Another reason to share this is I wish for more publishers, writers, and creators to reveal beforehand if they have any such vested interests. As a reader and friend aptly reminded me recently, none of us can be unbiased but we can always be transparent about our associations and thought processes. Having stated my position, I can now continue my blunt coverage. :)

There’s a lot riding on Odysseus for Intuitive Machines and NASA

On February 15, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched and deployed Intuitive Machines’ first lunar lander called Odysseus. The lander then established communications to Earth via its commercially availed ground stations, and the company later successfully fired Odysseus’ methalox-powered main engine, including testing its throttling—which needs to work later during landing to dynamically course correct the lander’s trajectory as needed. Next up, the 4-meter tall, six-legged Odysseus will fire its engine on February 21 to attempt getting into a 100-kilometer circular lunar orbit. After operational checkouts, Odysseus will attempt an autonomous landing on February 22 at the near-polar Malapert A crater at 80°S.

The mission, named IM-1, carries six NASA science & technology payloads as part of the agency’s CLPS program and several commercial payloads too. The Space Investor noted how Intuitive Machines’ stock surged after IM-1’s successful launch and commissioning. While the lander has been performing well so far, until Odysseus begins and completes its one-shot landing attempt, its engineers won’t know if their design and testing was appropriate. The lunar descent is the true litmus test of a lander, one where the recent past doesn’t paint a pretty picture:

• The previous three non-governmental Moon landings have failed; namely Israel-based SpaceIL’s Beresheet, ispace Japan’s Hakuto-R, and US-based Astrobotic’s Peregrine.
• Even when including national successes, failed lunar landing missions in the past five years total a five out of nine.

NASA has invested in CLPS as a “shots on goal” approach to lunar surface exploration but even then back-to-back failures of Odysseus and Peregrine would greatly reduce the chances of the 10-year, $2.6 billion program getting extended or renewed in a good capacity. And if Odysseus makes it to the Moon unscathed, and I really hope it does, there’s reason to celebrate but remember that the success rate of autonomous lunar landings in the past five years would squarely be 50%.

NASA has purchased rides for its experiments on two more Moon missions by Intuitive Machines: one to the south pole and the other to the magnetic swirl of Reiner Gamma. A successful touchdown of Odysseus would certainly bode well for both NASA and Intuitive Machines. The company not only also has some commercial customers aboard these later missions but is looking for more. But a failure would be deteriorating, especially in the absence of more CLPS flights.

The point of this perspective isn’t to bring down the exploratory spirits but to state that even a successful Odysseus still means that we’ve barely begun adapting ourselves to the harsh realities of Luna. That even as lunar ambitions skyrocket worldwide, having robotic landers touchdown by themselves remain a coin flip. There is much to do still.

Chandrayaan 3’s touchdown has induced confidence that a country other than China can autonomously land things on the Moon too. JAXA’s SLIM reinforced that for the most part while opening up a new, necessary frontier of precision landing. Odysseus has the opportunity to build on them and be the one that tipped us against a world stuck in occasional Moonshots.

Many thanks to Epsilon3, Gurbir Singh and Arun Raghavan for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love my work too, join them!

Reaching out for lunar resources

• The Honeybee-Robotics-provided TRIDENT drill is the fourth and final instrument to be tested and integrated into NASA’s upcoming VIPER CLPS rover. While VIPER was nominally being planned for a November 2024 launch to the Moon’s south pole onboard Astrobotic’s Griffin lander, Astrobotic’s failed lunar mission last month might induce delays. VIPER intends to explore areas in and around permanently shadowed regions for over four months to unravel the nature of the Moon’s water ice deposits, assess their resource potential, and help determine how accessible they are. This will help NASA plan crewed Artemis missions.
• An interesting bit in NASA’s update above on TRIDENT being integrated into VIPER is that the one-meter drill also carries a temperature sensor, which has additional value. Recall that India’s Chandrayaan 3 lander inserted a thermal probe to about nine centimeters into the surface to provide the first pristine near-subsurface lunar soil temperature measurements. Combining this data with that of TRIDENT will help scientists understand exactly how the Sun’s heat propagates downwards from the surface, determine the thermal conductivity of the near-polar and polar lunar soil, and from it infer its density and physical properties to help us know stability zones of lunar water.
• On February 14, the UK Space Agency announced £1.5 million in funding to a team led by the University of Leicester, who will develop a laser-based Raman spectroscope to fly onboard an unspecified future lander and rover by private company ispace Japan with the goal of locating water ice and other resources on the Moon’s south pole.
• UKSA will also fund Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL) with £306,000 to develop software for ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter to help its multi-band radar better detect underground water ice on the Moon’s south pole. UKSA, RHUL, and ISRO hope to use the same advancement for mapping Venus in high resolution using the radar on India’s upcoming Shukrayaan orbiter. Shukrayaan is not yet a commissioned mission from the Government of India, and might not launch before end of decade.

More Moon

• On February 15, Uruguay became the 36th country and the sixth Latin American nation to sign the US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration. The other Latin American signatories are Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, and Ecuador. Interestingly, the latter three are members of the recently formed “Latin American and Caribbean Space Agency”, or ALCE. Inspired in part by the model of the European Space Agency, ALCE aims to pool resources of Latin American nations to better their space activities and its impact. Uruguay, however, is not an ALCE member at the moment. This might change once the country establishes its own national space agency soon.
• IAA is organizing an international symposium on March 21 and 22 dedicated to protecting the radio-quiet lunar farside for its unique importance to cosmology, chiefly in that it’s the only place in the inner Solar System that provides a view into our Universe’s ‘Dark Age’—a slice of time right before the first stars were born. The symposium is in-person but key sessions will be streamed on YouTube.
• NASA got the iconic worm logo painted on hardware elements of Artemis II, which will push four astronauts around the Moon and back no earlier than September 2025. In the meanwhile, NASA finished making the liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen tanks of the core stage of the SLS rocket which will push astronauts to the Moon for the Artemis III crewed landing mission no earlier than late 2026.

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SpaceX and Intuitive Machines are targeting a Falcon 9 rocket launch of the latter’s first Moon lander during a three-day window opening on February 14 at 5:57 UTC. The mission, named IM-1, will carry six NASA science & technology payloads as part of the agency’s CLPS program. These include a radio beacon and a LiDAR to help test advanced navigation technologies for future Moon landers. If all goes to plan, IM-1 will attempt to land on Luna on February 22 at the near-polar site of the Malapert A crater at 80°S.

To follow IM-1 developments, see NASA’s dedicated webpage and my rundown on how to follow everything CLPS.

IM-1 will also carry a separate, commercial telescope called ILO-X from Hawaii-based International Lunar Observatory Association. While CLPS competitor Astrobotic’s first lunar landing mission failed last month, Intuitive Machines has continued to show confidence in their attempt. The public company earlier told Jeff Foust of SpaceNews that they have studied recent failed Moon landing attempts to subdue similar weaknesses in their lander, such as having dissimilar redundant inertial measurement units—the lack of which afflicted the lunar descent of Israel-based SpaceIL’s Beresheet lander.

But the fact remains that five out of the past nine lunar landing missions have failed. Even as lunar ambitions skyrocket worldwide, having a robotic lander touchdown by itself remains a daunting undertaking. Until IM-1 is aloft, its engineers will not really know if their testing regime was appropriate. In a feature piece for Nature, I explain the key tests and challenges engineers face in preparing a lander for Luna:

Also related: Past mistakes to avoid in our grand return to the Moon this decade

As urged by NASA for CLPS, Intuitive Machines signed multiple agreements over the years to get commercial Earth communications services for IM-1 to avoid further straining the precious but limited bandwidth of the agency’s Deep Space Network. Relatedly, Intuitive Machines has been progressing well towards its second Moon landing mission, which is also part of CLPS.

