Tag: moon

Luna-25, Russia’s First Moon Mission in 47 Years, Ends in Failure After Crashing on Lunar Surface

Russia’s first moon mission in 47 years failed when its Luna-25 space craft spun out of control and crashed into the moon after a problem preparing for pre-landing orbit, underscoring the post-Soviet decline of a once mighty space programme.

Russia’s state space corporation, Roskosmos, said it had lost contact with the craft at 11:57 GMT (5:27pm IST) on Saturday after a problem as the craft was shunted into pre-landing orbit. A soft landing had been planned for Monday.

“The apparatus moved into an unpredictable orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the surface of the Moon,” Roskosmos said in a statement.

It said a special inter-departmental commission had been formed to investigate the reasons behind the loss of the Luna-25 craft, whose mission had raised hopes in Moscow that Russia was returning to the big power moon race.

The failure underscored the decline of Russia’s space power since the glory days of Cold War competition when Moscow was the first to launch a satellite to orbit the Earth – Sputnik 1, in 1957 – and Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to travel into space in 1961.

It also comes as Russia’s $2 trillion (roughly Rs. 1,66,18,000 crore) economy faces its biggest external challenge for decades: the pressure of both Western sanctions and fighting the biggest land war in Europe since World War Two.

Though moon missions are fiendishly difficult, and many US and Soviet attempts have failed, Russia had not attempted a moon mission since Luna-24 in 1976, when Communist leader Leonid Brezhnev ruled the Kremlin.

Russian state television put news of the loss of Luna-25 at number 8 in its line up at noon and gave it just 26 seconds of coverage, after a news about fires on Tenerife and a 4 minute item about a professional holiday for Russian pilots and crews.

Failed Moonshot

Russia has been racing against India, whose Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft is scheduled to land on the moon’s south pole this week, and more broadly against China and the United States which both have advanced lunar ambitions.

As news of the Luna-25 failure broke, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) posted on X, formerly Twitter, that Chandrayaan-3 was set to land on August 23.

Russian officials had hoped that the Luna-25 mission would show Russia can compete with the superpowers in space despite its post-Soviet decline and the vast cost of the Ukraine war.

“The flight control system was a vulnerable area, which had to go through many fixes,” said Anatoly Zak, the creator and publisher of www.RussianSpaceWeb.com which tracks Russian space programmes.

Zak said Russia had also gone for the much more ambitious moon landing before undertaking a simpler orbital mission – the usual practice for the Soviet Union, the United States, China and India.

While Luna-25 went beyond the earth’s orbit – unlike the failed 2011 Fobos-Grunt mission to one of the moons of Mars – the crash could impact Russia’s moon programme, which envisages several more missions over coming years including a possible joint effort with China.

Russian scientists have repeatedly complained that the space programme has been weakened by poor managers who are keen for unrealistic vanity space projects, corruption and a decline in the rigour of Russia’s post-Soviet scientific education system.

“It is so sad that it was not possible to land the apparatus,” said Mikhail Marov, a leading Soviet physicist and astronomer.

Marov, 90, was hospitalised in Moscow after news of the failure of Luna-25 was announced, although details of what he was ill with were not available.

Marov told the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper that he hoped the reasons behind the crash would be discussed and examined rigorously.

“This was perhaps the last hope for me to see a revival of our lunar program,” he said.

© Thomson Reuters 2023

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Luna-25 Spacecraft Made Adjustments While Attempting to Prepare for Landing on Lunar Surface

Russia’s Luna-25 spacecraft adjusted its orbit on Friday as it prepared to attempt the first landing near the south pole of the moon, space agency Roscosmos said.

“Today at 09:20 Moscow time (11:50 am IST), the propulsion system of the automatic station performed an orbit correction lasting 40 seconds. Its goal is to provide the best conditions for the subsequent construction of a pre-landing orbit,” Roscosmos said in a statement.

It said the adjustment went smoothly and the spacecraft’s onboard systems and communications were all functioning normally. The space agency also released an image of moon shared by Luna-25 on August 17.

Luna-25 shared the first picture of the lunar surface on August 17
Photo Credit: Telegram/ Roscosmos

 

Russian space chief Yuri Borisov said last week that Luna-25 aimed to land on August 21.

An Indian spacecraft, Chandrayaan-3, is also orbiting the moon in readiness for a landing near the south pole, where scientists believe there are significant quantities of frozen water that could support a human presence there in the future.

Much is riding on the success of Russia’s first lunar mission in 47 years, with Moscow attempting to prove that it is still a leader in space exploration despite the huge costs of the war in Ukraine and Western sanctions aimed at curbing its access to technology.

