An Early Manned Mission to Mars in 2018?

On 27 February Dennis Tito, who paid his way to the ISS as a tourist back in 2001, will be announcing the plans of a new private space company, the Inspiration Mars Foundation.  The rumor mill has it that their purpose is to launch a manned expedition to Mars as early as January 2018. 

According to several sources, the mission would be a 501-day free-flying flyby (neither orbiting nor landing on Mars).  It would be lifted into space by a Falcon Heavy launch vehicle and with crew accommodation for two people in the form of a modified Dragon capsule, of recent ISS fame.  This scheme would incorporate ideas already put forward by SpaceX’s Elon Musk, who is a vocal advocate of both private space development and the exploration and eventual colonization of Mars.

The mission would be financed privately and would advance on a much more ambitious schedule than any governmental or intergovernmental project could reasonably expect to achieve.

For those who instinctively disbelieve the concept that private enterprise can provide access to space cheaper and on a larger scale than governmental entities can, a refresher course on SpaceShipTwo, the Bigelow inflatable space station module, the Dragon capsule, and the dozens of companies that have set their sights on providing low-cost private access to space would be in order.

This seems to be a typically American thrust, but in fact Canadian, European, and other companies are also engaged in these pursuits.  In fiction, the first manned mission to the Moon was envisioned by Jules Verne (De la Terre a la Lune; 1865) as being a private venture funded by rich American industrialists, building on Civil War military technology, and launched (fired!) from Florida by a giant gun.  In fact, strangely enough, the first technically plausible suggestion of how to get humans into space was in a novel, “Beyond the Planet Earth: In the Year 2000”, written by the pre-Soviet Russian visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovskii in 1916.  In it, the impetus for the development of manned spaceflight came from an international team of scientists and a group of private investors whom we would now call venture capitalists.

Travel to Mars (“Barsoom”) was a standard theme of the writings of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  Percy Gregg’s novel “Across the Zodiac” (1880) recounts a visit to Mars.  Another early tale of interplanetary travel, like Tsiolkovskii’s novel also set in the year 2000,  was “A Journey in Other Worlds”, authored in 1894 by John Jacob Astor IV.  These and many other books, such as E. E. “Doc” Smith’s novels, generally attribute space travel ventures to innovators and private individual, not governments.

Perhaps Dennis Tito’s announcement will bring that spirit of non-governmental initiative not just into space, but all the way to Mars.

Mining Asteroids, 2013

We now have two competing companies with their sights set on mining asteroids for commercial reasons.  Both companies are pursuing the dream I developed in my book, “Mining the Sky”, and both companies include long-time friends and students on their rolls.  To me the fact that there is competition in this endeavor is at least as important as the fact that it is being done at all.  It is through competition that new ideas are stimulated and old ideas are put to the test.

Which of these companies is the wave of the future?  I confess to having no crystal ball.  Being near the head of the line is no guarantee of long-term dominance—when’s the last time you used a Commodore PET or a TRS 80, not mention an Apple I?  Played any games on your TI-99 recently?  How’s the market for Xerox Altos?

Huge sales do not even guarantee long-term success: the best-selling personal computer ever was the Commodore 64, which, because of a price war with the TI-99, drove all players to the brink of bankruptcy (or over it).

The IBM PC and the Apple II were not “present at the creation”: they were just better…and quite different in design philosophy.  PCs and Apples still lead the personal computer world, although IBM has long since sold its own PC business to Lenovo in China, and armies of PC clones abound.

So are Planetary Resources Inc. and Deep Space industries the TI-99s and Commodore 64s of the space mining endeavor?  Or are they Apples and PCs?  Tune in again in ten years and maybe we’ll know.

A sure measure of the health of this new industry will be when even more competitors appear.

I have seen asteroid mining referred to as a “billion dollar industry”.  This is not correct: if the idea works, it is a multi-trillion dollar industry, making available to mankind more resources than the human race has used to date.  And if it is not successful, it will be known as a multi-million dollar flop.

