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In a mix of interesting circumstances and happenstance, two private firms and Japan’s space agency are all poised to land on the Moon within the back half of January 2024.
The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines are all exercising distinct launch and landing options to achieve the lunar surface. But all three have announced timelines that may see them land on the Moon inside days of one another, if every part stays heading in the right direction at this point.
While avoiding further timeline slipping is much from a certainty, Earth’s satellite could see its busiest month ever when it comes to recent spacecraft arriving.
Because it happens, the last lander scheduled to launch could possibly be the primary to the touch down on the Moon. Intuitive Machine’s Nova-C lander is targeting liftoff between Jan. 12-16 and is about to land on the Moon’s South Pole (80.297°S, 1.2613°E) on either Jan. 19 or 21.
A spokesperson for Intuitive Machines said the landing opportunity for each days is within the afternoon in EST.
Trent Martin, the Vice President of Lunar Access at Intuitive Machines, told Spaceflight Now in an Oct. 27 interview that they’ve instantaneous launch opportunities every day during their January window. He said because their lander must be fueled on the launch pad, crews will perform a wet dress rehearsal several days ahead of launch.
“We’ll do a full fuel of our vehicle to be sure that now we have the timeline down because we do a late fueling on the pad. We fuel with liquid oxygen and liquid methane, and we wish to fuel as late as possible,” Martin said. “SpaceX has been very accommodating they usually’re providing us a service that offers us liquid oxygen, liquid methane. They’ll refill until the very last minute in order that we’re as full as possible, in order that now we have the very best probability of success at landing on the Moon.”
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This mission together with the Peregrine lander will mark the primary two fulfilled contracts under NASA’s Industrial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.
Onboard the Nova-C lander for NASA are the next:
- Navigation Doppler Lidar (NDL)
- Lunar Node-1 (LN-1)
- Lunar Retroreflector Assembly (LRA)
- Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume Surface Studies (SCALPSS)
- Radio wave Observations at Lunar Surface of photo Electron Sheath (ROLSES)
This mission also contains a CubeSat payload called EagleCam from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, which shall be launched from the lander when it’s about 30 meters above the surface.
“The camera itself is definitely multiple cameras, 4 cameras. In order this 1U CubeSat tumbles, it’s taking video imagery because it falls to the surface. And so from that, inside a day or two, we’ll have video of us landing on the Moon,” Martin said. “So, I’m super enthusiastic about that one because that shall be the primary time that anyone’s ever actually recorded themselves landing on one other planetary body.”
Intuitive Machines announced on Monday that its Nova-C lander for the IM-1 mission arrived on the Cape in Florida ahead of its launch next month.
Double landing possibility
JAXA’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) is spending the longest in space, having launched back on Sept. 7, but depending on the timing of the IM-1 landing, it could touch down on the identical day from a Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) standpoint.
In keeping with a statement from JAXA on Tuesday, SLIM is about to start its descent to the lunar surface at 12:00 a.m. JST on Jan. 20 (1500 UTC on Jan. 19) and touchdown at 12:20 a.m. JST (1520 UTC).
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The subsequent big milestone in SLIM’s journey is coming up on Dec. 25 when it enters into lunar orbit. JAXA stated that the 200kg dry mass (700kg wet mass) lander will achieve a “full” degree of success whether it is capable of land inside a 100-square-meter goal using its “vision-based navigation” system.
The goal landing site for SLIM is the SHIOLI crater near the “Sea of Nectar,” situated at 13.3°S, 25.2°E. The lander is designed to operate until lunar sunset occurs.
Its payloads include the Multi-Band Spectral Camera (MBC), which can examine the composition of surrounding rocks, and a small probe called the Lunar Tour Vehicle 2 (LEV-2), “which separates from the principal spacecraft just before landing and performs photo imaging.”
“To satisfy the limited size of the vehicle to be [mounted] on SLIM, we needed to downsize LEV-2. Nevertheless, downsizing causes a decrease in running performance,” said Hirano Daichi, certainly one of the researchers involved with LEV-2, in a press release. “To be able to take care of this problem, we designed the vehicle to be a spherical object with expandable wheels and a stabilizer using the remodeling technologies for toys.”
“Furthermore, we adopted the robust and secure design technology for kids’s toys, which reduced the variety of components utilized in the vehicle as much as possible and increased its reliability,” he added.
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Peregrine takes flight soon
The subsequent lander to launch and the last one scheduled to land in January is Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander. Liftoff aboard a United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket is about for 1:49 a.m. EST (0649 UTC) on Dec. 24. If needed, there are backup opportunities at 1:53 a.m. EST (0653 UTC) on Dec. 25 and a pair of:08 a.m. EST (0708 UTC) on Dec. 26.
The mission will launch the lander on a translunar injection.
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“We shall be near Earth, but on a trajectory that can kind of intersect with the Moon’s orbit. It’s at that time, and that is inside about an hour or so of launch, we’re going to separate from the launch vehicle and our lander and Astrobotic’s mission begins,” said John Thornton, Astrobotic CEO, during a media teleconference on Nov. 29.
In keeping with a Nov. 14 presentation by Dr. Joel Kearns, NASA Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration, the landing window for the Peregrine Mission-1 landing is at 3:30 a.m. EST (0830 am UTC) on Jan. 25.
Once they land, Thornton said Peregrine will operate for about 10 days at which point the Sun will set on that a part of the Moon, after which he said it is going to likely turn into to cold to operate.
“In time, we’re developing capability to survive that night, but on these first missions, we’re really focused on the hard enough problem, which is landing on the Moon in the primary place,” he said.
As with the IM-1 mission, PM-1 can even host a slate of NASA payloads as a participant within the CLPS program. In the course of the teleconference, Thornton said he mostly only thinks concerning the other firms attempting to land on the Moon when asked about it by press, adding that many players are needed for the lunar economy to be a successful enterprise.
“We’d like this industry to succeed. We’d like the CLPS program to succeed. That’s the primary priority for us,” Thornton said. “After all, there’s some level of competition with our competitors, but at the top of the day, it’s really secondary. An important is the industry and most significant is landing success.”
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