Category Archives: The Moon

SpaceIL Beresheet fires engine to send it to the Moon

SpaceIL‘s Beresheet lunar spacecraft successfully fired its engine to extend its orbit to the Moon:


This diagram shows the change in the orbit with the 20.3.2019 burn:

A graphic timeline of the major events in the Beresheet mission.

When the spacecraft’s orbit reaches the Moon on April 4th, another firing of the engine will slow the vehicle down sufficiently to put it into a highly elliptical orbit around the Moon. After several orbits, another burn will circularize the orbit. Finally, on April 11th the engine will fire to slow the vehicle such that it falls towards the surface. At 5 meters above the lunar ground, the engine will cut off and the Moon’s low gravity will pull the spacecraft slowly down to the surface.

SpaceIL founder Yonatan Winetraub gives the basics of how the spacecraft’s engine firings get it to the Moon:

This video shows the full sequence of orbital maneuvers from launch to landing:

SpaceIL is a non-profit volunteer organization in Israel that began a quest for the Moon as an entrant in the Google Lunar XPRIZE. Thought the GLXP ended last year without a winner, SpaceIL raised sufficient funds to continue with development of the spacecraft and to buy a secondary payload ride on the SpaceX Falcon 9 that launched in February.

More about the latest mission event:

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Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir

Videos: “Space to Ground” ISS report – Mar.15.2019

Here is the latest episode of NASA’s weekly Space to Ground reports on activities related to the International Space Station:

Other NASA videos released this week focus on building upon lessons learned in LEO to go beyond earth orbit:

** NASA wants to build a human-tended station around the Moon called the Gateway:

** Agency chief Jim Bridenstine talked about lunar goals:

In an address from Kennedy Space Center on March 11, 2019, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine shares the work underway to return astronauts to the Moon and onward to Mars.

** Technologies for lunar exploration and a human base:

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Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir

SpaceIL Beresheet lunar mission update + iSpace of Japan to launch lunar orbiter and lander

SpaceIL‘s Beresheet lunar lander, launched as a secondary payload on a Falcon 9 last Thursday evening, has completed its first engine firing, which will raise the altitude of the perigee (low point) of its highly elliptical orbit around the earth so that it doesn’t reenter the atmosphere.  First Israeli lunar spacecraft completes first maneuver – Israel National News.

The maneuver was made at a distance of 69,400 km from Earth for 30 seconds and will increase the spacecrafts closest point of approach to Earth to a distance of 600 km.

Beresheet continues its course according to plan and the next maneuver is scheduled for Monday night.

As seen on this video, the craft will need to carry out several engine firings to extend its orbit outward to the Moon and then go into orbit around it:

The glare of the sun has affected the craft’s star-tracker but otherwise the vehicle seems in good shape.

Scott Manley posted a video before the launch in which he discussed the SpaceIL mission:

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Japan’s ispace is another organization that began as an entrant in the Google Lunar XPRIZE and then continued after the GLXP ended. ispace, however, is a commercial company rather than a non-profit like SpaceIL. The company has raised nearly $100M in investments and has contracts with several companies and government institutions.

The latest contract is with the NGK Spark Plug company and involves testing a solid-state a battery under the harsh conditions on the Moon, particularly the extremely cold temperatures during the 2 week long nights.

The company currently is focused on the first two missions to the Moon:

Mission 1 will entail an orbit around the Moon, while Mission 2 will perform a soft lunar landing and deployment of rovers to collect data from the lunar surface.

ispace has contracted with SpaceX to carry its Lunar Lander (Moon landing spacecraft) and Lunar Rovers (Moon surface exploration robots) for the HAKUTO-R Program as secondary payloads on it’s Falcon-9 rocket. The launches for the first and second missions for HAKUTO-R will occur in mid-2020 and mid-2021, respectively.

Here is a video showing the phases of the mission to land on the Moon and deploy a small rover to explore:

This video introduces some of the people working at ispace:

And this video presents the company’s long term vision:

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Telescopes and Binoculars at Amazon

Space science roundup – Feb.21.2019

A sampling of recent articles, videos, and images related to space related sciences:

** Mars weather reportsDaily Mars weather reports are now available from the Insight lander, which has activated its temperature and wind sensors – InSight Is the Newest Mars Weather Service | NASA

This public tool includes stats on temperature, wind and air pressure recorded by InSight. Sunday’s weather was typical for the lander’s location during late northern winter: a high of 2 degrees Fahrenheit (-17 degrees Celsius) and low of -138 degrees Fahrenheit (-95 degrees Celsius), with a top wind speed of 37.8 mph (16.9 m/s) in a southwest direction. The tool was developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, with partners at Cornell University and Spain’s Centro de Astrobiología. JPL leads the InSight mission.

The white east- and west-facing booms — called Temperature and Wind for InSight, or TWINS — on the deck of NASA’s InSight lander belong to its suite of weather sensors. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech. Full image and caption

Through a package of sensors called the Auxiliary Payload Subsystem (APSS), InSight will provide more around-the-clock weather information than any previous mission to the Martian surface. The lander records this data during each second of every sol (a Martian day) and sends it to Earth on a daily basis. The spacecraft is designed to continue that operation for at least the next two Earth years, allowing it to study seasonal changes as well.

