by This year, during the early hours of Christmas Eve, before gift-wrapping begins and the scent of gingerbread lights up the air, a spaceship is ready to launch to the moon.
It’s called the Peregrine Lunar Lander, named after the fastest-flying bird in the world. Land. If all goes according to plan, the robotic bird will approach space and fly toward the moon’s gravitational tides, then meticulously lower its orbit until finally landing in a region of ancient lunar lava flows known as the Bay of Stickiness, or Sinus Viscositatis.
This mission will go down in the history books for several reasons, one of which is the fact that it will be the first to launch under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, created as a way for the agency to deliver payloads to Moon without having to build all the spaceships needed to get those payloads there. In this case, the company Astrobiotic is behind the Peregrine lander and NASA is paying to keep some things on board.
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As for the rocket, there is another scoop to discuss. Peregrine to take off on first United Launch Alliance flight Vulcan Centaur Rocket. The successor to the company’s Atlas V and Delta IV vehicles, vulcan centaur It is, among other things, built to transport a considerable amount of stuff into space.
And during a briefing on November 29, representatives from Astrobiotic, United Launch Alliance and, of course, POTmet to discuss what some of Peregrine’s payloads will be and to explain how everything is expected to happen the day before Christmas.
What is heading to the moon?
There are five in total NASA-sponsored payloads heading to the lunar surface during the mission, and the first is known as the “pilgrim ion trap mass spectrometer” or PITMS.
PITMS will investigate the lunar exosphere, which is a thin gaseous envelope around the Moon, taking advantage of mass spectrometry. Mass spectrometry simply refers to the technique scientists use to measure the mass-to-charge ratio of ions, which are charged particles like hydrogen. atoms that have a positive protonbut no negative electron to balance the proton.
“The scientific results from PITMS will aim to improve our knowledge about the abundance and behavior of volatiles on the Moon and how they respond to perturbations such as rocket emissions,” said Ryan Watkins, program scientist at the Office of Integration and NASA Exploration Science Strategy.
Peregrine will also bring a neutron spectrometer system, or NSS, Watkins explained, which will measure the amount of neutrons near the lunar surface, as well as their associated energies. By inference, NSS will help scientists determine how much hydrogen is present in the environment, as well as soil hydration levels.
The Lunar Retroreflector Array, or LRA, launching on Peregrine in December is a device consisting of eight “retroreflectors,” which Watkins likens to small mirrors on a small aluminum support structure: “The LRA will enable a laser range of precision to help determine the distance from any orbiting or landing spacecraft to the LRA that will be on the lander. Therefore, the LRA is a passive optical instrument and will function as a permanent location marker on the Moon during the coming decades.”
The final two instruments NASA will send with the mission include the Near-Infrared Volatile Spectrometer System, or NIRVSS, and the Linear Energy Transfer Spectrometer, or LETS.
“NIRVSS is a sensor suite that includes a near-infrared spectrometer, a thermal radiometer, and a high-resolution seven-color imager,” Watkins said. “These sensors will make observations of the lunar surface to determine the surface composition, fine scale and morphology and thermal environment.”
In other words, NIRVSS will help the team understand how the aforementioned volatiles can diffuse across the lunar surface (including volatiles created by the lander itself) and reveal how surface temperatures affect the substances.
LETS, on the other hand, will shine on the lunar surface, when the lander is still cruising in the moon’s orbit. It is a radiation monitor that can measure the environment to help scientists know what solar particle events might be occurring mid-flight. This is particularly important because if humans are going to remain in lunar orbit for extended periods as NASA imagines, or even on the lunar surface, it will be key to know what protection they will need to use to avoid excessive radiation exposure.
Together, these instruments will dissect features near the landing site known as “Gruithuisen Domes” that interest scientists because they represent volcanic flows on the Moon, or “Mare volcanism.”
“Characterizing the emplacement history of these Gruithuisen Domes in relation to episodes of Mare volcanism is a really important component to understanding the entire history of the region,” Watkins said.
But beyond NASA’s payloads, there are 15 more treats being sent to the moon. And while many of them are super scientific, like the German Aerospace Center’s M-42 radiation detector, many are fun souvenirs that remind us of the humanity behind human space exploration.
The Japanese Lunar Dream capsule, courtesy of the Astroscale company, is a time capsule that will go on board with messages from more than 80,000 children from all over the world. America’s Elysium Space is sending the remains of people’s loved ones to create lunar memorials. And Seychelles scientists send a bitcoin.
“We are going to land seven nations on the surface of the moon, six of which have not landed software on the surface of the moon, including the United Kingdom, Mexico, Germany, Hungary, Japan and the Seychelles,” John Thornton. , said the CEO of Astrobiotic. “We actually made our first commercial sale of payload for lunar delivery, and I think it might have been one of the first in the world, back in 2014. And ever since then, we’ve been collecting payload customers and building the manifest for this mission.”
“If you’re a lunar scientist, you may have to wait your entire career for the opportunity to fly an instrument on a planetary mission,” he said. “CLPS and this partnership with NASA provide the opportunity for our nation’s scientists to regularly touch the surface of the moon, multiple times during their careers, and conduct a campaign of testing and results.”
As for how exactly Peregrine will get to the moon, here’s what the team says will happen.
Get there
Liftoff is currently scheduled for around 1:50 a.m. ET on December 24, the team says, with rain dates falling over the next two days. If the launch occurs during this window, the lander is expected to land on the lunar surface on January 25 of next year.
“You’ve seen China and, more recently, India successfully land on the moon in the last decade,” said Chris Culbert, CLPS project manager at NASA. Johnson Space Center in Houston, he said. “But today, no private company has managed to successfully land on the moon. Landing on the moon is a daunting technical challenge, particularly because robotic vehicle engines, navigation systems, radios and many other social systems have to work together to enable a soft landing.”
After launch, the launch vehicle and spacecraft (still connected) will enter directly into a maneuver called translunar injection, meaning they will still be close to Earth but on a trajectory that essentially intersects the moon’s orbit. About an hour after launch, the spacecraft will officially separate from its launch vehicle and the team will begin communicating with the lander and performing small maneuvers to make sure the path looks good.
“This will actually be the first time we’ve started our engines as a system,” Thornton said. “Of course, we’ve fired them individually here on Earth, but this will be the first time we’ve done it all together as a spacecraft, because you simply can’t test that here on Earth.” , potentially up to three, of those trajectory correction maneuvers, and that depends on the accuracy of the initial launch.”
Then, about 12 days later, the spacecraft will reach lunar orbit.
“We’ll go to a medium orbit and stay in that orbit for a while, while we wait for local lighting conditions to align,” Thornton said. “Most of the time between launch and landing is waiting for the local lighting to be correct. Basically, we are trying to land at a specific place on the moon, at a specific time in the morning.”
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— Watch ULA assemble the new Vulcan Centaur rocket for its first launch on December 24 (photos)
— Astrobotic presents the Peregrine lunar lander that will fly to the moon this year (photos)
Once all is well, the spacecraft will descend to the surface at the designated landing site. The lander will operate for about 10 days before Sun sets, leading to the same lunar night that India saw Chandrayaan-3 The lander fades away.
“It will go from a relatively warm temperature of 100 to 120 degrees Celsius to a cold temperature of liquid nitrogen,” Thornton said. “It’ll stay that way for two weeks, and normally with temperatures in that range, there’s a lot of things that break.”
“Yes, it’s Christmas Eve,” he said, “but it will make a great Christmas present.”
