A couple of missions currently planned for tonight (Aug. 18) and Sunday (Aug. 23). The first one is "just" one of those milestone missions for SpaceX - tonight at 11:46 PM EDT, 8:46 local, the 100th mission of the year for SpaceX will launch from Vandenberg's SLC-4E. The mission will be covered at that previous link, NASA Spaceflight or SpaceX where it will be starting around 10 minutes before launch (11:36 EDT).
This is the 12th flight of booster B1097. It will be the 97th Falcon 9 launch of the year and the 100th mission of 2026 overall for SpaceX (the other three were one Falcon Heavy and two Starship test flights). Further, of the 97 Falcon 9 launches, 73 have been Starlink launches.
The second one to be aware of is Sunday at 8:00PM EDT from the People's Republic of China. This a mission to the moon, in particular to Shackleton Crater, very nearly at the South Pole, and a target that gets interest from the US as well as China. This won't be televised live, as is generally the case, so you'll need to check for trustworthy sources of news on such a launch.
It barely needs to be mentioned that China has been emphasizing doing missions to demonstrate to the rest of the world that they're not some primitive country, but can do anything the US can. This mission is part of that overall "space race."
The mission will pack a punch: It contains a lunar orbiter with high-resolution cameras and other sophisticated tools, a lunar lander, a lunar rover, and a mini-hopper of a probe. Although the lander’s mass has not been disclosed publicly, it is several times larger than the NASA-backed probes that have recently landed on the Moon, such as Firefly’s Blue Ghost.
In case it has gotten by you, the reason for the interest in the south polar region on the moon and Shackleton crater is that the craters have a high rim and with the sun pretty much on the horizon all the time, the crater walls create permanent shadows that keep the prospects for finding water ice high. It's also thought that other materials that might be lost from solar heat influx might be more likely to have survived there. Water is critical to manned settlements on the moon not just for "human reasons" like drinking, cooking and all but potentially for use as liquid hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel.
So we’re faced with the prospect of a Chinese rover rolling around this most interesting but heretofore unexplored region of the Moon. Undoubtedly, there will be stunning images and videos. And the rover and hopper, if successful, will provide the best available data on the presence and prevalence of water there.
Scientists created this mosaic of Shackleton crater using images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the ShadowCam instrument on South Korea's Danuri orbiter, revealing the dark interior of Shackleton in new detail. Credit: NASA/KARI/ASU
While NASA administrator Jared Issacman is very aware of the Chinese competition, and NASA has done much since his arrival on the job to get rid of the needless complication that was embedded in Artemis when he took over, the real questions about a mission like this are about how China is going to behave. Are they going to claim the crater and say that the US missions aren't allowed to explore there? Are they going to live by treaties they've already signed about rights like those?
No comments:
Post a Comment