¶A VIPER is heading to the Moon. NASA’s Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover is an ambitious mission to explore the truly frigid (-249 °C) interiors of permanently shadowed craters on the Moon’s south pole. The mission, launching in late 2023, now has a specific destination: the western ridge of the Nobile impact crater, from which it will be able to access multiple ~600 m craters. The comparatively affordable $660 million, solar-powered, golf-cart-sized rover uses batteries, heaters, and headlights to survive forays into these mysterious regions, possibly the coldest in the Solar System, where it will attempt to determine the nature of water on the Moon. Able to drive in any direction and climb 30° slopes with individually articulated wheels, it carries a meter-long drill (which will provide the deepest samples of any robotic mission to date) and three water-seeking spectrometers: neutron for detecting hydrogen up to a meter down, infrared for determining if the hydrogen is in water ice or locked up in minerals, and mass for detecting volatiles and gasses. In late 2023, all eyes will be on Astrobotic’s Griffin CLPS lander (and the Falcon Heavy that launches it) as it delivers this ambitious mission to the Moon. VIPER is designed to last 3 lunar days (3 Earth months), and hopefully will teach us about the origins of planetary water and find abundant ice for future mining (some of which we now think is in small and accessible craters). |
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 | | A simulation of a small lunar impact crater at NASA's Ames Research Center is used to help with testing VIPER's lighting system. |
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| ¶‹Sponsored› Formlogic’s new autonomous factory speeds the supply chain for new space companies using DMG Mori and GROB equipment for rapid precision components. |
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¶A film shoot starts on the ISS. This week Soyuz MS-19 carried cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, film director Klim Shipenko, and actress Yulia Peresild to the ISS to spend 12 days filming “The Challenge”, the first feature-length fictional film shot with professional actors in space (beating Tom Cruise to the punch). The movie follows a young doctor sent to space to perform an emergency zero-g heart surgery on a Russian cosmonaut who can’t return to Earth for treatment. The Challenge follows several previous films with on-orbit footage: the (exceptionally cheesy) short Apogee of Fear, shot completely onboard the ISS in 2008, and the 1984 Russian film Return from Orbit which contained shots aboard the Salyut 7 station. Filming on the ISS will include all three Russian cosmonauts in addition to Yulia Peresild with footage shot on the station ending up at around 35-45 minutes of screen time in the final feature-length film. There is also a (Russian) reality show about the filming of the movie. |
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¶Gambling is risky business. Joey Roulette dug into Blue Origin’s lawsuit against NASA and found that NASA believes Blue was gambling by submitting a high bid in the hopes that NASA would just accept it, given that this strategy worked earlier in the HLS procurement process. Instead, NASA just chose a less expensive offer. Blue "made an assumption about the Agency’s HLS budget, built its proposal with this figure in mind, and [...] bet that if NASA could not afford Blue Origin’s initially-proposed price, the Agency would select Blue Origin for award and engage in post-selection negotiations to allow Blue Origin to lower its price. [...] Realizing now that it gambled and lost, Blue Origin seeks to use GAO’s procurement oversight function to improperly compel NASA to suffer the consequences of Blue Origin’s ill-conceived choices," wrote four NASA attorneys. On the other side, Blue Origin’s core argument is that SpaceX and NASA are risking astronaut safety by forgoing flight readiness reviews ahead of Starship’s uncrewed refueling launches, and that had they known of this “flexible” safety review structure, Blue could have proposed a less expensive option to the agency. Meanwhile, a former Blue Origin employee (fired two years ago due to multiple US export control issues) has written an essay supported by 20 anonymous current and former employees criticizing the company’s culture and accusing management of sexism, safety issues (now being reviewed by the FAA), and more, saying that they would not feel safe flying on a Blue vehicle. Blue Origin has had a reported 20% employee turnover this year and their current CEO, Bob Smith, has an abysmal 19% approval rating on GlassDoor. Comparing this to other industry players, Relativity Space (Ellis) has a 98% approval rating, SpaceX (Musk) is 92%, Rocket Lab (Beck) is 78%, ULA (Bruno) is 77%, and even Boeing (Calhoun) has 71%. As always, we feel for the hard-working employees at Blue, many of whom do not agree with the litigious direction of the company, have conducted multiple successful New Shepard launches this year, and are hard at work on New Glenn, BE-4, and other projects. |
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 | BepiColumbo snapped this photo as it flew within 199 km of Mercury. At 56 million kilometers from the Sun, the spacecraft is now experiencing 110° C temperatures. |
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¶Etc.- Ars Technica got access to internal notes sent from Blue Origin executives to CEO Bob Smith comparing the company to SpaceX.
- Much of the software powering VIPER is open source.
- It is very hard to see into permanently shadowed craters from orbit because they’re, well, shadowed. But researchers are finding ways to use reflected light and AI to do it. They used “more than 70,000 LRO calibration images taken on the dark side of the Moon as well as information about camera temperature and the spacecraft's trajectory to distinguish which structures in the image are artifacts and which are real. This way, the researchers can achieve a resolution of about 1-2 meters per pixel, which is five to ten times higher than the resolution of all previously available images.”
- Floating upside down in a levitating band of liquid.
- Researchers used Starlink satellite signals like GPS without any SpaceX involvement. Other constellations, like OneWeb, are intentionally adding positioning signals to their satellites.
- Masten Space has completed their FAST Landing Pad study (mentioned back in Issue 62) in which a retropropulsively-descending lunar lander would spray aluminum particles into its engine exhaust in order to sinter the regolith under it into a just-in-time landing pad. A normal (not Starship) sized lander would “take 10 seconds to release 186 kilograms of alumina at up to 30 meters above the lunar surface, creating a 6-meter diameter landing pad. The pad would then require 2.5 seconds to cool before the vehicle touches down for a safe landing.” Landing pads are critical to avoid kicking the Moon’s microscopic, razor-sharp dust into vehicles, astronauts, habitats, or even all the way into orbit.
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