2025 will be another big year for commercial moon missions

2025 will be another big year for commercial moon missions


As soon as a moonlander on the way to the Moon Instruments from the Kennedy Space Center of NASA, which could examine exactly what is below the surface. It will hardly be the third mission that has set off to the moon in 2025 so far. If 2024 all about 2025 is the year of doubling. Well, unless Trump And shift the focus on Mars under Elon Musk’s direction and throw off the entire timeline. But as it looks, it should be a busy year for the moon.

Last year the start of Astrobotics’ Wanderrine Lander, and marked the first of several missions that are managed by companies that work as part of the CLPS program (Commercial Lunar Payoad Services) of the NASA as part of multimillion dollar contracts . Hike ultimately After a leaflet after the start, but only a few weeks later intuitive machines and started On the moon – a premiere for a private spaceship. (Odysseus But his payloads could collect and transfer some data).

Now, and NASA now has half a dozen CLPS missions on its schedule. The first of them, the Blue Ghost Mission 1 of Firefly Aerospace, started on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on January 15. The same rocket also wore a moonland that was produced by the Japanese company ISPACE, the power Endeacour, Hakuto-R.

Firefly’s Lander, Blue Ghost, is expected to arrive at the moon first, with a target landing date of March 2 in an area called Mare Crisium. The 6.6 -foot high, solar -powered spaceship with 10 scientific payloads for NASA and other partners. This includes a new dust shield system to demonstrate how future missions could prevent particles from accumulating on spacecraft, instruments for testing the sample collection and the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) -based navigation and a radiation -tolerant computer. “The aim of the mission is to examine the heat flow from the interior of the moon, the interactions with flag surfaces, (and) electrical crust and magnetic fields,” said NASA. “X -ray images of the earth’s magnetosphere will also take on.”

Resilience, the ISPACE LANDer, occupies another low -energy low energy And only reach its location, Mare Frigoris at the end of May or June. This craft has a micro rover called Tenacious on board, which was designed to explore, collecting surface material and relay data. In addition to a camera and shovel, Tenacious has a tiny model house that is assembled on it – especially that ““The Swedish artist Mikael Genberg. The lander wears water electrolysis devices, a deep space radiation probe and a module for food production experiment. (And as we could forget, it also contains a memorial board from the Bandai Namco Research Institute in the style of the “Charter of the Universal Century” of the Gundam franchise).

The tiny model Red House, Moonhouse, is assembled on Ispace's Lander
Isspace

Intuitive machines, the company that drove the first commercial moon landing with its Odysseus trade last year, is scheduled to launch its second CLPS mission next month towards the end of February. The IM-2 Nova-C-Lander named Athena becomes a meter-long drill and a mass spectrometer for the Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 NASA (Prime-1) on the way to the moon pole. His goal is to demonstrate the feasibility of the drilling for rehearsals and analyze these samples on site for things like water. Is also used as carpooling for the Lunar Trail Blazer of the NASA, a small orbiter that “examines the shape, abundance and distribution of the moon water and its relationship with geology”.

In addition to the Prime-1 instruments, Athena transports a laser retro-defector array, an intuitive machine micro-Nova-Hopper as “a driving drone that starts from a Nova-Clander and jumps over the moon surface” and one Moon surface communication system “Network in a box” by Nokia. The two companies plan to set up the first cellular network of the moon, which is “constructed in such a way that they treat the surface connectivity between the landing and vehicles and carry high-resolution video streaming, command and control communication and telemetry data”.

Moonlander of the intuitive machine
Intuitive machines

There is a chance that the Blue Moon Mark 1 Lunar Lander from Blue Origin will take its first trip to the moon as soon as in spring or summer. John Couluris, Senior Vice President at Blue Origin, said in an interview with In March last year that “we end up on the moon between 12 and 16 months.” At that time, the company had brought its new Glenn rocket onto the market again, which would be the vehicle for this mission for this mission, so that this claim was not in great weight. But after many, many delays, Mid -January.

NASA unveiled in an FCC Already in August that it had chosen the Lander from Blue Origin to bring a camera system, the stereo cameras for moon cloud surface studies (SCALPS), this year as part of the CLPS program to the south pole of the moon. In the submission, NASA notes that this must be done before 2025, since the data collected by the instrument will help to inform plans for the first landing landing of the Artemis moon. Scalps protection loads have flown on other CLPS missions, but the push of the Blue Origin’s Mark 1 Lander is closer to the benchmark of the human state system will be used for astronauts.

Blue origin said in another In the same month in which his demonstration moon mission, Pathfinder, could start in March 2025. Room nets reported. Don’t be surprised if it actually happens much later.

The next CLPS mission afterwards is not expected that it will take off by autumn when Astrobotic lands another shot on the moon. This time it will send its larger Griffin -Lander to a region near the south pole. Griffin Mission 1 should initially carry the fleeting examination of the Polar Exploration Rover (Viper) from NASA, but From this project at the end of last year due to delays and increasing costs. However, Astrobotics Lander will not appear empty -handed to the moon. It will have a tiny, solar-powered cuberover in tow as well as a laser retro-defect array to determine the location of the landing.

The representation of an artist from Astrobotics Griffin Lander and Astrolab Rover on the moon
Astrobotic

We can see a third intuitive machine mission before the end of this year. At the end of 2025 or early 2026, the company and NASA look for the introduction of IM-3 that delivers a number of instruments that focus on the examination of the magnetic and plasma-like properties of pure Gamma-Lunar swirls, an area with its own ” Mini magnetosphere. ““ A Rover named Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform (Mapp) will also be on board, as well as a trio small rover from the Cadre project (Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robot Exploration), which mainly demonstrates autonomous robot. The moonlight laser retro-reflector of the European Space Agency will fly together with IM-3 together with and the moon-wing room environmental monitor from the South Korean Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI).

While this year will certainly bring a lot of activity on and around the moon, there is one thing that we will not see there yet – people. NASA has adapted the timeline of Artemis missions since the program was announced and a few times In December that the first occupation flight, Artemis II, will drive forward until April 2026. Start until mid -2027.

This article was originally on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/2025-is-Going-to-be-another-big–For–commercial-mons-160038622.html ? SRC appeared = RSS



Source link

Spread the love
Leave a Comment

Comments

No comments yet. Why don’t you start the discussion?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *