Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

This probe, the Chang-e 6, touched down successfully Sunday morning Beijing time. This is their second successful landing, the first, the Chang-e 4, landed in 2019.

The mission is multi-part, and complex. The lander is a robotic probe that is slated to gather 2 kilograms of soil and dust using a drill and scoop. It will package them and place them in a ascent rocket which will then rendezvous with an orbiting unmanned ship which will return to Earth, reenter the atmosphere, and hopefully land near the Chinese space complex in Mongolia.

The region they are in is believed to be high in frozen water and is a potential base site for a future manned base. Analysis of these samples will be helpful in planning for this.

Because everything is happening on the far side of the moon, the probe would normally be in a total communications blackout. To work around this, the Chinese launched a communications relay satellite in March, the Queqiao-2. They are planning two more Chang-e missions in preparation for manned missions in 2030.

Now I would like to refer you to a book, A City On Mars, by Kelly & Zach Weinersmith. Zack is a web cartoonist and author, Kelly is a PhD scientist. They spent four years deeply immersed in researching the literature of living in space, attending conferences, talking to scientists, astronauts, and enthusiasts. And overall, their conclusion is 'No, not at this time.' There are far too many unknowns to support rushing off and building bases on the Moon or Mars. While we have a large amount of people-years in near Earth orbit, we have a total of less than a month of people living on the moon. We need a methodical study of people living in orbit, conducting controlled experiments of what happens to people living in space, which has not been done. Are the Chinese going to do it? Doubtful.

It's a good book, some of the cartoons are amusing. Recommended. It's also available as an ebook through most sources.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/01/china/china-change6-moon-landing-intl-hnk-scn/index.html

This is pretty spectacular. It suffered a landing mishap when one of its engines failed and it toppled over to land on its face. Still, it got useful data - and the landing itself was quite a success in that it landed within a 100 meter target where it was supposed to. For an unmanned probe launched over 200,000 miles away, that's pretty much a bulls eye!

And then night came. It wasn't designed to survive the night, and the ground crew were resigned to that.

But when the next lunar day came, two weeks later, it woke up!

In the words of Monty Python, there was much rejoicing.

But then the next lunar night arrived, and the ground crew expected that to be the end of the probe.

Then two weeks later, the next lunar day arrived, and it woke up again!

It's not in that great of shape as it has been taking a beating with the lunar nights at over 200 degrees below zero Fahrenheit and the lunar days over 200 degrees above, but as I said before: they must have partnered with Timex because it's taking a licking and still ticking!

https://gizmodo.com/japans-slim-moon-lander-just-wont-die-1851371961

First up, the Varda orbital drug lab finally secured a re-entry permit and landed in Utah!

This is a curious thing. Varda makes pharmaceuticals. Okay, cool. Lots of drugs start their lives out as powders. Okay. Powders are, at their basic level, derived from crystals. Now's the cool part: crystals grow differently in microgravity than they do in full gravity on the Earth's surface. Varda secured funding to build this self-contained orbital crystal-growing facility and got it launched into space, where they grew crystals!

Nice!

It went into orbit on June 12 of '22. It was supposed to be in orbit for a month. And therein is the tale.

I am unclear what happened, but the FAA denied them a permit to "application for a commercial reentry license", and then the U.S. Air Force denied them permission to land at their facility. So this capsule has been humming along over our heads for an additional 6+ months, hopefully generating more crystals. Alternative landing sites in Australia and elsewhere were explored, but nothing became of it, I think the USA was exerting some sort of eminent domain authority since it was an American company. Eventually the reentry was authorized and the capsule landed in Utah and was recovered, it's now on its way to L.A. to see what new configurations the crystals achieved.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/21/varda-space-rocket-lab-nail-first-of-its-kind-spacecraft-landing-in-utah/

https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/02/22/1545243/varda-space-rocket-lab-nail-first-of-its-kind-spacecraft-landing-in-utah


Next up, an American unmanned lander touched down on the moon for the first time in 50 years, and it landed mostly intact!

The lander, Odysseus, is from a private company - an absolute first! All other lunar landers have been government projects. This one received a lot of gov't money, it's part of a NASA program to encourage private industry investment in space projects. The lander carries six scientific payloads and was launched last week on a SpaceX Falcon 9. It landed about 180 miles from the Lunar South Pole.

The location is important for three big reasons. First, it's likely to be a future landing site for manned missions because (2) there's a crater there whose rim is in sunlight like 80% of the lunar month. That makes for much more desirable conditions to live in. And (3), conversely the crater itself appears to have frozen ice, possibly on the order of two miles deep! That's a lot of frozen water! Now, we have no idea what the contaminant situation is, so you can't just go out with an ice pick and chip off some pieces and plop it in your drink.

The lander has one big problem, though: it fell over. The second lander in recent history to do so. Communications was lost in its final landing stage, and while the autonomous landing system worked remarkably well, you just can't beat an experienced pilot behind the controls. It appears that it probably clipped a boulder with one of its landing legs and fell over. The issue is that the communications mast is now lying in the lunar regolith rather than pointing straight up, so its signal is pretty weak. There's also a question as to whether this will impair the ability of the experiments to deploy.

Time will tell. And time is limited because the approaching lunar night is at -250 degrees Celsius, which will freeze the lander and that will be the end of that. I think they have something on the order of eight days to get everything done.

The Yahoo article has some nice photos of the launch.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/02/a-little-us-company-makes-history-by-landing-on-the-moon-but-questions-remain/

https://news.yahoo.com/watch-live-us-moon-landing-how-to-stream-lunar-lander-intuitive-machines-odysseus-houston-apollo-nasa-164032673.html

https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/02/22/1545243/varda-space-rocket-lab-nail-first-of-its-kind-spacecraft-landing-in-utah


And finally, Japan joined the club of countries to land unmanned probes on the moon last month. The lander is named SLIM, standing for Smart Lander for Investigating Moon. And while smart, it proved that space is hard: one of its engines failed in its landing descent and it flipped over and landed on its head.

This caused a bit of a problem with its solar panels generating power, and it took ten days for the spacecraft to power up. SLIM carried a couple of miniature rovers to move about and snap pictures, and here is the extremely cool part of this: one of the rovers was made by a TOY COMPANY! It's a company that specialized in Transformer-like robots, which is really a smart move. It's basically stored as a sphere, but it extends on an eccentric basis so that when it rolls, the two halves are offset, giving it better steering ability on the uneven terrain. Unfortunately the articles that I recovered did not have photos of the rover.

Japan is the fifth country to successfully land on the moon, following the USA, Russia, China, and India.

The CNN article has a really good photo of the lander, pity it landed on its head.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/29/asia/japan-moon-sniper-lander-resumes-intl-hnk-scn/index.html