Betting on Lunar Starship

OffWorld and Astrolab are among the handful of companies creating for the Moon with a bet on SpaceX’s Starship bringing about a paradigm shift in launch mass and volume. With support from ESA and the Luxembourg Space Agency, OffWorld aims to send a large, autonomy-capable rover on a Lunar Starship no earlier than 2027 which will specifically locate and process water-ice containing soil at the Moon’s south pole as a demonstration. OffWorld hopes to send swarms of such rovers in the future, all working in tandem to extract and process lunar resources at scale.

Astrolab aims to send its first lunar rover called FLEX on a 2026 Starship launch, carrying at least eight payloads worth $160 million. With a large payload capacity of up to 1,000 kilograms, FLEX sports essentially the same design that Astrolab pitched to NASA last year for the agency’s request for a versatile Lunar Terrain Vehicle, which will be used across Artemis missions starting Artemis V for more than 10 years.

Relatedly, Interlune—a mostly quiet startup founded over three years ago by several former Blue Origin employees—raised $15.6 million to develop lunar resource extraction technologies. Interlune seems to particularly focus on developing an efficient method to sort lunar material by particle size, which in turn would allow faster passing over of feedstock into systems extracting oxygen on the Moon.

Thank you to Epsilon3 and The Orbital Index for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love my work too, join them to support this project.

More Moon

• Axiom Space and NASA continue to test the core AxEMU suit design astronauts will wear during the crewed Artemis III lunar surface mission later this decade. Chosen competitively, the AxEMU suits offer enhanced mobility, upgraded insulation and cooling for the harsh lunar polar environment, and more such niceties compared to the current EMU suits used in Earth orbit. The latest series of tests concerned how well the suit is allowing astronauts to perform tasks related to handling samples on the Moon.
• Greece became the 35th country and 13th ESA member to sign the US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration.
• To prepare Artemis astronauts to explore the rocky, impact-cratered terrain at the Moon’s south pole, the Lunar and Planetary Institute and NASA have published a book which captures lessons from investigations of cratered lunar areas by Apollo astronauts. The book can be read and downloaded for free.
• How India’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter helped Japan’s SLIM craft nail its Moon landing 📌

Speaking at ESA

It was an honor and a pleasure to deliver a talk on Chandrayaan 3 and India’s lunar ambitions at ESTEC, Netherlands last month at the invitation of the European Space Agency. To be honest, as an independent space writer with barely any resources, I never thought such a day would come. Many thanks to Francesco Liucci and team for being kind and helpful hosts. Attached below are my talk slides. Also see key takeaways from this Space for Inspiration event as posted by ESA.

Jatan Mehta on Chandrayaan 3 and Indian lunar exploration | Space For Inspiration 2024, ESA ESTEC13.6MB ∙ PDF fileDownloadDownload

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SLIM

Japan’s SLIM lunar lander entered sleep mode on January 31, two days after it woke up when pre-dusk sunlight struck its solar panels from the west. Like Chandrayaan 3, SLIM wasn’t designed to survive the frigid lunar night, when temperatures can plunge below -100° Celsius. JAXA will nevertheless attempt to wake up SLIM the next lunar day in mid-February just in case serendipity awaits.

In its two days of operations, SLIM analyzed the composition of rocks and soil at 13 locations using a near-infrared multi-band spectroscopic camera, which will inform scientists about the landing site’s formation, and possibly that of our Moon’s mantle too. In any case, SLIM has gone down in history as the most precise robotic planetary landing ever, which has big implications for future lunar exploration. 📌

CAPSTONE

The NASA-funded and Advanced Space-led CAPSTONE lunar orbiter has been continuing to cross-communicate with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) for demonstrating autonomous navigation in lunar orbit, that is, without relying on Earthly ground stations. Being able to autonomously determine position and navigation states means future lunar satellites can operate more efficiently by not blocking as much of the precious but limited bandwidth of NASA’s Deep Space Network or other such ground stations.

Relatedly, NASA funded Advanced Space last year to develop a mission design and planning tool which will increase the autonomy and safety of lunarbound spacecraft along various trajectories. This tool would also benefit crewed missions such as those under Artemis. Another way CAPSTONE is proving useful to NASA is it’s test-flying the same fuel-efficient Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit to be flown by the NASA-led international Gateway lunar orbital habitat later this decade. The CAPSTONE team has been publishing some papers to that end.

Queqiao 2

The flight hardware of China’s Queqiao 2 lunar orbiter arrived at the Wenchang spaceport on February 2, CGTN reports. Andrew Jones says CNSA intends to launch the communications orbiter on a Long March 8 rocket as early as this month. Queqiao 2’s 4.2-meter wide parabolic antenna will relay communications between Earth and CNSA’s upcoming lunar missions, including the Chang’e 6 sample return craft and the Change’e 7 & 8 landers. Zhang Tong reports that Queqiao 2 will also deploy two experimental Tiandu CubeSats to test and verify technologies to be fed into the Queqiao constellation—an upcoming lunar navigation and communications service similar to ESA’s Moonlight project.

Relatedly, Andrew Jones reported last month that the four key modules of the 8200-kilogram Chang’e 6 Mooncraft arrived at China’s Wenchang spaceport on January 10. CNSA aims to launch Chang’e 6 on a Long March 5 rocket this May to bring about two kilograms of lunar samples from the Apollo impact crater on the Moon’s farside. These samples should be scientifically even more valuable than the Chang’e 5 samples as it would be our first tactile window into our Moon’s mysterious farside.

A gist of Gateway science

An armada of international instruments by NASA, ESA, and JAXA on the upcoming Gateway lunar orbital habitat will advance the lunar radiation-characterizing research as initiated with NASA’s Artemis I. They will also be the first space weather monitoring platforms on a crew-hosting spacecraft that’s outside Earth’s protective magnetic field.

NASA will mount the HERMES instrument suite outside the Gateway to monitor the continuous stream of charged particles coming from the Sun called the solar wind. HERMES will also take radiation and magnetic field measurements when the Moon passes through the tail of Earth’s magnetic field. This will allow NASA to combine its observations with two nearby THEMIS spacecraft sporting similar instruments, and thus reconstruct changes in the solar wind with time.

For higher energy radiation measurements, there will be ESA’s instrument suite ERSA mounted on the Gateway. ERSA will not only measure higher energy particles in the solar wind but also galactic cosmic rays. ESA, in collaboration with JAXA, will supply a suite of dosimeters inside the Gateway’s habitat module HALO to monitor solar and cosmic radiation from within the station, which will help assess requirements for the safety of astronauts on future Moon missions. Together, these instruments will provide us a fuller picture of the space weather conditions and ergo crew protection necessities near Luna. 🧑🏽‍🚀

In addition to the aforementioned instruments, here’s a quick refresher of other upcoming known scientific contributions to the Gateway.

• Because Canada is contributing the Canadarm3 robotics servicing system to the Gateway, the country has secured not just astronaut seats aboard but also dedicated time to perform science & technology experiments. The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) previously funded seven biology-related experiments totaling $1.25 million to be on the Gateway. Then, in March 2023, CSA announced it will invest $76.5 million over eight years in Canada-led Gateway experiments. Canadarm3 will help install and support scientific instruments on the Gateway.
• In parallel, ESA has continued expanding its “SciSpacE” program to fund more science on and around the Moon, with a focus on the Gateway. Separately, ESA has asked researchers in June 2022 across its member (and affiliated) states to submit lunar science payload proposals that can be developed for launch within three years of an identified flight opportunity. ESA has now shortlisted four proposals to consider further for launch, likely on a NASA-funded CLPS lander.

