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It looks like India’s Chandrayaan-3 succumbed to the cold, and its mission is over. The frigid lunar night lasted about two weeks, and a new day has dawned. With that day came hopes of a sunlit revival for the lander and the rover, but the India Space Research Organization (ISRO) says the chances of the spacecraft awakening in the Sun are diminishing by the hour.

The lunar night that wrapped its cold arms around the lander and rover lasted 14 days, and so will the current lunar day. When the day dawned last Friday, ISRO began trying to communicate with the lander. There’s been no response so far, as both explorers may be forever entombed about 600km (373 mi) from the Moon’s south pole.

Even though things don’t look good for the mission, it’s still a success. It’s the first spacecraft to land in the Moon’s south pole region. The area is critical because it contains vast quantities of frozen water in its permanently shadowed crater. That water is a valuable resource for astronauts who’ll visit the Moon in the future and set up bases. It’s also the first time ISRO successfully landed a rover and lander on the Moon after its predecessor, Chandrayaan-2, crashed into the surface.

But it’s encouraging that Vikram and Pragyaan are still intact. ISRO hoped that the Sun would bring both back to life after the agency put them into sleep mode as night fell. There’s a chance that the sunlight would recharge the batteries.

“Once there is sufficient solar generation, they are expected to come back to life provided that they have survived the night.”

M Srikanth, Chandrayaan-3 Mission Operations Director.

ISRO released an update on Friday, the beginning of the new lunar day. Unfortunately, there was no response from either the lander or the rover.

Chandrayaan-3 Mission:
Efforts have been made to establish communication with the Vikram lander and Pragyan rover to ascertain their wake-up condition.

As of now, no signals have been received from them.

Efforts to establish contact will continue.

— ISRO (@isro) September 22, 2023

When night falls on the Moon’s south pole, temperatures plummet as low as -200C to -250C (-328F to -418F.) The lander and rover were never designed to handle these temperatures. The rover has only a small battery—10 amp-hours—that provides the necessary power to deploy its solar array. It was also included to help the rover survive a periodic eclipse. The small battery was fully charged when night came, and the solar panels were positioned to receive incoming starlight when morning came. The Vikram lander was also ready for the morning, and its 62.5 amp hour was fully charged.

Both vehicles are pre-programmed to come back to life as the Sun reappears. “When sunlight comes back, there’s an autonomous logic pre-loaded on both the lander and rover,” said M Srikanth, Chandrayaan-3 Mission Operations Director, in an interview with the Times of India. “Once there is sufficient solar generation, they are expected to come back to life provided that they have survived the night.”

If ISRO's Chandrayaan-3 mission is truly over, it was still a success. It was the first spacecraft to land at the Moon's south pole region. Image Credit: ISRO
If ISRO’s Chandrayaan-3 mission is truly over, it was still a success. It was the first spacecraft to land at the Moon’s south pole region. Image Credit: ISRO

But according to Isro chief AS Kiran Kumar, the “chances of reawakening are dimming with each passing hour.” In an interview with the BBC, Kumar added, “The lander and rover have so many components which may not have survived the frigid temperatures on the Moon.” In fairness, they were never designed to.

It’s all up to the lander’s transmitter now. It’s ISRO’s link with the mission, and if it won’t function, it won’t matter if some of the spacecraft’s other systems are somehow still working. “It has to tell us that it’s alive. Even if all other sub-systems work, we have no way of knowing that,” Kumar added.

Some of ISRO’s hopefulness is based on China’s successful Chang’e 4 mission. It landed on the lunar far side and was plunged into darkness and freezing temperatures, too. It woke up with the sunrise more than once.
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Starship | Second Flight Test

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On November 18, 2023, Starship successfully lifted off at 7:02 a.m. CT from Starbase on its second integrated flight test.

While it didn’t happen in a lab or on a test stand, it was absolutely a test. What we did with this second flight will provide invaluable data to continue rapidly developing Starship.

The test achieved a number of major milestones, helping us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multiplanetary. The team at Starbase is already working final preparations on the vehicles slated for use in Starship’s third flight test.

Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on an exciting second flight test of Starship!

Follow us on X.com/SpaceX for continued updates on Starship’s progress

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https://mansbrand.com/for-its-final-trick-chandrayaan-3-brings-its-propulsion-module-to-earth-orbit/

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For its Final Trick, Chandrayaan-3 Brings its Propulsion Module to Earth Orbit

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On August 23, ISRO’s Vikram lander detached from its propulsion module and made a soft landing near the Moon’s south pole region. The lander then deployed its Pragyan rover, and for two weeks the endearing little solar-powered rover performed marvelously, detecting water ice and characterizing the makeup of the lunar regolith before succumbing to the darkness and cold of the lunar night.

But since the rover mission ended, the propulsion module that brought it to the Moon has made a detour, performing a series of complex maneuvers that took it from a tight lunar orbit back to Earth orbit. This was possible because the module still had more than 100 kg of fuel, allowing scientists to conduct additional maneuvers and experiments.

Right now, the propulsion module (PM) is orbiting Earth at an altitude of 115,000 km (71,500 miles), well above geostationary orbit. ISRO said the mission team decided to use the available fuel in the propulsion module to derive additional information for future lunar missions. More specifically, this demonstration gave them the chance to test mission operation strategies for a future sample return mission.

