Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander and rover outfitted to its propulsion module.
Image credit: ISRO.
India’s ambitious Moon exploration spacecraft, the Chandrayaan-3, is now en route to its lunar target, following a successful burn this week. The lander is to unleash a rover, which like the lander itself is stuffed with scientific instruments to inspect the lunar surface in the southern lunar hemisphere.
A powerful GSLV MkIII booster roared skyward on July 14 from the Satish Dhawan Space Center, Sriharikota, hurling Chandrayaan-3 into Earth orbit. The craft first carried out a series of orbit-raising maneuvers around the Earth. Those propulsive nudges led to the critical August 1 engine burn that placed the vehicle on a journey toward its celestial destination.
“Next stop: the Moon,” declared an internet posting from the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). All appears on track for the Chandrayaan-3 to swing into lunar orbit on August 5. The probe’s propulsion module will place the lander/rover into a circular polar lunar orbit and then detach.
India’s lander will then head for a touchdown on August 23 within the southern region of the Moon’s near side, soft landing about 13 miles (20 kilometers) west of the Manzinus U crater rim.
Elite group
This is not India’s first Moon landing attempt.
In fact, the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter is currently circuiting the Moon, left there following a failed try to reconnoiter the Moon with a lander and rover back in September 2019. After being cast off from the orbiter, the descent of the lander went well. But communication with the vehicle was lost as the craft augured into the barren lunar scenery.
This time, given a safe and sound touchdown on the Moon, India would join an elite group of successful lunar landing countries: the former Soviet Union (now Russia), the United States, and China.
Following separation of the lander module, the propulsion module is to run a Spectro-polarimetry of Habitable Planet Earth (SHAPE) payload, an experiment that will study the Earth from lunar orbit.
Also, the Chandrayaan-3 propulsion module is to remain in orbit around the Moon, serving as a communications relay satellite.
Once down on the Moon, the lander and rover are designed to operate for one lunar daylight period (about 14 Earth days).
Moon manifest
Both the Chandrayaan-3 lander and rover are loaded with scientific gear.
A tiny Moon rover is to be dispatched from the Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander. Image credit: ISRO.
Moon lander payloads: Chandra’s Surface Thermophysical Experiment (ChaSTE) to measure the thermal conductivity and temperature; Instrument for Lunar Seismic Activity (ILSA) for measuring the seismicity around the landing site; Langmuir Probe (LP) to estimate the plasma density and its variations. A passive Laser Retroreflector Array (LRA) attached to the lander was provided by NASA.
Moon rover payloads: Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) and Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscope (LIBS) to judge the elemental composition of lunar materials in the vicinity of landing site.
Thanks to the NASA-supplied LRA, which NASA Goddard Space Flight Center researcher Daniel Cremons told SpaceRef is mounted atop the lander, specialists will be able to precisely determine the lander’s location on the Moon.
An LRA consists of eight tiny retroreflectors affixed to a hemispherical platform. The total mass of the LRA is just 20 grams, and it requires no power. The device, when struck by laser light, reflects the light back to its source to reveal its location.
LRAs can be used as precision landmarks for guidance and navigation during the lunar day or night. In the future, by placing a few LRAs around a specific site they can guide arriving robotic or human-carrying landers to a safe, pinpoint landing.
NASA-supplied laser retroreflector array is mounted atop India’s lunar lander. The device can help precisely pinpoint the whereabouts of a Moon lander. Image credit: ISRO/NASA.
However, in this case, the ultra-small LRA is too small to capture a laser pulse shot from Earth. Instead, it was fabricated to reflect laser light from a laser altimeter or Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) equipment on a spacecraft orbiting the Moon or landing on the Moon.
Cremons said that the NASA LRA project office is also supplying similar devices for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services missions as well as for the upcoming Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) mission.
Technical competence
Following the Moon landing failure of Chandrayaan-2, the ISRO has a lot riding on Chandrayaan-3’s success, especially given India’s blossoming emergence as a major player in the global space industry.
“If Chandrayaan 3 lander fails, it will be a huge national setback, irrespective of the cause,” Gurbir Singh, the UK-based author of The Indian Space Program: India’s incredible journey from the Third World towards the First, told SpaceRef.
Singh said that India’s now-en route lunar probe has technology objectives that are important for ISRO to demonstrate its technical competence, and critical for its future ambitions to land on Mars and elsewhere.
“All space agencies are familiar with mission failures,” Singh observed. ISRO worked through its first launcher failure in 1979 and slogged through repeated failures with its cryogenic rocket engines in 2010, he said.
“If the Chandrayaan 3 lander fails, ISRO will set up a failure analysis committee, investigate and try again. It will be the pursuit of national pride that another failure will result in an immediate announcement of Chandrayaan-4, probably before the end of 2025,” said Singh.
