Another week flew by like water, and for Sunday lunch we traditionally serve another overview of the most interesting events of the past seven days. Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander, which will also be the first payload to be launched by ULA’s new Vulcan rocket, became the main topic in Kosmotydeník this time. Will Peregrine be the first CLPS lander on the moon? And what load will it carry? In other topics, we will focus on the current state of preparation of the Dream Chaser cargo shuttle, or the visit of the double planet by the Lucy probe. I wish you good reading and a nice Sunday.
The premiere of the lunar lander and the Vulcan rocket is about to happen!
The first example of the Vulcan rocket will launch the Peregrine module
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Vulcan, ULA’s new launch vehicle is to replace both the Atlas and Delta rockets. The rocket will be powered by BE-4 methane engines. The first launch is currently planned for Christmas Day, December 24, 2023. And although it is a premiere launch, the cost will not be insignificant. Currently, Astrobotic’s lunar module has arrived in Florida, which is also the actual start of flights within the CLPS program. This program is intended to enable NASA to purchase services from commercial companies, such as transporting cargo to the surface of the Moon. After all, NASA has a nice line of experiments aboard Astrobotic’s first example of the Peregrine lander. The module was shipped from the Pittsburgh manufacturing facility last Friday. The people at Astrobotic are obviously excited and looking forward to the launch. “It’s incredibly exciting. We’ve talked about this mission as an organization for 16 years, and now it’s finally here.” said Dan Hendrickson, Astrobotic’s vice president of business development.
The Peregrine Lunar Lander upon completion
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However, it is more complicated with CLPS primacy. Peregrine has a chance to launch a few days earlier than Intuitive Machines’ lander. Their lander will fly on Falcon 9 in January, but because it will be sent on a direct path to the moon, it may still land before Peregrine – which will fly on a more energy-efficient path. And that’s completely on purpose. Since this is their first mission, they don’t want to rush anything. The lander will be launched by a Vulcan rocket and after receiving the signal Astrobotic will perform a complete system check. The flight from Earth to landing on the moon will take more than a month. The module first flies into a highly elliptical orbit around the Earth. When everything is ready, it will enter a circular orbit around the moon at a height of 100 kilometers above the surface. It will then remain on such an orbit until the moment when the conditions at the landing site are ideal, which means the morning of the lunar day. “We want to land at the landing site early in the morning. And so we’ll wait until the light conditions seem ideal,” Hendrickson said. Nothing prevents the module from staying in orbit for a longer period of time. It uses hypergolic propellants. “We don’t have any problems with the propellants running out over time, so it gives us quite a bit of flexibility,” he said. “We’ll be fine as far as waiting for any light conditions.” The ideal scenario therefore assumes that 30-39 days should pass from launch to landing on the moon. If the launch is successful on December 24, Peregrine could land at the end of January 2024.
Peregrine lander flyby
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Let’s add that the module probably won’t survive the lunar night – it’s not equipped to do so. The company plans for the future that the landers will be able to handle the difficult conditions of the lunar night, but the first missions will offer only less than two weeks of operation on the surface. For now, after all, this is mainly a test of the entire concept. This first landing may not be successful. Peregrine is supposed to land on Gulf of Viscositywhich is the region located at 35.25 degrees north latitude and 40.99 degrees west longitude of the Moon.
The lander will carry 21 items of cargo, which is made up of commercial components as well as NASA-supplied instruments. Astrobotic received one of the first orders under the CLPS program back in 2019, which was worth $79.5 million at the time. The agency called it Task Order 2 – AB (TO2-AB). Peregrine was originally intended to carry up to 14 NASA payloads. However, five of them have been moved to future CLPS missions, according to NASA’s April 2023 update. corner reflectorRadiation senzor LETSwhich will gather information about the lunar radiation environment and relies on flight-proven hardware that flew on the Orion spacecraft’s inaugural flight in 2014. Furthermore a near-infrared volatile spectrometer systemt (NIRVSS), which will measure surface and subsurface concentrations of hydrogen, carbon dioxide and methane – all sources that could potentially be mined from the Moon – while also mapping the surface temperature and its changes at the landing site. Another device is Neutron Spectrometer System (NSS) and also Ion trap mass spectrometer (PITMS), which will characterize the lunar exosphere during descent and landing, but also during a lunar day, to understand the release and movement of volatiles. This device has an interesting history. It was originally developed for the Rosetta-Philae mission by the European Space Agency and has now been adapted for lunar use with the help of NASA. Peregrine-1 will also transport the Iris rover built by Carnegie Mellon University to the surface.