Luna-25 was launched from the Ruusia’s Vostochny spaceport on August 11, 2023 aboard Soyuz 2.1v rocket. The lander is expected to touch down on the moon on August 21. On the other hand, ISRO’s Chandrayaan-3 was launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, on board the LVM-3 rocket. The lander is expecting its touchdown on lunar surface on August 23. 

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ISRO Releases New Images of the Moon Captured by Chandrayaan-3’s Vikram Lander: See Here

ISRO on Friday released a set of visuals of the Moon captured by cameras positioned on the Lander Module of Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft. The images, captured after the separation of the Lander Module from the Propulsion Module of the spacecraft on Thursday, showed the craters on the Moon’s surface that were marked on the photographs released by ISRO as ‘Fabry’, ‘Giordano Bruno’ and ‘Harkhebi J’.

The country’s space agency shared on X (formerly Twitter) the images captured by the Lander Position Detection Camera (LPDC) on August 15, and visuals from the Lander Imager (LI) Camera-1 on August 17 — just after the separation of the Lander Module from the Propulsion Module.

The Lander Module comprising the lander (Vikram) and the rover (Pragyan) will on Friday be lowered into an orbit that takes it closer to the Moon’s surface for the soft landing on the Lunar south pole on August 23.

Meanwhile, ISRO on Friday said that Chandrayaan-3’s Lander Module had successfully undergone a deboosting (slowing down) operation taking it closer to the Moon, and that its health is normal.

The Lander Module comprising the lander (Vikram) and the rover (Pragyan), will undergo the second deboosting operation on August 20, to be lowered to an orbit that takes it much closer to the Moon’s surface.

” The Lander Module (LM) health is normal. LM successfully underwent a deboosting operation that reduced its orbit to 113 km x 157 km. The second deboosting operation is scheduled for August 20, 2023, around 0200 Hrs. IST,” ISRO said in a post on X.

The Lander Module of Chandrayaan-3 had successfully separated from the Propulsion Module on Thursday, 35 days after the satellite was launched on July 14. 

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Chandrayaan-3 Has Covered About Two-Thirds of Distance to the Moon: ISRO

The Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft, which was launched on GSLV Mark 3 (LVM 3) heavy-lift launch vehicle successfully from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Andhra Pradesh’s Sriharikota on July 14, has covered about two-thirds of the distance to the Moon. 

“The spacecraft has covered about two-thirds of the distance to the moon. Lunar Orbit Injection (LOI) set for Aug 5, 2023, around 19:00 hours IST,” Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) tweeted Friday.

Chandrayaan-3, India’s third lunar exploration mission, will make India the fourth country after US, China, and Russia, to land its spacecraft on the surface of the moon and demonstrate the country’s abilities for safe and soft landing on the lunar surface.

The spacecraft was successfully launched onboard LVM-3 on July 14, 2023, at 2:35 PM IST. The spacecraft is currently undergoing a series of orbit manoeuvres with the objective of reaching the moon’s orbit.

Chandrayaan-3 will take nearly 33 days from the launch date to reach the orbit of the moon. Upon landing, it will operate for one lunar day, which is approximately 14 Earth days. One day on the Moon is equal to 14 days on Earth.

Chandrayaan-3 components include various electronic and mechanical subsystems intended to ensure a safe and soft landing such as Navigation sensors, propulsion systems, guidance & control among others. Additionally, there are mechanisms for the release of Rover, two-way communication-related antennas and other onboard electronics.

The stated objectives of Chandrayaan-3 are safe and soft landing, rover roving on the moon’s surface, and in-situ scientific experiments.

The approved cost of Chandrayaan-3 is Rs. 250 crores (Excluding Launch Vehicle Cost).

Chandrayaan-3’s development phase commenced in January 2020 with the launch planned sometime in 2021. However, the COVID-19 pandemic brought an unforeseen delay to the mission’s progress.

Chandrayaan-3 is the ISRO’s follow-up attempt after the Chandrayaan-2 mission faced challenges during its soft landing on the lunar surface in 2019 and was eventually deemed to have failed its core mission objectives.

The key scientific outcomes from Chandrayaan-2 include the first-ever global map for lunar sodium, enhancing knowledge on crater size distribution, unambiguous detection of lunar surface water ice with IIRS instrument and more. The mission has been featured in almost 50 publications.

Moon serves as a repository of the Earth’s past and a successful lunar mission by India will help enhance life on Earth while also enabling it to explore the rest of the solar system and beyond.