I’m betting on long-term success.  Yesterday I joined the staff of Deep Space Industries as their Chief Scientist.  If, as the researchers are telling us, working Sudoku and crossword puzzles helps keep the brain functioning, then opening up the Solar System to the human race is likely to be an even more stimulating endeavor.  We no longer need fear “running out of resources” on a “finite planet”. 

The sky is no longer the limit.

Global Warming Update: What to Make of the Data

First, it is undeniably true that humans are injecting carbon dioxide and soot into the atmosphere at a record pace.  The data are uncontested.  Second, it is undeniably true that CO₂ is a “greenhouse gas” which inhibits radiation of Earth’s surface heat into space and thus has a global warming effect.  Third, it is well established that water vapor has a far stronger warming effect than CO₂.  As a further complication, clouds made by the condensation of that water vapor can lead to either cooling or heating, depending on the density, altitude, and particle sizes in the clouds.  Thus we are forced to estimate what effect warming by CO₂ will have on the water vapor (and cloud) content of the atmosphere, a very difficult task.  Fourth, we must also come to grips with the warming effects of soot and carbon black, which also are products of human origin via everything from biomass cooking fires to coal-fired power plants to diesel engines.  Fifth, we need to understand all the correlates of natural processes such as solar variability and volcanic dust emission.  We can see clearly from the data in the HADCRUT4 graph in the previous post (Global Warming Update) that warming (and cooling) of Earth is far more complex than any one factor can explain: attributing all the warming in any time interval to CO₂ makes CO₂ appear more important than it really is, and biases all predictions in the direction of exaggerated warming.

Temperatures are influenced by the amount of radiation absorbed by gases—but not in a linear fashion.  The temperature increase caused by multiplying the abundance of a gas such as CO₂ by, say, a factor of two is called the “climate sensitivity”: temperature is related to the logarithm of the absorbing gas abundance.  Doubling the CO₂ abundance from the 19^th-century level of less than 300 parts per million (ppm) to about 600 ppm would have the same warming effect as doubling the CO₂ pressure again, to 1200 ppm.  So what is this “climate sensitivity”?  Climate modelers have used numbers ranging from about 1.5 to 6.5 ^oC per doubling of CO₂.  Current wisdom favors a number near 1.5 or 1.6, right at the very bottom of the range used for generating dire climate predictions, for the short-term effects of solar heating.

Prof. Berntsen in a previous post suggested that the rapid warming of the 1978-1998 time period was due to a random combination of natural factors, carbon dioxide warming, and soot warming.  If we wrongly attribute all the observed warming to CO₂, we are led inevitably to a gross overestimate of its warming power, predicting unreasonably high “climate sensitivity” and leading computer models to exaggerate the future warming trend.  If Prof. Berntsen’s estimate holds up, the climate sensitivity of CO₂ after taking out the effect of soot is only about 60% of 1.5-1.6 degrees: call it 1 ºC.

How would we describe the temperature graph in the previous post without making reference to theories and explanations?  We could break the graph up into five “eras”: 1850 to 1927, with no significant net temperature change and a temperature anomaly of -0.3 ^oC; 1927 to 1940, with a warming of about 0.3 ^oC; 1940 to 1978 with gentle cooling of 0.15 ^oC; 1978 to 1998 with a strong warming of 0.65 ^oC, and 1998 to the present, with no significant change.  The “noise” in the data is striking: there are many independent effects of similar size at work, which sometimes work in synchrony.  Of course, if we included data extending back to the “Little Ice Age” of the 1600s, all of the data on this graph would be termed “very warm”.  And if we were to reach back to the “Roman Warm Period” 2000 years ago we would find temperatures closely similar to those of today.  Going back 9000 years to the early Holocene (the present interglacial period) we would have found an Earth that was warmer than today without any human influence or record-high CO₂ content, powered solely by natural variability.

