The Firefly Blue Ghost moonprobe conducted its trans-lunar injection on February 8th, launching it on a 4-day journey to lunar orbit (Figs. 1 & 2). A mid-course correction was performed on February 9th.
After a 4-minute 15-second capture burn on February 13th (Figs. 3 & 4), the probe lowered its orbit to 75 miles on February 18th with a three-minute 18-second burn (Fig. 5), and after 16 days in orbit (Fig. 6) it completed a descent to Mare Crisium, the dot above the Man in the Moon’s right eyebrow, on March 2nd (Fig. 7).
After so many failed landing attempts in 2023-24, the NASA Deputy Director commented, “They made it look easy. But it wasn’t.” Blue Ghost is carrying a record number of ten research payloads for NASA, ‘most’ of which were reported to be operating successfully by March 5th.
The mission is intended to last for one lunar day; the first photo was uninspiring (Fig. 8), but next ones showed a lunar sunrise, the first such picture (Figs. 9 & 10).
Another showed a dramatic view of the Earth above the spacecraft’s shadow (Fig. 11).
It looks remarkably like one of the classic paintings by Chesley Bonestell for Willy Ley’s The Conquest of Space (1950), but unfortunately that can’t be shown for comparison for copyright reasons. On March 5th NASA’s Lunar Orbiter found Blue Ghost as a tiny white dot on the Moon’s surface (at the centres of the squares, Figs. 12-14): different people find it easier to see at different magnifications, and some can’t see it at all.
After a joint launch with Blue Ghost (Fig. 15), Japanese company iSpace’s Resilience lander has been in a high elliptical orbit around the Earth, which brought it to a gravitational slingshot past the Moon at 5,220 miles on February 14th . The resultant orbital change will save a great deal of fuel when Resilience comes to its capture burn position, after which a landing will be attempted in June in Mare Frigoris, the ‘eyebrow’ of the Moon high in the northern hemisphere. To achieve the high latitude, Resilience flew over the north pole of the Moon, capturing Mare Frigoris, the Bay of Rainbows on the rim of Mare Imbrium, and Mare Crisium near the terminator at lower left centre (Fig. 16). After landing, its rover is intended to explore outwards in a spiral from the Hakuto-R carrier, for the duration of a lunar day (Fig. 17).
Intuitive Machines’ second attempt at a soft lunar landing, with its IM-2 Athena probe (Fig. 18), took flight on February 26th (Figs. 19 & 20).
After a short stay in parking orbit, it performed trans-lunar injection and separated cleanly from the upper stage, which soon afterwards released three independent probes, one for NASA and two for private companies (Fig. 21).
Sad to say, two of those three independent probes met trouble after release. NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer, equipped with new and more sensitive instruments to look for water ice from orbit (Fig. 22), developed power issues 12 hours after launch, and although contact with it was re-established, as of March 7th it’s in a slow unscheduled rotation and although its path will bring it into more sunlight, the intended navigational burns have been missed and it remains to be seen what if anything can be done.
The Astroforge Odin probe (Figs. 23 & 24), a private venture to the asteroid 2022 OB5, ahead of a follow-up mission to land there and possible future mining, failed to ‘phone home’ after release and it’s since been established that it too is in a slow unscheduled rotation; unless full contact can be re-established, that may be the end of it.
The third rideshare was the Epic Aerospace Chimera (Fig. 25), carrying 16 small satellites for carriage to gerosynchronous orbit – successfully, as far as I know. There was an initial delay in establishing contact with Athena after releasing them, but it was achieved (Figs. 26 & 27) and all seemed well for the Moon on March 6th – but see below.
The return of Butch Wilmore and Sunni Williams from the International Space Station will be part of the Crew Dragon Mission 9 return, and was to be after the Crew 10 mission was launched on a brand new SpaceX capsule and the handover of the ISS took place. President Trump has added that the wait has been due to his predecessor’s indifference, and Elon Musk followed suit, but actually the usual Soyuz lifeboats have been attached to the ISS throughout and they could have been brought back any time, if necessary. The new Crew Dragon is behind schedule, and NASA has now announced that Crew 10 will fly on March 12th, using the Endurance capsule which has already flown three times. The return will take place about a week later, after the handover, but of course the launch, the return or both could be delayed by other factors, such as weather at the launch or landing site.
Meanwhile Russia has launched an unmanned Progress cargo ferry to the ISS, and its shroud bore a logo commemorating Pavel Belayev, who was Alexei Leonov’s crewmate when Leonov made the first ever spacewalk, from Voshkod 2 (Figs. 28-30). As well as the 80th anniversary of that mission, this one marked what would have been Belayev’s 100th birthday. Docking with the ISS was successful on March 1st (Figs. 31 & 32), but the shrouds had been discarded during the final stages of boost.
March 6th turned into an unexpectedly busy day. Not much more than an hour before the Athena Moon landing, I got a notification that Europe’s Ariane 6 was about to make its second launch – which duly took place on schedule at 4.24 p.m., our time (Fig. 33).
