¶China’s 2030 Moon landing takes shape. The Chinese space program shared details on a plan to land taikonauts on the Moon by 2030. The mission profile resembles the later “J-type” Apollo missions with a 26-ton crew module (Apollo’s CSM maxed out at 30.3 tons) and a similarly-massed lunar descent and exploration module (the Apollo LEM extended version was smaller, at 16.4 tons). Like Apollo 15-17, the Chinese lander will include a rover—with a ~10 km range it is well shy of the Apollo LRV’s record of 36 km in a single drive (on that drive it roved to 7.6 km away from Apollo 17’s landing site). Unlike the Apollo missions, but closer to NASA’s recent Artemis plans, the mission will launch on two Long March 10 super heavy lift rockets—LM-10 is currently under development with a 2027 maiden launch target and will have a 70-ton to LEO / 27-ton TLI payload capability. Once launched, the crew module and lander will rendezvous in lunar orbit, transfer the crew to the lander and descend to the surface for a few days (J-type missions had a surface duration of 3 days). China has significant development ahead to meet its “before 2030” goal: they’ll need to finalize the next-gen crewed spacecraft (demonstrated at high altitudes in 2020, but likely now updating to a larger mass version), develop/launch/human-rate the LM-10, design new 8-hour rated lunar EVA suits (Apollo’s A7LB suits were rated for 7 hours, with 30 minutes of backup life support), and develop a completely new lander and rover. That said, the country does have significant robotic lander/rover experience under its belt, lots of crewed spaceflight experience, and some of the above engineering work has likely been underway (but unpublicized) for a while. CMSA also published a call for science payload proposals focused on lunar geology, physics, astronomical observation, life sciences/human factors, lunar surface drilling, and ISRU. |
|
 | A 1967 flight path diagram for the first Apollo lunar landing. China’s plan, in many ways, follows a similar mission profile to the later Apollo 15-17 landings. We recommend clicking on the image and exploring the details. |
|
The Orbital Index is made possible through generous sponsorship by:
  |
|
¶China’s upcoming planetary defense mission. More details emerged a couple of months ago about China's upcoming 2025 planetary defense mission. The mission’s target is 2019 VL5, a ~30-meter-wide object on a periodically Earth-crossing orbit. The mission consists of an impactor and an observation spacecraft, to be launched on a single Long March 3B. The observation craft will arrive first, to study 2019 VL5 with high-resolution cameras, radar, and LIDAR, before observing the 6.4 km/s impact of its partner with its ranged sensor suite, plus dust and particle sensors. The intent is for the impact to alter 2019 VL5's velocity by 5 cm/s. As with DART's impact on Dimorphos, the total change in velocity will likely depend on how much ejecta is thrown off by the impact, among other factors—for DART, the velocity change (2.7 mm/s) was larger than expected due to the amount of ejecta produced (paper). 2019 VL5 is much smaller than Dimorphos (12-50 m vs 177 m), and will hopefully provide a useful scientific counterpoint. Also observing the impact will be many telescopes on Earth and in space, including China's upcoming Xuntian space telescope which will co-orbit with the Tiangong space station. China is also currently working on an asteroid detection and early warning system, as well as an asteroid sample return mission (also NET 2025) which recently underwent parachute tests. |
|
¶Papers (about impacts). - Venus may have experienced higher-speed, higher-energy impacts during its early years than Earth did (paper), leading to a hotter planetary core, more volcanism, and a resulting resurfacing of the planet’s exterior which would explain why it is so geologically young.
- Using high-resolution EO data, researchers re-assessed the scale of known recent terrestrial impact craters created over the last million years (paper) and believe that these events may have been significantly more violent than previously thought. If true, this changes the statistics—and not in our favor—on the scale and potential risk of periodic planetary impact events.
- Speaking of which, the Chicxulub impact, which helped wipe out the dinosaurs, created a worldwide tsunami 30,000x more powerful than the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami (paper). Ranging in height from 1 meter to hundreds of meters, coastlines worldwide were hit by waves moving at 720 km/h, over half the speed of sound. “At ten minutes post-impact, the wave that had formed in the Gulf of Mexico was 1.5 km tall.” ☄️🌊🦖🦕💀
- Billions of years earlier, research suggests that Mars had a similar event— an impact crater 110 kilometers in diameter has been dated to about 3.4 billion years ago, in a region that was likely below sea level at the time. This event would have led to a Martian megatsunami a quarter kilometer tall (paper) and could explain boulder-strewn regions of previously unknown origin. 🌊👽
|
|
¶News in brief. Hubble detected 37 boulders ejected from Dimorphos’ gravity well by DART ● Astranis’s first GEO sat has malfunctioning solar array drive assemblies, limiting its power generation and reducing capacity ● Impulse Space (helmed by Tom Mueller) raised a $45 million Series A round for its orbital transfer vehicles and first commercial Mars mission aspirations ● Swarm is halting sales of its IoT modems as it appears to be pivoting towards SpaceX’s Starlink direct-to-cell plans announced with T-Mobile and slated for initial service testing later this year ● Amazon’s Project Kuiper announced a new satellite processing facility to be built at Kennedy Space Center (its two first test satellites are currently manifested on the first—but currently delayed—Vulcan flight) ● Italian Leaf Space raised €20M a Series B for their ground station network ● Chandrayaan-3 successfully performed its fourth and fifth (and final) orbit-raising maneuvers ● The U.S. Senate threatened to cancel the Mars Sample Return mission if NASA can’t stay within a $5.3B total budget—if NASA chooses cancelation, much of the $300 million budgeted for MSR in FY24 would be reallocated to Artemis ● Last week, Rocket Lab successfully parachuted the booster from its “Baby Come Back” mission, which placed NASA’s four Starling 6U cubesats along with ones from Space Flight Laboratory and Spire, to a soft landing in the Pacific and fished it out successfully—it remains to be seen if the company will ever attempt another mid-air catch. |
|
 | “Baby Come Back” coming back. |
|
<Support Us> Orbital Index is supported by readers like you. If you appreciate our writing, please consider a small monthly donation. |
|
¶Etc. - 60 years ago today, a Thor-Delta rocket took NASA’s Syncom 2 satellite to geosynchronous orbit as the world’s first GEO communications satellite. The satellite successfully relayed voice, teletype, facsimile, and data between Lakehurst, New Jersey and the USNS Kingsport off the coast of Africa.
- ESA will attempt what they claim is a first “assisted reentry” of a satellite not designed for controlled reentry in the next week or two. The agency will use a small amount of remaining fuel on Aeolus, a wind measurement satellite, to coax its reentry path and timing to occur over open ocean, mitigating any small chance of non-demisable debris hitting land.
- NASA has shelved the Janus twin asteroid surveyor mission which would have sent two 36 kg smallsats to two separate binary asteroid systems—the mission, fully developed and assembled, was scheduled to launch with Psyche last year but that mission’s delays caused the launch window for the asteroids to pass and NASA has decided it isn’t worth pursuing for the moment.
- Andrew Parsonson takes a deep look at ESA’s Boost! program and the European launch startups that it has funded. Although the program’s first tranche of funding was small, totaling just under €40M, it attracted 5x that in outside investment, bringing the total impact to a much more significant €240M into the future of ESA’s commercial launch capabilities.
- Linux4Space, an open-source, Yocto-based Linux distribution suitable for space applications.
- Can a massive space telescope really be “cheap”? An alternative approach to a traditional refractive lens in space telescopes could be thin diffractive lenses, historically unused due to their poor image quality. The proposed Nautilus Space Observatory would be built around an advanced 8.5-meter, ½ cm thin, etched diffractive lens, but would only weigh 500 kg, allowing the observatory to host a massive 35 individual telescopes capable of 10x the collective light gathering of JWST’s puny 6.5-meter mirror-based refractive lens. The team has attained near-perfect image quality (paper) and built a 24 cm prototype-scale lens. Meanwhile, the next flagship refractive space observatory is unlikely to fly before 2045 and is penciled to cost $11+ billion.
|
|
The Daocheng Solar Radio Telescope in southwest China recently started observing the Sun. The radio telescope is composed of 313 six-meter-wide parabolic antennas with a 100 m high calibration tower at its center. In addition to observing the Sun, the massive installation will also study pulsars, fast radio bursts, and asteroids. |  |
|
|