The tool will be geeky fun for meteorologists while offering everyone who uses it a chance to be transported to another planet.

Today’s readings:

A similar weather report is available from the Curiosity rover: Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) – Mars Science Laboratory.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) provides a view of global Martian atmosphere conditions: MRO MARCI Weather Report – Malin Space Science Systems.

** The Mars 2020 rover is coming together at NASA JPL in preparation for launch next year:

Tour the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and see the Mars 2020 mission under construction. Project System Engineer Jennifer Trosper explains the hardware being built and tested, including the rover, descent stage, cruise stage, back shell and heat shield. This NASA mission is preparing to launch to the Red Planet in 2020 and land in 2012. For more about Mars 2020, visit https://mars.nasa.gov/m2020

** Rovers on Mars and the Moon:  Bob Zimmerman gives an update on Curiosity as it slowly ascends Mt Sharp and on China’s Yutu-2 rover on the lunar surface: Rover update: February 20, 2019 | Behind The Black

The valley that Curiosity is presently traversing is dubbed “the clay unit” or “the clay-bearing unit” by the geologists, based on its make-up determined from orbital data. So far they have found this terrain to be “some of the best driving terrain we’ve encountered in Gale Crater, with just some occasional sandy patches in the lee of small ridges.” Initially they had problems finding any rocks or pebbles large enough for the instruments to use for gathering geological data. For the past week or so, however, they have stopped at “bright exposure of rock” where some bedrock was visible, giving them much better material to work with.

Click to see Curiosity’s track for past couple of years.

** Mars once had rivers flowing on its surface as shown by river beds seen from orbit. But up close images of the river beds show that it has been billions of years since water flowed over them: A river valley floor on Mars | Behind The Black

The floor of a canyon in Reull Vallis.

Here we see that the floor has been significantly eroded by later processes after the water disappeared. Later, wind action, which probably contributed to that erosion, also placed dust and dunes within the depressions here.

A lot of time has passed since that river flowed through Reull Valles. Or to put it another way, Mars has generally been a very dry place for a very long time. It might have considerable water at its poles as well hidden in an underground ice aquifer, but its surface is far drier than any desert on Earth, and has been for eons.

** Odd looking surface features on Mars are not uncommon. Here Bob examines an unusual pit that he spotted in an image of the south pole: Strange crescent-shaped pit near Martian south pole | Behind The Black

I found it in the February image release from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. I have merely cropped the full image to focus at full resolution on its primary feature, a region of stippled-like surface surrounding an area of black striping that in turn surrounds a crescent-shaped pit outlined by whiter material.

Why is there a pit here? Why is it crescent-shaped? Why is it surrounded by that whiter material? I could guess and say that the pit is a vent from which water vapor from the lower cap of water sprays out onto the upper cap of frozen carbon dioxide, staining it with white ice, but I am most likely wrong.

Moreover, what causes the black striping, as well as the stippled material surrounding it? The black stripes are probably related to a similar process that forms the spider formations found in the polar regions, except that these are not spiders. Why the parallel straight lines?

** The Chinese Chang’e 4 lander & rover on the far side of the Moon are currently in hibernation during the 2 week long lunar night. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has posted images of the pair taken during a pass over its location:

On 30 January LROC acquired a spectacular limb shot centered on the Chang’e 4 landing site, looking across the floor of Von Kármán crater. At the time, LRO was more than 200 kilometers from the landing site so Chang’e 4 was only a few pixels across and the rover was not discernable. The following day LRO was closer to the  site and again slewed (59° this time) to capture another view. This time the small Yutu-2 rover shows up (two pixels) just north of the lander. Also, shadows cast by the lander and rover are now visible.

“The Chang’e 4 rover is now visible to LROC! Just beyond the tip of the right arrow is the rover and the lander is to the right of the tip of the left arrow. The image appears blocky because it is enlarged 4x to make it easier to see the two vehicles. North is to the upper right, LROC NAC M1303570617LR [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].”

The official Chinese lunar exploration website doesn’t appear to offer an English version but your can always use the Google translation.

** Fly around Jupiter – Here is a cool time-lapse of images from the Juno probe as it made its 17th close pass above Jupiter’s clouds: ‘Juno’s Perijove-17 Jupiter Flyby, Reconstructed in 125-Fold Time-Lapse’ | JunoCam : Processing | Mission Juno

Via Movie of Juno’s December 2018 Jupiter fly-by | Behind The Black.

** A Neptune moon is a chip off the old Proteus moon according to a new report based on Hubble telescope imaging: Tiny Neptune Moon Spotted by Hubble May Have Broken from Larger Moon | NASA

Astronomers call it “the moon that shouldn’t be there.”

After several years of analysis, a team of planetary scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has at last come up with an explanation for a mysterious moon around Neptune that they discovered with Hubble in 2013.

The tiny moon, named Hippocamp, is unusually close to a much larger Neptunian moon called Proteus. Normally, a moon like Proteus should have gravitationally swept aside or swallowed the smaller moon while clearing out its orbital path.

