NASA announces future projects

This month has seen NASA announce details on two major missions it has in the pipeline. The Artemis Programme to send astronauts back to the Moon continues apace. This ambitious project was announced by US Vice President Mike Pence earlier this year, and tasks NASA with landing humans on lunar soil by 2024.

The target area is near the lunar South Pole, where it is hoped that ice trapped in craters may be a usable source of water for future Moon bases. This month, the Marshall Space Flight Centre in Huntsville, Alabama was announced as the NASA facility which will build the moon lander which will ferry astronauts to the lunar surface.

The Marshall facility was heavily involved in the original Apollo missions of the 1960s and 70s. It is where the iconic Saturn V rocket used in the programme was constructed and tested. The proposed moon lander is effectively a modern update of the original lunar module, used by Neil Armstrong and his fellow pioneers to land on the Moon fifty years ago.

The actual design has yet to be finalised. NASA has called for private and state backed space technology companies to submit proposals for the final design. Initially, this will be for a two person crew, just like the original lunar module. Ultimately though, NASA is aiming for a four person capacity lander, which could operate from the proposed Lunar Gateway, a space station which will orbit the Moon.

Meanwhile, a new deep space mission has also been given the green light. With a proposed launch date of 2025, the Europa Clipper is planned to visit Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter. Europa is an icy ball which is similar in size to our own Moon. It is thought that a liquid water ocean may lie under the icy surface. This is thought to be a possible place for extra-terrestrial life forms to be found.

The spacecraft will attempt to confirm plumes of water which have previously been observed erupting from the moon’s surface. It will also look for evidence of sub-surface lakes. Should these be found, a further mission will be necessary to attempt to drill through the ice to look for evidence of life.

Europa will certainly be in the spotlight over the next few years. The European Space Agency (ESA) also has a mission planned. Its Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) is slated for launch in 2022.

Major space projects near completion

Meanwhile, NASA and the ESA both have projects far further along the production line, which are now passing critical development milestones. The various components of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have been put together for the first time in Los Angeles. This joint project, built by NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) is considered a successor to the ageing Hubble telescope, which is nearing the end of its operational life.

The new telescope will be incredibly powerful. It will use an enormous 6.5 metre mirror and precision instruments to attempt to see light from the birth of the universe. It is also designed to be able to analyse the chemical composition of atmospheres of planets orbiting distant stars. This will enable scientists to look out for possible chemical signs indicating extra-terrestrial life. The telescope is due for launch in 2021.

Elsewhere, the construction of another joint European, American and Canadian project, this time also in co-operation with the Russian space agency Roscosmos, has been completed. The Rosalind Franklin Rover is a 300 kilogram, six wheeled robot which will be sent to Mars to continue our search for life there. It will be able to drill up to 2 metres below the Martian surface in order to look for microbes, both living and long dead.

The rover has been constructed in the United Kingdom, at the Airbus facility in Stevenage, Hertfordshire. It will now be shipped to Toulouse in France for further testing, and finally to Cannes for final calibration. It is due for launch in 2020.

Virgin Spaceport ‘opens’ in New Mexico desert

Further news of UK progress in space matters came with Sir Richard Branson’s announcement that his Virgin Galactic Spaceport has been opened in the New Mexico desert in the United States. The spectacular building was revealed to the press with a typical Branson fanfare as the “world’s first commercial spaceport”.

It is indeed a very impressive building, with three floors and a modernistic, variable sloping roof intended to blend in with the magnificent desert landscape. Around a thousand lucky (and wealthy) passengers have already signed up for a 90 minute sub-orbital space flight with Virgin Galactic. The cost is of a ticket is currently somewhere in the region of £200,000.

India’s Chandrayaan-2 spacecraft reaches lunar orbit

India’s mission to the Moon has successfully achieved its planned lunar orbit. The journey took more than four weeks, as the spaceship did not fly directly to the Moon. Instead it made increasingly large orbits of the Earth until it was close enough to the Moon to cross over.

Now it is there, it will continue with its planned, three part mission. A lunar orbiter will continue to circle the Moon for around a year, taking detailed images of the surface. Meanwhile, on September 7th, a lunar lander will attempt to land near the south pole of the Moon. Here it will search for water and minerals, and measure lunar seismic activity. It will be helped in its search by its on board lunar rover. This tiny 27kg vehicle will analyse the lunar soil, travelling up to 500 metres from the lander until its battery fades after around a fortnight.

Russia sends robot to the International Space Station (ISS)

A human sized robot has been sent to the ISS. It arrived safely on Saturday August 24th after its launch from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on board a Soyuz rocket. Fedor is around six feet tall, and weighs 160 kg. During its planned ten day stay, the robot will carry out a variety of electrical and practical tasks.

It is intended that future robots will be used to carry out more risky and dangerous tasks in space. These include regular or long duration spacewalks, where exposure to high levels of solar radiation could pose a threat to the health or even the lives of human astronauts.

SpaceX Starhopper takes flight

Elon Musk’s SpaceX company successfully tested its new Starhopper vehicle late in August. It took flight from SpaceX’s test facility in Texas, rising around 150 metres in the air before moving a short distance sideways and making a soft landing a short distance away.

The strange looking craft is for testing purposes only, and is not intended to be actually used in space. The single Raptor engine it uses is the same design as those planned for SpaceX’s next generation Starship and Super-Heavy space rockets. Raptor engines will burn liquid methane, rather than the kerosene fuel used in the company’s conventional engines.

The success of the flight means that the company can now move on to testing the engines on larger vehicles. The Starship is planned to use six of these Raptor engines, while the huge Super-Heavy rocket could have as many as 35 engines firing simultaneously to lift its 120m tall bulk into space.