It is sobering to realize that most of the “noise” in the temperature graph is not random measurement errors, but real climate effects that are not adequately treated in (and were not predicted by) present models.  But remember that, no matter how complex our modeling of the atmosphere, some important factors such as volcanic emission of dust and sulfur gases and the effects of the variability of solar activity and solar wind strength will still defy prediction. 

Climate modeling is one of the most difficult computational problems known.  Like any science, the body of available data expands rapidly, and computer models must constantly be updated to include those data.   Many effects, such as the role of clouds or of soot, or the variability of the Sun, are recognized as important factors even while we still lack the detailed quantitative understanding of them that we would need to incorporate them into computer models.  Critical thought is the essence of science: we learn from experience and constantly improve our theories in the light of new data.  Similarly, theory points out what data we need to improve our understanding, and may even suggest how to go about acquiring them.  Skepticism is not the enemy of science; it is the very heart of the scientific endeavor.

We need an end to name-calling and personal attacks and threats.  We need to remove the discussion of global warming from the realm of politics and economically involved interest groups of both extremes.  We need to accept that anthropogenic global warming is not a “settled science”, but a vigorous and ambitious area of research in which new knowledge is of critical importance.  Remember that Newtonian physics was once a “settled science”: and then along came Einstein.  For about a century, celestial mechanics was also viewed as “settled science”: then along came spaceflight and modern mathematics.  Climate science is neither “settled” nor “fraudulent”: we must stop repeating and amplifying the most strident rhetoric, very little of which emanates either from scientists or from those in the media with real understanding of the issues.  We need less activism and more understanding.

There is one final very simple point to make: the phenomena of nature are incredibly complex.  Simplistic slogans such as “big industry is destroying our planet” and “climate science is a left-wing plot” are not only ignorant; they endanger our future.  Let’s bury that simplistic rhetoric and strengthen the science of complexity.

Chelyabinsk Update

      1.      Yield:  Current evidence suggests an explosive yield of a little less  than 1 megaton of TNT, comparable to an ICBM warhead.  We should be very grateful that it did not detonate closer to the ground, or we would be looking at tens of thousands of civilian deaths.

2.      Optimum burst height:  The nuclear weapons literature, including the classic 1977 analysis entitled The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, shows that the effective range of destruction from an aerial explosion depends sensitively on the altitude of the explosion.  An explosion at sufficiently high altitude strikes a very large area with a weak shock wave, rattling windows but doing negligible damage.  In the daytime, or in cloudy weather, there may be no sightings of a fireball.  A little lower, and the same explosion would break windows.  Glass shards accelerated by the blast wave are the principal hazard.  This is the Chelyabinsk event.  Move the explosion a little closer to the ground, and radiant heating of the surface becomes important.  Fires can be ignited by the flash, especially clothing, window curtains, and automobile upholstery.  In rural areas, trees and brush ignite.  This is the Tunguska event of 1908, which flattened hundreds of square kilometers of forest and burned 2200 square kilometers.  A little closer to the ground, and blast overpressures become high enough to cause structural failure of reasonably well-constructed buildings.  The “premature” failure of the factory building in Chelyabinsk probably owes more to its Soviet-era construction quality than to the severity of the blast.  At about the same explosion altitude, the air blast that follows the flash (traveling at the speed of sound rather than the speed of light) hits hard enough to blow out many of the fires, but potentially fanning others into a firestorm.  In this sequence from high altitude to very low altitudes, each successive blast strikes with greater intensity (higher blast overpressure) over a smaller target area.  A body that reaches the surface either intact or as a compact swarm of high-velocity fragments can excavate a crater, depositing almost all of its kinetic energy in an area about 100 times the actual area of the crater by means of high-speed explosive ejection of debris from the crater.  This is Meteor Crater in Arizona.  Very large impacts eject vast quantities of dust and vapor and shock-produced nitrogen oxides in the form of a mushroom cloud, which lifts them to high altitudes and spreads them widely over the Earth.  The very biggest impacts seen in the geological record actually blast away the atmosphere above a plane tangent to Earth’s surface at the point of impact, hurling crater eject worldwide.  This is the Chicxulub event at the end of the Cretaceous Era, the famed dinosaur-killer.  For a given explosive yield there is an altitude, called the “optimum burst height”, at which the area of devastation is maximized.  For a 1-megaton explosion the optimum burst height is about 1700 meters (a mile) and widespread structural damage occurs for any blast below about 5000 m (3 mi).  For a 10-megaton explosion the optimum burst height is near 5000 m and the threshold for structural damage is near 12000 m (7 miles).  At yields of 1000 megatons (1 gigaton), a 10,000-year event, severe surface damage occurs at just about any plausible burst height. 

3.      Entry Angle and Velocity:  It is aerodynamic pressure that causes an entering body to crush and shear itself into fragments.  The aerodynamic pressure is proportional to the density of the atmosphere and to the square of the velocity.  The density of the atmosphere drops off roughly exponentially with altitude, and is therefore very low at 100 km altitude.  As a general rule, bodies that enter at lower speeds penetrate deeper than those that enter at higher (cometary) speeds.  They contain less kinetic energy per ton, but are more efficient at delivering that energy to the ground.  Bodies that enter the atmosphere at shallow grazing angles (nearly horizontal motion) spend a relative long time at high altitudes where the atmosphere is thin and crushing is least probable.  They tend to decelerate rather gently and therefore are traveling slower at any altitude; therefore they penetrate deeper before exploding than a vertically-entering body of the same size and speed.  Note that, for any given material, the higher the velocity, the higher the altitude of explosion: the faster the bullet, the less its penetration.  There is also a huge range of strengths for asteroidal and cometary material: cometary “fluff” fails at high altitudes; iron meteorites (M-class asteroids) often penetrate all the way to the ground before exploding, and hence deliver their full original kinetic energy to a crater (or small cluster of craters) with high efficiency.  This is the Sikhote-Alin meteorite fall in eastern Siberia in 1947.

4.      Linear Explosion:  The energy dissipated by a strong, deeply penetrating bolide is often released nearly in the form of a point explosion, with almost all the original kinetic energy being given off in the same moment.  But many smaller bodies deposit their energy along a lengthy path through the atmosphere as they break up in many stages.  This is especially true of bodies with shallow entry angles.  Since the impactor may be traveling at 20 km per second, its speed is about Mach 30.  We think of the shock wave from a supersonic aircraft traveling at Mach 2 or 3 as a cone with an opening angle of, say, 30 degrees originated at the nose of the aircraft.  But at Mach 30 the opening angle is only about 2 degrees: the energy released is very nearly in the form of a linear explosion.  Some theorists talk of the “exploding wire” model, which is not a bad way to picture it.  Imagine a “wire” stretching across the sky that detonates nearly instantaneously.  The first sound to reach you is not from the point where the explosion began but from the segment of the wire nearest to you.  That sound reaches you as a strong, sharp blast, a “sonic boom”, after which the sound reaches you from ever more distant locations on the wire.  Thus after the first sharp boom you hear simultaneously the noises emitted both before and after the body passed closest to you.  These explosions and “rumbling” continue until, at last, you hear the first sounds given off during entry.  The first sounds, having traveled so much farther, reach you last.

5.      Crater:  There have been reports on the internet, some illustrated by photos of a burning crater, that purport to show the impact point of the Chelyabinsk bolide.  The photos are simply a hoax, showing file pictures of a natural gas fire that has been burning for decades in an oil field in Kazakhstan.   If there is an impact crater, it is a hole found in the ice of a lake.  That suggests a low fire hazard.

6.      Meteorites:  Meteorite recovery from the bolide would be enormously valuable, and this morning’s news claims over 50 stones recovered to date.  My guess is that there is a potential for recovery of hundreds or even thousands of stones, and that they will prove to be ordinary chondrites (the most abundant types of meteorites, of H, L, and LL classes).  Much weaker (carbonaceous) material would explode at high altitudes; strong (iron or stony-iron) meteorites could penetrate to the ground intact and make a huge crater.  Let’s keep our eyes on this: as the many images of the event are carefully studied we should soon know the precise path of the bolide and hence know where to look for any other meteorites it may have dropped. 