Related: China’s Chang’e 4 lander and rover on the Moon’s farside produced two prominent results on long-term lunar radiation measurements:

• First measurements of low-energy cosmic rays on the surface of the lunar farside from Chang’E-4 mission
• Energetic Neutral Atom Distribution on the Lunar Surface and Its Relationship with Solar Wind Conditions

Thank you to Epsilon3 and Open Lunar Foundation for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love my work too, join them to support this project.

More Moon

• As Step #2 in a series of seven tests, NASA is prepping and enhancing dozens of high-speed film & digital cameras to record and document the launch of the second SLS rocket in late 2025, which will push four astronauts towards the Moon on the Artemis II mission. On that note, maybe relive some beautiful views from the Artemis I launch.
• The Planetary Science Journal published a special edition dedicated to LRO, which is a collection of open access papers showcasing the venerable orbiter’s wide impact on lunar and planetary science.
• Relatedly, JPL is hiring a postdoctoral research associate to utilize LRO’s radiometer data to better understand the Moon’s thermophysical dynamics, including (past) volcanism.

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XPoSat gazes at cosmic objects from space

On January 1, ISRO’s PSLV rocket launched India’s second space telescope called the X-ray Polarimetry Satellite, or XPoSat. While the country’s first space telescope, AstroSat, observes high energy cosmic objects in multiple wavelengths, the smaller XPoSat is more specialized and focuses on better analyzing just the X-rays emitted by cosmic objects.

XSPECT, one of the two instruments onboard XPoSat, already began observations, starting with first light from the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. Built by the Space Astronomy Group at ISRO’s U R Rao Satellite Centre (URSC), XPSECT will conduct long-term spectral as well as time-varying measurements of cosmic objects that emit lower-energy X-rays called soft X-rays. XSPECT is expected to study X-ray emissions from black hole binaries too.

For hard X-rays, there’s XPoSat’s polarimeter called POLIX built by the Raman Research Institute. In particular, POLIX will study the polarization of X-rays emitted by cosmic objects, which will uniquely inform scientists about the physical nature of those objects—such as the strength and distribution of their magnetic fields. NASA launched the IXPE space telescope on a similar mission in December 2021. IXPE and XPoSat are the world’s only telescopes dedicated for said purpose. When scientists are able to utilize and combine data from both telescopes, we will get first or better polarization measurements for many bright X-ray sources, including pulsars, binary stars, and galactic cores.

ISRO has a good blog post on some of the physics behind XPoSat as well as on how its instruments evolved.

Aditya-L1 begins its solar staring

India’s first space-based solar observatory called Aditya-L1 launched in September 2023 to uniquely study our Sun with its advanced set of seven indigenously developed instruments. In early January, it had reached the region of the first Sun-Earth Lagrangian point (L1), where the gravitational pull of the two bodies roughly balance. On January 6, ISRO commanded Aditya-L1 to fire its thrusters and successfully enter a 178-day halo-orbit around the L1 point. This will allow Aditya-L1 to continually study the Sun for five years with minimal station keeping.

While formal science observations will begin from around April after all operational checkouts are complete, Aditya-L1 has already returned first observations of solar flares in high energy X-rays, captured unique, full-disk ultraviolet images of the Sun’s “surface” and inner atmosphere, measured charged particles from the solar wind, and deployed its patented magnetometer boom.

AstroSat has been a space science success for India, with its more than 150 cited research results in reputed international journals. If Aditya-L1 and XPoSat are able to follow suit, it would bode well for India’s still growing space science efforts.

Related tangent: SatSure (parent company of KaleidEO, a sponsor of Indian Space Progress) has a detailed blog post with real life examples on how solar weather monitoring missions like Aditya-L1 uniquely expand the life span of satellites in Earth orbit.

Chandrayaan updates as India continues exploring the Moon

• India’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter’s CLASS instrument team released the largest and highest-resolution X-ray mapping of the Moon’s surface elements using orbital data collected over three years. Previously, CLASS provided us with the first ever global-scale sodium maps of Luna, sensed Chromium in its volcanic soil, and even detected energetic events from the Sun. Studying these datasets is unraveling specifics of how our Moon evolved and helping scientists constrain the lunar crust’s composition.
• On December 12, 2023, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) successfully laser-pinged the agency-provided small retroreflector sitting on top of ISRO’s Chandrayaan 3 lander. This first-of-a-kind demonstration is a stepping stone towards a future where Mooncraft with purpose-built lasers can locate such targets and land near them as they arrive. For example, this technique will be relevant for repeated cargo deliveries near future habitats.
• In another trick up its sleeve, ISRO pulled the Chandrayaan 3 lunar orbiter back to Earth orbit.
• In a symposium talk last November, ISRO Chief S. Somanath highlighted some key tentative missions and elements from an increasingly complex roadmap that will feed into and enable the new national goal of sending an Indian to the Moon by 2040. These include the Indo-Japanese LUPEX rover and the Chandrayaan 4 sample return missions before end of decade, a Chandrayaan 5 mission with the ability to survive the lunar night, a resource extraction and utilization demonstration with Chandrayaan 6, a crewed lunar cruiser docking with the NASA-led Gateway international orbital habitat (just as I had predicted!), a partially reusable Next Generation Launch Vehicle (NGLV), and more.

Many thanks to the Takshashila Institution, SkyServe, KaleidEO and Gurbir Singh for sponsoring this month’s Indian Space Progress report.

Some Earth observation updates from ISRO and the private sector

• Following the release of India’s much-awaited new space policy early last year, in December ISRO opened up access to 5-meter resolution remote sensing data from 44 of its satellites, making it among the highest resolution datasets of its kind in the world available to the public. Shyam Upadhyay has great coverage on its technicalities, and Vishesh Vatsal of SkyServe (a sponsor of Indian Space Progress) illustrates its potential with an example instrument from ISRO’s ResourceSat-2. Also see Bhoonidhi’s first newsletter of 2024 for more details.
• Pixxel Space, headquartered in the US but with a major Indian presence, opened up a 2800 square-meter manufacturing and testing facility in Bangalore with the hope of eventually building and qualifying up to 40 satellites a year. The announcement comes shortly after Pixxel recently closed a Google-led $36 million funding round, bringing the total money raised by the company to at least $71 million. The company is targeting launching six commercial hyperspectral Earth imaging satellites in late 2024.
• Satellogic is entering the Indian market via a partnership with Tata Advanced Systems Limited to build sub-meter resolution Earth observation satellites locally in the country for commercial as well as national defense applications.
• Ahmedabad-based PierSight Space raised $6 million to work towards its goal of building a constellation of SAR satellites aimed at providing a high 30-minute interval monitoring for the maritime industry.

