Artists impress of Chandrayaan-1 at the moon. Credit: ISRO
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India’s lunar orbiter Chandrayaan-1 lost contact with ISRO’s ground station early on August 29. “We are not able to establish contact with the spacecraft. We are not getting the data, we are not able to send commands,” an ISRO official told the Press Trust of India. “In simple terms, the spacecraft has become dumb. It can’t speak.” The 11 scientific payloads onboard the orbiter had been operating normally, and the spacecraft was sending data during a planned sequence to its ground station when contact was lost. Officials are now analyzing data obtained, hoping to find any indications of what could have happened.
Chandrayaan 1 and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter teamed up on August 20 to perform a bi-static radar experiment, and although no results have been released yet, the data had been successfully returned from the test.
Chandrayaan-1 was launched October 22, 2008, reaching the moon in early November. It has made over 3,000 orbits and its high-resolution cameras relayed over 70,000 digital images of the lunar surface, providing breathtaking views of mountains and craters, including those in the permanently shadowed area of the moon’s polar region.
The Times Now website is reporting that the mission is over, with a quote from Project Director of the Chandrayaan-1 mission, M Annadurai: “The mission is definitely over. We have lost contact with the spacecraft.”
He added “It has done its job technically…100 per cent. Scientifically also, it has done almost 90-95 percent of its job.”
But as of this writing it has only been about 18 hours since contact was lost. We’ll keep you posted on further news on Chandrayaan-1
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The operations team for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission has discovered the spacecraft experienced an anomaly, causing it to use up a substantial amount of its fuel. According to spacecraft data, the LCROSS Internal Reference Unit (IRU) experienced a fault. The IRU is a sensor used by the spacecraft’s attitude control system (ACS) to determine the orientation and trajectory of the spacecraft. The anomaly caused the spacecraft ACS to switch to the Star Tracker Assembly for spacecraft positional information and caused the spacecraft’s thruster to fire excessively, consuming a substantial amount of fuel. Initial estimates, however, indicate that the spacecraft still contains sufficient fuel to complete the full mission.
LCROSS is scheduled to impact the lunar south pole in early October.
The team discovered the problem during a communications pass with the spacecraft on August 22, 2009. Mission operations declared a ‘spacecraft emergency’ and were allocated additional communications time on the Deep Space Network. The team conducted procedures to mitigate the problem and were able to restart the IRU and reduce fuel consumption to a nominal level. Automatic operations procedures also were implemented to minimize the possibility of another IRU anomaly from occurring while the spacecraft is out of contact with the ground.
Thankfully, since the re-start of the IRU, the spacecraft has not experienced any additional problems.
The team continues to actively assess and mitigate the situation and is in contact with the manufacturers of the IRU and star tracker to investigate the root cause of the problems. Mission managers remain optimistic the LCROSS mission can reach its successful conclusion with projected impact at the lunar south pole currently set for 4:30 a.m. PDT on Oct. 9, 2009.
LCROSS launched with the Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter on June 18, 2009. The main LCROSS mission objective is to confirm the presence or absence of water ice in a permanently shadowed region near a lunar pole. Learn more about LCROSS and LRO here.
Cropped image of LRO's image from Apollo 14 landing site and Cone Crater. Tracks from the astronauts can be seen. Click for larger version.
During the second EVA of the Apollo 14 mission on the moon, astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell had a goal of hiking to the rim of nearby Cone Crater in the Fra Maura highlands. But the steep terrain made the going difficult, elevating the astronauts’ heart rates. Additionally, without landmarks it was difficult to judge distances. With the rolling terrain, filled with similar-looking ridges, Shepard and Mitchell couldn’t really tell if they were close to the rim or not.
Realizing time and available oxygen were getting short, Mission Control told the astronauts to head back to the Lunar Module, and although disappointed, the astronauts agreed. But how close did they actually come to the crater? No one knew for sure, until now.
Annotated figure showing the positions of various landmarks surrounding the Apollo 14 landing site. The small white arrows highlight locations where the astronauts’ path can be clearly seen [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].