After reaching an elliptical parking orbit, the second stage was to make four separate burns, to demonstrate capability to launch multiple satellites, before releasing this mission’s payload. I had intended to go over to Athena landing coverage at 5.15 p.m., but then it was announced that the ESA coverage would be off for 20 minutes, so I switched over right away.
I followed the full landing sequence from Powered Descent Initiation to touchdown near Mons Mouton, the closest approach yet to the lunar south pole (Figs. 34 & 35).
All went well (Fig. 36) until the Athena was within 6 metres off the surface (Fig. 37), at which point it appeared to be hovering and ‘hunting’, as if unable to decide on a landing spot. Despite all the assurances that the spacecraft was completely autonomous and ready for all contingencies, the controllers commanded it to begin the post-landing sequence, forcing it to switch off the descent engine and ‘safe’ the propulsion system. They ordered images as a priority, to establish the spacecraft’s orientation, but on March 7th the first one showed it on its side (Fig. 38).
There will be big disappointment if NASA can’t release the miniature MAPP rover (Fig. 39), and is unable to use its TRANSIT ice drill, or the GRACE ‘micro-hopper’ which is intended to explore shadowed crater interiors (Fig. 40).
Then that same night came the launch of the 8th SpaceX/Superheavy combination, after receiving clearance from the Federal Aviation Authority at the weekend. The Starship had carried out a record 2-minute static firing (Fig. 41) to check out the modifications following the loss of Flight Test 7, and went to immediate stacking (Fig. 42) for a launch attempt on Monday 3rd.
After two more attempts the launch went to March 6th, our time, and I could not get into live coverage until it was over, possibly because there were 1.5 million other viewers. After innumerable repeats of the Monday scrub, and adverts for US cars and holidays in Ireland, I finally managed to get through to the NSF coverage when it was all over.
It might have been just as well, though, because after a textbook launch (Fig. 43), staging, separation and booster recapture (Fig. 44), the Starship had exploded in the final minute of its 6-engine burn, just like FT-7. After a time looking at the captured booster without sound, NSF went to a studio discussion. This time the Starcams on the Ship had retained contact with the Starlink satellites, and the sharp-eyed experts were able to dissect the sequence frame-by-frame and pinpoint each event. The problem began with a fuel leak beside one of the three outer engines, and when the fuel ignited externally it took out two of the inner ones and another outer one. Two of the outer engines continued firing and put the Starship into a tumble end-over-end, with dramatic views of the Earth seen through the flames. Then came the breakup and the recall of aircraft north of Cuba as the debris cloud descended.
Several possible causes were noted. The current Starship models were built to take the new Raptor 3 engines in preparation, but are flying with Raptor 2s because the new ones aren’t ready, and perhaps are less compatible with them. Also the FT-7 explosion is now attributed to destructive resonances in a new fuel-line system, and these may not fully have been eliminated; and both FT-7 and FT-8 had individual fuel supplies to the outer engines, where previous successful splashdowns have had a central supply system which may prove to have been better. What everyone agreed on was that there will be no attempt to capture the Starship on FT-9, because data on the new re-entry systems are needed for that. SpaceX now has the desired FAA clearance for 25 launches this year, so we may not have long to wait for the next attempt.
Finally, in ‘The Sky Above You’ I pointed out that between here and 2027 the New Horizons probe is expected to leave the Solar System, penetrating the ‘heliosheath’ where the Solar Wind meets the interstellar medium. It has only been done twice before, by Voyagers 1 and 2. The confirmation that it had been done came with a sudden drop in Solar Wind particles and a corresponding rise in low-energy cosmic rays, detected by the spacecraft (Fig. 45).
But as the two probes launched in 1977 reach the limit of their nuclear power systems, to keep them operating just a little longer engineers switched off the cosmic ray detector on Voyager 1 on February 25th, and the charged particle counter on Voyager 2 will go the same way on March 24th. Starting with identical suites of ten instruments in 1977, they will be left with two each in 2026, and it’s hoped that at least one can be working into the 2030s. But because the spacecraft are in different regions beyond the heliosheath, they will no longer be able to compare ‘like with like’ as effectively when New Horizons makes the same transition.
NASA has an Earth-orbiting spacecraft called Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX, Explorer 91 or SMEX-10), launched in October 2008, whose mission is to discover the nature of the interactions between the solar wind and the interstellar medium at the edge of the Solar System, by generating full sky maps of the intensity (integrated over the line-of-sight) of energetic neutral atoms from space, in a range of energies every six months. Most of these ENAs are generated in the heliosheath, (Fig. 46).
The mission was originally planned to be for 24 months, but has since been extended, with the spacecraft still in operation as of 2024, and it’s to be hoped that it will still be working when the New Horizons event occurs. But as the heliopause responds to outflows from the Sun on a daily basis, the Voyagers (if still working) and New Horizons will add details to the IBEX mapping, rather than vice versa.