7.      Russian Defense Ministry Spokesman: A high-ranking Russian military officer has been quoted as saying that “this was no meteor; it was an American military test.”  If you can see any military advantage to breaking windows in Chelyabinsk, you’re more imaginative than I am.  Also, Russian scientific sources are quoting entry speeds of 18-20 kilometers per second, which is far above entry velocity for return from the Moon (about 11 km/s) and insanely larger than the top speed of any military weapons system ever devised.  The energy content of the explosion suggests a mass of 10,000 tons, 100 times the lifting ability of a Saturn 5 or the Space Shuttle (neither of which is in service), and about equal to the displacement of a guided missile cruiser such as the Ticonderoga.  This officer would profit from conversing with the Russian scientists who investigated the Tunguska event, and who actually do know something about these events.  Besides, if we take his explanation seriously, we would have to credit those aggressive Americans with having had even higher technology in 1908.

 

The Chelyabinsk Event, 15 February 2013

Early today a huge aerial explosion rocked the Siberian city of Chelyabinsk, collapsing or damaging buildings and shattering windows throughout the city.  Slivers of window glass accelerated by the blast wave from the explosion sent at least 500 people to hospitals for treatment, with many more injured less severely.  The media are trumpeting a “meteor” explosion and speculating about a link to this afternoon’s flyby of the Near-Earth Asteroid 2012 DA14.  I am being barraged with requests for information, even though the amount of solid quantitative date now available is minimal.  Nonetheless, there are several points that can confidently be made.

1.       This was not a meteor.  A meteor is an optical phenomenon, a flash of light seen in the sky when a piece of cosmic debris (usually dust- or sand grain-sized) enters Earth’s upper atmosphere, converts its huge kinetic energy into heat, and “burns up” (vaporizes), usually at an altitude of at least 100 km.  The Chelyabinsk object was a fragment of asteroidal or cometary origin, probably several meters in diameter, properly called a “meteoroid” or, more loosely, a “small asteroid”.  A brilliant fireball seen in the atmosphere is called a bolide.  Some bolides, caused by entry of large pieces of hard rock, drop meteorites on the ground: a meteorite is a rock of cosmic origin that reaches the ground in macroscopic pieces (not dust or vapor).  Some bolides are cometary fluff, of which nothing is strong enough to survive as a meteorite.  This body was fairly strong, and is therefore more likely to be an asteroid-derived meteoroid.  Indeed, some Russian sources are claiming that a meteorite from the blast fell in a lake in nearby Chebarkul, Russia, but this has not been verified.  Such judgments are tricky because the distance to the fireball is usually wildly underestimated (“it cleared my barn, so it must have been at least 50 feet up”).

2.      The path of 2012 DA14 is well understood.  It is in a generally Earth-like orbit, except that its orbit is inclined relative to the plane of Earth’s orbit around the Sun.  To first approximation, it is neither “catching up with Earth” or “being swept up from behind by Earth”: Its motion relative to Earth it basically at right angles to the direction of our orbital motion.  It will pass us from south to north.  Think of two cars on the freeway traveling in the same direction at the same speed, one of them in lane 2 and the other switching from lane 1 to lane 3.  Chelyabinsk is basically “behind the Earth” as seen by the approaching asteroid.  In other words, the Chelyabinsk object is not associated with 2012 DA14.

3.      There is also speculation about 2012 DA14 being accompanied by debris and even small satellites.  This is well founded, but these fragments, produced by collisions of small rocks with the asteroid, must follow paths that are closely similar to that of the parent asteroid.  If they exist, and if they hit Earth, they will do so near or to the south of the Equator.  Incidentally, the orbits of satellites of NEAs are usually close in, simply because distant satellites will be stripped away by the tidal forces of the Sun (and now, during a close flyby, by Earth also), and their orbital speeds are tiny (centimeters to meters per second).

