India is hoping to become the fourth nation make it to the moon when it attempts to land its Chandrayaan-2 robotic spacecraft on Friday afternoon — and you can watch the historic event live.
India launched its mission to the moon in July, with its multiple robotic probes reaching lunar orbit in August. If everything works out well, the lander — which has been named Vikram — will fire up its engine and slowly fall to the moon’s surface at some point between 12:30 p.m. and 1:30 p.m. PT on Friday, September 6.
India’s space agency, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), expects to begin live coverage of the landing at 12:40 p.m. PT, which you can livestream on YouTube. If the mission is a success, India will join an exclusive club: Only the United States, Russia, and China have landed on the moon so far.
The craft will land in the area of the moon’s south pole, and after a few hours, a rover will begin to explore the region in the hopes of learning more about it. Most importantly, it’s looking for signs of water — most likely ice — in the unexplored area. Along with an orbiter that will remain above the moon, the ISRO expects to operate the Chandrayaan-2 mission about a year.
“Through this effort, the aim is to improve our understanding of the Moon — discoveries that will benefit India and humanity as a whole,” the ISRO wrote about the mission on its website. “These insights and experiences aim at a paradigm shift in how lunar expeditions are approached for years to come — propelling further voyages into the farthest frontiers.”
This is India’s second mission to the moon — the ISRO launched Chandrayaan-1 in October 2008, though that spacecraft remained in orbit and took photos in order to map the lunar surface. If all goes well with Friday’s mission, India plans another mission, Chandrayaan-3, at some point in 2024.
India is the latest country to send a spacecraft to the moon, but it’s not alone. The United States, China, Russia, Japan, and Israel all have their own lunar missions in the works.
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.