One of the latest images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows new details of the Apollo 14 landing site. If you look closely at the image above, visible are the tracks from the astronauts steps and their three-wheeled MET cart, and you can clearly follow the trail of the astronauts on their “radial traverse.” Click the image for larger version if you’re having trouble seeing the tracks. Their tracks stop just 30 meters short of the rim, near a dark spot just to the lower left of the crater, which might be Saddle Rock, shown in the image below. Shepard and Mitchell never realized just how close they really were.
This photograph shows Saddle Rock, the largest boulder seen on this mission. Named for its shape, Saddle Rock is 4.5 meters across. Credit: NASA
On the LROC (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera) website, Samuel Lawrence notes that more and different detail is visible on this image as opposed to the initial images released prior to the Apollo 11 anniversary in July because the lighting is different. “This time the Sun is 24 degrees higher above the horizon providing a clearer view with fewer shadows. Albedo contrasts are greater, and more clearly show soil disturbances from landing, astronaut surface operations, and blast off.”
The MET cart from Apollo 14. Credit: NASA
Lawrence notes how the term “radial traverse” does not quite do the crew of Apollo 14 justice.
“Their journey sounds like a stroll in the park, however the reality is quite the contrary. The hike up Cone crater was quite challenging. For the first time, astronauts traveled out of the sight of their lunar module while hiking uphill over 1400 meters with only a poor map, dragging the tool cart (MET), and wearing their bulky spacesuits. It was an amazing feat that the two astronauts made it to the top of Cone ridge and acquired all their samples. They ended up about 30 meters shy of peering into Cone crater itself, surely a disappointment at the time, but absolutely no reflection on the success of the traverse and the scientific results gleaned after the mission.”
Chandrayaan-1, India’s first unmanned mission to the Moon, successfully entered lunar orbit on November 8, 2008
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and India’s Chandrayaan-1 will team up on August 20 to perform a Bi-Static radar experiment to search for water ice in a crater on the Moon’s north pole. Both spacecraft will be in close proximity approximately 200 km above the lunar surface, and both are equipped with radar instruments. The two instruments will look at the same location from different angles, with Chandrayaan-1’s radar transmitting a signal which will be reflected off the interior of Erlanger crater, and then be picked up by LRO. Scientists will compare the signal that bounces straight back to Chandrayaan with the signal that bounces at a slight angle to LRO to garner unique information, particularly about any water ice that may be present inside the crater.
Both spacecraft are equipped with a NASA Miniature Radio Frequency (RF) instrument that functions as a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), known as Mini-SAR on Chandrayaan 1 and Mini-RF on LRO.
“The advantage of a Bi-Static experiment is that you’re looking at echoes that are being reflected off the Moon at an angle other than zero,” said Paul Spudis,principal investigator for Chandrayaan-1’s Mini-SAR,discussing the mission on The Space Show. “Mono-static radar sends a pulse, and you are looking in the same phase or incident angle. But with Bi-Static, you can look at it from a different angle. The significance of that is ice has a very unique bi-static response.”
Erlanger Crater from the Lunar Orbiter. Credit: NASA
Stewart Nozette, Mini-RF principal investigator from the Universities Space Research Association’s Lunar and Planetary Institute, said, “An extraordinary effort was made by the whole NASA team working with ISRO to make this happen”
While this coordination sounds easy, this experiment is extremely challenging because both spacecraft are traveling at about 1.6 km per second and will be looking at an area on the ground about 18 km across. Due to the extreme speeds and the small point of interest, NASA and ISRO need to obtain and share information about the location and pointing of both spacecraft. The Bi-Static experiment requires extensive tracking by ground stations of NASA’s Deep Space Network, the Applied Physics Laboratory, and ISRO.
Even with the considerable planning and coordination between the U.S. and India the two instrument beams may not overlap, or may miss the desired location. Even without hitting the exact location Scientists may still be able to use the Bi-Static information to further knowledge already received from both instruments.
