclipse, study the Sun’s flares, and observe Earth as an exoplanet

Many thanks to the Takshashila Institution, PierSight, GalaxEye Space, Gurbir Singh and Arun Raghavan for sponsoring this month’s Indian Space Progress edition. If you too appreciate my efforts to capture true trajectories of Indian space, kindly join them and support my independent writing.

Anchoring human spaceflight

The TV-D1 Gaganyaan crew module test article near an Indian navy ship, waiting to be lifted after a successful in-flight rocket abort test. Image: ISRO

India revealed the first four astronauts to fly on the country’s initial set of human spaceflight missions as part of ISRO’s Gaganyaan program
- Related: ISRO’s years of preparations to get India its Yuri Gagarin moment
- Why does the Gaganyaan crew have no women?
ISRO entered agreements with ESA and the Australian Space Agency (ASA) to get their ground tracking support for crewed Gaganyaan flights. ASA will aid in crew recovery too if needed.
In the meanwhile, Indian astronaut training via NASA is ongoing to fly Shubhanshu Shukla to the International Space Station in 2025 through the Ax-4 Axiom Space private mission aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule as Mission Pilot
The Indian Government sanctioned $1.33 billion (over the prior $1.1 billion) for ISRO to undertake multiple Gaganyaan missions leading into deploying the first module of India’s eventual space station
- A roadmap for increasingly complex Gaganyaan missions

Private and commercial space

Launch of the SOrTeD demonstrator vehicle on May 30, 2024. Image: Agnikul

Despite Agnikul’s much-lauded rocket launch, its future remains unsorted
Private satellite companies either based in India or with a major Indian presence raised further investments:
- $24 million by Pixxel Space towards developing its hyperspectral satellites
- $15 million by Dhruva Space for its upcoming spacecraft manufacturing facility, and to develop full-stack solutions for satellites
- $10 million by GalaxEye (an Indian Space Progress sponsor) towards hybrid optical-SAR satellites
- $6 million by PierSight (an Indian Space Progress sponsor) for SAR satellites
- $2 million by Digantara towards developing space-based space situational awareness capabilities
Pixxel notably won a NASA contract to provide Earth observation data
Following the release of India’s much-awaited new space policy early last year, the government formally opened up approval-less foreign direct investments (FDI) for Indian private space companies, and separately established a pool of about $120 million in venture capital funding—which industry experts are cautiously optimistic about

Overarching constraints

A tailor-made truck carrying the large and tall fairing of a Launch Vehicle Mark III rocket. It housed the Chandrayaan 3 spacecraft stack. Image: ISRO

India’s flat space budget for FY2024
Commercial space reforms and regulations in India became a job half done
A report by Spaceport SARABHAI on the financial risk coverage of India's commercial space launch industry
A dialogue by practicing professionals on the evolving landscape of space law as relevant to India

Cooperation and collaboration

Japan’s SLIM spacecraft on the Moon as imaged by India’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter on March 16, 2024. Image: ISRO / Chandra Tungathurthi

NASA, ISRO, and KARI are coordinating lunar traffic for their orbiters
ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter helped JAXA nail SLIM’s Moon landing
The “it’s complicated” status of LUPEX / Chandrayaan 5, the joint Indo-Japanese mission to directly study water ice on the Moon’s south pole
ISRO is aiding NASA in Artemis landing site selection
A GSLV Mk II rocket successfully launched and deployed ISRO’s INSAT-3DS meteorological satellite, satisfying the launch criteria to finally loft the high-profile NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) Earth observation satellite to space next year

So that was an exhaustive look at India’s space progress in 2024 on multiple fronts. I wrote this for you, not social media or SEO. And so if you loved my 2024 Indian space tour, please share it with other space buffs by grabbing this link, and support my independent writing & this community resource with your donations—especially if you’re feeling generous this holiday season. 🌝

Aside: I attended the 2024 Galaxy Forum in Wenchang, China this month, where I along with speakers from over 12 countries discussed global lunar exploration plans, science from the Moon, and cooperative approaches to those ends. I’ve covered notable updates from the event on Moon Monday #205, and my experience there in Moon Monday #206. There I also gave a talk on India’s space capabilities and ambitions.

As you could see in this edition, India is doing a lot in the sky but ISRO’s outreach is lackluster, and professionals in many countries are not aware of the country’s ambitions and offerings. I’m doing my part with such talks and this monthly Indian Space blog+newsletter, hoping to be a good ambassador for India, science, and international collaboration. 🇮🇳🚀

- Jatan 🌙

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Moon Monday #206: The state of global lunar exploration in 2024

Jatan Mehta — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 19:25:42 +0530

As we wrap up an insanely happening 12 months in Moon exploration worldwide, I present to you a huge, curated linked list of lunar technology and science developments across 2024, organized by country or region. There’s also a section on all cooperative and collaborative international lunar efforts this year because these are the gems we need more of. When you see all of this activity for our Moon in one place, the scale of the world’s march to Luna really hits home. 🌗

Each linked article below explains the context and importance of that development, and I’ve made a conscious effort to highlight events and trends that actually happened instead of amplifying speculative coverage of what might happen—the latter of which seems to consume many media outlets too much.

Note: Moon Monday will be back in 2025 after the holidays. But do expect this month’s Indian Space Progress edition early next week before I take a break for real. I shall then rest, refresh, reflect, and re-energize, and I hope you do too. ✨

Alright, let’s dive into our worldwide lunar tour. If someone asks you what’s happening at the Moon, say all of this is. 🚀

China

A panorama from the Chang’e 6 lander on the Moon’s farside, showing one of its legs and the scoop sampling arm near its surface digs. Image: CNSA / CLEP

China doubled down on lunar infrastructure with Queqiao 2 and is building a lunar navcom constellation
CNSA landed the Chang’e 6 spacecraft on the Moon’s farside, part of which then lifted off and brought samples to Earth
Did China land Chang’e 6 in the farside Apollo crater to signal the US of a race? LOL, No
China revealed the anatomy of its first crewed Moon landing plans, the upcoming crew-robotic ILRS Moonbase, and its approach to scientific cooperation

China’s Long March 2F rocket flying with astronauts, with a lunar backdrop. Image: Xinhua

The US

Artemis

Left: The Starship upper stage from Integrated Flight Test #5 when re-entering Earth’s atmosphere; Middle: The flight 5 Booster stage auto-positioning itself to be caught by launchpad arms; Right: Illustration of the SpaceX Lunar Starship on the Moon. Images: SpaceX (1 & 2, 3)

The Artemis II and III crewed Moon missions got delayed again
NASA’s road to putting humans on the Moon inched through SpaceX Starship
- US companies betting on Lunar Starship
- Is dearMoon’s cancellation purely a financial setback?
How NASA has been incrementally planning Artemis science
Axiom Space showed off the Artemis Moonwalking suit
How the Artemis Lunar Terrain Vehicle is a giant leap for rover-kind