Collaborate Disseminate
Luna 9 was the first spacecraft to soft-land on the moon. In 1966, the main spacecraft ejected a 99-kg lander module that used a landing bag to survive impact. The …read more Continue reading Forget Waldo. Where’s Luna 9?
If William Gibson and Bruce Sterling had written an arcade scene into “The Difference Engine”, it probably would have looked a lot like [Pete Wood]’s Meccano Martian Mission, as illustrated …read more Continue reading Electromechanical Atari is a Steampunk Meccano Masterpiece
Everyone likes a good lunar landing simulator, and [Dominic Doty] wrote a fun take on the idea: your goal is to write an autopilot controller to manage the landing. Try …read more Continue reading Lunar Lander Game Asks You to Write a Simple Autopilot
Chang’e 5 touched down on the Moon in December 2020, where it scooped up a sample of the lunar regolith and returned it to Earth a few weeks later, marking the first successful lunar retrieval mission since 1976. Analysis turned up traces of water and the youngest known Moon rocks so far.
Commercial operations on the Moon won’t just be round-the-clock but round-the-calendar as ispace, inc. and the University of Leicester partner to develop nuclear heaters to allow future landers and rovers to survive the freezing lunar night.Continue Re… Continue reading New nuclear heaters use americium-241 to stop spacecraft freezing
NASA has revealed the four vehicles that astronauts will drive on the Moon, awarding contracts totaling US$4.6 billion to Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost and Venturi Astrolab to develop the Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) ahead of the Artemis V mission l… Continue reading NASA selects four next-generation lunar vehicles
With the recent string of lunar landing attempts, it’s interesting to consider how much things have changed – or stayed the same – since the first soft landing attempts in …read more Continue reading The Lunar Odyssey: Moon Landings From the 1960s to Today’s Attempts
As the Odysseus Moon lander faces its final hours of life, it turns out there’s one final twist in the saga: The spacecraft broke one of its legs on landing, thanks to a cascade of mistakes that began back on Earth, when a safety switch wasn’t flicked … Continue reading Odysseus broke leg on landing thanks to overlooked laser switch
Beating incredible odds, Japan’s SLIM lunar lander came back to life after surviving the intense dark and cold of the Moon’s night. On February 25, JAXA confirmed that it had temporarily reestablished communications with the robotic spacecraft.Continue… Continue reading Japan’s SLIM lunar lander comes back to life after killer Moon night
The IM-1 Moon landing mission will come to a premature end on Tuesday morning. Intuitive Machines has announced that the Odysseus lander will no longer be able to charge its batteries by February 27 as sunlight stops falling on its solar panels.Continu… Continue reading The Odysseus lunar mission ends following human error on Earth