More Indian space

• On the same launch as XPoSat, ISRO once again uniquely repurposed the PSLV’s fourth stage as a stabilized, solar-powered platform for onboard payloads. Called the PSLV Orbital Experimental Module or POEM, this platform affords organizations low-cost access to space for demonstrating their technologies ahead of use in future missions. On this launch, POEM hosted nine payloads from various organizations, including green thrusters from startup Bellatrix and the LEAP satellite platform demonstration from the private company Dhruva Space. POEM also successfully demoed 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.
• Hyderabad-based Skyroot raised $27.5 million, and hopes to launch their first orbital rocket Vikram-I later this year. The company previously launched suborbital test mission Prarambh in November 2022, becoming India’s first such privately developed rocket. In July, the company completed the carbon-fiber winding and curing of the rocket’s Stage-1 motor case. In June, Skyroot flight qualified its Raman-I engine, which will provide roll attitude control for Vikram-I. Also in July, the company successfully tested at an ISRO facility the first hot firing of its Raman-II engine, which will power Vikram-I’s fourth stage. In December, Skyroot passed pressure testing of Vikram-I’s first stage.

Reading menu

• Looking back at Chandrayaan 1 and forward to Artemis
• India’s Chandrayaan 2 lunar orbiter is also a Sun watcher

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SLIM is alive, and its landing is remarkable in more ways than one

On January 25, JAXA provided a detailed rundown of how the lunar landing of its SLIM spacecraft went on January 19. During its final phase of the descent when SLIM was roughly 50 meters above the lunar surface, it hovered for a second time and successfully identified touchdown hazards below it to start lowering itself accordingly. But at this point, one of the two main engine nozzles on the lander mysteriously broke off and fell (image). This reduced the lander’s thrust level to 55%, and made it go sideways. Since then, the latter issue had to be continually kept in control by SLIM’s guidance system using the other main engine and smaller thrusters.

SLIM touched down on the Moon at 13.316°S, 25.251°E, lying within the rocky ejecta of the 300-meter wide Shioli crater. While its vertical velocity of 1.4 meters/second on touchdown was well within the designed upper bound, the eastward lateral motion and touchdown orientation weren’t nominal, causing SLIM to flip on the surface with its solar panels facing away from the Sun.

SLIM explores Selene

SLIM woke up today, January 29, after the Sun lit the lander’s solar panels from the west. JAXA wasted no time to begin conducting its surface mission of analyzing the composition of Shioli crater’s ejecta using a near-infrared, multi-band spectroscopic camera, which might give scientists insights about our Moon’s mantle and its formation. When SLIM was briefly operational post-landing, JAXA imaged parts of the surface using the instrument, and mission scientists even identified specific rock targets to spectrally analyze if and when the lander woke up—which it now has. Here’s hoping JAXA can get a lot of the surface science mission done before the Sun sets for it on February 2.

The two small “Lunar Excursion Vehicles”, or LEVs, that SLIM deployed during descent at about five meters altitude have also demonstrated their abilities. JAXA said the two-kilogram LEV-1 hopper leaped on the Moon as planned, and directly communicated with Earthly ground stations, which made it the world’s smallest and lightest hardware to directly transmit data from Luna to Terra. The 250-gram, tennis-ball-sized crawler called LEV-2 also worked, and relayed an image of the flipped SLIM lander via LEV-1, providing us all a clear visual confirmation of the landing’s climax.

A new era of robotic surface science and exploration

Remarkably, because SLIM had been acing its lunar descent until the point at which it lost an engine nozzle, the spacecraft achieved its ‘pinpoint landing’ goal anyway by landing 55 meters from the center of its incredibly tight landing ellipse of 100 by 100 meters. JAXA says without the engine anomaly, SLIM could’ve touched down at least five times closer! In any case, SLIM goes down in history as the most precise robotic planetary landing ever. As covered in the previous Moon Monday, this has implications for more demanding future missions by Japan, India, and the US to explore the Moon’s rocky south pole and better access nearby water ice lying inside permanently shadowed regions. Just as importantly though, SLIM’s success will now lead to sophisticated surface science missions too:

• For example, scientists asserted in 2021 that due to scientific instruments becoming increasingly sophisticated, even low-cost robotic surface missions—and specifically those without sample return or crew—can help answer fundamental lunar & planetary science questions by focusing on precisely measuring trace elements. However, the generally immobile landers post touchdown and limited drive ranges of small rovers have kept such instruments from being right on or near the scientifically apt patches as identified from orbital data. With SLIM-like precision landings, that’s now possible.
• Such precision landings will also enhance robotic sample return missions, where retrievals like in the case of China’s Chang’e 5 mission have otherwise accepted higher tolerances in landing accuracies. Robotic missions can now have better chances of bringing material to Earth that have high fidelity to precise scientific objectives, such as, say, bringing home the Moon’s mantle material.

Many thanks to Epsilon3, Nathan Price and Ashish Gupta for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love my work too, join them!

How India’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter helped SLIM nail the landing

At the heart of SLIM’s precision landing ability is what JAXA calls “vision-based navigation”, wherein it compares images of the Moon it snaps at critical points during its descent to preloaded onboard orbital maps within just a few seconds to know where it is and to determine where it needs to go. These maps come from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter, and JAXA’s own SELENE craft, each uniquely useful at various heights.

During the January 25 press conference, JAXA said that the SLIM mission used high-resolution imagery from the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter for selecting the final target landing site pre-launch as well as for the lander’s final descent phase. This is because the orbiter boasts an imaging resolution in the range of 0.25–0.30 meters/pixel, which is roughly twice LRO’s finest. Such high resolution is useful in the final descent phase where otherwise standard orbital maps are rendered less useful for a lander now too close to the surface. While most modern robotic landers, including most recently India’s own Chandrayaan 3, can find a good landing spot on their own in this final phase, the lack of a relevant last-mile map can affect the landing precision.

SLIM’s case highlights how India’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter can provide advanced orbital data to help NASA and its partners better plan upcoming robotic & crewed Artemis missions. This has largely remained an untapped opportunity despite a formal report from US scientists recognizing the orbiter’s unique ability. There have been a handful of exceptions though, such as a NASA-ISRO team utilizing the orbiter’s radar to uniquely characterize the Artemis III candidate landing regions. At the last annual meeting of the NASA-backed Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) in September 2023, LRO project scientist and Science Lead for Artemis III, Noah Petro, said:

The Chandrayaan 2 orbiter is a valuable asset at the Moon. Its data is helping build on the LRO foundation by filling important needs, and we’re very much looking forward to more data from the mission!

More mission updates

• SpaceX and Intuitive Machines are targeting launch of the latter’s first Moon lander on February 14. The mission, named IM-1, will carry six NASA science & technology payloads as part of CLPS. A separate, commercial telescope called ILO-X from Hawaii-based ILOA will also be aboard. While CLPS competitor Astrobotic’s first lunar landing mission failed earlier this month, Intuitive Machines has continued to show confidence in their attempt. The company earlier told Jeff Foust of SpaceNews that they have studied recent failed Moon landing attempts to subdue any similar weaknesses in their lander, such as having dissimilar redundant inertial measurement units—the lack of which afflicted the lunar descent of Israel-based SpaceIL’s Beresheet lander.
• NASA’s decision to launch the upcoming US-led Gateway international lunar orbital station’s habitat module mated to its power & propulsion one led to some mass constraints, which combined with evolving Gateway requirements from NASA have resulted in habitat module contractor Northrop Grumman taking a $100 million hit out of a $935 million fixed-price contract, Jeff Foust reports.

