By Jatan Mehta | The world’s only newsletter dedicated to covering and contextualizing global lunar exploration updates, including plans to return humans this decade.
Moon Monday
Grab some tea, coffee, or beverage of your choice because this week’s Moon Monday is a sci-tech deep dive! 🌝 Chandrayaan 3 contributes to learning our Moon’s origin and evolution The first ever ground-based measurements of high-latitude lunar soil and rocks made by the Chandrayaan 3 rover’s Alpha
Moon Monday
First lander to drill on the Moon’s south pole delayed for good Jeff Foust reports that NASA will provide an additional $12.4 million to Intuitive Machines for its upcoming second Moon landing mission (IM-2) part of the agency’s CLPS program for work related to changing the landing
Moon Monday
Before we begin this week’s Moon Monday, I’m excited to share that I’ll be conducting a study on Indo-US lunar exploration as an Adjunct Scholar at the Takshashila Institution! As India too takes on increasingly complex Moon missions, my aim with the study is to identify specific
Moon Monday
Radar data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has helped scientists confirm that the lunar pit of Mare Tranquillitatis indeed does lead into a wide lava tube/cave for at least 80 meters. These results corroborate what scientists long suspected about many lunar pits leading to underground passages based
Moon Monday
Going deeper into VIPER Much has been said about NASA’s July 17 announcement to cancel the VIPER rover supposed to fly to the Moon’s south pole on Astrobotic’s Griffin lander mid-decade as part of the agency’s CLPS program to uniquely explore water ice there. Instead of
Moon Monday
China’s ambition to build a lunar navcom constellation Ling Xin reports on China’s ongoing studies to have a phased constellation of 30+ satellites which would provide high-precision navigation as well as high-bandwidth communications for most places on the Moon with up to quadruple coverage. Earlier studies focused on
Moon Monday
On the intersection of ispace, NASA CLPS, funding, and science The publicly traded ispace Japan is taking another loan from the Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, amounting to $62 million, to continue working on its upcoming three Moon missions: * The company’s second lunar lander M2/RESILIENCE, launching end of 2024
Moon Monday
How will ISRO go from Chandrayaan 3 to an Indian on the Moon? Clarifying and laying down India’s plans for increasingly complex robotic lunar missions, where human spaceflight comes in, and what realistic timelines look like.
Moon Monday
The first ever samples from the Moon’s farside are now cached on Earth After successfully collecting samples from the Moon’s farside and stowing them in lunar orbit earlier by excellently orchestrating multiple Mooncraft over months, CNSA made the Chang’e 6 mission’s lunar orbiter module fly towards
Moon Monday
Newly forged KASA aims to land on Luna At long last, South Korea formed its space agency called the Korea Aerospace Administration (KASA) to consolidate and/or coordinate the country’s various space activities—which span space science research, rocket and spacecraft technology development, and private space activities. So far,
Moon Monday
The efforts to gauge plume effects of Moon landers Two new papers by Philip Metzger suggest that Apollo lander rocket plumes blasted out at least four times more lunar soil than previously thought. This work, captured well by Michael Greshko for Scientific American, is part of an ongoing larger community
Moon Monday
I’m truly excited to welcome Astrolab as the latest yearly sponsor of my Moon Monday blog+newsletter! 🚀 California-based Venturi Astrolab Inc. (Astrolab) is developing a fleet of large multi-purpose rovers for advanced exploration of our Moon. To that end, Astrolab leads one of the three teams NASA selected earlier
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