Broader geopolitics
Singh offered a look at the broader geopolitics of India’s growing space endeavors — not only dispatching robotic explorers to the Moon, but also pressing forward on a home-grown human spaceflight agenda.
For instance, during a June 21 ceremony in Washington, DC India became the 27th country to sign the NASA-promulgated Artemis Accords – a pact that establishes a practical set of principles to steer space exploration cooperation among nations participating in NASA’s back-to-the-Moon Artemis effort.
“India is taking a landmark step in becoming a party to the Artemis Accords, a momentous occasion for our bilateral space cooperation,” said Taranjit Singh Sandhu, India’s ambassador to the United States, while inking the Accords. “We are confident that the Artemis Accords will advance a rule-based approach to outer space.”
Ebb and flow
India recognized the significance for the United States if it signed the Artemis Accords, space analyst Singh said. “As a major space power, India’s signature would probably set the USA’s Artemis Accords to become a de facto global standard. India saw an opportunity and bargained hard.”
Indeed, with the signing of the Accords, NASA agreed to fly an Indian astronaut to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2024.
Singh said that “if an Indian astronaut makes it to the ISS in 2024, a tight timeline, he will probably be one of the four already trained in Russia for India’s Gaganyaan program. With Russia’s space activities in severe decline, India rightly sees many opportunities with NASA to accelerate its space activities, human and otherwise,” he said.
“In the ebb and flow of geopolitics,” Singh added, “the deals signed by the world’s largest democracy and the most powerful one make sense for both.”
Return on investment
However, human spaceflight does not align well with India’s vision of harnessing space technology for national development, Singh observed. In fact, Vikram Sarabhai, India’s founding father of space exploration, explicitly excluded human spaceflight from its original objectives, he added.
“Return on investment in communication, remote sensing, and meteorology spacecraft makes sense,” Singh added, “but no buck spent on its human spaceflight program makes anything close to a bang.”
That said, India announced its human spaceflight endeavor, Gaganyaan, in 2018 with the goal of achieving its first piloted flight in 2023. By now, this is more likely to happen in 2025, Singh said.
As with the heady days of the “Cold War” and the “Space Race,” India’s Gaganyaan initiative is driven by a geopolitical imperative. “India has to have human spaceflight capability and a space station because China has,” Singh commented.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
VICTORIA – The British Columbia government is partnering with a bear welfare group to reduce the number of bears being euthanized in the province.
Nicholas Scapillati, executive director of Grizzly Bear Foundation, said Monday that it comes after months-long discussions with the province on how to protect bears, with the goal to give the animals a “better and second chance at life in the wild.”
Scapillati said what’s exciting about the project is that the government is open to working with outside experts and the public.
“So, they’ll be working through Indigenous knowledge and scientific understanding, bringing in the latest techniques and training expertise from leading experts,” he said in an interview.
B.C. government data show conservation officers destroyed 603 black bears and 23 grizzly bears in 2023, while 154 black bears were killed by officers in the first six months of this year.
Scapillati said the group will publish a report with recommendations by next spring, while an independent oversight committee will be set up to review all bear encounters with conservation officers to provide advice to the government.
Environment Minister George Heyman said in a statement that they are looking for new ways to ensure conservation officers “have the trust of the communities they serve,” and the panel will make recommendations to enhance officer training and improve policies.
Lesley Fox, with the wildlife protection group The Fur-Bearers, said they’ve been calling for such a committee for decades.
“This move demonstrates the government is listening,” said Fox. “I suspect, because of the impending election, their listening skills are potentially a little sharper than they normally are.”
Fox said the partnership came from “a place of long frustration” as provincial conservation officers kill more than 500 black bears every year on average, and the public is “no longer tolerating this kind of approach.”
“I think that the conservation officer service and the B.C. government are aware they need to change, and certainly the public has been asking for it,” said Fox.
Fox said there’s a lot of optimism about the new partnership, but, as with any government, there will likely be a lot of red tape to get through.
“I think speed is going to be important, whether or not the committee has the ability to make change and make change relatively quickly without having to study an issue to death, ” said Fox.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 9, 2024.
The European Space Agency is fast-tracking a new mission called Ramses, which will fly to near-Earth asteroid 99942 Apophis and join the space rock in 2029 when it comes very close to our planet — closer even than the region where geosynchronous satellites sit.
Ramses is short for Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety and, as its name suggests, is the next phase in humanity’s efforts to learn more about near-Earth asteroids (NEOs) and how we might deflect them should one ever be discovered on a collision course with planet Earth.
In order to launch in time to rendezvous with Apophis in February 2029, scientists at the European Space Agency have been given permission to start planning Ramses even before the multinational space agency officially adopts the mission. The sanctioning and appropriation of funding for the Ramses mission will hopefully take place at ESA’s Ministerial Council meeting (involving representatives from each of ESA’s member states) in November of 2025. To arrive at Apophis in February 2029, launch would have to take place in April 2028, the agency says.