More Moon

• Belgium became the 34th country and the 13th European nation to sign the US-led Artemis Accords for cooperative lunar exploration. Jeff Foust notes that Belgium is the fifth largest contributor to ESA, after Germany, France, Italy, and the UK. As such, all these contributors are now signees of the Accords.
• To achieve the ambitious Artemis Moon landing missions for NASA, both SpaceX and Blue Origin must prevent cryogenic fuels in their respective lunar craft from boiling off in the weeks and even months they spend in cislunar space. They must also be able to accurately assess the remaining fuel at any given point in time, a task made challenging due to lack of gravity. To improve fuel estimations, NASA says it will soon fly an agency-developed radio-based gauging technique on an unspecified upcoming Moon lander from Intuitive Machines as part of CLPS.
• New research from Western University discovered the mineral apatite in a meteorite sample once part of the old crust of our Moon. This reinforces the recently developed idea that the young Moon may have had considerably more water than what the Apollo sample findings suggest.

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SLIM’s Moon landing paves the way for more demanding missions for Japan, India, and Artemis

On January 19 at about 3:20PM UTC, JAXA’s $121 million SLIM lander successfully touched down on the Moon within the rocky ejecta of the 300-meter wide Shioli crater. This made Japan only the fifth country in the world to achieve a soft lunar landing, and JAXA just the second organization after CNSA to successfully do so on their first try.

Unfortunately, for an as-yet-unidentified reason, SLIM’s novel thin-film solar sheets weren’t generating power on the surface. The lander was operating and transmitting telemetry and imagery on limited battery power. Within three hours, JAXA decided to remotely disconnect SLIM’s batteries while it was at the 12% charge level, and thus the lander powered down. This means SLIM couldn’t carry out its surface mission of analyzing the composition of Shioli crater’s ejecta using a near-infrared, multi-band spectroscopic camera that could’ve give scientists insights about our Moon’s mantle and its formation. JAXA says that because SLIM’s solar panels are facing westward, when sunlight hit the panels towards the end of the local lunar day an Earth week later, SLIM might generate power and hopefully recover for brief operations.

When SLIM was about five meters above the surface during its descent, it successfully deployed two small mobile “Lunar Excursion Vehicles” or LEVs. These comprise the LEV-1 hopper, and the 250-gram tennis-ball-sized crawler called LEV-2. JAXA received communications from both these bots. LEV-1 was supposed to image the lander and its surroundings but we don’t know yet if it did so or transmitted the same.

In any case, what sets SLIM apart from every robotic Moon landing is its goal of achieving a ‘pinpoint landing’ by touching down within an incredibly tight landing ellipse of 100 by 100 meters near Shioli. JAXA originally said it would take a month to determine from orbital data if SLIM achieved this goal. Nevertheless, the agency will provide us an update on the same in a livestream plus press conference on January 25. Such gripping precision isn’t for the sake of a demonstration. The upcoming NASA Artemis crewed missions, China’s Chang’e robotic craft, and the majority of other government as well as private endeavors plan to explore the Moon’s rocky south pole, where such demanding touchdowns are indispensable in most cases to better access nearby water ice lying inside permanently shadowed regions.

In fact, for its next Moon mission launching before the end of decade, JAXA is partnering with ISRO to have its LUPEX rover directly study the nature, abundance, and accessibility of water ice at 89°S. To safely and precisely land LUPEX amid unforgiving polar terrain, ISRO will build the lander with input from both Chandrayaan 3’s success and that of SLIM. Since both Japan and India are signatories of the US-led Artemis Accords, the engineering as well as the science from LUPEX is expected to feed into the Artemis program in some form. JAXA is also considering flying a LUPEX-class lander by end of decade to deliver cargo for Artemis missions.

Against the contrast of many recent Moon landing mission failures, Chandrayaan 3 and SLIM have thankfully kept the global momentum for the Moon going by feeding into the frenzy of continuing to send robotic missions to Luna.

Tangent: In true Japanese style, there’s a game for you to get a feel for the SLIM mission and its pinpoint Moon landing.

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More mission updates

• With a series of 23 small main engine burns on January 18, Astrobotic directed its ailing Peregrine lander to safely enter and burn up in Earth’s atmosphere over the South Pacific Ocean. While the company could’ve avoided terrestrial reentry with the remaining propellent onboard, the company responsibly concluded that risking having an uncontrollable spacecraft littering cislunar space is a bad idea. Nevertheless, Astrobotic’s failed lunar landing mission has many implications for the company’s expansive future Moon missions and ambitions, from delivering the water-hunting VIPER rover for NASA to hopes of operating commercial lunar power grids and versatile autonomous rovers.
• On December 12, 2023, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) successfully laser-pinged the agency-provided small retroreflector sitting on top of ISRO’s Chandrayaan 3 lander. This first-of-a-kind demonstration is a stepping stone towards a future where Mooncraft with purpose-built lasers can locate such targets and land near them as they arrive. For example, this technique will be relevant for repeated cargo deliveries near future habitats. While LRO’s laser altimeter wasn’t built for this purpose, it’s nevertheless playing a pathfinding role to said end, which NASA will continue refining with the retroreflector the agency also has aboard SLIM.

Organizations worldwide continued investing in a lunar future

• ESA has been stockpiling quite a lot of Moon-like anorthosite rock material from Greenland to prepare several kinds of lunar soil simulants in the lead up to opening the versatile VULCAN and LUNA testbeds in the UK and Germany respectively. These facilities will be used to test both robotic and crewed exploration activities. Related tangent: For testing Chandrayaan landers and rovers, ISRO developed a lunar-highland-like soil simulant called LSS-ISAC-1 by sourcing naturally occurring anorthosite rock fragments from the Sittampundi Anorthosite Complex in southern India.
• Continuing to plan for future lunar exploration, the Italian Space Agency is funding construction of the Lunar Robotic Mission Simulation and Control Center in Turin. Once operational by 2027, it will be used to complement the European Space Agency Rover Operation Control Center (ROCC), which is also in Turin. Other related things the agency is funding is an oxygen extractor demonstration mission by 2028, and a multipurpose surface habitation module for Artemis Basecamp.
• ispace Japan and Orbit Fab entered a partnership with a futuristic focus on refueling landers and other Moonbound hardware with lunar resources such as water ice. Relatedly, the UK Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency are co-hosting the $2.2 million Aqualunar Challenge, encouraging people to develop technologies that remove contaminants from lunar water so as to purify it for consumption by future astronauts.
• As expected, NASA has finally formally asked SpaceX and Blue Origin to begin work on developing cargo variants of their crewed lunar landers with SpaceX Starship and Blue Moon respectively, Jeff Foust reports. NASA wants such cargo flights, which begin from Artemis VII in the 2030s, to support future astronauts and habitats by delivering a bare minimum of 12,000 kilograms of cargo per flight. These could include not just crew-critical supplies but also scientific payloads, technical equipments, large rovers, or even habitat modules.

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Astrobotic’s ailing lunar lander leaves behind a trail of transparency but also trepidation

After Astrobotic’s Peregrine Moon lander part of NASA’s CLPS program successfully launched to its intended high Earth orbit on January 8 aboard a ULA Vulcan rocket, it began communicating with mission control as expected. Unfortunately for the company, the spacecraft then began to tumble and thus lost its solar power generation capacity. Based on initial analysis, Astrobotic thinks a faulty valve part of Peregrine’s propulsion system caused high pressure helium to rush into and rupture the oxidizer tank. Mission operators have been using Peregrine’s small thrusters to keep the spacecraft’s solar arrays pointed towards the Sun and generate power. However, a skewed fuel to oxidizer ratio due to the propellant leak made any prolonged use of the main engine unfeasible, putting lunar orbital insertion and subsequent landing out of question for Peregrine.

