The phrase “silence is golden” is even more important for radio astronomers. The sheer amount of radio output created by humans can drown out any interesting signal from the heavens that they might wish to study. Those signals are also partially blocked by Earth’s atmosphere, adding more complexity to the challenge.
The obvious solution to the atmosphere problem is to launch space based observatories, and that has been done in the past. However, in near Earth orbit the radio waves emitted from radio stations all around the world can still blast any radio receiver with an unwanted deluge of signals. So scientists have come up with a novel idea to get the silence they so crave: park a probe on the far side of the moon.
An artist's concept of Canadarm3's large arm on the Lunar Gateway. (Credits: Canadian Space Agency, NASA)
When you need a robotic arm in space, you call in the experts. Over the past several decades, the Canadian Space Agency has expertly provided robotic arms for the Space Shuttle and International Space Station. And now it will build the next-generation of robotic systems for going to the Moon, called Canadarm3.
NASA’s Artemis Program is planning to land astronauts on the Moon’s south pole. To prepare for this, NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI) is creating the Lunar South Pole Atlas (LSPA). As part of that Atlas, NASA is mapping the topography of the region, including the mountains.
Meet VIPER, NASA’s new lunar rover, equipped with a drill to probe the Moon’s surface and look for water ice. VIPER, or Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, will carry a one-meter drill and will use it to map out water resources at the Moon’s south pole. It’s scheduled to be on the lunar surface by December 2023, one year later than it’s initial date.
Screen Capture from SLS Hydrogen tank test. Image Credit: NASA
By the time a rocket actually launches, it’s components have been through a ton of rigorous testing. That’s certainly true of NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) which is the most powerful rocket ever built. That’s right, something is finally going to surpass the Saturn V, the rocket that took Apollo astronauts to the Moon.
Artist's illustration of the new spacesuit NASA is designing for Artemis astronauts. It's called the xEMU,, or Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit. Image Credit: NASA
NASA is developing new spacesuits for their Artemis program. The new suits will give the astronauts greater mobility, will be safer, and will be designed from the ground up to fit women.
An artist's illustration of lunar lander that can carry humans to the surface of the Moon. Image Credit: NASA
NASA has chosen 11 American companies to help them build the next lunar landers that will carry humans to the surface of the Moon. The 11 companies will conduct studies and work on prototype landers in the coming years. It’s all part of NASA’s Artemis mission, and the mission’s 2024 date with the surface of the Moon.
Special Guests:
This week, we are SUPER excited to welcome author Andy Weir (The Martian), back to the show to chat with us about his new book, Artemis. Viewers who have seen Andy’s first appearance on our show on January 9, 2015, will remember just how awesome he is as a guest – and why we can’t wait to catch up with him this week.
Andy began his career as a software engineer but wrote science fiction stories in his spare time. His novel, THE MARTIAN, was a blockbuster success which has allowed him to pursue his writing full-time. He is a lifelong space nerd and a devoted hobbyist of subjects such as relativistic physics, orbital mechanics, and the history of manned spaceflight.
Announcements:
The WSH Crew is doing another book giveaway – this time in conjunction with Dean Regas‘ joining us again on November 29th in a pre-recorded interview. Dean’s new book, “100 Things to See in the Night Sky” hits the stores on November 28th, but we are giving our viewers a chance to win one of two copies of Dean’s book! (Note: telescope not included!)
To enter for a chance to win, send an email to [email protected] with the Subject ‘100 Things’. Be sure to include your name and email address in the body of your message so that we can contact our winners afterward.
To be eligible, your entry must be postmarked no later than 11:59:59 PM EST on Monday, November 27, 2017. Two winners will be selected at random from all eligible entries live on the show, by Fraser, on Wednesday, November 29th. No purchase is necessary. You do not need to be watching the show live to win. Contest is open to all viewers worldwide. Limit: One entry per person – duplicate entries will be ignored.
If you would like to join the Weekly Space Hangout Crew, visit their site here and sign up. They’re a great team who can help you join our online discussions!
We record the Weekly Space Hangout every Wednesday at 5:00 pm Pacific / 8:00 pm Eastern. You can watch us live on Universe Today, or the Weekly Space Hangout YouTube page – Please subscribe!
This image of the star formation region NGC 6334 is one of the first scientific images from the ArTeMiS instrument on APEX. The picture shows the glow detected at a wavelength of 0.35 millimetres coming from dense clouds of interstellar dust grains. The new observations from ArTeMiS show up in orange and have been superimposed on a view of the same region taken in near-infrared light by ESO’s VISTA telescope at Paranal. Credit: ArTeMiS team/Ph. André, M. Hennemann, V. Revéret et al./ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA Acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit
And the “Cat’s Paw” was waiting to strike! In this exceptionally detailed image of star-forming region NGC 6334 we can get a sense of just how important new instrumentation can be. In this case it’s a new camera called ArTeMiS and it has just been installed on a 12-meter diameter telescope located high in the Atacama Desert. The Atacama Pathfinder Experiment – or APEX for short – operates at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths, providing us with observations ranging between radio wavelengths and infrared light. These images give astronomers powerful new data to help them further understand the construction of the Universe.