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ISRO Successfully Completes Fifth Orbit-Raising Manoeuvre for Chandrayaan-3 Spacecraft

ISRO on Tuesday successfully performed the fifth orbit-raising manoeuvre (Earth-bound perigee firing) of the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft from the ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) here.

“The spacecraft is expected to attain an orbit of 127609 km X 236 km. The achieved orbit will be confirmed after the observations,” the national space agency headquartered here said.

“The next firing, the TransLunar Injection (TLI) is planned for August 1, 2023, between 12 midnight and 1 am IST,” added ISRO, which had launched the Chandrayaan-3 mission to the Moon on July 14.

An ISRO official told PTI that following the TLI, the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft would escape from orbiting the Earth and follow a path that would take it to the vicinity of the Moon.

In other words, the spacecraft would begin its journey towards the Moon on August 1, after leaving the Earth’s orbit following the TLI manoeuvre, which would place it on a “lunar transfer trajectory”.

ISRO has said it would attempt soft-landing of the lander on the Moon’s surface on August 23.

After the successful launch of Chandrayaan-3 on GSLV Mark 3 (LVM 3) heavy-lift launch vehicle, Director of ISRO S Somanath said that landing is one important step for further exploration. 

“Chandrayaan-3 is a very important step…Landing this time is very important. Unless you land, you cannot take samples, you cannot land human beings, and you cannot create moon bases. So, landing is one important step for further exploration,” said ISRO chief S Somanath.

Chandrayaan-3 is the ISRO’s follow-up attempt after the Chandrayaan-2 mission faced challenges during its soft landing on the lunar surface in 2019 and was eventually deemed to have failed its core mission objectives.

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(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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Chandrayaan-3 Landing Is Important Step for Exploration: ISRO Chief

After the successful launch of Chandrayaan-3 on GSLV Mark 3 (LVM 3) heavy-lift launch vehicle on Friday, Director of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) S Somanath said that landing is one important step for further exploration. 

“Chandrayaan-3 is a very important step…Landing this time is very important. Unless you land, you cannot take samples, you cannot land human beings, and you cannot create moon bases. So, landing is one important step for further exploration,” said ISRO chief S Somanath.

Chandrayaan-3 is the ISRO’s follow-up attempt after the Chandrayaan-2 mission faced challenges during its soft landing on the lunar surface in 2019 and was eventually deemed to have failed its core mission objectives.

Earlier today, Chandrayaan-3 was launched on GSLV Mark 3 (LVM 3) heavy-lift launch vehicle successfully from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Andhra Pradesh’s Sriharikota as per the scheduled launch time.

The journey from Earth to the moon for the spacecraft is estimated to take about a month and the landing is expected on August 23. Upon landing, it will operate for one lunar day, which is approximately 14 Earth days. One day on the Moon is equal to 14 days on Earth.

Chandrayaan-3, India’s third lunar exploration mission, will make India the fourth country after US, China, and Russia, to land its spacecraft on the surface of the moon and demonstrate the country’s abilities for safe and soft landing on the lunar surface.

Chandrayaan-3 will be inserted into the Lunar Transfer Trajectory after the orbit-raising maneuvers. Covering a distance of over 3,00,000 km, it will reach the Moon in the coming weeks. Scientific instruments onboard will study the Moon’s surface and enhance our knowledge.

Chandrayaan-3 is equipped with a lander, a rover and a propulsion module. It weighs around 3,900 kilograms.

Moon serves as a repository of the Earth’s past and a successful lunar mission by India will help enhance life on Earth while also enabling it to explore the rest of the solar system and beyond.

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Chandrayaan-3 Launch Will Make India Fourth Country to Land Spacecraft on Moon: MoS Jitendra Singh

Chandrayaan-3, scheduled to be launched from Sriharikota this week, will make “India the fourth country to land its spacecraft on the surface of the Moon“, said Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Science and Technology, Jitendra Singh, on Sunday.

He said Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent US visit was marked by significant space-related agreements indicating that the countries which had started their space journey long before India are today looking up to the country as an equal collaborator.

After such a quantum rise in our space expertise under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s regime, “India can no longer wait to be left behind in its march to the Moon,” the minister said.

Singh said Chandrayaan-3 is a follow-on mission of Chandrayaan-2 and is aimed at demonstrating India’s capability in soft landing and roving on the surface of the Moon or the lunar surface. The complex mission profile, he said, required for the spacecraft to enter the Moon’s orbit has been executed very precisely.

“After the successful landing of Chandrayaan-3 on the surface of the Moon, the rover, which has six wheels, will come out and is expected to work for 14 days on the Moon. With the support of multiple cameras on the rover, we will be able to receive images,” he said, as per a release by the Ministry.