With that it mind and the lander losing fuel, Astrobotic decided to switch on the payloads onboard, including NASA ones, to demonstrate the ability to operate them as well as collect and relay their data. But with the Moon not in Peregrine’s vicinity, achieving any of the intended scientific observations there isn’t possible. The lone exception is NASA’s radiation monitor onboard for which ongoing measurements in cislunar space constitute valid, relevant data too.

While Peregrine’s high Earth orbit was supposed to be stable, the propellant leak has caused deviations in a manner that will lead the spacecraft to enter Earth’s atmosphere on January 18 and burn up. Astrobotic says while it can avoid terrestrial reentry with the remaining propellent, the uncertainties introduced by the leak (and the eventual propellant loss anyway) risk having an uncontrollable spacecraft littering cislunar space. The company thus decided to let Peregrine incinerate in the atmosphere in which it was born. Astrobotic and NASA will provide more mission details in a media teleconference shortly after.

Ponder on Peregrine’s wake

Firstly, I’d like to publicly appreciate John Thornton, Alivia Chapla, Dan Hendrickson and the entire Astrobotic team for being promptly transparent to the world about the mission’s state throughout. As a private company, they didn’t have to do so but chose to anyway. Again, even tax-funded government space agencies haven’t been this forthcoming, case in point being the utterly opaque manner in which ISRO handled Chandrayaan 2’s crash landing in 2019. Between ispace’s also-transparent communications about its failed lunar landing and Astrobotic’s present efforts, the two companies have set an excellent precedence not just for the coming armada of robotic CLPS lunar landers but Moon missions at large.

Nevertheless, Peregrine’s failed Moonshot is another brutal reminder that space is hard, a phrase that simply refuses to become a cliché. It’s important to remember that Peregrine’s desired success was supposed to propel Astrobotic’s expansive lunar ambitions, which include operating a commercial lunar power grid and versatile autonomous rovers touting lunar night survival by end of decade. As such, Peregrine’s outcome has many (potential) implications for the company:

1. Since Peregrine’s landing mission ended well before its descent could even begin, Astrobotic unfortunately couldn’t get any data from this critical phase to know how well the lander would’ve performed against engineered expectations. Such information would’ve been particularly useful to Astrobotic for its next CLPS mission, which intends to have a large, 5900-kilogram Griffin lander deliver NASA’s VIPER rover to the Moon’s south pole in November 2024 to directly study the nature of lunar water ice.
2. Given VIPER’s more demanding landing constraints and its vitality in helping NASA plan future human missions to the Moon’s poles, the agency took a more conservative approach with VIPER compared to other high-risk, faster-reward CLPS deliveries. In 2022, NASA requested Astrobotic to delay VIPER’s delivery by a year, and contracted them $67.8 million to perform additional testing of Griffin to reduce risk. Eric Berger has previously reported that this includes more testing of Griffin’s propulsion system. It’s too early to say exactly how Peregrine’s failure will affect VIPER’s launch but definitely expect NASA to take actions that further reduce risk to the rover in one way or another.
3. Astrobotic’s third Moon mission aiming for a touchdown on the Moon’s south pole in 2026 will likely get delayed. Peregrine’s outcome might also affect Astrobotic’s offering of satellite deployments to lunar orbit on said mission.
4. Astrobotic’s aforementioned lunar ambitions intend to leverage everything the company has been building: landers, rovers, lunar solar panels, and wireless power delivery, which also means investing more to make sure every element works reliably. With Astrobotic having acquired Masten Space and its assets in 2022 and the company building a simulated lunar field for enhanced testing of Moonbound hardware, we will likely see Astrobotic further lean on better testing hardware for its future Moonshots. The trouble is that with its inherently limited resources compared to typical Moon missions by space agencies, this is going to be an expensive battle.

Mission updates

• On January 14, JAXA’s SLIM lander performed a circularization burn to enter the intended lunar orbit of 600 by 600 kilometers. On January 19, SLIM will reduce this orbit to 15 by 600 kilometers, after which it will attempt a 20-minute autonomous lunar descent on January 20 at about 12 AM JST (3 PM UTC on January 19). Will SLIM achieve its goal of a ‘pinpoint landing’? Watch the live stream on YouTube to find out.
• Andrew Jones reports that the four key modules of the 8200-kilogram Chang’e 6 Mooncraft arrived at China’s Wenchang spaceport on January 10. CNSA aims to launch Chang’e 6 on a Long March 5 rocket this May to bring about two kilograms of lunar samples from the Apollo impact crater on the Moon’s farside. These samples should be scientifically even more valuable than the Chang’e 5 samples as it would be our first tactile window into our Moon’s mysterious farside.

Many thanks to Epsilon3, Joseph Biernat, Sonia Tikoo and Arun Raghavan for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love my work too, join them!

More Artemis delays

In a January 9 media teleconference, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced (inevitable) delays to upcoming crewed Artemis missions:

• Artemis II, which will carry four astronauts around the Moon and back, will now launch no earlier than September 2025 instead of end of this year. One of the key reasons for the delay is that NASA is still trying to understand the root cause of the unexpected erosion of some heat shield material on Artemis I’s Orion capsule. Another major reason is having to replace faulty electronics part of Orion’s life support systems responsible for removing carbon dioxide from the cabin.
• Artemis III, the first crewed Moon landing under the Artemis program, will now launch no earlier than September 2026, with its pacing items being SpaceX’s HLS Lunar Starship and its many pending milestones as well as Axiom Space’s AxEMU suits for astronauts.
• The uncrewed, pared down Lunar Starship that’s supposed to demonstrate a safe Moon landing before NASA lets SpaceX carry crew on Artemis III is also formally pushed out from this year to 2025.

Relatedly, a recent report from NASA’s Government Accountability Office concluded that the “complexity of human spaceflight suggests that it is unrealistic to expect the HLS program to complete development more than a year faster than the average for NASA major projects, the majority of which are not human spaceflight projects.” The report says Artemis III is more likely to launch in 2027.

While Lunar Starship’s slow progress will delay not just Artemis III but also Artemis IV, the larger perspective to consider here is Starship’s criticality to NASA’s long-term lunar plans that should make up for time lost—if done right.

Science observations by South Korean lunar orbiter going strong

Continuing the tradition of leveraging the unique vantage point of the Moon for astronomical observations, like the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter observing solar flares and Chandrayaan 3’s propulsion module studying Earth as an exoplanet, now South Korea’s first lunar orbiter KPLO has chimed in too with new mission results, Alexandra Witze reports:

But from its vantage point orbiting the Moon, it [KPLO] also detected γ-rays from elsewhere in space, said Kyeong ja Kim, a planetary scientist at the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources in Daejeon. That includes the brightest burst of γ-rays ever detected — an enormous blast from a galaxy 580 million parsecs (1.9 billion light years) away that washed over Earth in October 2022. Danuri [KPLO] also measured dozens of other γ-ray bursts coming from distant stars, as well as spikes in radiation created by storms on the Sun.

Since KPLO formally started its one-year primary mission to study the Moon’s surface in February 2022, the orbiter has delivered quite a few notable observations:

• Initial optical, polarimetric, and gamma-ray observations from its four indigenously developed instruments
• Unique observations of permanently shadowed regions on the Moon’s poles from NASA’s ultra-sensitive ShadowCam imager onboard to enable planning of future resource prospecting missions.
• A new look at the ‘swirl’ of Reiner Gamma

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At 7:18 UTC today, January 8, Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander blasted off to space onboard the inaugural flight of ULA’s Vulcan rocket, at long last marking the formal start of missions part of NASA’s CLPS program to send agency-funded as well as commercial payloads to the Moon. Vulcan’s upper stage, Centaur V, performed two burns before releasing the 2-meter tall Peregrine into a high Earth orbit 50 minutes into the flight. At 8:18 UTC, Astrobotic began communicating with Earth as expected.