4.      There was an early report of Russia scrambling jet fighters to intercept the object.  Here’s how that works: suppose the bolide is traveling at the absolute minimum entry speed of about 10 km/second and radar picks it up at a range of 1000 km.  This radar detection tells them the speed of the bolide.  From detection to arrival they have 100 seconds, tops.  Then they have the interesting task of intercepting something moving 10 (or 20) km/s with an airplane that has a top speed of, say, Mach 2.5.  That’s about 0.75 km/s.  See the problem?  The real military significance of impact airbursts is not that it is impossible to intercept them with jet aircraft: it is the danger of a completely unpredicted high-yield aerial explosion occurring over a major city in a heavily armed, politically unstable region: think, Tel Aviv, Tehran, etc.  Instant World War III.

5.      There’s a lot of talk and speculation about how rare such events are.  Any meaningful statistics would require that we know how big it really was (the bigger the rarer).  But a reasonable first guess is that this is a decadal object: ten per century hitting Earth, of which typically nine are in sparsely populated or unpopulated areas, such as the Tunguska Event of 30 June 1908 and the two Brazilian events around 1930.  We’ll know more about the size and blast energy soon.  So my take is that these events are not rare, but having one over a city is unusual.

               In the 1997 edition of my book Rain of Iron and Ice I included a lengthy table of reports from public media and scientific journals documenting injuries, deaths, property damage, and near-misses due to cosmic impact events, ranging from a meteorite knocking off a girl’s hat to a powerful airburst showering a city in China with tens of thousands of stones and killing over 10,000 people [Ch’ing-yang, Shansi, 1490 AD; source: Kevin Yao, Paul Weissman, and Don Yeomans, Meteoritics 29, 864-971 (1994)].   My Monte Carlo models of the long-term effect of impact events in my 2000 book Comet and Asteroid Impact Hazards on a Populated Earth provide quantitative estimates of the events occurring in hundreds of 100-year computer models.  In it, Model H89 generates a low-altitude airburst of 83 megatons yield at an altitude of 19 km.  A random location generator placed this blast over the city of Orleans, France, killing 40,000 people and igniting a firestorm.  After this model was published, Pete Worden, who was then Commandant of Falcon AFB in Colorado Springs, sent me an account that he had found in Bishop Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks:  “580 AD  In Louraine, one morning before the dawning of the day, a great light was seen crossing the heavens, falling toward the east.  A sound like a tree crashing down was heard over all the countryside, but it could surely not have been any tree, since it was heard more than fifty miles away… The city of Bordeaux was badly shaken by an earthquake… The city of Orleans also burned with so great a fire that even the rich lost almost everything.”

The Role of Global Warming in Causing Asteroid Impacts

My son Chris brought this to my attention.

The Global Warming – Asteroid Connection

In it we are treated to the spectacle of a CNN anchor actually asking Bill Nye whether global warming can cause an asteroid impact. 

Is this the level of ignorance we should come to expect of the media?  I’m afraid it is.

Bill Nye, with astonishing self-control, did not break out laughing at the absurdity.  In his place, I would have lost it…and maybe that would not have been a bad thing.

We have already had to listen to explanations of why cold snaps and heavy snowfall are caused by global warming.  What about the Dow Jones Industrial Average?  What about sunspots?  The phases of the Moon?  And what about fact-checking and editorial oversight and minimal standards of scientific competence, such as completion of a Junior High School general science course?

And I was just getting over the news, courtesy of the Huffington Post and CNN, that Betelgeuse was about to explode and wipe us out.  (See my earlier post on “The Sky is Falling!”)

Hmm, I wonder—can global warming cause a star to go supernova?  Stay tuned to CNN and find out…

 

CNN Announces Iran Puts Monkey in Orbit! (Not)

I heard it clearly: CNN announced that Iran had put a monkey in orbit.  Several news sources also mentioned that the United States could not confirm the story.  So what’s the truth?