“The international coordination and cooperation between the two agencies for this experiment is an excellent opportunity to demonstrate future cooperation between NASA and ISRO, “says Jason Crusan, program executive for the Mini-RF program, from NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C.
Are we perhaps one step closer to being able to live on the Moon? A new device developed by scientists in Cambridge, UK, can extract oxygen from Moon rock. This technology would be extremely important for creating a lunar bases for long term habitation, or using the Moon as a jump-off point to explore the deeper reaches of space.
The new device, a reactor developed by Derek Fray and his colleagues, was created from a modified electrochemical process the team invented in 2000 to get metals and alloys from metal oxides. The process uses the oxides — also found in Moon rocks — as a cathode, together with an anode made of carbon. To get the current flowing through the system, the electrodes sit in an electrolyte solution of molten calcium chloride (CaCl2), a common salt with a melting point of almost 800 °C.
The current strips the metal oxide pellets of oxygen atoms, which are ionized and dissolve in the molten salt. The negatively charged oxygen ions move through the molten salt to the anode where they give up their extra electrons and react with the carbon to produce carbon dioxide — a process that erodes the anode. Meanwhile, pure metal is formed over at the cathode.
To make the system produce oxygen and not carbon dioxide, Fray had to make an unreactive anode. “Without those anodes, it doesn’t work,” said Fray. He discovered that calcium titanate, which is a poor electrical conductor on its own, became a much better conductor when he added some calcium ruthenate to it. This mixture produced an anode that barely erodes at all — after running the reactor for 150 hours, Fray calculated that the anode would wear away by roughly three centimeters a year.
To heat the reactor on the Moon would need just a small amount of power, Fray said, and the reactor itself can be thermally insulated to lock heat in. The three reactors would need about 4.5 kilowatts of power, which could be supplied by solar panels or even a small nuclear reactor placed on the Moon.
In their tests, Fray and his team used a simulated lunar rock called JSC-1, developed by NASA. Fray anticipates that three reactors, each a meter high, would be enough to generate a ton of oxygen per year on the Moon. Three tons of rock are needed to produce a ton of oxygen, and in tests the team saw almost 100% recovery of oxygen, he says. Fray presented the results last week at the Congress of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry in Glasgow, UK.
This false-color image of Earth was taken from 200 kilometers (124 miles) above the lunar surface was taken by the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, one of two NASA instruments onboard the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. Credit: NASA/JPL/Brown
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It’s a little fuzzy, but considering the camera was meant to capture the surface of the Moon from 200 kilometers (124 miles) away rather than Earth at 360,000 km (224,000 miles), it’s not bad. This image was taken by NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3 – M Cubed), on board the Indian Space Research Organization’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft orbiting the Moon. Australia is visible in the lower center of the image. The image is presented as a false-color composite with oceans a dark blue, clouds white, and vegetation an enhanced green. The image data were acquired on July 22, 2009.
The Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument is a state-of-the-art imaging spectrometer designed to provide the first map of the entire lunar surface at high spatial and spectral resolution. Scientists will use this information to answer questions about the moon’s origin and development and the evolution of terrestrial planets in the early solar system. Future astronauts will use it to locate resources, possibly including water, that can support exploration of the moon and beyond.
Taking an image of Earth, well, that’s just showing off!
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If you haven’t had enough Apollo yet, this is like a firehose of image goodness. Gigapan and NASA Ames have collaborated to make huge, zoomable, panable images from two of the Apollo missions to the Moon. Apollo 16 and 17 are the only missions where the astronauts took panoramic images, so these are the only landing sites available in Gigapan. And if you really want to blow your socks off, look at these images in Google Moon. Click your icon for Google Earth (you DO have it downloaded already, don’t you?? If not go to Google Earth and download it,) choose Moon under the little Saturn-like icon on top, zoom in and find the flags for the Apollo 16 and 17 landing sites. Then look for the “camera” icons and click on one, and then choose the option to “fly” into the images. I’m still gasping from doing this with Apollo 17! Once you recover from flying in, you can then pan around and feel like you are walking alongside Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt on the Moon. It really is amazing!
