It eventually figured out that its moon lander suffered a software glitch and misjudged the height of the terrain below, causing it to run out of fuel and crash.Īnd sometimes there are hardware failures. This can lead to issues like the ones faced by Ispace in 2023.
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“There’s no way for a human to correct things in real time just because of how quickly it all happens.” “You have to do this all autonomously,” Addie Dove, an associate professor at the University of Central Florida working on a moon landing mission, said. There’s usually a few seconds of delay when sending commands to these spacecraft. Complicating things is the moon’s distance from Earth. Robotic landers often rely on information collected by the vehicle’s sensors, as well as imagery of their landing target collected ahead of time, which is often not very high resolution. Otherwise they risk crashing.Īll this requires knowing what the spacecraft is about to land on. The spacecraft must burn their engines so precisely that they come to a relative stop just above the surface. To land there, practically all spacecraft must use some form of rocket engine to lower themselves gently to the ground below. Unlike Earth, which has an atmosphere that helps cushion the fall of returning spacecraft, the moon has almost no atmosphere. “Because of that, you have to have navigation that understands precisely where you are and can adapt in real time.” “When you orbit the moon, you will eventually crash into the moon because the lumpy gravity will perturb your orbit,” Metzger said. Its rough terrain, craters and other factors spread the gravity unevenly. The moon is roughly a quarter the width of our planet, with much less gravity overall, making it hard to maneuver into orbit. Spacecraft must deal with wild swings in temperature, depending on which parts of the vehicle are facing the sun, and they’re often bombarded with cosmic rays - irradiated particles streaming from the sun or deep space that can easily fry electronics that aren’t well protected. Just traveling through the vacuum of space to reach the moon is a struggle to begin with. Yet physical challenges remain for lunar exploration. Intuitive Machines and Astrobotic both partnered with the space agency’s CLPS program, designed to help spur the development of commercial landers for Artemis. And unlike the Apollo era, private companies have the potential to make it there - with a little help from NASA. This means lots of lucrative government contracts. The space agency’s goal is to create a sustainable presence on the moon, claiming that learning to live and work there will help ultimately allow humans to explore the solar system. But in 2017, President Donald Trump spurred NASA to launch the Artemis initiative to send humans back.
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Various administrations proposed returning to the moon, but those programs didn’t survive political headwinds. NASA had turned its attention away from the moon after the last Apollo mission in 1972 to focus on the space shuttle, the International Space Station and other goals. “It is really new technology that’s being perfected and matured right now.”
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“We say we've been there before, but these companies haven’t been there before,” Phillip Metzger, a planetary physicist at the University of Central Florida, said in an interview. It has been more than 50 years since people have designed and sent landers to the moon, so firms were starting from almost scratch and working with novel technologies. The biggest hurdle may have been the 21st-century engineers and companies with little or no moonshot experience.