The lander will attempt getting into lunar orbit in the last week of January. After orbiting Luna for several weeks, wherein Astrobotic can conduct final operational checkouts to ensure all lander components are performing as desired, Peregrine will attempt an autonomous touchdown on February 23 in a lunar lava plain called Sinus Viscositatis just outside the Gruithuisen volcanic domes.

The lander carries 15 payloads from 6 countries, including the shoebox-sized, 1.8-kilogram Iris rover designed by students at Carnegie Mellon University. Notably, Carnegie Mellon is also a subcontractor for Astrobotic’s upcoming MoonRanger rovers. Peregrine will also deploy five autonomous 12-centimeter, 60-gram rovers collectively called COLMENA, representing Mexico’s first Moon mission. The key contributions from these small rovers won’t be imagery they take but rather how their traverses can help us better understand the mechanical properties of the lunar soil and also realize specific challenges in autonomously navigating on the Moon.

There’s also a Navigation Doppler Lidar from NASA onboard to precisely determine Peregrine’s velocity and position while landing on the Moon. As part of NASA’s CLPS program, Peregrine was also supposed to carry 11 agency-funded instruments but will now only fly five of them partly to have performance margins on the lander. Three of these are spectrometers to study water ice molecules and other such volatiles on the lunar surface and in the exosphere throughout the 10-Earth-day mission. As I covered during Astrobotic’s landing site swap, the previous higher latitude location was actually more suitable to study how water gets transported from the Moon’s equator to permanently shadowed regions on the poles, where it can remain preserved for billions of years. And so for the new site, the focus has had to be shifted to how the lander’s water-containing plume exhausts settle on the surface or exosphere.

Of the lander’s passive payloads, it’s the cremated human remains that have caused controversy to the point of calling in a last-minute White House meeting. There are different sides to the story, but a point Marcia Smith has uniquely noted is that the Navajo Nation did not raise their concerns during the public comment period for the launch license review.

How to follow CLPS mission updates

Since a fleet of NASA-supported robotic CLPS Moon landers will launch throughout this decade, I’ve compiled an exhaustive rundown on these novel CLPS missions:

I update this page every month or so. Other than referencing everything high-level I can on there, whose 102 links should help you get to places, there’s more you can do to keenly follow all things CLPS:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. NASA hasn’t posted on the official CLPS blog for more than half a year but has put out a few CLPS updates on the Artemis blog. For some reason, Astrobotic’s mission updates are being posted on the Artemis blog instead of the CLPS blog. And yet the CLPS blog is the one currently linked on official CLPS pages. It’s quite confusing.
4. 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.
5. Search the Moon Monday archive 🙃. No, seriously, it’s one of the reasons I write this one-of-a-kind newsletter!

Many thanks to Epsilon3, Open Lunar Foundation, The Orbital Index, Henry Throop, Gurbir Singh and Abhinav Yadav for sponsoring this week’s Moon Monday. If you love my work too, join them!

More mission updates

• JAXA’s SLIM lunar lander successfully entered orbit around the Moon on December 25. Next up, SLIM mission operators will send commands to circularize the spacecraft’s elliptical polar orbit to 600 by 600 kilometers. SLIM will then attempt a 20-minute autonomous descent on January 20, 2024 at about 12 AM JST (3 PM UTC on January 19) to achieve a ‘pinpoint landing’.
• NASA says the upcoming VIPER rover’s flight model has been half built. VIPER’s CLPS launch to the Moon’s south pole onboard Astrobotic’s Griffin lander remains on schedule for November 2024. Over four months, VIPER will unravel the nature of lunar water ice deposits, assess their resource potential, and help determine how accessible they are to help NASA plan crewed Artemis missions. Tangent: You can send your name onboard VIPER; apply before March 15.
• Two NASA astronauts, Nicole Mann and Doug Wheelock, recently tested a sub-scale elevator mockup for SpaceX Starship to provide feedback on the flight version for future astronauts landing on the Moon aboard Lunar Starships starting with Artemis III. The astronauts put on spacesuits during their testing to simulate the mobility constraints crew will face on the Moon.
• Roscosmos is considering making 2 versions of the Luna 27 high-precision lander for its targeted launch in 2028. One lander would attempt a precise touchdown on the Moon’s south pole, as originally intended, while the other could either land on the north pole or the farside. Note though that this plan isn’t sanctioned yet, and Luna 25’s crash last year has slowed down if not descaled Russia’s lunar ambitions.

An international Artemis

• The US Vice President Kamala Harris announced at the National Space Council meeting on December 20 that the country intends to have an international astronaut onboard a crewed Artemis Moon landing by end of decade. More details will presumably come later but based on JAXA and ESA’s existing and upcoming future contributions to Artemis, it seems likely that said foreign astronaut will either be Japanese or European.
• On January 7, NASA and the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) announced that the UAE will provide the airlock for the NASA-led international Gateway lunar orbital habitat. Russia was originally supposed to provide the airlock, per a joint statement in 2017, but the country later pulled out. An airlock would allow future Artemis astronauts on Gateway to do spacewalks—while around the Moon! The announcement did not provide a timeline but Jeff Foust notes that the airlock is intended for delivery in 2030, a few years after the Gateway starts hosting astronauts. In return for this contribution, the UAE will get to send an astronaut to the Gateway aboard an Artemis flight. Per an earlier report by Sarwat Nasir, it’s possible that Boeing builds this airlock for UAE.

More Moon

• Following the 2022 funding of Canadian-company-led concept studies on possible infrastructure contributions to NASA’s future Artemis Basecamp surface habitat, CSA is now funding six of these studies to build terrestrial prototypes. The total award amount is $2.17 million. The concepts span food production, autonomous mining, power generation, and long-range optical communications. This project is part of Canada’s larger efforts to ramp up its lunar exploration ambitions.
• NASA conducted its second annual Architecture Concept Review in November 2023, following its first such Concept Review and Definitions Document released earlier. With this process, the agency hopes to optimally refine its Moon to Mars Objectives and the strategy to achieve them. NASA will share the meet’s results and updated documents early this year. Relatedly, NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate (ESDMD) formed a new Strategy and Architecture Office last year to lead the development of an integrated master plan for crewed Artemis missions to meet desired objectives. This office sits in parallel to the Moon to Mars one, which is centralizing all elements of Artemis. Here’s the new ESDMD organization chart:

And, welcome back to Moon Monday after the year-end break. This was one satiating edition to write. :)

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Upcoming CLPS Moon landings

To date, NASA has funded several commercial companies for these CLPS Moon landing missions:

• 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
• Mission 6, November 2024: $226.5 million contract to Astrobotic ($320.4 million due to 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

Unlike traditional missions, these CLPS missions will be fully built, operated and managed by their companies, with minimal oversight from NASA. The agency only 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

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.

Update on January 15: Astrobotic’s lunar lander failed before it could reach Luna, which has many implications for the company’s expansive future Moon missions and ambitions, from delivering the water-hunting VIPER rover for NASA to hopes of operating commercial lunar power grids and versatile autonomous rovers.

Intuitive Machines’ first CLPS mission

For its first CLPS mission named IM-1 launching February 12, 2024, Intuitive Machines will carry six NASA payloads to the Moon, attempting a landing in the polar Malapert A crater at 80°S. Most notably, the lander will have stereo cameras to record how its engine plumes impact the surface. This will help us quantify how rocket plumes interact with and kick off Moondust so that we can protect future surface spacecraft and habitats. A separate, commercial telescope called ILO-X from Hawaii-based ILOA will also be aboard.