So why does the tiny moon exist? Hippocamp is likely a chipped-off piece of the larger moon that resulted from a collision with a comet billions of years ago. The diminutive moon, only 20 miles (about 34 kilometers) across, is 1/1000th the mass of Proteus (which is 260 miles [about 418 kilometers] across).

** The Moon receives a constant shower of solar protons, which can interact with oxygen in surface rocks with oxygen-bearing molecules to produce hydroxyl (OH), which needs just one more proton to become water (H2O):  NASA Finds Moon Could Be a Chemical Factory for Water | NASA

When a stream of charged particles known as the solar wind careens onto the Moon’s surface at 450 kilometers per second (or nearly 1 million miles per hour), they enrich the Moon’s surface in ingredients that could make water, NASA scientists have found.

Using a computer program, scientists simulated the chemistry that unfolds when the solar wind pelts the Moon’s surface. As the Sun streams protons to the Moon, they found, those particles interact with electrons in the lunar surface, making hydrogen (H) atoms. These atoms then migrate through the surface and latch onto the abundant oxygen (O) atoms bound in the silica (SiO2) and other oxygen-bearing molecules that make up the lunar soil, or regolith. Together, hydrogen and oxygen make the molecule hydroxyl (OH), a component of water, or H2O.

“We think of water as this special, magical compound,” said William M. Farrell, a plasma physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who helped develop the simulation. “But here’s what’s amazing: every rock has the potential to make water, especially after being irradiated by the solar wind.”

This has implications for lunar settlers:

A key ramification of the result, [NASA Goddard plasma physicist  William M. Farrell] said, is that every exposed body of silica in space — from the Moon down to a small dust grain — has the potential to create hydroxyl and thus become a chemical factory for water.

** Dark matters – On a recent episode of The Space Show (Fri, 02/15/2019)Dr. William Dawson of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) discussed “dark matter, dark energy, physics research, black holes, research goals and legacy, gravitational waves, gravitational lensing and much more”.

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Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto

Space Science: Planetary rover update, Martian slope streaks, Lunar eclipse flash

Some space science items of interest:

** Planetary rover update: January 22, 2019 | Behind The Black – Bob Zimmerman reports on the status and plans for the Mars rovers and the Chinese Yutu-2 rover on the Moon.

Since November Curiosity has remained on the top of Vera Rubin Ridge, where it drilled its third successful hole there, out of a total of six drilling attempts. The failures were partly because of the hardness of the rock on the ridge, and partly because they are using a new drilling technique because of the failure of the drill’s feed mechanism. Instead of having the feed mechanism push the drill down into the rock, they use the robot arm itself. This has required care because the last thing they want to do is damage the arm itself.

The image [below] shows where Curiosity is heading in next year or two and was discussed in detail in my December 19, 2018 post, Curiosity’s future travels.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) image “Monitor Region Near Curiosity Rover” annotated by Robert Zimmerman at www.behindtheblack.com

** Planetary Scientists Continue to Puzzle Over the Mysterious Slope Streaks on Mars. Liquid? Sand? What’s Causing Them? – Universe Today – Investigations into what causes the long streaks down the sides of hill and mountain slopes on Mars.

“A splitting slope streak on Mars captured by HiRISE”. Credit NASA JPL,University of Arizona via Universe Today

Since they were first observed in the 1970s by the Viking missions, the slope streaks that periodically appear along slopes on Mars have continued to intrigue scientists. After years of study, scientists still aren’t sure exactly what causes them. While some believe that “wet” mechanisms are the culprit, others think they are the result of “dry” mechanisms.

Luckily, improvements in high-resolution sensors and imaging capabilities – as well as improved understanding of Mars’ seasonal cycles – is bringing us closer to an answer. Using a terrestrial analog from Bolivia, a research team from Sweden recently conducted a study that explored the mechanisms for streak formation and suggest that wet mechanisms appear to account for more, which could have serious implications for future missions to Mars.

** Lunar impact flash observed during eclipse – During the lunar “Blood Moon” eclipse on January 21st, a meteoroid impact was observed as seen in this video:

These images correspond to a lunar impact flash spotted by the telescopes operating in the framework of the MIDAS survey on Jan. 21, at 4:41:38 universal time (23:41:38 US eastern time). The impact took place during the totality phase of the lunar eclipse. The flash was produced by a rock (a meteoroid) that hit the lunar ground. The MIDAS Survey is being conducted by the University of Huelva and the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia.

Scott Manley discusses the impact:

More at:

Meteoroids hit the Moon all the time. Literally. NASA has been observing the impact flashes since 2005. Recently, other groups in Europe have joined the hunt. Flashes are typically observed once every 2 or 3 hours of observing time. Impactors range in size from softballs to boulders, liberating energies equal to tons of TNT when they strike.

The rare thing about this strike is that it was photographed during a full Moon, when lunar glare usually overwhelms the glow of any fireball. During the eclipse, Earth’s shadow turned lunar day into almost-night for an hour, allowing the fireball to be seen.

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Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto