NASA plans to return humans to the moon in 2025 with the Artemis III mission. Before that, the space agency plans to conduct an important preliminary mission in November 2024, the Artemis II mission, which will fly a crew of astronauts into lunar orbit for the first time since the 1970s. But, as NASA said in a recent blog post, a “significant first step” toward these goals is the IM-1 mission with the lunar lander NOVA-C scheduled in the coming weeks. It’s the launch. NASA plans to land several scientific experiments near Malapart A, a crater in the moon’s southern polar region. These studies could help NASA prepare for astronaut operations in the region in 2025.
However, unlike the Artemis mission, NOVA-C is not a large-scale NASA project. Instead, a truck-sized spacecraft designed to carry small payloads to the moon’s surface will be built and operated by a small Texas-based company, Intuitive Machines.
If NOVA-C successfully lands near the moon’s south pole, it will be the first time in the United States. soft landing This was the first commercial lunar landing that had been conducted since the 1970s without a crash or failure. So why is a small spacecraft built by a relatively small company a key part of his NASA Big Moon program?
“We’re seeing a pattern of NASA trying to move towards more commercial solutions and services rather than doing everything on their own,” he says. wendy whitman cobb, a space policy expert and lecturer at the U.S. Air Force School of Advanced Aerospace Studies. This is similar to NASA’s commercial crew and cargo program, which contracts with SpaceX to transport astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station in Dragon space capsules.
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Now, NASA is turning to commercial companies to prepare the way for humans to return to the moon. Intuitive Machines was one of the first companies to receive this award. contractIt was delivered in 2019 under the NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Service (CLPS) program for $77 million. NASA designed the CLPS to provide funding to private companies interested in building small, relatively inexpensive spacecraft to fly experiments and rovers to the moon, making it easily available for purchase by NASA. . Rather than developing and operating it ourselves, we need space on a spacecraft.
For NOVA-C, five NASA payloads will be carried along with devices from universities such as Louisiana State University and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. “NASA’s payloads will be used to demonstrate communications, navigation, and precision landing techniques, and to collect scientific data on interactions between rocket plumes and the lunar surface, as well as interactions between space weather and the lunar surface that will impact radio astronomy. ” the space agency wrote. blog post About the mission.
“We still don’t know much about the moon,” Whitman Cobb added. The moon’s gravity changes depending on where there is a lot of metallic material. “Finding out where those locations are, how the moon dust gets kicked up when you’re about to land or take off, all of that is very important.”
That’s why NASA is transmitting the payload to be carried on board NOVA-C. But the reason NOVA-C will land some 300 kilometers from the South Pole has more to do with how the entire world currently thinks about the moon.
NOVA-C was originally scheduled to land on Oceanus Procellarum, one of the large, dark regions of the moon known as Mare, or “Ocean.” But in May, NASA and Intuitive Machines announced a change in plans and a new target near the South Pole.
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“The decision to move from the original landing site, Oceanus Procellum, was based on the need to learn more about the topography and communications near the lunar south pole,” NASA said in a statement. blog post at that time. “Landing near Malapart A will also help mission planners understand how to communicate from low on the lunar horizon and send data back to Earth.”
Research and resources explain why NASA wants to land near the moon’s south pole with Artemis, and why India’s recently successful Chandrayaan 3 mission and Russia’s failed Luna 25 mission both targeted the moon’s south pole. According to NASA, there are two. richard carlsonLunar geologist who retired from the Carnegie Institution for Science in 2021.
“Both the Arctic and Antarctic regions are permanently shadowed by craters where water has been detected from orbit,” he says. “The real question is, is that water just a micron of water coated on the surface of a few grains, or is it a significant amount of water?Water, of course, is everything from drinking water to hydrogen, which is used as rocket fuel. It is useful for a variety of purposes, from oxidation to conversion to oxygen.”
Another motivation for going to Antarctica, Carlson said, is that the geology is very different from where the Apollo missions landed. “They all landed on a fairly small Earth-facing part of the flat mare moon, which is geologically a fairly unusual part of the moon,” he says. “If you think about studying the Earth in this way, the Apollo moon mission basically would have just landed in, say, North America and that was it.”
Carlson said the moon’s south polar region is much more geologically diverse, with tall mountains and ridges as well as rocks dug from the moon’s depths and scattered across the region by impact craters billions of years ago. It is said that it exists. However, of course, this kind of scenery also has a downside for spacecraft flying from Earth.
“When you look at the pictures of the places they chose, [for Artemis III] And I don’t want to land there. I mean, they’re really rough,” he says. “If you land on a rock, the spacecraft will topple over.” Sending a small, unmanned spacecraft like NOVA-C to the moon’s south pole, ahead of the Artemis astronauts, means that a landing there would actually be impossible. It will be a test to see how difficult it is.
After all, as Whitman Cobb points out, landing anywhere on the moon is extremely difficult.before you fail Luna 25 Since the landing on August 21st, two commercial moon landings have failed. Israeli company SpaceIL witnessed the crash of its Beresheet lander in 2019, and in April, Japanese company ispace’s Hakuto-R M1 lander crashed.
“I’ve never seen a commercial company successfully land on the moon,” Whitman Cobb said. “This is really interesting considering the ability of humans to land on the moon in the 1960s and his 1970s. Even with all the technology we have now, this is really, really difficult to do. That’s it.”
