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Moon Mission
Landing a spacecraft on the moon has long been a series of hits and misses. Last year, a spacecraft built by Intuitive Machines through a NASA-sponsored program put the US back on the moon for the first time since the end of the Apollo program, but the lander ended up tipping on its side and operated briefly on the surface. Now another US company Firefly Aerospace on Sunday added its lunar lander to the win list, becoming the first private entity to pull off a fully successful moon landing. Both US businesses are part of NASA's effort to support commercial deliveries to the moon ahead of astronaut missions later this decade. The moon is littered with wreckage from failed landings over the years. A rundown on the moon's winners and losers: First victories The Soviet Union's Luna 9 successfully touches down on the moon in 1966, after its predecessors crash or miss the moon altogether. The U.S. follows four months later with Surveyor 1. Both countries achieve more robotic landings
A private company launched another lunar lander Wednesday, aiming to get closer to the moon's south pole this time with a drone that will hop into a jet-black crater that never sees the sun. Intuitive Machines' lander, named Athena, caught a lift with SpaceX from NASA's Kennedy Space Center. It's taking a fast track to the moon with a landing on March 6 while hoping to avoid the fate of its predecessor, which tipped over at touchdown. Never before have so many spacecraft angled for the moon's surface all at once. Last month, US and Japanese companies shared a rocket and separately launched landers toward Earth's sidekick. Texas-based Firefly Aerospace should get there first this weekend after a big head start. The two US landers are carrying tens of millions of dollars' worth of experiments for NASA as it prepares to return astronauts to the moon. It's an amazing time. There's so much energy, NASA's science mission chief Nicky Fox told The Associated Press a few hours ahead of th
NASA announced more delays Thursday in sending astronauts back to the moon more than 50 years after Apollo. Administrator Bill Nelson said the next mission in the Artemis program -- flying four astronauts around the moon and back is now targeted for April 2026. It had been on the books for September 2025, after slipping from this year. The investigation into heat shield damage from the capsule's initial test flight two years ago took time, officials said, and other spacecraft improvements are still needed. This bumps the third Artemis mission a moon landing by two other astronauts to at least 2027. NASA had been aiming for 2026. NASA's Artemis program, a follow-up to the Apollo moonshots of the late 1960s and early 1970s, has completed only one mission. An empty Orion capsule circled the moon in 2022 after blasting off on NASA's new Space Launch System rocket. Although the launch and lunar laps went well, the capsule returned with an excessively charred and eroded bottom heat .
Indian lunar mission Chandrayaan-3 landed within a buried impact crater, which is around 160 km in size and approximately 4.4 km deep, and likely to be older than the South Pole Atkin (SPA) basin, according to Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). This is revealed based on analysis of images obtained by navigation cameras on Chandrayaan-3 Pragyan rover and Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter's optical high resolution camera, according to scientists from Physical Research Laboratory and ISRO, who published their study in peer-reviewed journal 'Icarus'. The Chandrayaan-3 mission with the Vikram lander and the Pragyan rover landed in the high latitude highland region near the south pole of the Moon, an ISRO statement noted. The landing site is located approximately 350 km from the SPA basin rim, an ancient and the largest impact basin in the Solar System. This landing site has undergone the complex emplacement sequence of SPA basin ejecta followed by the nearby and distant impact basins and ..
Responding to the Union cabinet's nod to India's fourth lunar mission, the Indian scientific community said that the country is not far from sending a 'cosmonaut' to the moon.Speaking to ANI, the former director of the Space Applications Centre, Ahmedabad Center, Tapan Misra, said, "We should be able to land a lander there and collect stones and lunar soil and bring it back to the orbiter, and with this orbiter, we should come back and land safely and retribute. This is the very first step towards sending an Indian cosmonaut to the Moon. We will not be far from sending a cosmonaut to the moon."He further said, "The Govt of India has approved 3 programmes and one of them is Chandrayaan 4. We are happy that Chandrayaan 3 landed there...we demonstrated 2 critical technologies, we can send something to the moon and bring it back, and we can fire a rocket after landing and waiting for 14 days, it's a major development."Describing the Chandrayaan 4 mission, RC Kapoor, Astronomer & ...
Seismic activity in the Moon's soil could be due to impact from meteorites in the past or local heat-related effects, according to ISRO's preliminary analysis of data received from Chandrayaan-3's quake-detecting instrument. However, detailed studies are needed to get more insights from the data, they said. Their research paper, published in the journal Icarus, is a summary of observations made on 190 hours of data recorded by the Instrument for Lunar Seismic Activity (ILSA). ILSA is one of the five major major scientific instruments, all of them carried by Chandrayaan-3's Vikram lander and Pragyaan rover together. Chandrayaan-3 made a soft-landing on the Moon's south pole on August 23, 2023. The quake-detecting ILSA was operated continuously until September 2, 2023, after which it was switched off and was packed back up, before the lander was relocated to a new point roughly 50 centimetres away from the initial one, the researchers from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO
China is preparing to launch a lunar probe on Friday that would land on the far side of the moon and return with samples that could provide insights into geological and other differences between the less-explored region and the better-known near side. The unprecedented mission would be the latest advance in the increasingly sophisticated and ambitious space exploration program that is now competing with the US, still the leader in space. China already landed a rover on the moon's far side in 2019, the first country to do so. Free from exposure to Earth and other interference, the moon's somewhat mysterious far side is ideal for radio astronomy and other scientific work. Because the far side never faces Earth, a relay satellite is a needed to maintain communications. The Chang'e lunar exploration probe is named after the Chinese mythical moon goddess. The probe is being carried on a Long March-5 YB rocket set for liftoff on Friday evening from the Wenchang launch centre on the south