Exactly what is ArTeMiS? The camera provides wide field views at submillimeter wavelengths. When added to APEX’s arsenal, it will substantially increase the amount of details a particular object has to offer. It has a detector array similar to a CCD camera – a new technology which will enable it to create wide-field maps of target areas with a greater amount of speed and a larger amount of pixels.
Like almost all new telescope projects, both personal and professional, the APEX team met up with “first light” problems. Although the ArTeMiS Camera was ready to go, the weather simply wouldn’t cooperate. According to the news release, very heavy snow on the Chajnantor Plateau had almost buried the building in which the scope operations are housed! However, the team was determined. Using a makeshift road and dodging snow drifts, the team and the staff at the ALMA Operations Support Facility and APEX somehow managed to get the camera to its location safely. Undaunted, they installed the ArTeMiS camera, worked the cryostat into position and locked the instrumentation down in its final position.
However, digging their way out of the snow wasn’t all the team had to contend with. To get ArTeMis on-line, they then had to wait for very dry weather since submillimeter wavelengths of light are highly absorbed by atmospheric moisture. Do good things come to those who wait? You bet. When the “magic moment” arrived, the APEX team was ready and the initial test observations were a resounding success. ArTeMiS quickly became the focus tool for a variety of scientific projects and commissioned observations. One of these projects was to image star-forming region NGC 6334 – the Cat’s Paw Nebula – in the southern constellation of Scorpius. Thanks to the new technology, the ArTeMiS image shows a superior amount of detail over earlier photographic observations taken with APEX.
What’s next for ArTeMiS? Now that the camera has been tested, it will be returned to Saclay in France to have even more detectors installed. According to the researchers: ” The whole team is already very excited by the results from these initial observations, which are a wonderful reward for many years of hard work and could not have been achieved without the help and support of the APEX staff.”
The view from above of the ARTEMIS orbits as they make the transition from the kidney-shaped Lissajous orbits on either side of the moon to orbiting around the moon. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
It took one and a half years, over 90 orbit maneuvers, and – wonderfully – many gravitational boosts and only the barest bit of fuel to move two spacecraft from their orbit around Earth to their new home around the Moon.
Along their travels, the spacecraft have been through orbits never before attempted and made lovely curlicue leaps from one orbit to the next. This summer, the two ARTEMIS spacecraft — which began their lives as part of the five-craft THEMIS mission studying Earth’s aurora – will begin to orbit the moon instead. THEMIS is an acronym for the Time History of Events and Macroscale Interaction during Substorms spacecraft.
Even with NASA’s decades of orbital mechanics experience, this journey was no easy feat. The trip required several maneuvers never before attempted, including several months when each craft moved in a kidney-shaped path on each side of the moon around, well, nothing but a gravitational point in space marked by no physical planet or object.
“No one has ever tried this orbit before, it’s an Earth-Moon libration orbit,” says David Folta a flight dynamics engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “It’s a very unstable orbit that requires daily attention and constant adjustments.”
The journey for ARTEMIS — short for Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of the Moon’s Interaction with the Sun — began in 2009, after THEMIS had completed some two years of science data collection on the magnetic environment around Earth, the aurora, and how these are affected by the sun.
The spacecraft are solar-powered, but orbits for the two outermost THEMIS spacecraft had slipped over time and were going to be subjected to regular eight-hour periods of darkness. These spacecraft could withstand up to three hours without sunlight, but this much darkness would soon leave the batteries completely discharged.
Teams at UC-Berkeley and Goddard handled the day-to-day control of the THEMIS spacecraft. The Principal Investigator for the mission, Vassilis Angelopoulos of UCLA talked to the teams about moving the two spacecraft to the moon to study the magnetic environment there. But quick models of a conventional boost technique showed that all the remaining fuel would be used simply in transit. There wouldn’t be enough left over for the fuel-hungry process of adjusting direction and speed to actually begin circling the moon.
So Angelopoulos pulled together a new, more complex multi-year-long orbit change plan. The move would rely predominantly on gravity assists from the moon and Earth to move the spacecraft into place. He brought his idea to two engineers who had been involved with launching THEMIS in the first place: David Folta and another flight engineer at Goddard, Mark Woodard. The pair used their own models to validate this new design, and the plan was on.