The truth is that CNN apparently was hoodwinked by an astonishingly misleading press release from the Iranian press agency, which used the word “satellite” to describe a mere probe.  The Iranian launch was on a Kavoshgar 3 ballistic missile capable of attaining 100 km altitude but far too slow to achieve orbital velocity.  The monkey flew a parabolic trajectory that reached 120 km altitude, but certainly did not circle the Earth.  American radar and optical tracking stations regularly monitor all satellite traffic, and infrared-sensing military surveillance platforms in geosynchronous orbit high above the equator keep an eye on all rocket launches.  But neither of these tracking systems is equipped with a monkey detector.  Anything that gives off lots of heat is fair game: bored staff members at USAF Space Command used to pass the time by checking whether the trains on the Trans-Siberian Railroad were keeping to their schedules.  But a train gives off far more heat than a monkey.

So why is 100 km altitude considered “space”?  The answer is quite simple: 100 km is the lowest altitude at which a typical satellite can survive for a single orbit against the retarding forces of air friction.  Satellites with unusually large area (such as a large expanse of solar cells) and low mass experience more drag deceleration, and would not last for even one orbit at this altitude before reentering the atmosphere and burning up.  Compact, dense satellites (such as those launched to study Earth’s gravitational field) would last a little longer.  But for typical satellite designs, surviving one orbit (about 87 minutes) at 100 km would be about normal.  Besides, 100 is such a nice, round number.

And what does “in orbit” mean?  It means that the object is following a ballistic (un-propelled) path that will take it all the way around a body such as Earth or the Sun.  For orbits around Earth, that means at least a 40,000 km trip.  The Iranian monkey launch traveled about 200 km, not 40,000, and briefly reached a maximum altitude of 120 km.

Not that Iran can’t launch small satellites: it has already done so three times, in 2009, 2011 and 2012.  A real orbital mission with a monkey aboard is a possibility for the future.  The remarkably uninformative press release by the Iranian press agency tells nothing about the launch, but does mention that the purpose of this flight is to prepare for manned spaceflight—and adds that the launch was in celebration of Mohammed’s birthday.  The Director of the Iran Space Agency, Hamid Fazeli, recently announced that Iran plans to send humans on “half-hour” space flights “within four years”.  This is clearly not orbital flight, and I expect that “half hour” will eventually be found to mean “quarter hour”.  He also claimed that Iran will be ready for manned orbital flight within 10 years.  By then, the intrepid Iranonaut may find himself unnoticed among the swarms of Western space tourists.

Who, if anyone, should care about this monkey mission?  Israel, which is within reach of Iranian ballistic missiles such as the one used in this launch.

In other satellite-related Iranian news, I see from a posting at  http://www.ncr-iran.org/en/news/society/12720-iran-regime-is-fearful-of-use-of-satellite-in-villages that Iran is confiscating satellite dishes from its citizens as part of its “cultural offensive”.  Certainly, “offensive” is the operative word here.

Exploring the Moon: The Next Ten Years

          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…

 In 2015 we can expect the launch of China’s Chang’e 4 lander and rover.  This mission, featuring increased rover autonomy, will extend the technical scope of Chang’e 3.  Also in 2015 the Russian Space Agency RKA will launch the Luna-Glob 1 spacecraft into lunar orbit.  Originally planned for launch several years ago, this spacecraft was delayed by Russian budgetary constraints.  The highlight of the mission as presently planned is the deployment of four penetrators (provided by the Japanese Space Agency JAXA) which will impact the lunar surface at high speed and return data on both the impact deceleration and the seismic activity of the lunar interior.  The orbiter will study solar wind interaction with the Moon and the dust environment at orbital altitudes, and also carry a cosmic ray experiment package.  The very name of this mission is subject to change: possibly due to financial constraints, it appears that this mission will be divided into two parts, a lander to be launched in 2015 and an orbiter in 2016.

       
          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.