The Moon is Still Shrinking, Explaining Why it Still Has Landslides

Artemis mission landing locations near the South Pole of the Moon. Blue boxes indicate selected landing spots, while small red marks are locations of scarps caused by moonquakes. Credit: NASA/ LRO/ LROC/ASU/ Smithsonian Institution
Artemis mission landing locations near the South Pole of the Moon. Blue boxes indicate selected landing spots, while small red marks are locations of scarps caused by moonquakes. Credit: NASA/ LRO/ LROC/ASU/ Smithsonian Institution

Although our Moon formed 4.5 billion years ago, it’s still evolving. The interior continues to cool and its orbit is slowly changing. As a result, the Moon has lost 150 feet of its circumference. That shrinkage contributes to near-constant moonquakes, and those trigger landslides and other surface changes. The Moon is currently uninhabited, but all that activity threatens future Artemis landing sites and missions at the South Pole.

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Japan’s Moon Lander Is Lying On Its Side After Hitting Its Target

Image of SLIM lander on moon
An image sent back by a mini-probe shows Japan's SLIM lander on its side on the lunar surface. (JAXA / Takara Tomy / Sony Group / Doshisha Univ.)

Now we know why Japan’s lunar lander wasn’t able to recharge its batteries after touching down on the moon last week: The spacecraft appears to have tumbled onto its side, with its solar cells facing away from the sun.

The good news is that the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, achieved its primary mission of setting down within 100 meters (330 feet) of its target point — and that the mission’s two mini-probes, which were ejected during SLIM’s descent, are working as intended.

Scores of images were taken before and after landing. One of the pictures. captured by a camera on the ball-shaped LEV-2 mini-probe, shows the lander sitting at an odd angle with its thrusters facing upward and its solar cells facing westward.

To conserve battery power, mission managers at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency shut down SLIM after the probes transmitted the imagery they collected. But there’s still a chance that the sun’s shifting rays could provide enough power to allow for further operations in the week ahead.

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China Reveals How it’s Planning to Search for Water Ice at the Moon’s South Pole

A render of China's planned lunar base. /CFP

It’s been a big week for Chinese space exploration. First a successful test flight of Zhuque-3 and this week we learned of their plans to explore the Moon’s South Pole. Previous missions have even returned samples to Earth but the Chinese landers have yet to explore more southerly areas of the Moon. Chang’e-6 is due to launch in a few months to collect samples from the far side of the Moon while Chang’e-7 launches in 2026 to the Moon’s south pole. 

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Japan’s Moon Lander Touches Down, But Power Problem Mars Its Mission

Illustration: SLIM lander on the moon
An artist's conception shows Japan's SLIM lander on the moon. (ISAS / JAXA Illustration)

Update for Jan. 21: The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency shut down its moon lander to conserve battery power, but says the lander might be recharged and revived if sunlight hits the solar cells at the right angle.

Japan has become the fifth nation to land a functioning robot on the moon, but the mission could fall short of complete success due to a problem with the lander’s power-generating solar cells.

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Astrobotic Confirms it Won’t be Landing on the Moon

Image from Peregrine mission

It’s a real shame that spaceflight is seen as routine by the world’s media.  In reality, our exploration of the Solar System is still in its infancy, problems are still seen and sadly missions do still fail. We are reminded of this with the recent launch of the Astrobotic Peregrine lander on Sunday. It was launched atop a Vulcan rocket but it soon became apparent that there was a problem with the lander propulsion system. A leak has been discovered and unfortunately there is insufficient fuel to support a soft landing on the Moon. 

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The First Launch of ULA’s Vulcan Goes Smoothly, but there’s a Problem with its Lander Payload

Space missions regularly test multiple new technologies in one go. It’s very common to have a single mission test out three or more new technologies, making them “flight-proven.” Unfortunately, that sometimes means that though one particular new technology, or even many of them, might succeed, one technology could work. At the same time, another one could fail, and that single failure might mean that several other technologies might never even get a chance for their day in the Sun. That seems to have happened with NASA’s first Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) mission. While the Vulcan rocket, developed by the United Launch Alliance (ULA), lifted off successfully, the Peregrine lander, developed by Astrobotic, seems to have run into an error that jeopardizes the rest of the mission.

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We Owe Our Lives to the Moon

Occultation
The occultation of Aldebaran by the Moon in 2016. Credit: Andrew Symes.

Life appeared on Earth through a series of lucky coincidences, and that luck started with our Moon. None of the other planets of the inner solar system have significant moons. Space is lonely around Mercury and Venus. Mars does have two small moons, Phobos and Deimos (Fear and Despair, befitting companions for the God of War), but those are simply captured asteroids, lassoed in the not-too-distant past and doomed to eventually come close enough to their unloving parent to be torn to shreds by gravitational forces.

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Questions Remain on Chinese Rocket That Created an Unusual Double Crater on the Moon

A rocket body impacted the Moon on March 4, 2022, near Hertzsprung crater, creating a double crater roughly 28 meters wide in the longest dimension. Credits: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University

In November, we reported how an impact on the Moon from a Chinese Long March rocket booster created an unusual double crater. For a single booster to create a double crater, some researchers thought there must have been an additional – perhaps secret – payload on the forward end of the booster, opposite from the rocket engines. But that may not necessarily be the case.

Other researchers feel the extra mass wasn’t anything secretive, but possibly an inert structure such as a payload adapter added to the rocket to support the primary mission payload.

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ESA is Stockpiling Simulated Regolith for the Ultimate Lunar Playground.

Testing interplanetary landers means putting them in an environment as close to their destination as possible. Mars landers are often tested in the ‘Mars Yard’ at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in South California and now, ESA are looking to build a similar test bed for the Moon.  They are mining a mateiral in Greenland known as Anorthosite to create the largest lunar test bed yet. 

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A Radio Telescope on the Moon Could Help Us Understand the First 50 Million Years of the Universe

Artist's illustration of a radio telescope inside a crater on the Moon. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

In the coming decade, multiple space agencies and commercial space providers are determined to return astronauts to the Moon and build the necessary infrastructure for long-duration stays there. This includes the Lunar Gateway and the Artemis Base Camp, a collaborative effort led by NASA with support from the ESA, CSA, and JAXA, and the Russo-Chinese International Lunar Research Station (ILRS). In addition, several agencies are exploring the possibility of building a radio observatory on the far side of the Moon, where it could operate entirely free of radio interference.

For years, researchers have advocated for such an observatory because of the research that such an observatory would enable. This includes the ability to study the Universe during the early “Cosmic Dark Ages,” even before the first stars and galaxies formed (about 50 million years after the Big Bang). While there have been many predictions about what kind of science a lunar-based radio observatory could perform, a new research study from Tel Aviv University has predicted (for the first time) what groundbreaking results this observatory could actually obtain.

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