A new company is looking to sell advertising on the Moon. No, not with giant billboards, but by a new technology called Shadow Shaping that can creates images with robots that carve small ridges in the lunar dust over large areas that capture shadows and shape them to form logos, domains names or memorials.
“Never in the history of advertising has the possibility of penetrating every market on Earth, reaching every person on the planet, and touching them at emotional level only possible with the beauty of the moon on a starlit night, been made available,” says the website for Moon Publicity. “Twelve billion eyeballs looking at your logo in the sky for several days every month for the next several thousand years.”
Bid now for this exclusive ad space, starting at $46,000 (USD).
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Isn’t this going a bit far, proposing to change the face of the Moon? The Moon Publicity people say they are doing this for the benefit of mankind.
“Advancements in space robotics as a result of Shadow Shaping, will aid in the colonization of outer space, helping preserve mankind from the inherent dangers of placing all of our species’ eggs in one basket, planet Earth. Any number of catastrophic events could end human life on Earth: Pandemics, collisions with comets or asteroids, weapons of mass destruction, supercollider accidents, environmental changes, hypernova radiation or the expansion of the Sun.”
“If shadows form a logo during a quarter moon, it will be a small price to pay for saving mankind.”
The website goes on to say that creating images on the Moon provides a commercial incentive for turbo charging space travel technology. “Shadows are only the beginning. These advancements will eventually place robots on other worlds building space stations and planting crops.”
The Laser Ranging Retroreflector experiment on the Moon. Credit: Lunar and Planetary Institute
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The recent images released by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter of the Apollo landing sites are truly remarkable. But there is one instrument on board LRO that must avoid studying some of the the Apollo sites as well as other places where humans have placed spacecraft on the the lunar surface. The Lunar Orbiting Laser Altimeter (LOLA) pulses a single laser beam down to the surface to create a high-resolution global topographic map of the Moon. However, LOLA is turned off when it passes over the Apollo sites because bouncing the laser off any of the retro-reflective mirrors on experiments left by the astronauts might damage the instrument.
Don Mitchell, who owns a software consulting company and is writing a book on the Soviet Exploration of Venus, wrote about this problem on his blog, saying that if LOLA’s beam did strike the retro reflector experiment, “the light bounced back would be 1,000 times the detector damage threshold.” LOLA Engineering model. Credit: Goddard Space Flight Center
The LOLA instrument is based on Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA), flown on Mars Global Surveyor and the Mercury Laser Altimeter (MLA), currently on MESSENGER. LOLA will perform the same type of work as these previous instruments, but with 3-5 times greater vertical accuracy and 14 times more measurements along the spacecraft ground track.
The Laser Ranging Retroreflector experiment was deployed on Apollo 11, 14, and 15. It consists of a series of corner-cube reflectors, which reflects an incoming light beam back in the direction it came from.
Ever since the experiments were deployed, the McDonald Observatory in Texas has beamed a laser at these mirrors and measured the round-trip of the beam. This provides accurate data on the Moon’s orbit, the rate at which the Moon is receding from Earth (currently 3.8 centimeters per year) and variations in the rotation of the Moon. These are the only Apollo experiments that are still returning data. A similar device was also included on the Soviet Union’s Lunakhod spacecraft.
David E. Smith, LOLA principal investigator confirmed that, indeed, LOLA is switched off over the Apollo and Lunakhod sites, to avoid damaging the instrument. He said the Russians have been very helpful in in providing the LOLA team the best known locations for the two Lunokhod landers. Lunokhod-2 has been located precisely and is routinely probed by lasers from Earth. Lunokhod-1 has never been found by laser, and it is not known for certain if its reflector is deployed. Smith said he and co-PI Maria Zuber have visited Moscow to consult with Russian scientists, who have shared their knowledge of the locations of their landers.
As Mitchell wrote, “While conspiracy nuts debate the reality of the Apollo landings, scientists must deal with some practical consequences of what astronauts put on the Moon.”
