Space News -update

Steph P. Bianchini September 28, 2019 5 Comments

It has been a while since the last time I’ve given any news about what’s going on in the sector. This is mainly due to the fact that the whole summer has been devoted to fiction -getting Frozen Wavelets ready and sending out my own work. Even this post is just a short update.

First and foremost: let’s get ready for the new SpaceX design. Tonight (at 8 pm EDT) Elon Musk is going to unveil the next generation of the company’s spacecraft. If you’re excited, you’re right: this is the prototype of the ship destined to take humans to Mars (at least, in Musk’s plans). You can watch it online here.

What’s happening right now with the Indian’s Lunar lander? If you have followed during these weeks India’s Chandrayaan-2 mission, that was aimed at sending a lander on the Moon’s South Pole, you also know that the lander has somehow got lost. The Vikram lander was targeting a site between two craters called Simpelius N and Manzinus C. The last tracking data the lander sent back to Earth before falling silent suggested that the robot was off course.”This event was India’s first attempt at a soft landing on the Moon. The site was located about 600 kilometres (370 miles) from the south pole in a relatively ancient terrain (70.8°S latitude, 23.5°E longitude). In order to visualize the site, take a quick fly-around. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) passed over the landing site on Sept. 17 and acquired a set of high-resolution images of the area; so far the LROC team has not been able to locate or image the lander. 

It was dusk when the landing area was imaged and thus large shadows covered much of the terrain; it is possible that the Vikram lander is hiding in a shadow. The lighting will be favourable when LRO passes over the site in October and once again attempts to locate and image the lander.” (NASA Press Release, 26 September 2019).

And, for the last in space exploration projects, shapeshifter robots could explore on Titan’s surface. The biggest Saturn’s moon has already been visited by Cassini Huygen probe, but now it seems the plans are getting really ambitious. “NASA describes the prototype as “a contraption that looks like a drone encased in an elongated hamster wheel,” but that’s fine, since this robot isn’t trying to look glamorous. Instead, the point is that it can split into two half-wheels, each of which is an independent drone armed with a propeller” (read the whole story here).