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A graphic of the Chandrayaan-3 lander separating from the propulsion module. Credit: ISRO.

The PM has had a busy and productive mission. While in lunar orbit for about a month, it wasn’t just taking it easy.  After the separation of the lander, the PM operated an on-board experiment, the Spectro-polarimetry of HAbitable Planet Earth (SHAPE) payload, designed to observe the Earth. Specifically, this instrument also provided scientists and engineers experience for future missions and research as its purpose was to study habitable planet-like features of Earth. These observations will be used by ISRO for future studies of exoplanets. Additionally, there was a special operation of the SHAPE payload on October 28, 2023 during the solar eclipse.

But because the spacecraft had such a precise orbit injection and optimal burn maneuvers, the amount of leftover fuel meant the engineers could do even more with the PM than originally expected. The PM was commanded to execute an orbit-raising maneuver at the Moon and then perform a Trans-Earth injection burn, which placed the PM in an Earth-bound orbit.

ISRO said the first orbit raising maneuver at the Moon was performed on October 9, 2023 to raise apolune altitude to 5,112 km from 150 km.  The Trans-Earth injection (TEI) maneuver was performed on October 13, 2023, and as its orbit was slowly raised, the PM made four Moon flybys before departing Moon on November 10.

Currently, propulsion module is orbiting Earth with an orbital period of nearly 13 days, at 27 degrees inclination. Because of this high orbit, ISRO said there is no threat of close approach with any operational Earth orbiting satellites.

ISRO said these extra operations allowed them to plan and execute trajectory maneuvers to return from Moon to Earth, as well as develop software to plan and validate the maneuvers. They also planned and executed a gravity assisted flyby between two celestial bodies and, most notably they avoided an uncontrolled crash into the Moon’s surface at the end of the life of PM, which met the requirements of creating no debris on the Moon.

Will its current high geostationary orbit be the Chandrayaan-3 PM’s final trick? Who knows? The resourceful engineers might figure out another way to make use of this multi-purpose spacecraft.

The post For its Final Trick, Chandrayaan-3 Brings its Propulsion Module to Earth Orbit appeared first on Universe Today.

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In 1872, a Solar Storm Hit the Earth Generating Auroras from the Tropics to the Poles

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Imagine a solar storm generating auroral displays across the entire sky. No, we haven’t quite seen them that strong in the current solar cycle. But, back in February 1872, people around the world reported seeing brilliant northern and southern lights. The culprit? A medium-sized sunspot group that unleased a torrent of charged particles in a coronal mass ejection directed toward Earth.

As with strong space weather storms today, the long-ago event not only sent aurorae dancing across most of Earth’s skies, but it disrupted technology. It affected telegraph communications on the submarine cable in the Indian Ocean between Bombay (Mumbai) and Aden for hours. Similar disturbances were reported on the landline between Cairo and Khartoum. That presaged the damage that such storms can do to today’s power grids and satellite communications.

Nowadays scientists know quite a bit more about the solar activity that causes these storms. Back in those days, however, solar science was still in its infancy. We didn’t have globe-girdling, interconnected communications systems. And, then as now, extremely strong solar storms were relatively rare, but they could still do damage. Today, we are well aware of the threat to modern technologies. Strong solar storms can shut down power stations, stop communications, threaten the world’s financial and trade systems, and harm life. “The longer the power supply could be cut off, the more society, especially those living in urban areas, will struggle to cope,” said Hisashi Hayakawa, the lead author of a group studying ancient solar storms. “Could we maintain our life without such infrastructure? Well, let us just say that it would be extremely challenging.”

Studying an Ancient Solar Storm

The 1872 solar event was named the Chapman-Silverman storm. Recently, an international team of 22 scientists, led by Hayakawa at Nagoya University in Japan, Edward Cliver at the US National Solar Observatory, and Frédéric Clette of the Royal Observatory of Belgium studied it in great detail. Their tools were historical records coupled with modern techniques to assess the Chapman-Silverman storm from its origins on the Sun to its impact on our planet.

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Sketches by Italian astronomer Angelo Secchi (Pontifical Gregorian University). The top shows the disk of the Sun, and the lower images show the 1872 sunspot group in more detail. Courtesy Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma.

How do you go about finding records for a storm that far back? First, you look at sunspot records. People have long sketched sunspot groups and records go back quite far. The team scoured Belgian and Italian records of sunspots during the period. For terrestrial impacts, they used geomagnetic field measurements recorded in places as diverse as Bombay (Mumbai), Tiflis (Tbilisi), and Greenwich. Those gave them insight into the temporal evolution and intensity of the storm. Finally, they examined hundreds of accounts of visual aurorae caused by the storm, written in different languages.

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A Japanese drawing of the aurorae triggered by the 1872 solar event. Courtesy Shounji Temple.

“Our findings confirm the Chapman-Silverman storm in February 1872 as one of the most extreme geomagnetic storms in recent history. Its size rivaled those of the Carrington storm in September 1859 and the NY Railroad storm in May 1921,” Hayakawa said. “This means that we now know that the world has seen at least three geomagnetic superstorms in the last two centuries.
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