First step: increase the size of the orbits. The original Earth-centric orbits barely reached half way to the moon. By using small amounts of fuel to adjust speed and direction at precise moments in the orbit, the spacecraft were catapulted farther and farther out into space. It took five such adjustments for ARTEMIS P1 and 27 for ARTEMIS P2.
Next step: make the jump from Earth orbit to the tricky kidney-shaped “Lissajous” orbit, circling what’s known as a Lagrangian point on each side of the moon. These points are the places where the forces of gravity between Earth and the moon balance each other – the point does not actually offer a physical entity to circle around. ARTEMIS P1 made the leap – in a beautiful arc under and around the moon — to the Lagrangian point on the far side of the moon on August 25, 2010. The second craft made the jump to the near side of the moon on October 22. This transfer required a complex series of maneuvers including lunar gravity assists, Earth gravity assists, and deep space maneuvers. The combination of these maneuvers was needed not only to arrive at the correct spot near the moon but also at the correct time and speed.
Using a series of Earth and moon gravity assists – and only the barest bit of fuel – the ARTEMIS spacecraft entered into orbit around the moon’s Lagrangian points in the winter of 2010. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Scientific Visualization Studio
History was made. Numerous satellites orbit Lagrangian points between Earth and the Sun but, while this orbit had been studied extensively, it had never before been attempted.
Not only was this an engineering feat in and of itself, but the spacecraft were now in an ideal spot to study magnetism some distance from the moon. In this position, they could spot how the solar wind – made up of ionized gas known as plasma — flows past the Moon and tries to fill in the vacuum on the other side. A task made complicated since the plasma is forced by the magnetic fields to travel along certain paths.
“It’s a veritable zoo of plasma phenomena,” says David Sibeck, the project manager for THEMIS and ARTEMIS at Goddard. “The Moon carves out a cavity in the solar wind, and then we get to watch how that fills in. It’s anything but boring. There’s microphysics and particle physics and wave particle interaction and boundaries and layers. All things we haven’t had a chance to study before in the plasma.”
Life for the flight engineers was anything but boring too. Keeping something in orbit around a spot that has little to mark it except for the balance of gravity is no simple task. The spacecraft required regular corrections to keep it on track and Folta and Woodard watched it daily.
“We would get updated orbit information around 9 a.m. every day,” says Woodard. “We’d run that through our software and get an estimate of what our next maneuver should be. We’d go back and forth with Berkeley and together we’d validate a maneuver until we knew it was going to work and keep us flying for another week.”
The team learned from experience. Slight adjustments often had bigger consequences than expected. They eventually found the optimal places where corrections seemed to require less subsequent fine-tuning. These sweet spots came whenever the spacecraft crossed an imaginary line joining Earth and the Moon, though nothing in theories had predicted such a thing.
The daily vigilance turned out to be crucial. On October 14, the P1 spacecraft orbit and attitude changed unexpectedly. The first thought was that the tracking system might have failed, but that didn’t seem to be the problem. However, the ARTEMIS team also noticed that the whole craft had begun to spin about 0.001 revolutions per minute faster. One of the instruments that measures electric fields also stopped working. Best guess? The sphere at the end of that instrument’s 82-foot boom had broken off – perhaps because it was struck by something. That sphere was just three ounces on a spacecraft that weighed nearly 190 pounds — but it adjusted ARTEMIS P1’s speed enough that had they caught the anomaly even a few days later they would have had to waste a prohibitive amount of fuel to get back on course.
An artist's concept of the ARTEMIS spacecraft in orbit around the Moon. Credit: NASA
As it is, ARTEMIS will make it to the moon with even more fuel than originally estimated. There will be enough fuel for orbit corrections for seven to 10 years and then enough left over to bring the two craft down to the moon.
“We are thrilled with the work of the mission planners,” says Sibeck. “They are going to get us much closer to the moon than we could have hoped. That’s crucial for providing high quality data about the moon’s interior, its surface composition, and whether there are pockets of magnetism there.”
On January 9, 2011, ARTEMIS P1 jumped over the moon and joined ARTEMIS P2 on the side of the Moon closest to Earth. Now the last steps are about to begin.
On June 27, P1 will spiral in toward the moon and enter lunar orbit. On July 17, P2 will follow. P2 will travel in the same direction with the Moon, or in prograde; P1 will travel in the opposite direction, in retrograde.
“We’ve been monitoring ARTEMIS every day and developing maneuvers every week. It’s been a challenge, but we’ve uncovered some great things,” says Folta, who will now focus his attention on other NASA flights such as the MAVEN mission to Mars that is scheduled to launch in 2013. “But soon we’ll be done with this final maneuvering and, well, we’ll be back to just being ARTEMIS consultants.”
See additional ARTEMIS imagery and video at this link.