Another payload on board will be a demonstration technology called Terrain Relative Navigation (TRN), which was developed under a $10 million contract with NASA’s Tipping Point and in collaboration with JPL and Moog. “We’re in an environment where GPS isn’t available, so this sensory guidance system is something we appreciated early on in our lunar program that we needed to develop in-house. It’s an extremely important capability that we need to have for our landers,” Hendrickson said. “It’s an opportunity to test hardware as well as algorithms that will visually identify key features to help the probe understand where it is in space in relation to the Moon.”
Cosmic overview of the week:
The image below shows the current state of production of the Dream Chaser cargo shuttle from Sierra Space, which is scheduled to launch to the International Space Station in 2024. The carrier will be a Vulcan rocket (its second launch) and the first mission should last 82 days. The return body itself will be extended by the Shotting star cargo module, which will not be able to return. At the same time, this module will be able to connect to the ISS and will crawl through it into the shuttle. According to the SNC, it should also be capable of independent missions and one day possibly even transporting cargo to the Moon.
Current production status of the Dream Chaser cargo shuttle
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On Tuesday, October 31, 2023, at 01:11 CET, the Chinese manned ship ShenZhou 16 successfully landed, bringing three members of the Tiangong station crew. Their mission lasted 153 days and 22 hours.
The ShenZhou ship descends on a parachute
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Overview from Kosmonautix:
In this section, you will find an overview of all the articles that we have published on the Kosmonautix website in the past week. We publish at least two articles about cosmonautics a day, so let’s remind ourselves of the topics we have already covered. We started the week by watching the launch of the Falcon 9 rocket with other Starlinks that joined the global constellation. Right after that, we focused quite extensively on the current events surrounding the preparation of the second integrated flight of the Super Heavy Starship assembly. However, the overview of the current events surrounding Starship also addressed other topics. We also looked at how the newly prepared Europa Clipper mission will be protected against the extremely radiation-intensive environment around Jupiter. This week, only the fourth spacewalk in history by two women took place. It took place from the International Space Station and was attended by Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara. At the European Kourou Cosmodrome, everything revolves around the preparations for the first launch of the new European Ariane 6 rocket. Space Challenges were also published this month, which once again summarized the most interesting events of the past month from the point of view of cosmonautics. The popular series devoted to the X-Planes project also continued. The joint US-French SWOT satellite sends scientists valuable data related to the water element on Earth, including global information on sea level heights. We have shown you a visualization of this data. We have also prepared an astrobiological article for you, which was devoted to the very interesting exoplanet K2-18 b. During the next live and Czech-commented launch of the Falcon 9 rocket with Starlink satellites, the record for the number of reuses of one stage was broken. On this mission, the stage flew for the eighteenth time. And astrophysics lovers, who have been enjoying Saturday mornings on the Kosmonautix server for several months, also got a chance. The topic was the first observation of Cepheids. And on Saturday night, another installment of the Space Tech series came out, which looked at the WFC3 wide-field camera from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Picture of the week:
Photos of another object visited for the first time have been added to the family pictures of the solar system. The American space probe Lucy flew by the Dinkinesh asteroid on November 1, the first opportunity to test the probe’s capabilities. The relatively high mutual speed (4.5 km/s) placed great demands on the platform, which during the flyby ensured the correct direction of the cameras and instruments to the object under study. The mutual distance was roughly 430 kilometers. The biggest surprise was finding out that the planet is not the only one, but that it is a double planet. The Lucy probe continues towards its main goal, which is the study of several Jupiter Trojans.
Planet Dinkinesh captured by the Lucy probe
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Video of the week:
The Chinese company i-Space has published a video of its test machine designed to gain experience with motorized rocket landings. The first stage flew out and then landed powered. This is a similar demonstrator used by SpaceX and named Grasshopper. This one should gain experience to build a Hyperbola-2 rocket with a reusable first stage. The stage was also equipped with grid rudders, but they were ineffective at these speeds and therefore were folded down during the entire flight.
Sources of information:
https://space.skyrocket.de/
https://en.wikipedia.org/
Image Sources:
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2023-11-05 11:01:18
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