Giving full credit to Prime Minister Narendra Modi for providing an enabling environment for space workers and taking path-breaking decisions like unlocking the space sector for Public Private Partnership (PPP), Singh said, based on the current trajectory of growth, India’s space sector could be a $1 trillion economy in the coming years.

Singh said, “The primary objectives of Chandrayaan-3 mission are threefold, to demonstrate safe and soft landing on lunar surface, to demonstrate rover roving on the moon and to conduct in-situ scientific experiments.”

The minister recalled that the first in the series of Chandrayaan missions — namely Chandrayaan-1 — is credited with having discovered the presence of water on the surface of the Moon, which was a new revelation for the world and even the most premier space agencies like the US’s NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) were fascinated by this discovery and used the inputs for their further experiments.

Chandrayyan-3, he said, will be operating at the next level. The spacecraft will use Launch Vehicle Mark-3 developed by ISRO for its launch, he added.

Singh added, “There is tremendous excitement across the country about the launch of Chandrayaan-3, particularly because Chandrayaan-2 mission could not yield the desired results because of a lapse just about 13 minutes after Spacecraft began its descent on September 6, 2019. Prime Minister Narendra Modi was personally present at Sriharikota to witness the event.”

The minister added, “A successor to Chandrayaan-2, Chandrayaan-3 has undergone a few changes to increase the robustness of the lander. He said, all these modifications have been subject to exhaustive ground tests and simulations through test beds.”

“The lander and rover module of Chandrayaan-3 is also configured with payloads that would provide data to the scientific community on various properties of lunar soil and rocks including its chemical and elemental composition,” Singh was quoted as saying in the release.

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Chandrayaan-3 Launch Window Set Between July 13 and July 19: ISRO Chairman

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman S Somnath on Monday said that the launch day for Chandrayaan-3 for a soft landing on the moon is July 13. 

“We will be able to do a soft landing on the moon. The launch day is July 13, it can go upto 19th,” ISRO Chairman S Somnath said on the launch of Chandrayaan-3 while speaking to ANI. 

He said that the launch date would be July 13. However, it may go up to July 19.

Earlier on June 28, Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation S Somanath revealed that Chandrayaan-3 testing is complete and the window of opportunity for the launch is aimed between July 12 and 19.

“Currently, the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft is fully integrated. We have completed the testing and also mated with the rocket compartment… Currently, the window of opportunity for launch is between July 12 and 19 and we will take the earliest possible date, maybe the 12th, maybe the 13th or maybe the 14th. We will announce the exact date after all the tests are completed,” Somanath told ANI.

Earlier in June, he also shared an update on Aditya-L1 Mission which is India’s first mission to study the Sun and said ISRO is aiming for August end as the target for its launch.

The ISRO chief also shared his views on Artemis Accords and believes that it is an opportunity for Indian industries that are working in the space sector to work with the US companies.

“We are looking at Artemis Accord as a political engagement with the US. It is a statement of Intent that when the US is proposing collaborative work in the space sector, especially the exploration of outer planets in a very cordial atmosphere between different nations, we agree with that. So it has a big statement. We would like to work with the US, especially on technologies which are high-end and space is one of them. It will open opportunities for Indian industries who are working in the space sector to work with the US companies that are equally working in the space sector,” he mentioned.

“So the advancement of electronics, new processors, the centre takes place in the US and this access to this new technology to the Indian company is so important for them to innovate and bring up value which will give an opportunity to market them in the US market. This is precisely the objective of the US. So we would like to make sure the Indian companies contribute to the US space program. It’s not a great thing now. So, the earlier the US sees it as an opportunity because Indian companies have the technological strength today, they have cost-effectiveness and they have a lower development cycle time which they want to bank on. So it is the purpose that it is jointly developed this whole accord signing is for the benefit of the US as well as the benefit of India,” he added.

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NASA’s Hubble Telescope Spots Runaway Supermassive Black Hole Leaving Behind Trail of Newborn Stars

A supermassive black hole, weighing as much as 20 million Suns, has left behind a 2,00,000-light-year-long condensed trail of newborn stars, twice the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy, in its wake, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), US.

Captured accidentally by NASA‘s Hubble Space Telescope, the black hole was seen racing through the intergalactic space so fast that, within our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes.

“We think we’re seeing a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars. So, we’re looking at star formation trailing the black hole,” said Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, US.

“What we’re seeing is the aftermath. Like the wake behind a ship, we’re seeing the wake behind the black hole,” said van Dokkum.

The researchers have published their paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

They said that the black hole lies at one end of the column, at the other end of which lies its parent galaxy. They think that the gas is being ‘shocked’ and heated from the motion of the black hole hitting the gas, or it could be radiation from an accretion disk around the black hole.

