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When a rocket makes its maiden liftoff attempt Monday, it will carry nothing less than the first lunar lander launched from the United States since NASA’s last Apollo mission in 1972.
The stakes are high.
The success of the rocket, developed by the Lockheed Martin and Boeing joint venture called United Launch Alliance, is crucial to that company’s future and its desire to undermine SpaceX’s dominance in the commercial launch industry.
The lunar lander, built by small Pittsburgh-based company Astrobotic Technology, could become the first commercially developed spacecraft to make a soft landing on the moon.
NASA has sponsored the development of a small fleet of privately developed lunar landers, with the goal of using them to give the United States a presence on the Moon amid a new international space race that began to heat up in 2023.
And while NASA’s program does not depend on a single lander making a successful landing, this first robotic mission could set the tone and pace for the space agency’s renewed efforts to explore the moon robotically before attempting to return astronauts to the lunar surface later this year. decade.
Astrobotic’s robotic lunar lander, Peregrine, is scheduled to launch aboard the ULA Vulcan Centaur rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 2:18 a.m. ET on Monday.
Recent forecasts showed about an 85% chance of clear weather for takeoff. Backup launch opportunities will also be available over the next few days.
The road ahead
Space industry experts, including Astrobotic CEO John Thornton, have compared the odds of successfully landing any spacecraft on the moon to flipping a coin.
“This really is like a 50-50 shots on goal approach, where it’s really more about the industry being successful, not a specific mission,” Thornton told CNN in a Jan. 2 phone interview.
That said, Thornton added, “we’ve put everything we can into this mission.”
Landing on the moon is a complex task.
If the launch takes off as scheduled on Monday, Vulcan Centaur will boost the lunar lander en route to the Moon, placing it in what is called a translunar injection orbit. This involves a precisely timed engine firing that will push the Peregrine lander onto a path in Earth’s orbit that will allow it to synchronize with the Moon about 384,400 kilometers (238,855 miles) away.
From there, about an hour after launch, the Peregrine lander will separate from the rocket and forge its own path, using onboard thrusters to set itself on a precise course toward the moon.
After reaching the moon, Peregrine, named after the falcon that is the world’s fastest flying bird, will spend some time in lunar orbit before attempting to land on February 23.
The target landing site is a patch of surface near the Moon that extends a few kilometers wide, Thornton said, but the lander will test technology that could provide a more precise landing zone on future missions.
The final moments before the spacecraft reaches the lunar surface will be the most crucial. Two failed moon landing attempts last year, one by a Japan-based company and another by Russia, foreshadowed the difficulty of maintaining precise control over a vehicle as it swooped in for a landing, and both efforts crashed into the moon. .
A new space race
This mission will mark the United States’ first lunar landing attempt (robotic or manned) in five decades.
And the mission comes amid a renewed international push to explore the moon.
While both Japanese company Ispace and Russian space agency Roscosmos failed in their lunar landing attempts last year, India’s Chandrayaan-3 made a safe landing in August. With that success, India became the fourth nation (after China, the former Soviet Union and the United States) to put a vehicle on the Moon.
So far in the 21st century, only India and China have achieved soft landings.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, could complete its first lunar landing this month, using its “Moon Sniper” spacecraft that has already been en route for months.
But NASA hopes to catch up quickly using the commercially developed robotic landers it has sponsored. In addition to Peregrine, the space agency has contracts with Texas-based companies Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines. The latter could launch its lunar lander in mid-February.
Those contracts, all part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Cargo Services program, are intended to dramatically reduce the cost of building a lunar lander, especially compared to the multibillion-dollar effort it took to create the Apollo-era lander. .
Peregrine and the other CLPS landers are designed to be much cheaper, and NASA agreed to pay its partner companies only a fixed-price contract.
(Astrobotic’s contract for this mission, for example, totaled $108 million, more than NASA initially promised. But agency officials said the contract was renegotiated amid the pandemic.)
“This is one of many relatively cheap missions that will be sent to the surface of the Moon to try to break the paradigm and reach a new price,” Thornton told CNN.
Other robotic lunar missions for CLPS could take off later in 2024, including a golf cart-sized vehicle aboard a different lunar lander for Astrobotic called Griffin.
This rover will examine the lunar south pole for water ice, a search that is a key feature of the 21street-Space race of the 19th century. Water ice could be used to support colonies of future astronauts or become rocket fuel for missions deeper into space.
A cornerstone of NASA’s lunar efforts will be paving the way for humans to return to the surface under the Artemis program. NASA aims to send astronauts on a mission to fly near the Moon in late 2024 before returning humans to the surface later this decade.
The pilgrim’s science
For this mission, Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander is headed to a lunar region called Sinus Viscositatis, also known as the “Bay of Stickiness.”
The name is a tribute to the nearby Gruithuisen Domes, a unique lunar feature that scientists suspect formed from sticky magma.
The Peregrine lander will carry 10 scientific payloads, five of which are NASA-sponsored experiments. They include two instruments that will monitor the radiation environment, “helping us better prepare to send crewed missions back to the Moon,” said Paul Niles, NASA project scientist for the Commercial Lunar Cargo Services program, during a press conference. press on Thursday.
Other instruments sent by the space agency will analyze the composition of the lunar soil, looking for water and hydroxyl molecules. NASA will also study the moon’s super-thin atmosphere.
Thornton said the Peregrine rover will operate for about 10 days on the moon’s surface until the region plunges into lunar night, a period when it will be too cold for the instruments to function.
Human remains and memories
While NASA is the mission’s primary financial backer, the space agency is just one of the customers involved.
Also aboard the Peregrine will be scientific experiments and commercial cargo from other nations, including Germany, Mexico and the United Kingdom.
Astrobotic partnered with the German shipping company DHL, for example, to take small souvenirs into space, including “photographs and novels of student work and a piece of Mount Everest.”
Notably, Peregrine will also transport human remains on behalf of two commercial space burial companies, Elysium Space and Celestis, a move that drew opposition from the Navajo Nation, the largest Native American group in the United States.
The group maintains that allowing the remains to land on the lunar surface would be an affront to many indigenous cultures, which consider the moon sacred. Celestis offered to bring ashes to the Moon for prices starting at about $13,000, according to his website.
Thornton, Astrobotic’s CEO, told CNN that the landing attempt will be a surreal moment: the culmination of 16 years of work by the company’s employees.
The hardest hurdle to overcome during Astrobotic’s journey, he noted, was convincing people that a Pittsburgh-based company of fewer than 300 people was capable of creating a lunar lander.
“We had a lot of people doubt us and laugh at us along the way,” he said.
But Thornton is hopeful that success will lead to a thriving lunar economy, helping NASA achieve its goals while inspiring the commercial sector to pursue possibilities on the Moon.
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