Intuitive Machines’ second CLPS mission

On its second Moon mission in late 2024, 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.

Masten’s first CLPS mission

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 will launch NASA’s VIPER rover to the Moon’s south pole in November 2024 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. VIPER will 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 will help us plan future human missions to the Moon’s poles and eventually build sustainable habitats.

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 is the most expensive CLPS delivery yet. Note that NASA is separating its own costs to build and operate VIPER (currently at $433.5 million) from the payment to Astrobotic.

Aside: On the same mission, ESA will fly a landing-precision-aiding camera, the first ever commercial delivery to the Moon contracted by the agency.

Firefly’s first CLPS mission

Firefly’s first Moon lander aims to descend in the lava plains of Mare Crisium at 18.56°N, 61.81°E in late 2024, carrying several NASA instruments to study the lunar environment. The company announced in October 2023 that it has completed assembling and qualifying the Blue Ghost lander’s in-house-developed structure.

One of the lander’s legs will 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.

Intuitive Machines’ third CLPS mission

Intuitive Machines’ third Moon landing will be in the swirl of Reiner Gamma in 2025. 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 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.

Firefly’s second CLPS mission

Firefly will deliver an orbiter and two 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.

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 in 2026, the south pole (again) around the same time, and Ina in 2027. 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 four countries have accomplished this feat so far—the Soviet Union, the US, China, and India. 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 challenges, particularly with an immature supply chain and keeping costs low. Ultimately though, if enough of the CLPS missions stick the landing, it would open up frequent and periodic access to the Moon’s surface for diverse scientific investigations in ways never possible before for any planetary body.

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An earlier version of this article was originally published on The Planetary Society in 2022. Since then the piece has been significantly rewritten, updated, and revised on here to provide the latest launch and mission information.

In my lifelong mission to write & blog about the exploration of space and our Moon, 2023 turned out to be satiatingly eventful. Here are just some highlights that I’d like to share with you all.

• I published 50 editions of Moon Monday. The newsletter remains the only one dedicated to covering lunar exploration developments from around the world. A big thank you to each one of you 6,000+ humans for reading my labor of lunar love.
• I started publishing monthly Indian Space Progress reports, the only such resource collating and contextualizing all major (civil) Indian space developments.
• Got invited to speak at various conferences and institutes, including delivering the “Early Career Featured Presentation” at the annual meeting of the NASA-backed Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG).
• Published articles on Nature and Payload Space, and covered Chandrayaan 3 for Scientific American while witnessing the mission’s launch and landing from respective ISRO sites.
• The majority of all of this independent work is kindly supported by organization sponsors and individual supporters.

I’d like to remind you that all of my work is completely free to access with no ads, and is published in line with my transparent Editorial Independence Policy. If you love what I’ve been doing for space and lunar communities worldwide, sponsor my work. It would mean the Moon to me.

– Jatan

[Note: Clicking on images below will also take you to the respective stories]

Key launches

In February, ISRO conducted the first successful orbital flight of its new, homegrown SSLV rocket. With a modular design and rapid assembly times, the SSLV is a unique addition to ISRO’s rocket fleet, and is set to enter the commercial small satellite market to compete with the likes of Electron.

In March, the GSLV Mk III rocket commercially launched and deployed its second batch of 36 OneWeb satellites. While ISRO’s rockets exist first and foremost to give India independence from foreign launchers, they are also offered commercially once operational for the nation’s own needs. The MK III’s orbital loft of OneWeb satellites aptly illustrates this by giving ISRO a small but definitive place in the medium-lift global space launch market.

In May, a GSLV Mk II successfully launched and deployed the NVS-01 navigation satellite, marking the rocket’s return to flight after its cryogenic third stage had failed on its last mission in 2021. And, with NVS-01 sporting GPS interoperability as well as an indigenous atomic clock, it provided a much needed boost to India’s regional navigation service.

Technology building

In April, ISRO successfully carried out an autonomous runway landing demonstration of an indigenously developed spaceplane, whose larger version will be part of a future Reusable Launch Vehicle.

With the goal of flying Indian astronauts on the ambitious Gaganyaan mission mid-decade, ISRO continued finishing work on many of its key enabling technologies this year as well. This notably included conducting a successful abort test in October, qualifying the crew module’s propulsion system in May, and in April human-rating the liquid-fueled Vikas engine—two of which power the GSLV Mk III’s core stage.

Policy

As part of an unprecedented set of broad-sweeping, collaborative science & technology Indo-US agreements in June, India signed the US-led Artemis Accords. Since India is one of the few nations with independent and frequent access to space and the Moon, the move has big implications and opportunities for both NASA and ISRO to better explore our Moon as well as shape lunar governance frameworks.

In April, the Government of India put out the country’s much-awaited new space policy, which formally encourages Indian private businesses to pursue a whole spectrum of space capabilities, calls for repurposing ISRO to double down on advanced space research and cutting-edge technology development, and states for the first time some of India’s novel space ambitions such as utilizing space resources. While the policy’s first draft is crude, the consensus among all stakeholders is that it’s a good start.

A big thank you to the Takshashila Institution, SkyServe, KaleidEO, Gurbir Singh and Arun Raghavan for sponsoring this month’s Indian Space Progress roundup.

Chandrayaan 3

On August 23, ISRO’s Chandrayaan 3 robotic lander triumphantly touched down on the Moon, making India only the fourth country to achieve the feat of a soft lunar landing. The mission’s nominal execution and its team’s meticulous approach is what resulted in Chandrayaan 3 keeping the global momentum for the Moon going by feeding into the frenzy of sending robotic missions to Luna.

Fun fact: Chandrayaan 3’s landing ellipse spanned 4 by 2.5 kilometers, and it touched down ~350 meters away from the target spot, making it the second most precise robotic planetary landing to date.

Science

In September, ISRO launched its first space-based solar observatory called Aditya-L1 to uniquely observe our star with its advanced set of indigenously developed instruments. To that end, it follows AstroSat (India’s first dedicated space telescope) and Chandrayaan 1 (India’s first planetary mission) in setting a foundation for the country’s growing space science abilities and ambitions.

[Not ISRO but relevant for India] In April, the Indian government approved the construction of a $320 million gravitational wave detection facility called LIGO-India. When completed end of decade, astrophysicists expect the LIGO network’s ability to locate the sources of detected gravitational wave events to improve tenfold. This is a big moment for Indian science, especially since the country hasn’t yet built a state-of-the-art scientific facility of this scale in its home turf.

Perception versus reality

Like every year, a lot of the coverage and projections of India in space continued to confound reality—both from within the country and outside. Here are three such things I’d like to note:

Even as we celebrate Chandrayaan 3 and ISRO’s newly announced ambition of sending an Indian to the Moon by 2040, having more than 200 million Indian school students learn about Chandrayaan 3 mixed with mythology is a worrying development:

Given that Chandrayaan 3 attempted its lunar landing on August 23, and that Russia launched Luna 25 on August 11 seemingly out of the blue for a targeted August 21 landing attempt, many people and media publications worldwide boldly framed it as a race—notably without backing it up with due rationale. So was Russia trying to beat India with Luna 25? No:

If you love my coverage of Indian space, all of which is free to access by everyone in order to serve related communities and Indian space enthusiasts worldwide, kindly consider sponsoring it as an individual or an organization. 🚀🇮🇳

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