Scientists in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory. Credit: NASA
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Even though scientists have been able to study Moon rocks up close for almost 40 years, there are still many answers to be gleaned from the lunar samples collected by the Apollo astronauts. “We know even more now and can ask smarter questions as we research these samples,” says Randy Korotev from Washington University in St. Louis. “There are still some answers, we believe, in the Apollo 11 mission.” One possible clue the Moon rocks could provide is a better understanding of Earth’s history and when life actually began on our planet.
Korotev has been mainly interested in studying the impact history of the moon, how the moon’s surface has been affected by meteorite impacts and the nature of the early lunar crust.
“You can look at the moon and know that the moon has been hit a lot by very large meteorites,” he said. “We know this occurred some 3.9 billion years ago. We don’t know, however, the history of large meteorites hitting the Earth — we can’t see those impacts because they would have been erased by Earth’s active geology. We want to see if meteorite bombardment on the moon coincided with what was happening on Earth, and, in turn, with life starting on Earth.”
Recently, Korotev and his colleagues decided to begin taking a closer look at the Apollo samples to learn more about the Moon’s impact history. He says they still have much work to do with his samples, which have been chemically analyzed and are sealed in tubes and securely stored away for now.
Korotev expects the Apollo Moon rocks will provide scientific study for years to come, as our technology and understanding of the Moon improves. “We went to the moon and collected samples before we knew much about the moon,” he said. “We didn’t totally understand the big concept of what the moon was like until early 2000 as a result of missions that orbited the moon collecting mineralogical and compositional data.”
“Bringing samples back from the Moon wasn’t the point of the mission,” added Korotev. “It was really about politics. It took scientists like Bob Walker to bring these samples back — to show the value of them for research.”
Korotev credits Walker, also from Washington University and a handful of other scientists for the fact that there are even moon samples to study.
“Bob convinced them to build a receiving lab for the samples and advised them on the handling and storage of them. We didn’t go to the moon to collect rocks, so we scientists are really lucky that we have this collection.”
See Universe Today’s article on the history of the Lunar Receiving Lab.
Researchers in WUSTL's Laboratory for Space Sciences in Arts & Sciences have a long tradition of being among the first in the world to receive samples from a NASA mission. In this photo taken in 1969, the late Robert M. Walker, Ph.D., the McDonnell Professor of Physics and first director of the university's McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences in Arts & Sciences, displays photos and lunar samples from the Apollo 11 mission that year. Credit: WUSTL
Walker was recruited to serve on the scientific team that advised NASA on the handling and distribution of moon rocks and soil samples from the first Apollo missions. That team distributed Apollo 11 samples to some 150 laboratories worldwide, including Washington University, St. Louis (WUSTL).
Walker also briefed those early astronauts about what to expect on the rocky, dusty moon surface.
In an interview some months after the first moon samples arrived in WUSTL’s space sciences lab, Walker recalled the excitement of that momentous day in 1969: “We felt just like a bunch of kids who were suddenly given a brand new toy store … there was so much to do, we hardly knew where to begin.”
Ghislaine Crozaz, Ph.D., professor of earth and planetary sciences emerita in Arts & Sciences at Washington University and a member of Walker’s space sciences group that was one of those selected to study the first lunar samples, says the event is “as vivid in my mind as if it had happened yesterday.”
Crozaz says that the team studied the cosmic rays and radiation history of the lunar samples mainly using nuclear particle tracks, which were revealed by techniques invented by Walker.
“After we received the samples in early September, we worked like hell until the First Lunar Science Conference in early January 1970 in Houston, where we arrived with our Science paper after having worked ‘incommunicado’ for 4 months.”
In their study of the lunar materials, Walker’s laboratory led the way in deciphering their record of lunar, solar system and galactic evolution. Of special importance was the information they gave on the history of solar radiation and cosmic rays.
Crozaz says the lunar samples provided insights into the history of the solar system that couldn’t be achieved at the time by looking at meteorites found on Earth. The intense heat encountered during their passage through the atmosphere would have erased much of the record of radiation the meteorites carried.