“This is pure serendipity that we stumbled across it,” van Dokkum added. He was looking for globular star clusters in a nearby dwarf galaxy.

“I was just scanning through the Hubble image and then I noticed that we have a little streak. I immediately thought, ‘oh, a cosmic ray hitting the camera detector and causing a linear imaging artifact.’ When we eliminated cosmic rays we realized it was still there. It didn’t look like anything we’ve seen before,” said van Dokkum.

Van Dokkum and his team followed up the sight with spectroscopy with the W M Keck Observatories in Hawaii. The star trail being “quite astonishing, very, very bright and very unusual” made them conclude that they were looking at the aftermath of a black hole flying through a halo of gas surrounding the host galaxy.

Astronomers suspect this phenomenon to likely be the result of multiple collisions of supermassive black holes, the first two having perhaps merged 50 million years ago. Brought together closer at their centres, they whirled around each other as a binary black hole, they said.

Then came another galaxy with its own supermassive black hole, mixing up the three to form a chaotic and an unstable configuration. One of the black holes robbed momentum from the other two black holes and got thrown out of the host galaxy, they said.

Following this, the remaining binary system of black holes shot off in the opposite direction, they said.

There is a feature seen on the opposite side of the host galaxy that might be the runaway binary black hole. Circumstantial evidence for this is that there is no sign of an active black hole remaining at the galaxy’s core, they said.

The next step, they said, would be to do follow-up observations with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory to confirm the black hole explanation.

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When to see March’s upcoming full moon

The time has come for March’s full moon to light up the night’s sky, and if conditions are clear, it could be visible for several nights.

The full worm moon is slated to peak in illumination on Tuesday morning, at 7:40 A.M. EST, meaning large parts of North America will have to catch the height of the lunar event in hours and days before the peak.

NASA expects the moon will appear bright from Sunday evening and could last through Wednesday morning.

The Farmers’ Almanac said the moon got its nickname because the ground in the northern latitudes begins to soften during the month allowing earthworms to appear.

Similar to other folklore behind the naming of each month’s full moon, the nickname might be a bit of stretch because March is a still chilly month across large parts of North America, which would generally prevent sightings of worms.

According to Penn State’s extension office, the optimum temperature for an earthworm is between 50-60 °F, and many don’t tolerate freezing weather.


Getty Images/iStockphoto

Much of the country still has potential for freezing events.
FOX Weather

If Punxsutawney Phil or historical temperature data is to be believed, large swaths of the country still have several weeks left for the potential of frost and freeze events.

The South usually sees its last freeze in March, the Midwest follows suit in April and the Northeast and West are generally the last regions to wave goodbye to Old Man Winter, which happens in May or even later.

Other names for the moon


An image of a full strawberry moon.
Getty Images/iStockphoto

If you don’t fancy the nickname of worm moon, there are at least a dozen other names that March’s full moon goes by.

The Farmers’ Almanac reports tribes in the northeastern US referred to the moon as the crow, crust, sap and even the sugar moon.

NASA said it has heard Europeans refer to March’s event as the Lenten moon because it corresponds with the religious period of Lent.

In Sri Lanka, an island country off the Indian coast, every full moon is uniquely identified, and the event is a public holiday. The events mark key commemorations in Buddhism.

Many other religions and cultures have their own nicknames for the full moon and mark the occasion as a celebration or a reflection point.

Other planetary delights to watch out for


Venus and Jupiter are spotted to be near conjunction.
NWS Grand Rapids

NASA says Venus and Jupiter, the solar system’s largest planet, will also dominate the night sky on Tuesday.

If viewing conditions are clear, watch the western sky, especially as evening twilight ends.

Earlier in the month, the planets were in conjunction, a term used to describe when features appear to be over the same point and eventually pass each other.

Even though they appeared close in the night sky, the second and fifth planets in our solar systsem were more than 400 million miles apart.

As the month progresses, the planets will quickly head in different directions – Venus is set to climb higher each night, while Jupiter will disappear as a viewable object until May.

Calendar of next moon phases

After the full moon, the lunar body will wane into a third-quarter state by March 14 and reach a new moon status on March 21.

The next full moon won’t rise into the sky until Thursday, April 6, and it will be known as the pink moon.


2023 will see 13 full moons, instead of the average 12 cycles.
NASA

Due to the moon taking around 354 days to complete a full 12 cycles, some years experience and additional full moon and 2023 is one of those years.

Thirteen full moons will grace the skies this year, with the extra sighting scheduled to happen in late August.

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