It has been nearly 40 years since human exploration of the
Solar System ended with the return of Apollo
17 to Earth. Space exploration at
that time was overwhelmingly dominated by the competition between the two Great
Powers, the Soviet Union and the United States.
But we now live in a different era, in which several nations have
ambitious plans for their space programs and the Soviet Union is no more.
Here’s
how the future of Moon exploration looks from a February 2013 perspective.
The
first lunar mission in this coming decade will be NASA’s LADEE (Lunar
Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer) orbiter mission in August 2013.
The next lunar mission to fly after
LADEE will be the Chinese Chang’e 3
spacecraft, presently aiming for takeoff in October of this year. Chang’e
3 consists of a landing vehicle and a small rover, which can leave the
lander and explore the vicinity of the landing site. The last lunar landing was carried out by the
unmanned Soviet Luna 24 mission in
1976. Chang’e 3 is far more ambitious than even the recent Chang’e 2 mission, which orbited the
Moon for a year before departing via the Earth-Moon L2 Lagrange point for its
flyby of the near-Earth asteroid Toutatis
earlier this month. I will be in Beijing
to cover the Chang’e 3 mission live in
my role as a regular commentator on China Central Television.
Hard on the heels of the Chang’e 3
launch will be India’s Chandrayaan 2,
which will orbit and land on the Moon.
The exact launch date of this mission is not yet firm, but a 2014 launch
is expected. Chandrayaan 2 was planned to deploy on the lunar surface, near the
lunar south pole, a small Russian-made rover, Luna-Glob 2, also referred to as
Luna-Resurs. It is presently
doubtful whether the Russian rover will be ready for the Chandrayaan 2 launch. The
name of the rover raises three obvious questions. First, “Glob” is not a description of an
amorphous or amebic space craft; it is the Russian word for “globe”. Second, this lunar rover is not based on the
Soviet-era Lunokhod rover designs of
40 years ago; it is a much more modern and smaller vehicle. And third, what about Luna Glob 1? Read on…
The year 2017 may see the launch of JAXA’s Selene 2, which was planned to include an orbiter, lander, and rover. The orbiter is no longer included in the mission plan, and penetrator probes one considered for the mission also appear to have been omitted. Several press reports have confused Selene 2 with a manned mission, which is categorically nonsense. This mission had been postponed for budgetary reasons, but now appears to be on schedule for a 2017 launch.
Also in
2017 we should expect the launch of China’s Chang’e
5 lander. This very ambitious
mission, which will drill 2 meters into the lunar surface, extract a core
sample, and return the sample to Earth, requires the availability of a new and
larger booster rocket, the Long March 5
(CZ-5). The first flight test of the Long March 5 is expected in 2014.
The
European Space Agency (ESA) has under consideration a lunar lander for flight
in about 2019, but budgetary debates have left the status of this mission in
doubt. Even more dubious are the Russian
Luna-Grunt 1 orbiter and lander and
the Luna-Grunt 2 lander with surface
sample return. The latter would, if
budgetary constraints allow, recapture the capabilities of the Luna 15 (?), 16, 20, 23 and 24 lunar sample return attempts of the
1970s, but with wholly new equipment.
These missions are tentatively assigned to the 2020-2021 time
frame. The “Grunt” here is not a sound
effect, but the Russian word for “ground”, as in the ill-fated Phobos-Grunt mission of 2011-12, a
vehicle intended to land on and return a surface sample from the Martian moon
Phobos. Unfortunately, it ended up
exploring a subduction zone off the coast of Chile.
1 comment:
Think any of the Lunar X-Prize contestants will succeed in landing a rover?
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