Luna 2076

Five Apollo expeditions landed spacecraft on the Moon without incident. One would think that a feat accomplished with 1969-era technology would be a cakewalk today. But landing people on the Moon remains an ambitious feat, writes Mashable.

“Just because we went there 50 years ago does not make it a trivial endeavor,” Csaba Palotai, the program chair of space sciences in the Department of Aerospace, Physics and Space Sciences at the Florida Institute of Technology, told the publication.

The article identifies three main challenges: more “Challenges to Landing Spacecraft on the Moon”

California-based Venturi Astrolab has built a working prototype, tested in the American desert, of a rover, called FLEX, that is capable of transporting astronauts and cargo in support of lunar activities and experiments.

If selected by NASA, FLEX will support the Artemis program goal of establishing a long-term base on the Moon.

“Once you get there, you’ve got to be able to move things around,” said retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield who test-drove the vehicle, as reported by VOA Learning English. “You also need to transition the equipment that keeps you alive and that enables the activities.”

“When we settle somewhere,” he added, “we don’t just need to get people from one place to another, but we need to move hardware, cargo, life support equipment and more.” more “FLEX: A Vehicle to Support Early Moon Colonization”

A congressional spending bill has added $61 million for the U.S. Space Force toward setting up a surveillance network — or “highway patrol” — to track the domain between the Earth and the Moon.

Nation-states and commercial companies will fly nearly 100 missions, both crewed and uncrewed, to the Moon by 2030. As the cislunar region fills with satellites and space junk — there are at present an estimated 27,000 piece of human-made objects larger than a softball in orbit — the Cislunar Highway Patrol System (CHPS) will track and identify all man-made objects a combination of optical and radar sensors — critical for mitigating potential collision risks.

“The responsible use of space and unfettered access to space domain awareness ensures collision avoidance, on-orbit logistics, communication, navigation and maneuvering, all critical to the United States and allied space commerce, science and exploration,” states a video produced by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory that can be viewed here.

Some critics warn that the intrusion of the armed forces into cislunar space represents a potential usurpation of NASA and militarization of space. Military strategists say the stakes are too big to leave cislunar space to the civilians, and the Pentagon will be compelled to take on a major role. China, which has plans to build a lunar base, cannot be trusted to pursue only peaceful aims, and could use its space program for both economic and military advantage, Politico says. more “The Pentagon Plans Highway Patrol for Cislunar Space”

The Moon is dotted with steep-walled holes known as pits, or skylights, which likely lead to sub-surface lava tubes that could serve as sheltered underground environments for human settlers. Engineers are developing specialized robots to explore these hard-to-access topographical features.

The trick is designing these vehicles to be compatible with small landers, making them capable of negotiating steep pit aprons, and equipping them to acquire cross-pit images. A team led by William “Red” Whittaker, a robotics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, has developed the PitRanger, a 33-pound mini-robot outfitted with a solar panel and an adjustable telephoto camera and tested it in a massive sinkhole in Utah.

Whittaker explains his challenge to Space.com:

“The scenario is to rove to a pit with a micro-rover, peer into the pit, acquire images of walls, floors, caverns, and then generate pit models,” Autonomy for fast exploration is the critical technology since the small, solar-powered rovers won’t be able to carry direct-to-Earth radio for supervision or guidance.

In addition, “the rover must succeed in a single illumination period” on the moon, because it needs the sun for energy and heating. (A lunar day lasts about 14 Earth days, and the lunar night is equally long.) “It only has 12 days, not 12 years, to complete its mission.”

The rover would circumnavigate the rim, identify the overlooks offering the required, and deploy a tiltable camera to obtain the required angles needed to create a high-fidelity, 3D-quality image, The result will be far superior to anything that a Moon-circling satellite could capture.

Not only do pits provide potential habitats, they are windows into lunar geology. Scientists expect to gain insights into volcanology, morphology and much more, Wittaker said.