Over at the moon, things are busy this week as a lunar mission gets to work on its science research. The Blue Ghost mission from Firefly Aerospace performed a picture-perfect landing 10 days ago, since when it has been deploying its payloads onto the lunar surface and collecting science data.
Blue Ghost was set to be joined on the moon’s surface by another spacecraft, the Athena lander from Intuitive Machines, but problems with the landing caused that craft to come down on its side and end its mission early. Now, Blue Ghost carries the torch for moon missions, though it will hopefully be joined by the Japanese Resilience spacecraft from ispace in June.
In the meantime, Blue Ghost has been busy working with its payloads including operating a NASA drill system designed to detect temperature information from beneath the moon’s surface. The LISTER or Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity instrument is designed to measure how much heat is coming from the moon’s interior, as although the moon doesn’t have plate tectonics like Earth, it is still somewhat warm from its formation.
Firefly has released amazing footage showing the LISTER instrument at work, where you can see it drilling into the moon’s rocky surface and throwing up dust and small particles as it goes:
This video shows the first operations of the LISTER payload from last week, March 3. It was recently released by Firefly, which wrote in an update: “Blue Ghost has performed ongoing LISTER operations over the past week. Mounted below Blue Ghost’s lower deck, NASA’s Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity (LISTER) payload is a pneumatic, gas-powered drill developed by Texas Tech University and Honeybee Robotics that measures the temperature and flow of heat from the Moon’s interior.”
The LISTER payload is designed to measure two different aspects of heat flow: both how the temperature changes at different depths, and how thermally conductive the material beneath the moon’s surface is. The drill is designed to go as deep as three meters under the surface, pausing every half-meter to collect data using a probe.
“By making similar measurements at multiple locations on the lunar surface, we can reconstruct the thermal evolution of the Moon,” said Seiichi Nagihara, principal investigator for LISTER, in a statement describing the experiment. “That will permit scientists to retrace the geological processes that shaped the Moon from its start as a ball of molten rock, which gradually cooled off by releasing its internal heat into space.”
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.