This is a big deal because large asteroids don’t come this close to Earth very often. It is thus scientifically precious that, on April 13, 2029, Apophis will pass within 19,794 miles (31,860 kilometers) of Earth. For comparison, geosynchronous orbit is 22,236 miles (35,786 km) above Earth’s surface. Such close fly-bys by asteroids hundreds of meters across (Apophis is about 1,230 feet, or 375 meters, across) only occur on average once every 5,000 to 10,000 years. Miss this one, and we’ve got a long time to wait for the next.
When Apophis was discovered in 2004, it was for a short time the most dangerous asteroid known, being classified as having the potential to impact with Earth possibly in 2029, 2036, or 2068. Should an asteroid of its size strike Earth, it could gouge out a crater several kilometers across and devastate a country with shock waves, flash heating and earth tremors. If it crashed down in the ocean, it could send a towering tsunami to devastate coastlines in multiple countries.
Over time, as our knowledge of Apophis’ orbit became more refined, however, the risk of impact greatly went down. Radar observations of the asteroid in March of 2021 reduced the uncertainty in Apophis’ orbit from hundreds of kilometers to just a few kilometers, finally removing any lingering worries about an impact — at least for the next 100 years. (Beyond 100 years, asteroid orbits can become too unpredictable to plot with any accuracy, but there’s currently no suggestion that an impact will occur after 100 years.) So, Earth is expected to be perfectly safe in 2029 when Apophis comes through. Still, scientists want to see how Apophis responds by coming so close to Earth and entering our planet’s gravitational field.
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“There is still so much we have yet to learn about asteroids but, until now, we have had to travel deep into the solar system to study them and perform experiments ourselves to interact with their surface,” said Patrick Michel, who is the Director of Research at CNRS at Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in Nice, France, in a statement. “Nature is bringing one to us and conducting the experiment itself. All we need to do is watch as Apophis is stretched and squeezed by strong tidal forces that may trigger landslides and other disturbances and reveal new material from beneath the surface.”
The Goldstone radar’s imagery of asteroid 99942 Apophis as it made its closest approach to Earth, in March 2021. (Image credit: NASA/JPL–Caltech/NSF/AUI/GBO)
By arriving at Apophis before the asteroid’s close encounter with Earth, and sticking with it throughout the flyby and beyond, Ramses will be in prime position to conduct before-and-after surveys to see how Apophis reacts to Earth. By looking for disturbances Earth’s gravitational tidal forces trigger on the asteroid’s surface, Ramses will be able to learn about Apophis’ internal structure, density, porosity and composition, all of which are characteristics that we would need to first understand before considering how best to deflect a similar asteroid were one ever found to be on a collision course with our world.
Besides assisting in protecting Earth, learning about Apophis will give scientists further insights into how similar asteroids formed in the early solar system, and, in the process, how planets (including Earth) formed out of the same material.
One way we already know Earth will affect Apophis is by changing its orbit. Currently, Apophis is categorized as an Aten-type asteroid, which is what we call the class of near-Earth objects that have a shorter orbit around the sun than Earth does. Apophis currently gets as far as 0.92 astronomical units (137.6 million km, or 85.5 million miles) from the sun. However, our planet will give Apophis a gravitational nudge that will enlarge its orbit to 1.1 astronomical units (164.6 million km, or 102 million miles), such that its orbital period becomes longer than Earth’s.
It will then be classed as an Apollo-type asteroid.
Ramses won’t be alone in tracking Apophis. NASA has repurposed their OSIRIS-REx mission, which returned a sample from another near-Earth asteroid, 101955 Bennu, in 2023. However, the spacecraft, renamed OSIRIS-APEX (Apophis Explorer), won’t arrive at the asteroid until April 23, 2029, ten days after the close encounter with Earth. OSIRIS-APEX will initially perform a flyby of Apophis at a distance of about 2,500 miles (4,000 km) from the object, then return in June that year to settle into orbit around Apophis for an 18-month mission.
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Furthermore, the European Space Agency still plans on launching its Hera spacecraft in October 2024 to follow-up on the DART mission to the double asteroid Didymos and Dimorphos. DART impacted the latter in a test of kinetic impactor capabilities for potentially changing a hazardous asteroid’s orbit around our planet. Hera will survey the binary asteroid system and observe the crater made by DART’s sacrifice to gain a better understanding of Dimorphos’ structure and composition post-impact, so that we can place the results in context.
The more near-Earth asteroids like Dimorphos and Apophis that we study, the greater that context becomes. Perhaps, one day, the understanding that we have gained from these missions will indeed save our planet.
