by The final preparations are underway in Cape Canaveral in Florida for a milestone mission to place a US lander on the moon, a feat not seen in more than 50 years since the Apollo project ended.
Last minute glitches aside, Falcon mission one, named after the world’s fastest animal, will roar into the sky at 7.18am UK time on Monday. After looping around the planet, it will head to the moon and slide into lunar orbit before attempting a landing soon after sunrise on February 23.
Even in the world of white-knuckle space exploration, the mission is considered dangerous. Although NASA has instruments on board the robotic lander, this is a commercial operation. No private company had achieved a soft landing on the moon or any other celestial body.
“There’s a lot riding on this,” said John Thornton, chief executive of Astrobotic, the Pittsburgh company leading the mission. “It’s a mix of emotions. There’s thrill and excitement, but I’m also a little scared because there’s a lot on the line.”
Adding to the concern is that the Vulcan Falcon rocket has never flown before, although the manufacturer, United Launch Alliance, had a 100% mission success rate with its predecessor rockets.
Peregrine is the first mission to fly under NASA’s commercial lunar payload services (CLPS) initiative, a new scheme in which the space agency pays private companies to deliver scientific equipment to the moon. The Falcon carries five NASA payloads and 15 others. One of them, a shoebox-sized rover from Carnegie Mellon University, is set to become the first US robot to take a spin on the moon.
“This whole task is not easy,” said Chris Culbert, CLPS program manager at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. “Landing on the moon is extremely difficult. We recognize that success cannot be guaranteed.”
Not all of the payloads are scientific: the trip includes a copy of Wikipedia, a physical coin loaded with bitcoin-only “moon boxes” and DHL carrying mementos from novels and photographs to a small lump of Mount Everest. Also on board, courtesy of space memorial companies Elysium Space and Celestis, are cremated human remains and DNA, some of which belong to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.
The final payloads were separated. In a letter to NASA, Buu Nygren, president of the Navajo Nation, emphasized that the moon was sacred to many Native cultures, and said that depositing the material was “tantamount to disbelief.” In response, Culbert emphasized that Falcon was a commercial mission and that NASA could not tell Astrobotic what they could and could not fly.
The Hawk is needed for an ancient lava flow called Sinus Viscositatis, or Bay of Stickiness, so named because the formations suggest that the lava had an unusual consistency. If all goes well, Peregrine’s instruments will measure radiation levels, surface and subsurface water ice, the magnetic field, and the highly compressed layer of gas known as the atmosphere. It is hoped that the readings will help minimize risks and take advantage of the moon’s natural resources when humans return to its surface.
“It’s high risk, for sure, but we knew that when we went into this game,” said Simeon Barber, senior research fellow at the Open University and UK co-principal investigator on the Peregrine ion trap mass spectrometer. or the PITMS Instrument, a mini mass spectrometer that sniffs molecules as they bounce along the surface of the moon.
PITMS will analyze the composition of the moon’s exosphere and monitor how it changes over the eight or so Earth days the lander will operate. Researchers hope to see the effect of natural cycles, such as temperature swings from 100C to -100C, and the activities of the lander itself. “We asked the rover team to make a donut to kick off some gas,” Barber said. “They said they will try.”
As a potential resource for future missions, water is a key molecule to obtain. PITMS could reveal how water molecules are released from the surface during the day and recaptured at night, shedding light on lunar water circulation.
The Falcon is just the first in a number of landers destined for the moon under the CLPS scheme. The next one, built by Houston-based Intuitive Machines, is scheduled to launch in mid-February. It will take a more direct route to the moon and may even touch down before the Falcon.
While many scientists welcome the rise in commercial interest in the moon, some have called for agreements to protect sites of special interest, such as potential future bases for lunar telescopes or gravitational detectors. “People should think about this now,” said Professor Katherine Joy at the University of Manchester, a member of the Prospect science team, which will use a drilling and sampling tool on a future CLPS mission to assess resources on the moon.
“Space mining is a long way off, but companies are taking those first steps to understand where you would go and what technology you would use. We need to think about the regulatory framework before things move too quickly.”
